940: Battlbox And Carnivore Club: Insights About Creating Unique Customer Expectations and Experiences In The E-commerce Frontier With John Roman

Robert Plank 0:04 Hey, welcome back to the podcast. We're here with John Roman from battlbox.com. That's B, a TTLBOX. And John has a so many amazing stories and amazing history in his business. He is in the E commerce arena. He has a company called battlbox, which he grew exponentially, and they were acquired, and he bought them back. And just before this interview, John, I saw that you have this Netflix show when I dialed it up, and it was like the craziest trailer for anything I've ever seen. So I'd love to hear about that. But enough for me, can you tell us who you are? And what's the quick summary of what you're all about?

Speaker 2 0:41 Sure. Thanks for having me. So John Roman battlbox is the company, it's outdoor adventure gear. The majority of our revenue is subscription base, we send out a box each month, we call it a mission. And we've been doing it since 2015. You you touched on, we got acquired in October of 2021. And as of three or four weeks ago, we bought the business back on. So it's been a journey, from the days of firing customers for $5 apiece, and not knowing what a goldmine we had in 2015 2016 to now post iOS and all the challenges and, and different approaches we could take in today's today's day.

Robert Plank 1:27 And what do you think you've done that others have failed at, like, what's your secret sauce.

Speaker 2 1:33 So the secret sauce is it's not necessarily a secret, but it is hard to execute. And it's community. So building building that community, building the fanatics, right that people that love your brand, and, you know, building it, where it can stand on its own with with without you, per se, we've done a really good job of of doing that. A lot of it's been done through content. So we we've probably for the past, I guess seven or seven years now, we've been very, very, very focused on putting out lots and lots of content. It's what led to the Netflix show. But um, you know, you get some community from that, but also just engaging with our customers the way we do. It's like, they're, they're part of our family. And it's kind of unusual, for a business, that's our size at this point, to still be so engaged with every single customer, you know, an hour, I spent an hour this morning, and I was in our members only group to a Facebook group where if you're a paying subscriber, you can be a member of, we don't have all of our customers in there, but we have about I think, at 200 customers in there, and just interacting with them in the comments and posting stuff. And it really just you can't fake that. It's real. And I think customers are smart, and they understand that. Um, and I think, you know, you look at kind of the need want scale, right? You could argue there's probably some of our customers that could argue that the gear we send the adventurer, the camping, the survival gear that we sent, maybe it is far farther along on the scale, and it is just some people in the need category. But the reality is for the majority of our customers, this is on the one side, right? And consumers when they're making, you know, those decisions for stuff that they want with disposable income. At this point, they really want to buy from a brand they can connect with. And they can they can relate to and they like and it's more than just the product. I think we've done a it's really long answer, but I think we've done a really good job at executing that. That plan.

Robert Plank 3:59 And that's it's cool to think about because like, you know, you figure okay, you could especially with ecommerce you can just like find a supplier source any any product you I mean, there's so many choices of what to what your offer can be. And then you think, Okay, well I want to put out something that that they can't live without, that's an essential, but then there's all these hobbyists where if you can find the fanatics and have them connect with it emotionally, and it's this whole like intangible kind of just bigger than what it is and there's the community and the brand and all those kind of intangible things, that then that's something special. And that overcomes being like the first thing they cancelled when they're looking to cut their budget. And so you're mentioning that a lot of with your success is by like, putting it putting forth that time into keeping the community going into replying into making it fun. And so just to give us an idea of what's like in a typical battle box, like if someone gets this box in the mail, like what are they paying for it? What kind of things are they seeing inside?

