Andrew Youderian is the Founder of eCommerceFuel, a vetted community of seven- and eight-figure sellers. Having launched and sold several e-commerce stores, he has experience in SEO, organic and content marketing, and community building. Andrew also hosts The eCommerceFuel Podcast, which features e-commerce thought leaders.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [5:08] Is it realistic to get acquired at nine figures?
• [10:49] How to develop focused growth goals
• [16:53] The importance of allocating your efforts throughout various areas of your life
• [22:41] Andrew Youderian shares his perspective on current and future e-commerce trends
• [24:59] Tips for building and scaling your e-commerce store
• [34:34] AI’s potential to enhance e-commerce websites
• [37:47] Optimizing supply chain and logistics to build durable brands
• [43:58] How to manage operational expenses
• [48:24] Why e-commerce founders must maintain conviction
• [51:56] The benefits of joining e-commerce communities
• [56:29] Andrew talks about his upbringing, the weird foods he’s eaten, and his music tastes
• [1:16:06] Andrew’s investment endeavors

In this episode…

Many entrepreneurs believe that achieving a nine-figure exit is the ultimate goal, but the pursuit often comes with significant trade-offs. The relentless focus on scaling at all costs can lead to burnout, strained personal relationships, and an imbalance between work and life. How can you build a winning e-commerce brand without sacrificing your time and energy?

As an eCommerce business builder, Andrew Youderian argues that financial freedom should be about achieving a fulfilling and balanced life rather than simply accumulating wealth. Building a durable and resilient e-commerce brand requires focusing on high-quality products, exceptional customer service, and authentic brand connections. Entrepreneurs who prioritize these elements can create sustainable businesses that thrive, even in highly competitive markets. Andrew also highlights the importance of operational efficiency, recommending that business owners stay lean and avoid unnecessary overhead that can hinder long-term growth.

In today’s episode of the Up Arrow Podcast, William Harris hosts Andrew Youderian, the Founder of eCommerceFuel, to discuss building strong e-commerce stores to achieve financial freedom. Andrew explores AI’s potential to enhance e-commerce websites, the importance of maintaining conviction in your efforts, and allocating efforts throughout various areas of your life.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• William Harris on LinkedIn
• Elumynt
• Andrew Youderian on LinkedIn | X
• eCommerceFuel
• The eCommerceFuel Podcast
• The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness by Morgan Housel
  
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Quotable Moments:

• "If you just buy, invest in broad ETFs or broad indexes that cover the US market, the S&P 500, or the total Vanguard Index, and just invest every month and just leave them, you're going to be so hard-pressed to beat, especially from a financial perspective."
• "There's very few people in this day and age who will just speak their mind with conviction about what they believe in a respectful way, but not…filtering it through what is this going to mean for other issues in my life?"
• "The wheels on the bus go round and round, but where is the music taking us? And when do we stop to listen to what matters?"
• "It's less about expertise and more about behavior."

Action Steps:

1. Define clear and concrete financial goals that align with personal values and happiness: This encourages individuals to avoid the trap of ever-moving financial targets and focus on sustainable contentment.
2. Focus on building smaller, durable brands that prioritize product quality and customer connection: Andrew Youderian's experience showcases the long-term benefits of cultivating a strong brand identity and customer trust rather than relying heavily on advertising.
3. Embrace community and peer learning by joining groups like eCommerceFuel: Surrounding oneself with a community of like-minded entrepreneurs facilitates knowledge sharing and can significantly accelerate business growth.
4. Adopt a disciplined approach to investing, emphasizing dollar-cost averaging into index funds: Andrew’s investment advice is grounded in avoiding the pitfalls of market timing and instead opting for a consistent investment strategy proven to yield long-term results.
5. Balance professional pursuits with enriching personal and family experiences, such as travel and music: Incorporating personal passions and quality time with family can lead to a more well-rounded and fulfilling entrepreneurial journey.

Sponsor for this episode...

This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is a performance-driven e-commerce marketing agency focused on finding the best opportunities for you to grow and scale your business.

Our paid search, social, and programmatic services have proven to increase traffic and ROAS, allowing you to make more money efficiently.

To learn more, visit www.elumynt.com.

Episode Transcript

Intro  0:03

Welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris, featuring top business leaders, sharing strategies and resources to get to the next level. Now let's get started with the show.

William Harris  0:15  

Hey everyone. I'm William Harris. I'm the founder and CEO of element and the host of the Up Arrow Podcast, where I feature the best minds in e-commerce to help you scale from 10 million to 100 million and beyond as you up arrow your business and your personal life. Joining me today is Andrew Youderian. He left his corporate job in 2008 to dive into e-commerce full time, and hasn't looked back. He started multiple e-commerce businesses, and now is the founder and owner of eCommerceFuel the world's premier community for seven and eight figure store owners, and I'll say that I have a lot of customers in eCommerceFuel and several that have had nice exits. It's a fantastic community. His mission is to help them both build incredible businesses and equally amazing personal and fulfilling lives. Andrew, long time coming. Excited to have you on the show. Yeah, thanks

Andrew Youderian  0:59  

for having me. Appreciate the invite and excited to geek out about some stuff. And congrats on the podcast. I know it's not new, but newish. And was checking out some of your past episodes, and you're doing a great job with it. So well done.

William Harris  1:12  

Well, yeah, I've got you as inspiration. You know, I try to keep it on top of you know what's going on. It's only natural to do that right. And I think we've cracked it at the top 5% now, if we look at, like, Listen notes, and you're in like the top 0.5% of me, like you, you've done a great job building yours.

Andrew Youderian  1:28  

So thanks, man. It's a lot of ups and downs, but appreciate it. So for sure, yeah,

William Harris  1:34  

I was trying to think about how we first got connected, and I don't remember how we first met, for sure. We were talking about this even a little bit yesterday, but I believe, I believe I had you write a guest post on sell bright, way back in like 2014 way before they were acquired by GoDaddy. And then in person we met. I believe it was like at an after party at IRCE back in like 2015 I mean, this is before Shopify even had a 10 by 10 booth at IRCE. Like, this was the early days of Shopify Plus and stuff like that. It was a lot of fun. But I think we met up at like, an eCommerceFuel event there. I was invited as a guest, so it was pretty cool.

Andrew Youderian  2:10  

Yeah, that was, man, I was, like, a decade ago. It's digging deep at that one when Shopify was the Yeah, the up, the underdog, upstart, scrappy competitor kind of, yeah, yes. It's, those were, those are fun days. I mean, this is still a lot of fun too, but those were super fun days.

William Harris  2:26  

Yeah, I have to imagine, when you were running eCommerceFuel, like, it's like, I don't know if Shopify was like, as dominant at the time when you started it back then, because I know it. I think it was 2015 when I launched. I helped bring an e-commerce Store from Magenta over to Shopify Plus, and they had like 70,000 SKUs at the time, and there was a lot of things that we had to, like, work almost custom doing with that. And I remember people just being like, what are you doing? Like, Shopify is for small stores. Like, you're making the biggest mistake. Like, this is a terrible I'm like, no, no, I really feel good about this decision. Wrote about this, you know, a blog post about this, and it got a lot of attention. The C suite of Magento had me on the phone. They were like, Let's talk about what you just wrote here. Like, we obviously don't like it that much. But, I mean, this was, like, it was very, I don't know, like, this was not the way to do things back then, right?

Andrew Youderian  3:18  

No, I hear I Shopify, have a lot of affinity for them and respect for them, because they were back in I mean, this was probably 2012 or 2000 32,012, and 13, but they helped. They probably built half of my email list. And when I say they built, I got partnered up with them. I kind of stalked the head of the blog over there. His name was Marques at the time, a really great guy. A really great guy. And somehow, you know, convinced him to let me do a bunch of guest posting for Shopify. And then that ended up driving a ton of traffic to eCommerceFuel. And so they were instrumental in helping, kind of help me get that brand off the ground. And then same with with you, I was on Magento for a while, and I, if you're on Magento, like, there should I bet there's a couple therapists in the United States that specialize in helping people who are on Magento for more than than six months. It was just is awful. And so same thing, I jumped ship, went to Shopify, did a big write up about it, in partnership with, yeah, anyway, all this, all to say it was fun days and it was fun. Fun. Win shop. It still is fun, but it's especially cool when they were kind of young and on the up swing

William Harris  4:26  

totally. Well, today we're going to be talking about building wealth, winning in e-commerce and finding peace. Before we do, I want to announce our sponsor. This episode is brought to you by element. Element is an award winning advertising agency optimizing e-commerce campaigns around profit. In fact, we've helped 13 of our customers get acquired with one that sold for nearly 800,000,001 that ipoed. You can learn more on our website@elumynt.com which is spelled E, l, u, m, y, N, t.com that said, onto the good stuff. I want to start off here, because the bulk of the podcast, what we usually talk about is, and I even mentioned this in the intro. Scaling from 10 million to 100 million and beyond. But what's the problem with the goal of getting acquired for nine figures? Yeah,

Andrew Youderian  5:08  

I mean, there's nothing. It depends what you want out of life, right? Like, and I think you get acquired for nine nine figures, assuming you own a big chunk of that equity, and the payout works, and it's a great outcome. I think it just depends on what do you have to trade to get there, right? And I think we were talking recently about how, I think there's kind of three big financial milestones in life, or, like, you go from not, you know, let's say zero, to maybe, you know, not having to worry about money from a bill basis. Or, you know, you've got, you've got a regular income coming in, maybe a little bit tucked away an emergency fund. Money is not a pressing issue every day for you. That's a great step up from the step before the next one is like, let's say the next big one is, say financial freedom. You've got enough assets and investments to cover your monthly burn, and so you can pick and choose. You can work or not work. But largely, a lot of people, entrepreneurs that are able to do that can then switch from saying, What do I have to do to what do I want to do for work? And then the third one is probably like, hey, let's ball out. Let's rent jets. Let's get the bling bling. Let's go hang out with Durant and buy the you know, and like that. Step Up is a dramatically larger in terms of what you need to get there. And B, I would say it's probably the least gratifying from a just sense of security, safety and well being and happiness level of those three jumps. So all that to say you can sell for nine figures, make a bunch of money, but anyone I know who has done that has probably, I want to say mortgaged five to 10 years of their life, but it has been all consuming, and almost certainly has made some very noticeable trade offs for that. And so I think the question is, that's really important to you, great, but I think for a lot of people, it's not necessarily what it's cracked up to be for the trade offs. Yeah,

William Harris  6:59  

yeah, yeah, that's fair. You were telling me about the book The Psychology of Money. Stop moving your goal posts. You know? What does that mean?

