How Chubbies Avoided Bankruptcy and Built a Nine-Figure Brand with Preston Rutherford

Drew Sanocki

Hey, everybody. Drew Sanocki here with the Nerd Marketing Podcast. Today, Mike and I talk to Preston Rutherford, who was one of the founders of Chubbies. And he did what everybody wants to do, which is basically build this business up to nine figures, sell it to private equity, eventually go public with the business. And he talks a lot about what we all ask about, which is like, how do you balance brand spending with performance spending. That's what he talks about a lot online. And in this podcast, we kind of get into the playbook of kind of how you measure brand advertising, why it's important, why he thinks it was critical to growing Chubbies. You know, they almost went bankrupt when they were entirely driven by performance, performance marketing and ROAS. So it's an awesome case study. And Mike and I just totally respect this guy. He's one of our favorite people on the internet. And I hope you enjoy today's Nerd Marketing podcast. We're so lucky to have him on board.

Drew Sanocki

Where are you right now? It looks cool wherever it is.

Preston Rutherford 

Sometimes I just gotta get out of the home office. It's like our local athletic club is too friendly a way to tell you. It's just like a local gym that has a bunch of tables where you could just kind of work.

Drew Sanocki

Yeah. All right, work, deadlift, work.

Preston Rutherford

A little bit of both, jump into the sauna.

Michael Epstein

Preston, might be, you might be our most quoted person, when on the podcast. I am like, I am always quoting one of your LinkedIn posts and, of course, giving you credit for it. I'm not taking credit for the knowledge bombs that you are dropping, like on a consistent basis. Like I love your content. So, you know, just to lead, like if you're not following Preston's content on LinkedIn, you should be. and for those of you who don't know, Preston was one of the co-founders of Chubbies, Chubbies, is an awesome brand. Again, especially today when people are thinking about how to build a real brand and what it means to be a brand, Chubbies is like such a gold standard for that. but I think your commentary on like how you built that, your approach and a lot of the mistakes and changes that you made from being like a direct response brand focused on like ROAS to building a true brand is really what we wanted to talk about today. I know, you know, one of the things that you've said is you grew this to a nine figure brand, but you practically nearly went out of business several times, I think focusing on the wrong metrics. maybe like, let's just go right there. What, you know, how do, how are you growing like a weed and nearly killing the business at the same time?

Preston Rutherford

It's funny how that works, isn't it? So, well, first of all, thank you guys for having me. I'm a big fan of both you guys. And if anyone listening watching this doesn't follow you guys, do it. I mean, you guys have some of the coolest stories. Can I cuss?

Michael Epstein

Yeah.

Drew Sanocki

Yeah, go for it.

Preston Rutherford

So you guys have just seen a lot of shit and you've dealt with it and you've seen cycles and I think, I mean, I've seen some cycles, but I don't think you guys have gone through like the cycle before that as well. And yeah, you guys are old dudes. But like, I'm almost 40, so shoot, I can't talk. anyways, I just want to say like the stuff you guys write about.

Michael Epstein

Polite way of calling us old, thank you.

Drew Sanocki

Yeah, thanks.