Speaker 2 5:02 Sure. So I'll, I'll cheat. And I'll just outline. So on our website, we have a what's in the box section, where we outline the 99 boxes we've sent thus far. So there's four tiers, there's the basic, the advanced, the Pro, and the Pro Plus 35 a month, 65 a month, 120 a month and 170 a month. The majority, not the majority, but 45% of our base is in the higher Pro Plus. And what they do is they stack on top of each other. So if you get the Pro, you're getting everything from the basic and the advanced. And then the Pro, Pro Plus, it's everything. Um, so as an example, in the last box, the ship last month, on the basic level, there was a camping tripod, there's a bleed stop. It's, if like you're out in the wild, and you have maybe a bleed, you can put this on it to stop it. Some twist ties, a pouch that you can store stuff in, on the advanced level, there was a pocket knife. On the pro level, there was Bushnell puts this out to trail camera. So it can connect to you know, wireless service, whether it's Verizon AT and T, and you can put it on a tree. And there's the practical use, like for hunters like that. But then there's the practical use, maybe I just want to have a camera outside to catch the woods were just to catch maybe my backyard. So that was a big hit. And then the pro class, it's always a high end premium knife. So we sent exactly that.

Robert Plank 6:41 Well, fun. And so you have this, this sort of subscription box. And you also from like I said, when I was looking you up, I found this TV show southern survival. And there was this trailer where like, people were like shooting guns into glass and flipping cars and some guy had like a full on bear suit. And so it seemed to me from that first impression that it was sort of like a like a Mythbusters meets Shark Tank worried like they were kind of demoing all these products, but like in all these fun and crazy ways. So can you tell me about what this TV show is all about?

Speaker 2 7:14 Sure. So So southern survival is is a TV show, it is an effort to original, which allowed person the cool stuff you have, because it was Netflix budget, putting putting the bill. So the commercial is actually great for the business, it is literally us testing gear, to determine if it's going to get the stamp of approval from us to go into a battle box to send to you know, our 10s of 1000s of customers. So it's great from a marketing advertising perspective, it's a it's a commercial for us. Now, it is Netflix, and I don't think the world would really want to watch us going through the actual testing. It's not as exciting. You know, we don't we don't jump in various stuff out of helicopters. But that does make for good TV. So it's just the added reality TV spin on it to make it more exciting than to blow some stuff up.

Robert Plank 8:07 And I mean, that's a good just I mean marketing lesson in general, just that if there's a way to be larger than life, in order to stand out in a way that makes sense, then then why not go for it, right. And if there if there is an even if the Netflix show didn't exist, and you just had your YouTube channel, which I saw you have like 620,000 plus subscribers, even if it was just a YouTube channel, why not blow stuff up, right? Why not make it and and make it something where it can go viral and that people will want to share it. And so you've been through this whole journey and all these ups and downs in selling the company and buy it back. And it's always fun to talk about the struggles, the errors, the mistakes, the you know, the failures, things like that. So what do you have to say about just like a, like a stressful or emotional kind of failure we've had along the way.

Speaker 2 9:00 Um, so one of the first failures and you see people still do it when we talk about when people want to have an E commerce business and they're thinking about what which way to go, right. Um, you see this all the time where they have one single lead source channel, typically, typically Facebook, or Facebook slash Instagram. So we did that. With pure naivety, we didn't know any better. We started this company, we're going to, you know, do some online advertising. We're going to advertise on Facebook. So from February 2015, when we launched to, to Labor Day, we were only advertising on Facebook. So 99.9% of our paid traffic. And intern customers are coming from Facebook. Well, we're going into labor day weekend, and it's like six, seven o'clock. We're going to have the biggest weekend we've ever had. We're in Kill mode, it's going to be great grabbing a sale, like, conservatively, we are going to crush every previous weekend, and around six or seven o'clock, we start getting the notifications in our phone, and all of our ads are getting cancelled or declined. And then we get this one notification that our ad account has been suspended. So we went from this, you know, in 2015, we was our first year we did about 4 million in revenue. And at that point, we have a couple of million in revenue in a very short period of time. So there's growth here, there's there's scale, and we went to zero, literally immediately because we we didn't know any better. And it was not every we weren't diversified in our lead sourcing. There's so many different platforms and ways to advertise. Facebook for a lot of brands works really, really, really well, right. But you can't put all your eggs in one basket. Now we got super, super fortunate, middle part of next of the following week. Again, our community, we're desperate at this point, we're asking our community like, you know, it's not easy to get someone on on the phone with Facebook. And we're asking our community, hey, do you have any ideas? Do you have any help? One of our customers works at Facebook, he's a few row cubicle rows over from the manual auditing team that did this. And he's like, Well, I'm gonna walk over there and like, see if I can get you an answer. And like, within an hour, we were back up and running. So we got fortunate there. And then we were able to advertise again, and, and then make it a priority to start advertising on other platforms and, and have reach outside of Facebook. But it was a it was a scary moment. And, you know, it's unfortunate, we had to go through it to experience it. But anyone listening to this, like, if you have a great, a great business and you're advertising on on one platform specifically, at least try the other ones they might not all work most probably won't work some maybe they'll all work but you have to diversify. And it seems it seems simple to say now, but there's so many econ businesses that are not doing it. They're just 100% dependent on a single platform. And how do you