Andrew Youderian  7:13  

Yeah. So if anyone has not read The Psychology of Money, it's the number one book I recommend. I have a business background, got a degree in finance, worked in banking. I feel like I understand that world reasonably well. Have read a lot of books in the finance realm, and it's by far the best finance and investing book I've ever read. And the one, probably the biggest thing I took away from that is the guy Morgan house who wrote it. He says the hardest thing to do in finance and investing in wealth building is to stop moving your goal posts, meaning it's to stop increasing the amount of money you think you need. He says it happens to almost everybody, and it's the thing that keeps people making suboptimal decisions for a really long time. So that's, you know. And I see that happen. I've seen it happen in my life. I've seen it happen in other people's life. And I think if you can, I gave a talk to some some some business students recently, and one of the things I recommended to the movement that was completely apart from the topic at hand was you're going out, you're ambitious. Try not to do this. Give yourself the ability to double pick a number that you think is your number. Everyone is. It's always interesting. A question to ask people, how much you need to be happy. How much is enough? Double that once, and then don't move on past that. And if you can do that, you'll be in pretty, pretty good shape, at least better shape than a lot of other people in terms of chasing stuff. So,

William Harris  8:32  

yeah, yeah, that's, that's a tough thing, right? Because it's, you know, you go from one of those levels to the next level, and you're, you're not necessarily living any differently. It's just maybe, instead of eating ramen, you're eating a little bit better noodles. Instead of, you know that one house, you've got one more bedroom, one more bathroom. I mean, it can seem like it's not that much of a change sometimes, and I can see how that can sneak up on you. Oh, totally.

Andrew Youderian  8:59  

And, I mean, I just, we live America. I love America. We have some issues, but I have a lot of love for our country totally. But we're also you have some of the smartest people in the world constantly telling you, and that's kind of, I mean, sometimes I'm honest, being in the e-commerce Industry, that's kind of what you do as marketers as well. You're trying sure to convince people that their life is not going to be full and complete and happy unless they buy what you have to offer. And sometimes that's true. A lot sometimes that's true. A lot of times it's not true, but you've got an insane number of people trying to part you with your money and with your time, really is what they're trying to part you with, yeah. And so just that, a lot of times we lot it's very easy to spend too much time optimizing for the wrong thing in life. And so I think that's what it boils down to. And I also think a lot of entrepreneurs will start out and have a hard time changing gears, right? Like they start out, they start you because you need to bust it, you need to hustle. You really need to work hard to build up that foundation, to build a business. And I do think you know, financial stability, financial freedom, is a very important and great thing to aspire toward. Right? But it is so difficult to take that mindset and switch gears once you achieve that, to get to a point where you can say, Okay, I let off the gas a little bit. I'm invest in these other areas of my life, because it's they've maybe been neglected for a little while, and I really need to invest over here. And the incremental trade offs for more money are not worth the, you know, the areas I'm short changing in my life. And so I think that's, that's something as I as I grow, as entrepreneurs, I see other entrepreneurs grow. I'm increasingly more interested in and trying to talk about more, because I think it's so important. I think it's such a hard shift to make.

William Harris  10:31  

Yeah, how do we make this a reality? Like, if this was the, you know, if that was the problem, the problem is potentially saying, I'm not going to be happy and successful unless I have that nine figure exit. Like you said, there's nothing wrong with it, but oftentimes it's the mentality of getting there. What's the solution? How do we fix that? Yeah,

Andrew Youderian  10:49  

I mean, I think, if I think, if you I think, if you tell yourself you can't be happy without a nine figure exit, sure, but you're never going to be happy. A nine figure exit isn't going to make you happy. That's insane, right? Like, right? And so I think, I think the first part of that is saying, like, Okay, coming to terms with this is not gonna make me happy. And so what is I'm trying to optimize for? And I think a lot of entrepreneurs are optimizing for, some are optimizing for freedom. I think they have an easier time making that, that transition. I think some are optimizing for for ego, for proving people for kind of proving people wrong, making a dent in the universe. And there's kind of a concept. I'm stealing this from someone, but like clean fuel versus dirty fuel. And I can't remember who said that. It's not mine. But I think that's a good, good way to think about it, like, if you think your nine figure exit is gonna be the thing that makes you happy, like I talked about with those three tiers, almost, I mean, almost every, quantifiably, 99% of people who are, you know, who get into that upper echelon aren't gonna be any happier than they were when they just had, you know, enough to cover their their their basic stuff. So I think the first part of that whole process, like you said, is just saying, you know, it's not going to make you happy. And so I think doesn't mean that's a bad thing to go for if you know, maybe you want to do it because you love the you love the game, because you want to make a big impact in the world. But just not lying to yourself about

William Harris  12:17  

Yeah, yeah. It's very easy to lie to yourself about it, isn't it? We lie to ourselves about all kinds of things. And I think being able to look at like the root of what it is that you actually want to do this with my daughters, even too right there, I've got a 1411, and nine year old, and, you know, maybe there's something that they're aspiring to, and it's like, those are good aspirations, but like asking them questions to get to the root of it's like, what is it that you actually want in this? And I think that we say this even as businesses, right, where it's like, hey, our goal is to be able to get to 10 million. You want 10 million in 2 million in EBITDA? Or do you actually want 5 million and 4 million in EBITDA? Right? Like, which one do you actually want? And that's obviously a wild scenario, but the idea it's like, wait a minute, what do you really want? Do you want the revenue? Do you want the profit? Okay, so let's work backwards a little bit and kind of figure out, like, what those like, what those root goals are, yeah,

Andrew Youderian  13:05  

and I actually think a little bit going down that road, I actually think it, it's so we lie to ourselves all the time, like you said, I think what a lot of people think they want is a massive exit where they can go, you know, bling, bling out with Kevin Durant, right? Like and cash in the bank. I think that's what people entrepreneurs think they want. I think they want. I think when often of them get it, it leads them down to a path of unfulfillment and and a lot of you know, yeah, a lot of unfulfillment and kind of surprise. I think what most entrepreneurs would be much better served by is a business that they, for the most part, enjoyed doing, believed in, could run for a medium to long term period and produced, you know, meaningful financial results for them. Like, I think that is something, because what do you hear so often when somebody sells a business, right? Like, the the trope is, you hang out on a beach for six months, 12 months, you golf, you go a little crazy, and then you go start something else, right? Like, you're just going back to the beginning. And so, I mean, there's a lot of validity if, if you were going from not secure financially, just secure financially with an exit, like, that's a meaningful, that's, I think, a meaningful reason to sell business. There's also some level of credibility that comes with that. And so I don't want to take away from those, but the incrementality of going from, you know, from that to double, triple, quadruple, just to pad your bank account. I think a lot of people don't think hard enough about the trade offs there.

William Harris  14:30  

I I had an article that I wrote on entrepreneur, and I think it's still posted there, but I wrote it a few years ago. Said, don't be like Elon Musk when you take your last breath. This is, this is before Elon, like, really catapulted to where he's at now. And I want to clarify. I'm a big Elon fan. I think that he's done incredible work. He is at the forefront of some of the most impressive stuff that's going on within our country and within the world, technologically wise. But for most people, they don't what, I think what he's now worth more than both Bill Gates. States and and Mark Zuckerberg, right? I mean, like, fantastic. But most people this isn't what they actually want. Most people who get to the end of their life aren't going to say, like, Man, I really wish I would have worked harder. I really wish I would have spent less time with my family. I really, you know what I mean. That's not the thing that you say on your death. But, and to your point, it's like, if you can evaluate that from that perspective, it's like, what do I want? Maybe then you can start to align what you do with the actual goals and values that you have in life. Yeah, it's hard, right? Like

Andrew Youderian  15:32  

one, one kind of framework I like to use if I find myself being envious or jealous about someone is what I trade places with them. Because it's very easy to trade back and be like, I want their athleticism, I want their their business or their portfolio or whatever it is. But I think you can't do that like, that's not how life works. And so I think the better question is, what I trade places with this other person in their entirety. And like, for Elon Musk, there's no way I wish this with him. One, from a stress perspective. Two, you know, I don't know. I'm not part of his family. I imagine it would be difficult to be a great father to, like, 10 kids working 100 hours a week, right? Like, I can't I could I struggle to be a great father, or at least try to to three kids working significantly less than that. So just all of the stuff that is on his plate, anyway, all that said, Yeah, I think that's always an interesting exercise when you're when you're finding yourself, you know, being envious, yeah.