Preston Rutherford

It just comes from a different level of believability where there's people popping off on DTC Twitter and they don't know shit, right? They've not built anything. They've not weathered any storms. They just launched an ad and they're scaling it, but I don't know if they're generating any cash or whatever. I think you guys get my point. But I think what you guys bring is like, man, I've seen things come and go and like, don't believe the hype. It's just like fundamentals. And let's think about how this looks in this, like how does this asset behave in this environment, in this environment, and what are we truly building? And I think maybe that's a segue to maybe the Chubbies experience a little bit, which is kind of like the classic thing, man. I think all these consumer brands are the same. We're all run by humans. Humans are idiots. We want things today. And we think we're going to get acquired on some kind of a revenue multiple in 18 months. It's always 18 months. It's always 18 months. And it's always 18 months. It's always a revenue multiple. And it's always 18 months. And you're always coming up with board slides that tell the same story every single quarter. Like we just need to raise this one last round and then we're self-sustaining. It's the same story. But for us, we were born and raised in Silicon Valley. We thought we were a tech company. Didn't really understand the fact that a consumer brand is fundamentally different. And so we just tried to, we discovered this perceived gold mind that was put the dollar in, get the dollars out and I think just over time we just kind of learned that, you know, we lost sight of the stuff that is truly important, which is maybe like to sum up what I think you guys know and have seen is like, what is truly important when building an asset that truly has equity value, economic value, that is truly something someone else wants to own? And I think we totally lost sight of that where it was like, this big, shiny top line number, let's just play the game to drive that. Then when the precursor metric to that, which is your ROAS number, when that becomes more more disconnected from that top line metric that is already a flawed metric as your initial goal metric to begin with, you start doing even more suboptimal short-term maximizing things, right? We just get into these classic Doom Loops that, again, I think is just part of every consumer brand's life cycle story, right, where we just kind of have to learn the same lessons. And it's like, what do you do then when you're in like the valley of the shadow of death or whatever you'd call it, right? Just like when you're in the times when, you know, it just doesn't feel like it can get any worse. And I think that's maybe where I try to be helpful is just like, it's cool because you graduated to this point. You've gotten to some level of scale where maybe you've earned it. But it's like what got us here won't get us there. so that's, guess, where I try to kind of like peel back the onion a little bit and kind of like try to boil things down to like, I don't know, some of these like capital truths as it relates to like what does growth actually look like once you're maybe out of your adolescent phase. And trying to tell the story and clarify that the measurement tools that we have generally, the way we look at data is very much oriented around this baby, toddler, adolescent phase, but it really, in a lot of ways, hasn't graduated to, I don't know, young adulthood or just even legitimate adulthood. It's a little bit of a difficult sort of situation, but then it's also like, let's just become adults and let's understand how a business functions, how a P &L functions, what drives the actual lines of the P &L that we want to go up and the ones that we want to go down. Maybe yet another reason why people should follow you guys, because you guys actually understand a P&L and how to tweak and how to adapt based on just fundamental financial statements. So anyways, long-winded answer of just trying to say it ultimately just comes back to building a business. A consumer brand is just like a slow burn, right, unless you're Vuori But even Vuori been around for a decade, you know, it's just like, it's just a different beast, and it's something you just sign up for and know that it's gonna be slower than you think. Nothing's in 18 months, right? 18 months means five years, and that's okay. Because building a consumer brand is an awesome thing to do. It's really fun. You're making people happy. You get that feedback loop from consumers. There's obviously a lot of stuff that sucks, but there's a lot of value just to like the human condition that comes from just being a part of building a consumer brand.

Michael Epstein

And what are some of those metrics that you started out optimizing around? And then how did you navigate changing what the definition of success was for you, particularly from like a brand and marketing perspective?

Preston Rutherford

Yeah, so for us, it was, probably the same thing. Like you guys come in and you're like, well, okay, different, different lines in the P and O actually matter. So let's start orienting the team around that. So for us, it meant it was Evita, which is like what we had, like we used to bonus people off of revenue growth. And, and then, you know, that really stopped working. But then the human incentive piece has to work its way through the system. You've got to go through a quarter or a half year, whatever your bonus cycle is. But largely for us, was changing the way the team was incentivized, because that's ultimately when change happens. And so for us, was EBITDA. Then it moved to contribution, particularly for the marketing team, just variable profit or contribution or just revenue less, cost of sales or variable costs, which I think most relevant for modern marketers is just understanding your advertising costs, your discounts, shipping fulfillment costs, too, just understanding that, and also just knowing which products we're pushing and what the product gross margin is of those products. But mostly it's like ad spend and discounts. And understanding what a dollar that we're spending is actually buying not only on a first purchase basis, but let's call it a 30, 60, 90 from a contribution dollar perspective. So I think just orienting the team around understanding what that means, number one, and then getting that data into our team's hands faster, which is actually a pretty difficult thing because many brands, they'll do their monthly financial close, and then that'll close two to three weeks after month end. And then the marketing team gets the contribution readout, but they're already thinking about two months into the future. And so like the, the readout of, I thought I crushed it and I actually didn't, you know, cause contribution was down. the impact, the feedback loop isn't there. So getting it to our, our team 24 hours later was a huge, huge thing for us. And then that just helped, you know, the hands on keyboard folks start to make better decisions, right? With where we're sending traffic. What products we're talking about. And then as it just relates to sort of like doing the things that maybe aren't optimizing for the short-term click in the purchase, right, whether you want to call it demand gen or the very dirty word of brand, it just makes that conversation a lot easier.

Michael Epstein

And how, how do you get it to 24 hours? Like from, you know, weeks after close. Cause I think that's, that's tough. That's amazing to be able to provide that quick feedback loop from finance. that, you know, the CFO was able to do that or how'd you get there?

Preston Rutherford

Yeah, mean, all the credit to a lot of people. I mean, NetSuite had something to do with it, even though NetSuite was an absolutely hellacious experience. If anyone's gone through it, everyone knows. yeah, I mean, all the credit to Kyle and Dave and to a bunch of people on the team who implemented all of this infrastructural stuff. It's less hard, to be fair, if you're a single-skew business kind of thing, right? Because your product cogs are relatively similar. Maybe they'll change on a PO basis, but it's right. But when you're broad, when you're apparel, when you've got more skew proliferation, it's super difficult. But what we did was start with an 80 % solution, right? Blended averages, whatever, right? And then move to, OK, let's see if we can roughly, by product category, get to roughly the blended product cost per category, just so we can get right. So making that sort of a transition, let's just understand what our discount amount was yesterday, right? And then let's deduct, right? And even from that perspective, just taking into account marketing costs and discounts, and then understanding what that ultimately netted us and how that compares to last year's sequential or what our goal is, even just that super helpful in reframing the conversation around what good is.