Robert Plank 12:24 reconcile being either like too focused or too diversified? Because like, that makes total sense it in hindsight, you say, you know, we had this near miss or near hit with the Facebook collapse with the Facebook ads. And so that's like a lesson to go in, like setup on on their platforms. But like, there's that problem, like kind of almost like a mind game with yourself where you're like, well, I need to be like, focused and all in and give the Facebook ads the attention it needs and not be like, you know, thinking about other platforms and half my time divided? So does that. Do you ever think about that? Or is it ever just drive you crazy of like, am I being spread too thin? Or too focused in some areas?

Speaker 2 13:03 Um, yeah, I think I think it goes to just the importance of, of building building a good team as you as you try to do this, because you can't you can't do it all yourself. Right. And, and just to clarify, when I say team, you might hire a person full time that is good at specific platforms, or you can do what we do and we leverage an agency, and and leveraging the agency is for us right now. It's, it's probably pretty close on what makes more financial sense to have a small team internal or an agency. But the beauty of an agency is just that, right? They have a guy that knows Facebook, they have a guy that knows knows tick tock, they have a guy that knows Google on Google search. And maybe it's the same person for a couple of them, but typically, it's not. So I think that's you leverage that, so you don't have to worry about it.

Robert Plank 14:01 And that makes a lot of sense how, when you refer to a team, it doesn't necessarily have to be a full time employee, you can just hire an agency and they're someone that kind of off off there in the periphery doing the side project that you check in on and so you can kind of have your cake and eat it too in that way where you have these results, but it doesn't necessarily require so much of your attention. And what I'm always really impressed with an e Commerce Guys such as yourself is the attention to detail and never dropping the ball because like you sort of can't drop the ball right with all these like this massive scale and these huge numbers if you stop looking at your numbers for even a short period of time where if someone's not watching that, that's total catastrophe. And so it seems like from our conversation here, you mentioned a lot about how the community and just sort of like communicating and respecting people and making time for people is so important, like even mentioned, like, you know, something about like Got an hour a day or just going back to the community? And so do you have any like tricks and tips for staying consistent with people? Are you one of those people that like, do you block time for that? Do you say like, I need to talk to 100 people a day? Like what do you have as far as staying solid and consistent with people.

Speaker 2 15:19 So my calendar gives probably 99% of the population would give them anxiety, if they saw it. I live and die by my calendar, it's blocked off, and that time is allocated to that. It's non negotiable. It's not perfect, don't get me wrong, there could be a fire drill tomorrow morning. And I'm gonna have to reach out to my 11 o'clock and say, Hey, I'm so sorry, like, this is on fire over here. Let's please reschedule, but I do my absolute absolute I try as hard as I possibly can just stick to the calendar. And that allows time for for everything, you know, deemed important.

Robert Plank 16:01 I love it. So schedule that time. And you always hear about these things like even scheduling the free time or scheduling thinking time. And it was only until a couple of years ago, John that I thought that scheduling the calendar was like limiting your freedom. But it seems like it's the opposite. And I used to think that it was either like, well, if my calendar is free, I can just do whatever I want. But then the reality is that if you don't schedule those things, then other things, and other people will schedule for you. And then that's the opposite of your freedom. So it took me personally like many years to get out of that mindset that it's not about an empty calendar, it's about the calendar that that you choose. And as you said, it's sort of a best stab at it a best guess you fill up that calendar, knowing that like some surprise emergency might happen, you might have to shift things around, but at least fill up that calendar. And so this is there's been like I have so many ideas now swirling around in my head, but what am I not asking you? What would you like to share with us about like yourself or your company, your successes, what should we know that I haven't even thought to ask.