William Harris  16:36  

So when I get into other practical ideas, one of the other ideas that you had told me about was, like, the balance sheet of your life, or whatever. What this was, right? So, like, not the balance sheet of your finances, but the balance sheet of your life. Like, how do you go about starting to figure these things out? Are you sure this

Andrew Youderian  16:50  

was me that was talking about it might not have been you. It might

William Harris  16:53  

have been something I listened on a podcast and heard and so then maybe I'll just, I'll go ahead and say that, like, the way that I've heard you said was something along the lines of, just, like being able to say it's like, what are those things that you those things that you at least find values and goals on? And it's like, where are those buckets depleted, right? And so it's like, if you say, Yeah, I value financial security, that's one of the buckets that you value. But you're also saying I value being a good father, and I value being a good husband. I value, you know, being involved in my community. I value going to church. Whatever these things are that you're saying. And you look at that, you're like, Well, I've filled up this balance sheet very, very well, but these ones are, you know, down to zero or negative. Then you can start looking at this and saying, Hmm, I need to make some adjustments, because I'm not pouring back into the right areas that I want to within life.

Andrew Youderian  17:33  

Yeah. And I think you can't be everything all the time, right? And I think people are mostly familiar with the buckets, right? You've got, like, financial, relational, spiritual, health, those are kind of the four big ones, right? And I think it's very rare you have all those balanced like when you're young. I'm a big proponent of working your butt off in your 20s. I think the 20s is such a defining moment. Like you have an airplane, right? And you get an airplane in a five hour journey off by a degree or two, and they end up radically off course, and or vice versa. You stay on track, and you don't have to, you know, have you don't have emergencies, you can land at the airport. Fine. Things are good. I think your 20s are a great time to sacrifice and hustle and bust it, maybe at the expense a little bit of your health. Because your health can probably, you know, take it a little bit more, maybe a little bit at the expense of some of your relationships, if they're strong. But then, you know, you get into, like, your 30s and 40s and further on, I think that's a great time, especially if you have been busting it for 10 or 15 years and seen some fruit to start shifting and start investing, because your health is, yeah, probably going to be some more important. You start taking it seriously. Your relationships. You let those you know, go on too long. If you had a marriage and you neglected for too long, like that's so I think you always have to be cognizant of, you know, where you're you're running short, and reinvest appropriately. So there's a lot we can talk about there, but I think it's very rare that you get think it's very rare that you get them all. Maybe when you're like, you know, 50s, 60s, financially set, you can start really investing in those equals. Even then, I would say that on the finance side, you're going to be in the business side, you're probably investing less if you're reprioritizing your time into those other

William Harris  19:18  

areas. Yeah, yeah. And I think to recognize that there are seasons. Is an important part of this too, right? It's like, what season are you in in life? What season are you in to to make sure that you're appropriate, and even week to week, right? I forget who it was. Somebody on the on the podcast, had something good that they said along those lines, which is, you know, even letting their their wife know that it's like, hey, this week, I'm going to be prioritizing this, this and this. I might be like, not the best dad this week, but next week I'm going to be, you know, at these games. I'm going to be doing these things, and so I might not be the best worker this week. And, you know, just trying to work through that and saying it's like, you you do have to kind of pick and choose sometimes, and at least if you're upfront and honest about it, that helps both you and those around you to understand, you know, headspace. Ways wise, where you're at? Yeah, absolutely. I think it's a great you said something about this. This is completely tangential, but I can't let it go. You talked about being off by like a half a degree in an airplane. I don't know if you know this, and I could be wrong exactly on the exact number. Somebody can fact check me on this, but I memorized pi out to like, 59 digits on my way to work one time, it's just driving to work, and I was like, you know, okay, great, I'm gonna memorize pi. Totally normal. Totally normal. It's a very normal thing, right? A lot of us do this. And one of the things that I learned after the fact, though, is that if you calculate, you can calculate roughly the circumference of the observable universe to within the width of one hydrogen atom, which is about all the more accuracy you need with only 38 digits of pi, so 59 is completely unnecessary amount of digits of pi. Wait,

Andrew Youderian  20:47  

what do you mean? You can calculate the circumference of the universe with that many digits of the observable universe. So you're saying you can. It's that degree of accuracy, of precision with PI lets you get close enough with hundreds of millions of light years to become almost exact. Wow, that's interesting.

William Harris  21:07  

I right which, which doesn't feel intuitive, but I had to look it up. And I was like, yeah, it's it. I could be wrong. Maybe it's maybe it's 3839 I don't remember exactly where it was like, Yeah, significant less than what I memorized.

Andrew Youderian  21:18

Wow. Well, man, now my my wife and I also gonna talk about a date night tonight. We're night tonight. We're gonna, well, date night ever? Like, maybe, I guess you're not gonna believe what I learned today.

William Harris  21:33  

That's so good. She's like, that's like, or is she like? Now this is the dumbest idea topic.

Andrew Youderian  21:38  

Oh, dude, on Valentine's Day, I just read, read math equations and theorems to her, and she goes, she's kind of unique in that which wild, wildly erotic.

William Harris  21:46  

So I can't tell if you're serious or joking right now, totally messing with you. When I was in high school, I wrote a poem for the girl sitting next to me in science class. We were learning about the different uranium isotopes and stuff like that. And I said, Hey, I'm uranium. 235 you're uranium. 238 What do you say? We get together and radioactively date? And she laughed. And

Andrew Youderian  22:10  

was like, No, you ended up with but

William Harris  22:15  

I would say my wife would be equally as unimpressed. So I want to chat through, then, some of the practical things of where we think e-commerce is going. You're, you have a group of what, over 1500 companies now, or whatever that are in this group. I mean, a significant amount here. You see a lot of trends. What do you what do you think about the future of e-commerce and where it's at?

Andrew Youderian  22:41  

Yeah, so e-commerce, through it's a community of we have about 11 107, and eight figure store owners. It's a community where we where those vetted store owners learn from each other, share what's working, what's not, etc. I would say, you know, you look at some of the trends from the last year and last year or two, I don't think any of these will surprise people. I think maybe the conversation might be a little more interesting for or at least newer for people when we talk about where e-commerce is going. But big trends I'm seeing are acquisition is getting harder and harder, right? Like it's just, it's just tough to squeeze it out, even with people who do it well with Google and Amazon and and Meta, of course, a lot of competition from places like on the low end, like temu and shin and even from just direct factories selling directly into the United States, either through FBA or just operating three pls or even their own warehouses. A lot of competition coming in that way. And I think it's just just e-commerce has matured a lot and become a much more difficult over the last two to three years, and particularly the last 18 months. So that's that's kind of the trend I'm seeing. And I think from a product perspective too, you're kind of in the world where if you could figure out distribution early on, you could win, and then if you had a private label and could figure out manufacturing, you could win. You manufacturing, you could win. And then if you had your own, you know, your own brand that you actually built some proprietary stuff around, you could win. And now I think the bar for even having your own brand, it's got to be a pretty compelling product, and you've got to be a good a good marketer as well. So that's where I think we are in some of the trends I'm seeing, and I'm not sure if you want to dive more into those, or maybe talk about where I, you know, where we think e-commerce is going in the next few years. Let's, let's

William Harris  24:22  

dive into those, and then we'll get into like, where it's going. Because I agree with you. I feel like the barrier to entry has never been easier, but the barrier to succeed has never been harder in at least the DTC space, which is where I spent more of my time than I would. And I can't really say much drop shipping, but I see a lot less drop shipping videos on Tiktok, of people just going, you know, this, so I assume that maybe they're just, you know, giving up on that a little bit too. But so if you are going to dig into, how do we correct some of these areas, or how do we fix some of these areas, what are some tips that you're seeing? Yeah, I mean, let's

Andrew Youderian  24:59  

start. With, let's start with, maybe brand and marketing. I think I have this, this concept that I can adopt smaller, more durable brands. And so if you look at the brands that were built quickly over the last, you know, five years, not all, but most of them, were built on the backs of cheap traffic, or cheaper traffic from especially from Meta, and I think that is becoming so much harder to do that. I think we've almost come full circle. And I think the brands that are going to win in the future are going to stay smaller. They're going to kind of win the old fashioned way, interesting, great products, more of a specialty, more of a personality, more of a real connection with customers, through great service, through unique marketing, through superior product innovation. And yes, they will market but they'll win a lot of their market share slowly over time, the old fashioned way, but it will be stronger. It will be stickier and and so hence, smaller, more durable brands will be more stable, and I think probably they'll they'll be worth more as well, because they have more of a moat. If you look at, I'm a big fan of Prof G, he does a great show. He's probably one of my favorite podcasts, and he talks frequently about how if you look at the brands that are the best in the world, they really don't rely on advertising that much. They do a little bit. But Apple, Apple doesn't, I mean, they have ad campaigns, but they don't spend that much. Netflix has ad campaigns. They don't spend that much, right? Like they mostly invest in a phenomenal product, and let's speak for themselves, and if it's him or someone else, but advertising is kind of a crutch for a weak product, right, or experience. And I think that's always been true, but I think it's never been more true than it is going forward. That's on the marketing side and brand building side. We can go deeper, if you want there, I think on the supply chain side for a

William Harris  26:53  

second, if that's yeah, because I want to, I want to dig into that a little bit. So I run an advertising agency, but I couldn't agree more with you, and so,