Drew Sanocki

You were like, had a cultural question because you, you write a lot about how the focus on performance marketing almost bankrupt the company. Um, so then you, you moved to, uh, your 50 50 rule, like 50 % of spend was going to brand or 50 % of budget was going to brand. The other was going to performance. How I guess, how did you sell that? Or was it a challenge to sell that to the same team and to investors or was it more, was it just like, guys, yesterday we're going to optimize around ROAS today. We're going to come up with some brand metrics to optimize around.

Preston Rutherford

Way less clean and simple as you can probably imagine, right? It was just a mess. was more just like how not to die and, somehow be able to continue to be able to work on this thing that we were, that we really loved, right? And not have it, not have it not go out of business. I'd say all of the credit to the other co-founders, Tom and Kyle and Rainer and to the whole, the whole team, right? It was very much of a let's get bought in on revenue not being the metric. Let's get bought in on the fact that this might mean that revenue might not grow. So there's a lot of identity as you know tied up in it, right? I mean, pretty much for any marketers, well, for me, my sense of self-worth was very much tied to what real estate looked like on a particular day or whatever vanity metric it was, right? And then if that was low, like everything in my life was bad. So there's that, where there's just that re-association with, or disassociation, right? We're just like, okay, this might work, but for me it was not, it was much more than that. So it was just reframing what matters and what good is. That's step one, but for us, because we were also just going through some craziness with inventory management, we were opening stores, we were also transitioning manufacturing from made in the US to international, or just diverse set of locations because costs were becoming completely prohibitive making stuff in San Francisco. So there are all these things that were happening that kind of like put us at the brink, like where it was like a little bit of a shit or get off the pot sort of situations, which is like looking back, I mean, never when you like have to fire people, that awesome? But like outside of that, having no other choice was good in that it's like clearly what we've been doing is not going get us to the next step. So it was like, yeah, it was a reframing to be able to survive, because we can't raise more money. So we did not have the ability to raise additional equity. We already did all the convertible notes. We already went back to all of the existing investors, right? Just the ability to access additional capital was not there. I don't know if at this time we were fully drawn on whatever line we had, but there was just no other cash that we could exogenously infuse into the business, right? So it was very much like, well, the only way to continue to have a heartbeat is to generate more cash, you know, than we're spending. So we just were forced.

Drew Sanocki

I mean, if you were, I guess if you were to do it again today, would you, would you come out of the gates spending on both brand and performance, or did you have to go through that process where, you hit a wall first and then had to sort of kick into the brand spend.

Preston Rutherford

Drew, let's just mark this as the day that I see what we're recording, June 26, 2025. I will work on a consumer brand again. And when I do, it will absolutely just be balanced the whole time, right? It's not about brand performance. It's like just generate demand, capture demand. Generate demand, capture demand. Like, if you think about it from that perspective, it's like idiotic to say that, no, I'm not gonna generate demand. That's stupid. Like, no thinking rational individual, whatever, like murmur those words. But that's what it is. Like that's what brand is, right? It's just somehow become a bad word. Because there have been a lot of people who've wasted a lot of money. And it's harder to point to people and call them out for the fact that they've wasted probably even more money on performance marketing. But the facts are the facts, right? There's just so much money being wasted on just like bad bottom funnel performance marketing sort of thing. But yeah, from that perspective, starting a brand in the future, 100%. And ideally, guys, it would be unpaid. You know what I mean? I don't want to have to pay anything. would love to be like a supreme isn't a perfect example anymore. But when they were purchased for like $2 billion, right, after having done maybe zero traditional advertising? I mean, I could be wrong on that. But just from light research that I've done, it's not like they were spending 25 % of top line on Meta, you know what mean? So things like that where you're just earning the reach and the mind share and whatever you want to call it, the mental availability. I mean, that's where you'd like to be, where you're just doing shit that is so interesting and so worthy of attention and thought and so famous, you know, to use that word that I think people put into different categories, but this being famous. Like, that's the dream. So, but that takes, that can take a bit longer. I think people try to take the easy way out with celebrities, which can, I mean, look at Rhode and whatever, name your list of companies that are celebrity-led, but they've earned it from weighing a foundation. Not that I would go that route, but yes, would absolutely generate demand and capture demand from day one. Being out of balance in anything in life is obvious to people. So in the same way, being in balance when building a consumer brand seems like it totally makes sense. Now, does it look like meta top of funnel? It could take any form. It could just be a bunch of post pilot that's just going out into the world and just wowing people's mailboxes. Part of me wants to just go so hard in the paint on mail and just do the RH coffee table books and just go so intense and just own people's coffee tables. I have no expertise with that, but it is just something I've thought about from time to time.