Speaker 2 17:05 I'm so so really front of mine that I'm so excited about, like at the moment, as of right now is so we're next month, we're sending out our 100th mission mixer work we call our boxes missions. So it's it's pretty cool for a bunch of reasons and you know, means we've, we've been around for eight years. And that we have all these customers that have so many have stayed with us the entire way, we wanted to do something special for it. So we decided to go for a couple reasons. One, it's going to be great content, to it's it truly is going to foster and build the community, we wanted to do something for our customers. So we didn't announce it. So we renew our customers on the 15th. So, uh, you know, eight days ago, they renewed for the upcoming mission 100 box. So later that day, we had teased some stuff, but we didn't give any details. Later, the day after the renewal, we dropped a video explaining that about 500 of the boxes you're going to have, some of our vendors shipped us about $35,000 worth of extra gear to put in them. So 500 boxes, you're going to have just some extra staff, on average $70 worth of extra gear that they're just getting for free. But five of the boxes are going to have golden tickets in them. And if they have a golden ticket, think literally Willy Wonka style, we're going to fly them to an undisclosed location, they're going to hang out with us that night, that following morning at 8am. They're all going to meet us outside the hotel, we're going to get on a bus and a drive about two hours into a rural area where this can legally occur. And we're going to put them one at a time into an actual tank. And they're gonna shoot that tank downrange at a target. And if they hit that target, we're gonna give them $100,000 Oh, man. Now, here's the cool thing. The first thing when I tell people that they're like, Wow, what a great sales tool. This could be right. We announced it a few hours after the renewal, you sign up for battlbox Today, you're not getting mission Andrei. We wanted to truly do this for our customers. We want to hopefully have one of them at this targeting get 100,000 hours. And I'm just so excited about that for like, multitude of reasons the opportunity of someone getting 100,000 The opportunity that we're going to get to shoot tanks, which is to me just beyond cool. And then we're having our vendors out there. We're going to obviously add these customers out there. We're going to have after the day and we take everybody to dinner. We're going to have a beer with battlbox event. So everybody in that surrounding area will invite them to come hang out with us. It's just going to be a really fun day. So I'm most excited about that. How did you

Robert Plank 19:58 even there Open an idea like that because like you said there like it's, it would be really easy to be lazy with something just to be like, Okay, here's a cool idea and just be lazy and just only think about it for a little while and be like, oh, yeah, we'll use this to drive new signups. But you have all these kind of special, like rules in place and things where you're like, limiting eat on purpose, so that way, other parts of the offer, or even, you know, more, more popular, so like, how did you develop that idea? Is that a matter of like thinking it through over time? Or like adding to it? How did you create all of that

Speaker 2 20:32 it's a monster, and it just kept growing. So it started in January, we, we started to hear buys people with, I don't wanna say unreal, unrealistic, but unrealistic expectations of what they were expecting mission 100 And be like, some of the things are A and you should put this in there, we'll, we put that in there. And we sent it out to everyone, like, we wouldn't be out of business because, like, we spent, like, that's not possible. We're at the end of the day, we're a business. And we have, you know, a lot of people that depend on us, like, you can't do that. So we were like, we want to do something. Our CFO was at a conference. And it was a pass a booth that was a company that was like, you can come see us and shoot tanks. And it's a cool like team bonding experience or great content experience. And he grabbed a little flyer, and he was telling me about it. And we're like, oh, we could do this, this would be a cool thing to do for content. I'm blowing stuff up. And then it just more at the same time, or we were hearing you know, our customers wanting something big for the upcoming hundreth mission. And it just kind of morphed into that and then talking with the tank people and then talking with everyone internally, and then just kept growing. And we started telling our vendors about it. And they were excited, and they wanted to be a part of it. So we started doing sponsorships, it's just continued to grow. And even though everything's pretty firm, I'm sure we'll keep adding Cool, cool things to it. We had a call this morning with a company that is in a similar EECOM space that just happens to be located near where we're going to be. And we told them about it. And they're like, Oh, well, we'd love to come. And we'll bring this this, this, this this. And we're like, Okay, I think when we're telling people about it, they can tell like that we're genuinely excited that this is like such a cool opportunity, that it's almost a little contagious. And it's just, it's made this this this idea of continued ideation and building into craziness.