Andrew Youderian  27:04  

because one of the things the business to the ground here, well,

William Harris  27:07  

no, no, like, but let's say that it's a crutch. Oftentimes for this, it's a necessary crutch, right? It's like, I think that it needs to happen, but I do think that it ends up being over inflated in terms of its importance so much that there's, there's oftentimes, you know, we run into, you know, end of year or whatever, somebody saying, it's like, almost entirely relying on your your media team to make or break the business. And it's like that. But what else are you doing? And it's like, literally, will sometimes have those conversations with like, 90% of your sales volume, so comes from ads. And so it's like, yes, it is break or break, but reality is, you have to do something else. And I know that there's been a really good push lately, thankfully from others in the space, Preston Rutherford, who was one of the founders of Chubbies. I'm trying to blank on the guy's name from Airbnb now, but this idea of like a return to brand advertising and look just even just to say brand growth again, because I do think you're right that it was cheap traffic that built the Initial DTC. It was arbitrage. It was the opportunity to do that. But that won't allow those businesses to grow in the same way, like businesses shouldn't come in expecting the same kind of growth plan that got those businesses to where they are. But it is investing in a brand where people say you should be having word of mouth, you should be having direct traffic, that should be in some sort of a ratio with what you're doing on paid. And you can use paid to get that out there to more places, but then you need to be able to continue to maintain that growth momentum outside of that,

Andrew Youderian  28:40  

oh, 100% I mean, I think, and I think creative marketing as well to like more interesting things that genuinely engage, that are genuinely creative, genuinely emotive, like those things are good to to spark interest and get attention. But it's kind of like when you're dating, right? Like, if you roll up some some if a woman rolls up to some guy at a bar, I'm gonna speak on behalf of women. That doesn't sound like they don't get me in trouble at all. And the guy is good, looking, handsome, Suave, you know, and just has everything going for him on the outside. But 10 minutes in, you find out he's just shallow, super vain, you know, hates his mother, you know, just bankrupt four times morally corrupt. Sure, you're not, you're not going out with this guy. And I think it's the same with, you know, advertising and the actual product, right? You got it. Advertising just gets you in the door. The product is what seals the deal, and that's got to be good,

William Harris  29:35  

yeah. And that's always been true. Like you said, that's always been true, although you were able to get away with it for a while because of how cheap the traffic was to acquire, and now it's back to you. It's back to the product has to be good,

Andrew Youderian  29:47  

like I'm not advertising. Every business I've ever built has been based around completely organic traffic and word of mouth, which I don't say that was pride, because I feel like I was idiotic and gave up a ton of. Have very, very cheap clicks, and I left a lot of money on the table because I looked at everything as a nail, because I had a hammer, and that's what I was, you know, that was my background here. But even still, having very little background in the paid world apart from a high level understanding of it. When people talk about, like, Oh yeah, I'm getting a one and a half to 2x ROAs. And so happy with that, my head explodes. And I'm just like, I mean, it depends on your economics, right? Like, I guess it can work for brands with good margins, with good repeat, but sometimes people are excited about one, one and a half, you know, better than I do, but a lot of times the levels of return people are talking about and getting excited about it just are kind of bewildering to me, so I don't know if they're unsustainable, yeah. Well,

William Harris  30:41  

yeah. And the reason why this is such a problem, and I would say, like, there's two, two clarifications that I'll make. One is, if you're saying that your ROAs is a one and a half two, that might be completely fine, because the actual incremental volume may be a four or 5x M, E, R, and part of the issue comes down to reported revenue versus actual revenue. You know, the amount that you can actually attribute there could be very, very often we see this, especially on a lot of top of funnel channels where Facebook is significantly at least now post, like all the ios 14 stuff, it's significantly under reporting, usually. And so let's say that it's a hey, two, not good. But if it's a two, that actually means a 405, might be fine. But where this becomes a problem is if you do run too much on a red line there, the costs are only going to go up. The CPMs are very likely going to go up. The cost to acquire, you know, beyond your first tier, your your second tier customer, your third tier, each new person starts getting a little bit more expensive to reach, in terms of of, you know, actually being able to draw that business. And so it does become unsustainable if you're still so reliant on that. And this is where I'd say, where your your paid is making up, you know, was, maybe it was making up 10% of your growth. Now, paid is making up 20% 50% 80% of your growth. When you get to that point where it's like there has to be something else keeping up in there, usually, I would say that's an indication that you have a problem, a product problem, because you should have, if you're going out there and acquiring people, you should be able to keep up with the there should be an equal amount of brand searches, direct searches, word of mouth. There should be an equal amount of other things, of people wanting to get into your product through other means besides paid and if it's not, then why aren't they talking about your product

Andrew Youderian  32:23  

offline? Yeah, there's, there's a again, our community, jump ventures. Leo Caracas, I think I'm getting his last name correct. He's had a very impressive track record with building, building his own brands, but also incubating and helping others brands grow. And one of the biggest things he looks at is when he's thinking about who to partner with to partner with to help try to blow him up is product review, like, if they don't have, like, a 4.8 4.9 on average for their product reviews, like, exceptionally good he's out, I think, for this exact thing that we're talking about, because he knows it's really, really difficult to scale up anything that doesn't have an exceptionally good product.

William Harris  33:00  

Yeah, yeah. And then let's couple that with exceptionally good service, which you mentioned, is customer service, right where it's like, one of the things that you can stand out, you're not gonna be able to compete with Amazon on shipping speed. Typically, you not gonna compete with Amazon in breadth of products available, or anything along those lines. But you can compete with Amazon on like that, really intimate, like you just walked into the corner hardware store and like, Tom's gonna help you figure out exactly what you need, walk you to the aisle, make sure you get the right one. And you're like, This just saves me a lot of time, a lot of effort. And by the way, I got home, it wasn't the right one. I'm back at the hardware store for some reason. But it's like, you're taking care of, yep, returns easy. Like, those are the things that you can at least have some kind of a competition with Amazon in Yeah,

Andrew Youderian  33:44  

and the bar, I think just, you know, as it always does, keeps getting hired. Talking to a really talented entrepreneur recently and in our community, and he was just saying how, with his team, his customer service team, their their benchmark for trying to reply to an email that comes in to start replying to, it is one minute. And so hopefully I have a reply in like, five minutes, because, and maybe even less because. And I said, that's great. Like, I pushed back a little bit. I was like, one minute, that's crazy. He's like, Well, think about, like, if you walked into a nice boutique and you walk around for five minutes and nobody helps you, you're gonna walk out. And he's like, hey, I want to model that. And B, how awesome is it if you reply to something, if you send an email, and you have an email back in three minutes, like the signal that sends as long as it's not a garbage email, is pretty powerful,

William Harris  34:34  

yeah, as long as it's not a garbage email, well, and that reminds me then of there are some AI tools that are doing this a little bit now, there's none that I'm impressed with, but I do know that some others are in development that I think will hopefully fix this. But AI should be able to know your entire catalog, to know all of the different customer service answers, and be able to send over that immediately, right, like an answer that is extremely thoughtful, of like I'm trying to. Find the right dress for my daughter's prom, whatever the thing is that you're looking for, and it's like, you know, this is what she likes. These are her sizes, blah, blah, blah, whatever this is. It should be able to give you excellent, excellent examples. And I do think that there's going to be, let's say, like on the agentic side, where we are going to have our own AI agents that are doing a lot of that work for us, but there will be the need for these to be, let's say, you know, at the brand level, because you want to have as much control over that, and it's going to have, obviously, a lot better details about what you're doing. But what I want to see happen, and what I'd like to see happen, is get that to the point where it is real time, right where it's real time, and even it can, like, walk on and hop on a video with you, because we're seeing multi modal. Ai being that where you're like, I'm thinking of the example that I have would be like a store working with RC cars, and you're like, I don't know what's wrong with my RC car, but it's making this noise. Well, through text, you have no clue whether that's good, but it's like, through multimodal, it's like, here's the car. I've taken this apart. Here's the thing that's making the noise. I don't know what part I need. And it's like, that AI agent should be able to, like, right then and there, while you're on the website, say, Oh, you need this part. Here it is, by the way, you can go ahead and check out blah,

Andrew Youderian  36:15  

blah, blah. I mean, man, I think the AI agents, I haven't played around with them a lot. I'm hoping to be able to do a lot more this spring. I think they're decent. I don't think they're phenomenal yet. I think what you're talking about is pretty impressive. That's probably two or three years plus out to be able to take a video and digest that. But I do think five years out, operations, customer support, a lot of the, all the all the operational facets of a business. Many of them, the majority of them, will be driven by AI in a way that makes them much simpler. And I think it's so much of what is going to allow people to succeed or not exceed is a product quality like we're talking about in innovation, and then B the ability to connect to story tell. I think interesting lives or interesting brands and conviction are also something that I think are going to be deeply valuable. Actually. Think the personal brand is something that is becoming really important to have on an individual level. 10 years ago, I think a lot of people would say it's not as important build your brand makes it harder to sell. I think the personal brand in the age of AI, in an age of people not connecting as much with other peers or other others relationally, is is only gonna skyrocket importance. So I think those are other things too that can help you build one of those smaller, more durable brands.

William Harris  37:37  

Yeah, I agree. So in keeping with this idea of building a smaller, more durable brand. I interrupted you before you went into I think it was supply chain and logistics.

Andrew Youderian  37:47  

Oh, yeah. So the other side of that, you think, like, Okay, well, how, how are we going to compete with a lot of if you look at China, China just there's a few things America makes better than China. China's expertise. China has the edge. They don't have the edge. They have a massive, huge advantage in manufacturing. They just manufacture things. And a lot of times, I think people think China's manufacture, manufactures a lot of junk, and there's some junk, but they also, I mean, they also manufacture the iPhone, right? Like, one of the highest quality piece of electronics out there. And so when you think about building something you're going to be able to compete with China or other other countries in, I think some of the things that make sense to do, or you think about, okay, what, what things would people want to buy? And again, I'm speaking here from, like, a Western country perspective, what kind of things do do we have, or does the Western world or United States specifically have an advantage in? And some things along those lines are, if there's anything that's regulated, if I'm on if I'm looking for dietary supplements or or anything I'm gonna drink or cups, or anything that's gonna get into my body or I'm gonna consume I'm I'm not buying that from Amazon unless it is from a brand that I trust deeply and know it's going to be authentic product off Amazon in general. I buy it from somewhere else, anything health related, again, same kind of thing, anything that's in a regulated market, I think anything that has a degree of it's gonna be interesting. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on Made in America with the Trump administration. It's gonna be very interesting to see if they actually do provide some kind of reverse tariff or bonus or tax break for made in the USA, which could help you with margins. So I do think the universe of products that you can successfully compete in is going to narrow over the next two, three years. I think it already has narrowed to some degree, but I do think there's some areas where you can still still compete fairly well.

William Harris  39:45  

Yeah, yeah. I don't have a lot of good thoughts on that. I'll be honest, that's way outside of my scope of what I typically dig into. I think that the win that you have versus some type of like a reverse incentive, or whatever, a reverse. Yes, Tara, if you were calling there whatever, I don't know if it's even necessary, but I don't know, right, like, that's literally outside of my purview. But I do think that there should be some sort of a benefit now to people being able to manufacture in America, or even like you see with the iPhone assembled in America, you know as much as you can, if you can use that in some way, I do think that that's still a powerful selling feature for a lot of people, and we see that for a lot of people. I don't know if that's the thing to build a business around. Typically, that much anymore. And I would say that other things that I feel like have gone by the wayside when I look at them as far as being something that is a differentiator, that people are like, Oh, I'll buy this instead of that. I don't see that being a strong one as much anymore for older generations, yes, for younger generations, I don't think they usually seem to care, because that's why we're seeing the growth in of Shin and we're seeing, you know, 10 Moon people buying off of, you know, Tiktok like it doesn't matter. The other things that I think don't matter as much that I'm noticing would be, I don't know environmental impact, you know, whether it should or shouldn't is completely besides the point. But I see a brand, there was a coat brand, I know that really tried to go after that as being their biggest thing, even optimizing their logistics to be, you know, far and above anybody else's logistics within that space, it didn't matter enough to be able to allow them to be profitable, the product still has to be the best product, period. Yeah, it's

Andrew Youderian  41:25  

interesting. You say that I saw some research or data on, I can't remember where I saw this. I wish I could attribute it. Everyone thinks of like, Tom's right, like they kind of pioneered the one for one model. And there's been a ton of other companies who have popped up a with a similar model in mind, and tried to replicate that. And in general, I think statistically, they did some research, and it did not help sales at all when people were looking for a product, which is kind of depressing, I would push back on the Made in America thing a little bit. I think it depends on the demographic. I think it depends on what what you're selling, sure who you're selling to. And I think sometimes it does not matter. I think sometimes it can be a powerful signal of quality. And some people, just like, I think there's a there's a demographic that definitely does look for that. So I would say, if you had to pick between those two, kind of sad, that you know, the charitable aspect doesn't drive more, but I do think there is an edge for for American manufacturing. I don't know if it's a massive one, but I do think that's beneficial for some buyers. Yeah,

William Harris  42:29  

I and I could get behind that. I guess I'm looking at anecdotally, just speaking, and seeing the rise of a lot of these other, you know, Chinese things that are just taking off, and people don't seem to care, at least, you know, and I'm gonna say, people, I'm gonna, I'm gonna pick on the Gen Z, Gen alpha, just like, Oh, look at this. And it's a really good price, and I just want to buy it. And so I would say, maybe that'll change as as each person gets older. Then you buy enough junk, and you say, I really just want this one to last.

Andrew Youderian  42:54  

There's a, there's a great subreddit I came upon recently. It's called buy it for life. And I'm a big fan of, like buying something once, ponying up and, you know, I like the cry, the cry up front, kind of approach, versus the cry on the back end. Anyway, cool sub reddit, because they're just, I'm a big fan. We went to Japan recently, and one of the things I deeply respect about their culture is just this, this, this obsession with quality and craft, right? Like a lot of the restaurants there, they're not big, you know, we have a family of five, we roll around, we try to get into places. And, you know, they're not big. They're they're built for maybe they seat 20 people, mostly one and two tops or bar and two tops and and, you know, they have the same 200 300 people roll through every day for different meals, and they're not trying to be the next McDonald's, but they're just trying to do something exceptionally well. And I think that's cool, yeah. So

William Harris  43:47  

yeah, I like that a lot. Okay, so aside from logistics, what are some other things that we could be looking at for really building more resilient brands

Andrew Youderian  43:58  

as they grow resilient brands. I think we covered supply chain, we covered product we covered kind of marketing. I think the other one is, is thinking through just operational expenses. I think AI, over time will help with that. It's been, it's been a couple of years since I did this, as I'm overdue for doing my next report, but I did a did some research into what brands were the most successful, and what I found was that the biggest correlation was not how well they ran their advertising. Wasn't even their gross margins, it was how how big a chunk of overhead they had relative to the size of their business. And so the best companies were the ones that were able to stay lean and do a lot with a little. And I think that's as you're thinking about e-commerce, getting more mature, getting more competitive, I think that's going to be as important as ever. And so I think that's something we forget a lot of times, especially as you're growing. It's nice to you feel good with more people. You feel good just throwing people at problems, money at problems, but, but oftentimes that's not the best long term solution.

William Harris  45:08  

Both of the companies that I mentioned that I know, that were in e-commerce, fuel of ours, that had good exits, were also on EOS, also both in Minnesota. So I'm, you know, really representing the Minnesota here, but I'm a big fan of EOS. We run on EOS here, and you really start to understand the impact that that has, right? And I've heard people say that it's like, if you scale something that's inefficient, then you're scaling your inefficiencies. And to a point, if you just throw a a person at a problem, you're usually creating a completely different problem. Now you're creating a people problem, and it is very quick, where that can catch up to you. It can diminish the the culture of what's happening. It can diminish a lot of ways, especially the communication. And so there's a really good example that I liked, that EOS gave, where, you know, if you have two people communicating, there's, there's only two ways of communication, here to here and here to here, right? Like, that's it. Once you have three people communicating, that doesn't just go to three ways of communication, it's now six ways of communication, here to here, here to here, here to here and back to back, right? And so the more people you implement to this, yeah, exactly. It's significant. And so I think that to your point, it's very quick. And we've all been probably part of a company where you ended up having somebody where it's like, somebody was hired, and there maybe even wasn't, like, sufficient work for them to do. A good example that would be like the tech stuff where, like, there are people that are saying they're like, I was getting paid $200,000 a year at, you know, Facebook to do nothing like, to enter like, one line of code a year or something. And so it's very easy for those things to catch up? Yeah,

Andrew Youderian 46:42  

well, I think too, apart from just the communication, it's, it's hard to say small from an ego standpoint, kind of like, like, what's one of the first question? What's one of the first questions people ask you, and you're getting to know each other, network. Oh, where do you where you from? Sure, what do you do? Oh, you do a company. How many people do you have working with you? Right? Like, you know? And the right answer is, more people. More people, larger numbers, right? We, I have seen companies with 50 people doing 30, $40 million in sales, make less money than companies that have two or three people that just have it dialed in. And it's, it's easy to talk about employees, but I think that's a really bad metric. Like, we're, I mean, my company is eCommerceFuel is 12, 13, years old. We only have like, three or four employees, right? Like, we could be bigger, but I've been hyper focused, partially because of what we're talking about, and partially because I want to try to not grow something too big that becomes just all consuming and pulls at other areas I want to invest in. It's gotta be really intentional not to know what you're trying to build. And I think it's easy to get too big too fast. It's much easier to get too big than it is to get small. That's really pain downsizing,

William Harris  48:04  

yeah, for everybody, right? Which brings me to maybe a good point of another thing that you brought up before, which was conviction. Conviction being like in the scarcest supply, right, where there's like from at the founder level. Then if, like, you want to build all these things, we can talk practically, but there has to be a mentality that you have as a founder. And you know, why is conviction so important then? Well,

Andrew Youderian  48:24  

I think conviction, I think one of the things that is in in is going to be a real asset going forward, is conviction of founders, not even necessarily within a company, although that's important, but publicly, right? We're kind of coming out of a it's not quite I think it's a cute as it was a couple of years ago, but it's a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of people in general didn't feel like they could really voice things that they wanted to in the world, what they believed, what they you know, what their opinions were and or even just taking hard opinions again, going back to Prof G I mentioned him earlier. One of the things I one things I really admire about him is that he's, he's a, I would say, a left of center guy, but when he sees something on the left that he thinks is crazy, he will come out all, you know, all barrels tilting and just fire away at it. You know, kind of condemnation be damned from from whoever you look at, Bill Maher, he's another he's someone else. I really enjoy. I mean, he's on the left. I think he would call himself on a progressive journalist, but he also will tackle things on the right that he thinks that will infuriate people on the left. And I just that's hard to do. There's very few people in this day and age who will just speak their mind with conviction about what they believe in a respectful way, but not doing it, filtering it through. What is this going to mean for other other issues in my life, in my business, things like that. And I think when people hear that my. Included is so refreshing. It's so helpful and energizing and honest that is wildly attractive. And so I think that if that's something you have, you can something I'm trying to cultivate more of, and I think it's something that is just personally as important, but I think from a business perspective, it's an incredible marketing tool, too. How? How is that a marketing tool? Because people want to listen to it. I mean, I think that's one of the reasons why prof G, why Bill Maher, are so popular, is because you can't put him. They refuse to be put in their box. They refuse to, kind of, like, temper their opinions when they don't fall in line with the party that they subscribe to or that they're oftentimes with, you know. And I think, I don't think you if you do it purely from marketing, I think people will see through that. But if you can do that genuinely for things you deeply believe, and I think a wonderful byproduct of that is that people say, Whoa, who's this guy? Who's this gal? Like they care deeply. They're willing to like, you know, say it how they see it, and I trust them more, sure. So, yeah,