Robert Plank 22:47 And just getting out of control, but in a good way. So contagious genuine excitement, and continue any with ideation. And then just throughout this, that whole idea of involving other people and relationships and the feedback loop and being open to ideas, no matter how crazy and being like well, the buzz around the forums is this but maybe we can't do that crazy. But something similar leads this other idea. And because we're doing it that location, we invite the people in nearby and this other company that's also nearby talks to us. It just, I mean, it's just, you have such an amazing and crazy life, and so much fun. Yeah. And so if someone wants to be part of this and join in on the fun in the community and battlbox and find out what you have going on, what's the call to action here? What's the next step?

Speaker 2 23:36 I mean, you can just so you can google or Go to battlbox.com To see more about the brand. I like to I'm big, we're big into the battlbox community, but me personally, I'm big into the fellow ecommerce community and talking about what's working, what's not working, kind of opening up the road, if you will, on strategy. More importantly, also sharing things that don't work. Because I think there's you're inundated with all of these success stories. And the reality is, most or not, right. And we have we've had some some successes along the way. But we've had way more failures. So I like to highlight things that aren't going well. Not a negative way. But just because we can learn from those. So I have a blog online casio.com Where I outline things that are working, but also things that are not working. And then I'm really I'm I'm probably most active on the least popular platform of LinkedIn. I love LinkedIn. I think I'm the only person

Robert Plank 24:46 I've been big on LinkedIn for about the past year or so even though sometimes you open that front page and it looks like Tony Robbins Notes app with just like only successes, which like it's fun for a while but it can get kind of boring, right? They call that toxic positive Have it. But then when you talk about the failures and how that led to successes, or you stop the failures right away, I think that's a much more interesting journey, and a lot more relatable, especially because you figure that the people who are reading and learning from that are on that same path where they're experiencing those failures. So if it's, if it's 100% success, you're like, Well, is this really someone who gets me right? Or I can learn from so you say, online caso.com And John Roman on LinkedIn, but most importantly, battlbox. And then southern survival on Netflix is that reality show where I mean, even just looking at that YouTube trailer, like looks like so much fun, I might just choose a random episode and watch that because I'm just looking at like, I'm not even much of a reality person. But I'm like, What the heck is this before from an E commerce brand? And so battlbox.com Go there right now. And as we're finalizing our conversation here, John, it's always fun to think about, like a profound quote, or lesson or advice that you wish you'd gotten, say 20 years ago. So to put you on the spot, do you have anything just really profound and final to tell us as far as like, quote, lesson or advice you wish you got?

Speaker 2 26:15 The did put me on the spot with this, I think I would go with it just a way and outlook in general. And I think it's that in order for you to when others don't have to lose. And I try to almost make that a Northstar of mine, if you will. And being you know, we have a conference next week, and I'm looking forward to it because I want to talk shop, but I don't want to be guarded, right. I want to truly like dive in and, and share the details of stuff. I think you don't see that a lot. And it's because people are guarded because they think that you know, only they can win. And I think it's just a horrible mindset. And if you if you if you understand that everyone can win. I think it's just a good way to take take on business and just life in general.

Unknown Speaker 27:07 I agree

Robert Plank 27:08 completely non zero sum thinking, abundance mindset, and a rising tide lifts all boats. And so as John said, so how do we phrase that exactly? In order for you to win, others don't have to lose. All right. And so with that advice, head on over to battle box.com We'll see you there. And thank you, John, for being generous with your failures and your advice. I appreciate you very much.

Unknown Speaker 27:32 Thanks so much for having me.

Robert Plank 27:36 This is Robert plank from DF Why podcast.com forward Slash Free. Me and my team are super excited to jump into your podcast, whether it already exists, whether it's brand new, whether it's just in the idea stage, set up a call and contact us today claim your free gift at dfi podcast.com/free and we will see you there