William Harris  51:07  

I think authenticity breeds trust in all areas. So I completely agree with you on that. I think that the more we can allow people into some of those more personal aspects of our mind, the more people feel like, okay, I can trust you, even if I disagree with you, I can trust because I know that you have opened up to me, and I think that's a really good thing. Yeah, absolutely. What about what about the group itself, eCommerceFuel. I've mentioned a couple of the businesses that we're in. I want to talk about this a little bit. What are the benefits? Let's say, if you're building a resilient brand, and I know this is going to feel like too promotional for you even want to talk about but I want to talk about it, so I'm the one bringing it up. In what way does being a part of a group like eCommerceFuel help to build a resilient business like this? Yeah,

Andrew Youderian  51:56  

well, well, thanks for the mention, and give me a chance to talk about it. I think there is, business is hard, e-commerce is hard, and it's been changing continually since the dawn of time, but especially rapidly since the e-commerce and the Internet came on the scene, and we're kind of at the stage we've talked about a lot. I won't rehash it, but kind of coming into a new era, I believe, where you're building brand. Where you're building brands, and one of the best ways that you can kind of help calibrate and level up and be able to adapt to what's coming is buying being able to talk to other people who are doing the similar thing. Right? If you want to become a great rock climber, you know, you don't go just in the woods by yourself. You go hang on a rock jam with other people, and you hang out with them and learn from them and get to know them, and they watch you climb up the wall, and when you fall off of stuff, they're like, Hey, you missed this super easy hold. You couldn't see around the corner. And you go up and do it again, and you make each other better, right? And so that's the entire point of e-commerce. So people will often ask me, like, especially when I meeting them for the first time, like, Oh, hey, what do you do? And I kind of explain it to them, and they're like, sweet. Are you like it? Do you teach them? Are you like, some weird guru that, like, teaches them all how to do this? And I'm like, No. I'm like, the least, you know, impressive person in this group. The whole point is, we create this environment where we screen everyone that comes in to make sure that they're a seven or eight figure owner, that they're committed to reciprocity, that they have been in the trenches and are actually able and willing to share what's happening. And the value add you get is, if you have questions about things, you get fast answers where there's not a lot of places. As an e-commerce Store owner, let's say you're thinking about adopting a new AI platform for customer service. You go, you go to your local chamber meeting in your your city, and ask that question, and people will look at you like you're crazy. You come and post, hey, I'm thinking about going to a help desk that has AI animation. What are the best ones out there? What should I think of you post that, and within a day, you'll have many, many responses of people saying, this one's great. Don't like this one. Tried this one was all right. You can get very in depth, very topical answers incredibly quickly. So that's the biggest part, and it helps you level up, be able to kind of go into this brave new world on all different facets of business with people who you can learn from and who can sharpen

William Harris  54:13  

you. Yeah, and I think that's the key, is you've done a very good job of curating this. It is just people that are like, similar in that means you don't have service providers in there. You've, you've, I know because I've tried, and you said no, tried again, and you continued to say no, that I could offer in terms of help, but to your point that it's like, it's just the wrong kind of help, like they just need to have this help because they can't trust the answer. As much of it's coming from me. It has to come from somebody else in the group, and so I love that you've stuck to it very well.

Andrew Youderian  54:50  

Oh, thanks. We didn't talk for years, probably as a result, and I appreciate the forgiveness that you've given me here. So thank you. I was waiting for a call. It was took four years, but finally it came.

William Harris  54:59  

No, I do want to get to know, speaking of, let's just say, gaining trust and authenticity. I want to get to know the person of Andrew Youdarian, before we dig into the personal stuff, is there anything else professionally that we should be talking about, that we're thinking about, like, hey, we need to talk about this from a standpoint of, you know, having the right goals in mind, or the future of e-commerce and where we're going, or things like that.

Andrew Youderian  55:26  

No, I think we covered a lot of good stuff and a lot of things that I like talking about. So no, only other thing I'd mentioned that I forgot in that last question was the name of the community was eCommerceFuel. So if you're interested ecommercefuel.com, and then also, if you're a podcast listener, which you are, have been doing a podcast over there for a while, so you might find it interesting. Do a lot of interviews with our members. But I think, yeah, in terms of other things, other things to talk through, I don't think so. I think cool. I mean, yeah. I mean, there's always things we can talk through, but I think those are the big ones, yeah, yeah. I

William Harris  56:00  

just wanted to make sure I didn't miss anything. So now we're getting into the good stuff here, the fun stuff. We were talking about this a little bit before, and I intentionally like to keep it a little bit more open. What about your childhood? How has your childhood helped to shape you into who you are?

Andrew Youderian  56:17  

Yeah, my therapist said you called him up and he sent over a bunch of notes for your prep. So this could get weird, but we'll go with it.

William Harris  56:23  

Yeah, Bill's a good guy. We go way back.

Andrew Youderian  56:29  

He is a quasi therapist. How has the chat? I would say I grew up with a couple amazing parents. My dad was a nuclear engineer. My mom stayed at home and had raised us, and I feel like, from my dad, I learned how to work hard. Sometimes that was not fun, but he was, he was someone who taught, like, taught us integrity and working hard. My mom taught us entrepreneurship in her own special way, like, and it's not just a unique story, but you know, when we were 10, she'd kind of like, kick us out. Outside probably the catalyst. My brother probably fighting, and she was looking for any reason, any justification, to throw us outside. I'm sure you can relate to this with three kids. And she's like, Listen, go outside. You're not coming back for four hours. Don't come back until you've made like, you know, $25 shoveling snow. Door slams, bam, behind us, right? So we go out and tread shoot. We don't think it's gonna work. And, you know, you make some money out there that first, first, when you have five, when you have 10 or $15 as like a 10 year old, you feel like you're just feel like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, right? You just feel flush with cash, like the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund. And so that kind of lit spark for entrepreneurship, that kind of, different things that has come from that, but that was probably the start. So great parents. I think another thing they taught me, too, was growing up. We, my parents were very frugal, not cheap, but frugal, like, made a good income, but they intentionally socked away, I don't know, a very high percent of their income and lived well beneath their means for 15 to 20 years so that my dad could quit his engineering job, which was all consuming, to be able to go and do stuff they believed in. So they went and, like, you know, quit that. Went rent homeless shelter for for a while, he went and became like kind of a pastor later in life. And I just, I didn't fully realize the intentionality with which they did that until later in life, but that was so cool that they were, they had such a long term vision for what was important, and kind of executed on it. And we were willing to delay gratification. Like I remember one time we were rolling through this super nice part of town. It was called Stonebrook, and we're driving through, my mom was like, and this is probably when I was, like, six. My mom is like, Andrew, you see all these nice houses. She's like, we could live in one of these nice houses, but then you would be grossly in debt when you went to college. And she just didn't say anything else, right? And like, this is what's going on in like, six year old Andrew's brand. And so that was very much a mentality of use money as a way to build opportunity, and not as a way to, like, create standard of living, or or or status. And I always, I've deep, I really appreciated that, that that model, that's

William Harris  59:13  

beautiful, um, some of the fun things that you like to do then, because it sounds like you had good parents, you like to be a good parent. We've talked about this, and you like to travel. And I understand there's a couple of interesting things that you have discovered in your travels, one of which I still don't even know if I'm going to pronounce it correctly, balut. Tell me about your time experience balut, and what the heck balut even is.

Andrew Youderian  59:38  

Half the people are just kind of blinking, the other half. We're kind of gagging a little bit. Went to the Philippines recently for a couple different reasons. One of the reasons was to to visit a team member that I've worked with for 15 years on my team and never met. It was super cool to meet her and a ballute is this Filipino. It's a delicacy, and is a duck egg. Egg that is fertilized, and the duck has been allowed to grow to, like, I don't know, half maturity, a third of maturity, something like that. I'm not sure. But then it is boiled. It's a little cruel to be honest, but it's boiled, and then, and then you peel the egg and eat this duck embryo. That's like, and it's a thing that, it's kind of thing where, if you don't think about what you're there's a lot of cultural things like this. Like, there's a lot of things even in America, America, like, if you're, like, fairly thought about this, like, we do what this is weird, but yeah, it's a little gnarly, because you're eating, like, bones and, like, a lot of times the feathers, things like that. Anyway, had the chance to experience the cotton, and was with some some Filipinos, and they had asked if I want to try it, and I kind of demurred. And then they, they bought it, and I was like, I can't, you know, I can't bail out. Now, this is, you know, you're traveling when in Rome. So here we go. So that was it. That was a it was interesting. Did you and

William Harris  1:00:52  

would you get it again?

Andrew Youderian  1:00:56  

I'm not gonna rush back to the Philippines to try it. I in the right. If I was, if I went back next year, would not do it again in five years at a festival. If everyone was doing it again,

William Harris  1:01:06  

I would do it. So is that the most interesting thing you've ever eaten? Oh, hands

Andrew Youderian  1:01:10  

down. Hands down. Yeah. The other thing too, this cool is one of the reasons I did it too, is my son, who is six, was going to do it. And I was like, I can't let my, like, one, we have these four values in our family. Our four values are be kind honest, hard working and brave and, like, if I'm gonna tell my son, he needs to be brave, and then his dad won't, you know, won't pony up and eat this weird thing that he's willing to eat. I, you know, yeah, it doesn't really sync up. So, but the cool thing is, now we have the story that we've done this together, that when we're, you know, when he's like, 30, he will remember the time that he ate blue with his dad, and his dad was a wimp, and did it with his eyes closed, and he was eyes wide open, charging the head like a pro. So

William Harris  1:01:51  

that's good. Well done. The I've tried a lot of things. I have not tried blue. I would try it. I've tried just about anything.

Andrew Youderian  1:02:00  

What's, what's the weirdest thing that you have eaten? I don't

William Harris  1:02:04  

know if this is the weirdest thing. My brother was in Shanghai, and when we went there, I had seen, like, the Beijing Olympics, right? Like, a couple years before that. And so I was like, Man, I really want to find, like, a scorpion on a stick. And we looked everywhere. We tried, could not find it anywhere. So it's like, that was just like, for, you know, TV, like, I don't think it's a real thing, but he was like, Well, this is the weirdest thing I can find for you. And it was stinky tofu, which is, like a fermented tofu. I couldn't get it down. Like, I got like, three or four pieces down. It was, it was really bad, worst food I've ever had in my life. And it's meant to be like, I think it's a gag. I don't know if anybody actually said I think it's just something they get, like Americans when they get like Americans when

Andrew Youderian  1:02:43  

they come there. Oh, I think balloon might be the same way. I mean, I think they, they just, they were gleeful watching this, you know, this white dude from America trying to choke down balut and just, yeah, I think that was, I think they thoroughly enjoyed watching me squirt while I was eating it. So, that's

William Harris  1:03:00  

a good experience with your son that you have now, but you've also got some experiences, I think, in an old Volkswagen van breaking down mechanic space. What's going on here?

Andrew Youderian  1:03:09  

Yeah, we so we had our first daughter, who is now 12. When we had her, you know, 12 years ago, we went camping. Love getting outside and trying to explore and have fun, and we went camping with her, and it was, I don't know if you've ever been camping with a 12 to 18 month old baby. Oh my, I don't know if I have. Maybe it makes you never want to leave the house again ever. He was awful. And so we quickly realized, like, hey, if we're gonna try to get outside a lot with our family, we need to have we need to make it as seamless and streamlined as possible. And I've always loved these old it's very cliche. I know there's probably a lot of people that roll their eyes here, but I've always loved the those van again, from the 80s and early 90s. Yes, they're just they're built like tanks, foot for foot. They are the most functional vehicles for interior living space I have, I'll do bike races sometimes with friends, and we can sit, we can sleep for full size adults with a stove, and also have a place to sit and hang out and talk and have beers in this thing that is about the size of a minivan. It's crazy how well it was engineered by the Germans. The downside is they're all old. They usually break down a lot, and they've got some issues. But we've, we have this. We've had this for about 10 years. We've taken it on a bunch of ventures throughout the rest we've taken to Canada. We've taken down to Mexico, and the kids love it. I've loved it, although it's been trying at times, and it's always an adventure. Sometimes, the typical great sometimes, as in one year we, like, went down to Joshua Tree. We're camping there. The engine blew up on a Friday at like 4pm when all the shops closed, right? And so we're stuck in this city trying to get this thing fixed with like, a one and a three year old. We ended up, like, staying at the mechanics house with like, little kids and just in. Same we look back at the pictures, and it's like, what were we thinking? But it's been a really fun vehicle for creating memories, realizing that a lot of situations you get in, there's always a solution. You just have to be patient. It might be uncomfortable, it might be inconvenient. You always get through it, you always figure it out, and you always have, you know, oftentimes good stories from it. But yeah, it's been a fun part of our life and raising our kids. I

William Harris  1:05:22  

don't remember who did the study, but one of the guys at church told me that there was a study that was done that said one of the biggest common denominators between families that are close when they're older was whether or not they went camping together. And the hypothesis behind it is exactly what you just said, where it's like you're in close quarters, you have to figure out how to get along. And there's always something that goes wrong, to have to figure out how to solve problems together. And that's like, such an important thing to have to go through. And I like that. I don't think that. I don't remember if we ever did anything with like, a one and a half year old, but we've done a bit of camping as well as a family, and it's a lot of fun. I can remember, you know, the first time, I think we set up a tent with them the torrential downpour, and we're just like, Okay, here we go. Like, you know, how well is this gonna hold up? Did we pick a good spot, or is it gonna be we're gonna wake up, you know, completely soaking. And it does give me a lot of really fun memories. And

Andrew Youderian  1:06:16  

then, and then he followed up that stat about the close families with and also the families that are most likely to be estranged from each other are the ones that went camping a lot as young kids.

William Harris  1:06:26  

Maybe I don't know. He didn't fall that was part B.

Andrew Youderian  1:06:30  

Part B. He left that part out.

William Harris  1:06:32  

Yeah. What about anything ever happened in Montana with handcuffs?

Andrew Youderian  1:06:42  

Dude? Man, did you get Did you like, did somebody sign off on these privacy things for like, information? Ask,

William Harris  1:06:50  

yeah, we allowed. I'm in your email. Well, it's GPT now,

Andrew Youderian  1:06:56  

the one I will tell you about, the one so to, went to Montana State University here in Bozeman, and they have, there's, I think a lot of universities have this. They have this tunnel system that goes all throughout the college. And one day, when I was walking back to my my apartment, yeah, I saw my little hatches these hats. They're kind of tucked away by some of these hatches that was loose, and they went over and tested it. And I was like, Oh, sweet. This thing is open. And I've always wanted to see these things. So later that night, at like midnight, we come back. I come back, I talk my roommate into going down in there with me. And we start going down. We sneak down, and we hear some little noise and run away like, you know, you know, scared cats, and hide in the bushes, and then we go down again, hear the same noise, or run out again like a bunch of scared little wieners. And finally, we went on a third time, and we're exploring in there, and I'm videotaping and stuff, and we hear footsteps. And anyway, there had been sensors on all the doors, and they had to send some cops down in to flush us out. And because it was like, a single cop. He's walking around, gun drawn, doesn't know who's down there, hand cast us, walks us out, tosses us in the back of a cop car. And I was actually, I was actually less worried about any kind of legal consequences, because we're not, like, robbing, you know, we're knocking over a bank. We're not kidnapping people. I'm like, you know, this will probably just be a good story I can tell on a podcast in 20 years. You know, the thing that worried me the most was I had a radio show, and because I was terrible, they put me at, like the 3am spot in the morning. They did that for all the new DJs. And if you lost one, if you didn't show up to one time, you would really kill your credibility to get better spots. And we got a we got, like, I don't, was technically arrested, but thrown back with Kafka at like, 1:30 in the morning, and I'm just thinking, like, I have an hour and a half to figure out how to talk my way out of here anyway. All worked out. They threatened to toss us in the in the clinic. It didn't, didn't transpire, but it was a, it was, it was, it was totally worth it cool seeing the tunnels and good bonding experience for me, my buddy, that's

William Harris  1:09:00  

so good. Those are some of the best memories. But I have to ask you, said you were recording this video with what this was like. I mean, it sounds like you're talking pre iPhone. Yeah, Social Security is gonna

Andrew Youderian  1:09:12  

call me and ask me why my benefits haven't started after hitting this they it was, yeah, it was like a mini, it was a little it was a tape, some kind of tape medium, and I had it down there. And the worst part, yes, total old school, not digital, analog, completely. And the next day, I was telling the story to my friends, and they're like, we were recording it, right? And I was like, Yeah, but the police officer took my tape. And I was like, well, but the cop took my tape and nobody believed me, because they're like, it just sounds so fishy, right? Like it's like that kid in third grade. He was like, Yeah, I've got a tank in my in my garage. I'm just gonna show it to you. Kind of thing, right?

William Harris  1:09:51  

Exactly, amount of stuff that we got away with, even though, back then, because social media didn't exist and everybody didn't have iPhones, is unreal. Oh.

Andrew Youderian  1:09:59  

I know I'm I'm very thankful that I feel like I know how old you are. I'm 42 I am, I don't think I would have picked a different time to be alive, like growing up born in 1982 in an analog childhood with the internet, kind of maturing as I was getting in. You know, late high school, early college, phone, free childhood, being able to leverage technology in the early days to build an internet business like I mean, I am so thankful I was born when I was like, I just, I don't think, I don't think I changed the thing. I

William Harris  1:10:33  

feel the same way. I'm 40, so your childhood is my childhood. It sounds very, very similar. And, yeah, there's just, we literally saw everything happen. Like you said, we know what it was like to have not have a computer in the house, and then to have one, and then that computer didn't really have internet, and then, oh, now the computer also has internet. And it's like, before that, all you had was Microsoft Paint, right? It's like, that was it?

Andrew Youderian  1:10:57  

Yeah, it was just such a good time to be alive. Such a good trajectory. I'm thankful for. It is awesome. I

William Harris  1:11:02  

agree. What about music? I understand that you're also a musician. What instruments you play?

Andrew Youderian  1:11:10  

Going deep here, I love music. Enjoy playing it, although I'm not phenomenal at it. Guitar, mostly is what I play. So played guitar a lot in college. Have picked it up a little bit the big, big lull, kind of in my 20s, when doing a lot of work and and getting busy, kind of talking about those buckets that suffer, picked it up a little bit more in recent years, especially fun with kids. It's really fun to play with kids for playing them to sleep, to playing music to, you know, getting teaching them as well. And yeah, music is just something that for me in particular, but I think for a lot of people, it is. It's hard to have a terrible day when you have listened to a lot of good music. And sometimes I can be very guilty about guessing I'm the only one listening that's gonna suffer from this, but listening to like, 100 business podcast in a row, or, like, reading my fifth business book, right? Sure, and like, those are important, and those are super good, but, man, sometimes you need to just turn off the business stuff and crank up a little bit of really good music. And it's, it's, it's medicine, it's really, it's, it's amazing how it can be a mood enhancer. It can, it can make an average day, a great day. Can make a crappy day, an average day, which is, which is pretty cool, and playing music with people live or together. It's, yeah, there's something primal and wonderful and really cool about it. What do

William Harris  1:12:35  

you consider to be really good music? When you say, like, hey, cranking up some really good music, what are we talking here?

Andrew Youderian  1:12:40  

Oh, we're talking TLC waterfalls. Yeah, right, yeah. I like, I bring that up just only because that was a Kira Q song I sung recently in the Philippines. Oh, nice. A good music. I like a lot of everything I am. I think, like a lot of people, I am what you grew up with and what you in college is a lot of what you easily fall back into. So I liked dispatch. I like collective soul. I liked I like Coldplay. I like Neil Young. I like more modern stuff. One thing I've been bad about is keeping up on more modern music, and I need to do that. I like funk music a lot, like James Brown. I like BB King. So blues, it's kind of a smattering a lot of different things. But I would say in general, 90s, rock, funk and blues and anything EDM like, I work really well the EDM so anything, anything in those genres. I'm a happy man.

William Harris  1:13:42  

You have young kids still, I mean, I still consider kids to be young in this grand scheme of things. And so, yeah, you do, you lose a decade or two of what's cool during that period of time, because I feel like you're listening to the wheels on the bus go round and round and round and round and round and round and whatever end up they end up listening to. Or you definitely change your music taste. You're like, I need to not listen to that song. Let's listen to something else.

Andrew Youderian  1:14:06  

I'm the dad who gets in the car, and my wife has had, like, the wheels on the bus go running around, and she's not with me. And I pop it out, and I turn on, like, I don't know, some AC DC, and the kids, you know, kind of looking around a little bit. So the kids, usually, we, usually, I usually change it up and there's, but yes, there's, there's a lot more of the wheels on the bus than there was in the 20s. For sure,

William Harris  1:14:33  

I don't know if you know who DC talk is. Do you know who DC talk is as a group? I

Andrew Youderian  1:14:36  

do know who DC talk Yes. I definitely listen to them in my in my late teens. Yeah,

William Harris  1:14:41  

so my my daughter, who's nine, she's been learning one of the songs from Free at last, and she was like, I want to be the girl version of DC talk when I grow up. I'm so proud of that, because I'm like, I loved DC talk the kid. I'm like, you can do it, and I support you. That's

Andrew Youderian  1:14:58  

awesome. That's really. Cool, you will probably, you'll probably know this then too. I was jars of clay. Was another band that was popular, kind of in that genre at the same time. And I remember when I was, I know, maybe mid 20s, late 20s, and I heard they were coming to a city near me, and I was like, Oh, this is amazing. So we went and and I show up and like, I'm out there, I'm listening to them, and it's really fun. But I'm, like, kind of surprised. There's not that many people there. That many people there, and then they wrap up and I'm getting ready to go home, and then a ton of people flooding, and this other band shows up and starts playing, and what I realized was they were, like, the opening act, and nobody knew who they were. And I was like, This is not a good sign. It was similar to when I was up skiing this weekend, and I looked up on the wall and there are the skis I was skiing in college, and they have now mounted them as antique skies up on the wall. I'm like, these are not good road markers for what lies ahead. Yeah,

William Harris  1:15:50  

that's good. One of the things that you and I were talking about before, too is that we both love to invest it's just like, let's almost call it a hobby if you were what are some of the things that you like to invest in? Like, what are your What are your thoughts overall, with where we're going

Andrew Youderian  1:16:06  

right now? Yeah, such a big question. I would say, Where do I like to invest? Maybe we'll start with investing mistakes. I've tried to time the market in the past. I think this is one of those areas where all the advice that you get, it's so it's repeated so frequently. It sounds so obvious, but the trick is actually in doing it again. Going back to that the psychology of money book, he talks how so much about how money is not knowledge. It's psychology and behavior, and it's one of the few areas where, like beginners and the novices can beat the pros if they just can master a few psychological and behavioral tricks like you don't. It's more about it's less about expertise and more about behavior. So I would say, in the past, I have been thought I was very smart, and would try to time the market. So I take, you know, have, like, an investment fund, or money in a brokerage fund, and I'd, you know, be in the some, some ETF, and I'd sell it all, because I think the market's gonna crash. The market would crash by 10% and I'd feel brilliant, and then and it would shoot up 30% and I'd feel like an idiot and lose out on everything. And I think that's one of the biggest things that I have just man, if you just buy, buy, invest in broad ETFs or broad indexes that cover the US market, the S, p5, 100, or the total Vanguard Index, and just invest every month and just leave them, you're going to be so hard pressed to beat, especially for from a from a if you're weighing the effort and energy you'd have to go to find other investments. That's the biggest mistake I've made. I like to take an approach of kind of a diversified approach, I'd say, like, if you look at my investments, the liquid or just Non, non real estate, probably 80% I'd say probably 70% stocks, index funds, maybe 5% individual stocks, maybe 75 and you know, a little smattering of maybe 5% private investments, and then maybe 15 to 20% crypto, which is pretty high. And I think I like to take an approach that is more focused on very proven index markets, and then trying to pick things that you think have a on the barbell approach. And I didn't come up with this this term either, but they can really that you have a high degree of conviction in and you have an unfair edge on. I think stock picking in general, is not a great, you know, thing to do. But for example, you and I with Shopify. I was talking earlier about how totally I was working with Shopify early on, and I remember thinking at one of the Unite conferences, I should really buy their stock. It's a great team, a great company. I'm migrating to them. Everyone's talking about them and loving them, but I remember thinking, Oh, they're at $30 a share, the IPO to 20. I'm gonna wait till they go down a little bit and then, you know, they 20 or 30x from there. Anyway, I'm rambling a little bit here, but I think the mistakes I have made are trying to over complicate things, not betting heavily where I have an unfair edge or unfair advantage, which I did in that case. And I think the third one was private investments. I've tried to invest for a short period of time. Ran a very small investment fund. It was an investment syndicate where I got, had 15 investors came in. We kind of pulled together deals. I ran them and took a cut. And those did well by Well, I mean, they probably beat the markets by, I don't know, maybe five or six percentage points every year. So they were good investment, but the amount of time and energy and effort it took, particularly because we weren't investing large sums, it was, it was a lot of work for not a lot of payoff. So I found it was difficult to invest. You know, we were writing checks with our syndicate of maybe in the, let's say, the 500 to $700,000 range. And. And that was a hard for minority positions, in some of them for for, yeah, in all of them for minority positions, and it was just a hard way to make money.

William Harris  1:20:10  

So sure, yeah, to your point, I'd say that I I subscribe to the same model of dollar cost average into ETFs being still one of the best things that you can do. And then I have, what I would say is, like, the fun investing, where it's like, it's good, it's just not fun. Well, then there's, like, other things, like you said, where it's like, I really like getting into IPOs, or close thereafter, of companies that I just think are gonna do well, and then just buy and hold and so Shopify is one of them that it's like, got into that. I mean, basically, right when they launched and have held and bought more and would continue to hold, because I still think, you know, when I look at e-commerce as a percentage of total retail sales, it's about like 17% and so you think this has still got a lot of room to grow, and they are positioned in a very good spot to be at the forefront of this?

Andrew Youderian  1:21:01  

Yeah, totally agree. It's and one thing I think, too, is your investment, your investment antenna gets better over time. You have to learn to pattern match when you're early on investing. You don't have the track record of saying, Oh, I wanted to invest in this, and this did really well. I had a lot of conviction here. Didn't do well, ooh, I was skeptical about this, and it bombed. Or who I want to do this one, and this one bombed. You learning to trust yourself or realize where you're making bad decisions is, I think, a really important part of just maturing and getting better as an investor. So and it's hard to do. It takes longer the less you're making individual investments, which I think is probably a good thing, right? Like I don't think, I think if you're in your 20s and you're making dozens and dozens of individual investments, I think you're probably doing things sub optimally, unless you have a wild edge on something that I am not thinking of. But part of it is it just takes time for your brain to be able to figure out where you have competency with 2020, hindsight, looking back at where you don't Sure. Just

William Harris  1:22:07  

wanna clarify, this is not an official investment advice. Talk to your financial planner. Neither one of us are financial planners, blah, blah, blah, all that disclaimer stuff. But that said, Andrew, I do wanna thank you. I mean, we're at the top of this time, and I just can't even imagine. This has been very nice, very good talking to you, learning from you, both from professional and personal side of things, and so just excited to have had you on here, man,

Andrew Youderian  1:22:32  

yeah. Well, thank you for the invite. It's been good getting to know you over the years, even you know in our dark period when you wouldn't speak to

William Harris  1:22:40  

me, that's never been true, just so we're clear.

Andrew Youderian  1:22:46  

But no, man, it's it's a pleasure to be on I really appreciate you having me, having me on the show. Thank you. I'm excited to see, see how it continues to grow and evolve

William Harris  1:22:54  

for you. Yeah, and you pointed us towards e-commerce. Feel that said, if people want to follow you, what's the best way for them to follow you? Yeah,

Andrew Youderian  1:23:01  

if you're a Twitter person, @youderian is where I post the most, Youderian, ecommercefuel.com. Is where you can learn about the community and apply to join if you're interested. The eCommerceFuel Podcast is where I put out a weekly show about all things e-commerce and life and and and business and relationships. But I think those are, those are probably the best

William Harris  1:23:22  

places, awesome. Well, thank you again for your time and knowledge and sharing that all with us. And thank you everyone for listening. Have a great rest of your

Outro  1:23:28  

day. Thanks for listening to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris. We'll see you again next time, and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.

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