Drew Sanocki

We're here for you when you're ready.

Michael Epstein

Yeah, totally.

Preston Rutherford

I think the problem that happened to us is that you assume that you got to get into some kind of like scalable, consistent rhythm because you have a forecast and you have a board and blah, blah. So then you're like, OK, well, I've got to just like pop money into MetaL day every day. Whereas at the beginning, you know, things were lumpy. And I think that's OK, right? Because we would we would do a cool thing. We would try another thing and it wouldn't take as well, but it was largely organic. And maybe then we would do another, I don't know, fun, interesting giveaway or way for the community to participate or whatever it might be. And that would then lead to another pop. We would have like a drop of sorts and we'd get a new product in. And that kind of stuff, like it wasn't consistent, but it did create like an interesting drum beat of stuff that people would remember and refer back to that, you know, allowed us to kind of rise above the noise. And I think that's what a lot of young brands that break out do. And then we get caught up into this like, need systematic scalable solutions, blah, blah, blah. And I think that's somewhat cancerous if you don't maintain balance of focus. I'm like, what is the cool, interesting shit that I'm going to keep doing that are just like the things that really generate all the alpha? Yeah, you have to have a nice demand capture machine, but just the overall really interesting stuff that can truly allow you to reach 10x more people and get them to remember you in a really interesting way. I lost focus on that stuff because I got so focused on a consistent model forecast, blah, blah. And I think that can easily happen to anyone. So I would just remember, spend as much or more time thinking about cool, interesting, funny, creative stuff that we can do that serves our community and never lose sight of that being way more important than the ad account.

Michael Epstein

Well, I think that's, that speaks to one of my sort of favorite principles that you've talked about, which is like the 95 five rule, which that I quote a lot also 95 % of your target customer isn't in market for your product at any given time, which, know, for a brand like Chubbies are people actively out there looking for a fun pair of shorts, like all the time, you know, no, but as you were describing the key is getting it remaining top of mind so that, you know, after a repetition or when the time comes that it's time to pull the trigger, like you are the first one that comes to mind. But one of my other favorite pieces of content that you post on a pretty regular basis is like these, these CMO, CFO conversations. and like the, and how to, examples of how those conversations probably are going in real life, which I think is really well done. How, for those folks who haven't read all of those posts of yours that sort of lay this out, like what's that example? What's that conversation sound like when you're having to justify to your CFO that a bunch of my spend is going to something that I cannot give you a metric that says it worked great yesterday on.

Preston Rutherford

Totally. Well, to your first point about 95.5, right? mean, and I don't know how hot of a take this is. Maybe it's not hot. Maybe it's just slightly warm. But I could say that the goal of all of your paid media is not to get any clicks and purchases. Like, I want to zero ROAS from the perspective of a click-based attribution. So like, OK, crazy. What do I mean? I would like for all of the money that I spend to drive branded organic searches, right? And then purchases from branded organic searches. And that would be zero click-based ROAS, right? But I would be hitting people, the 95 % who are out of market. I would then be getting them to see me and then go on with their lives. And then whenever they come in market for some funky shorts, to then think of me and then seek me out by searching for my brand name and then buy. That is truly the goal of building a consumer brand, right? That's where resilience comes from. That's how we stop being beholden to the ad platforms. And that's honestly like higher EBITDA way to drive purchase behaviors, right? Because you're, rather than having to go out and beg and enter that auction and just be like, I gotta have this strong offer and I can only really drive a three ROASif I'm doing a 30 % off, right? It's not that. It's, you come by for me when you're ready. It's not selling, it's allowing people to buy, right? Fundamentally, that's what everyone wants to be doing, right? And it's trading the inbound. And that's what we want to do with our paid. And then people will be like, you're an idiot. I'm like, maybe, but it works. And I've seen it work. And I've seen it work for a ton of different brands. The most valuable brands are getting most of their purchases from inbound, from people who search for their brand or come direct to their brand. That's what we're trying to do. That is like objective number one. Getting some clicks on a buy button and a purchase that you can then attribute on a one-day click basis. Fine, right? And I used to think that's all that mattered, right? What I learned is that that's like, whatever, icing on the cake. What truly matters is that I'm spending dollars to drive more brand search volume and then drive more revenue from brand search. So that's the high level. And then that kind of speaks to the CFO, CMO conversations where it's like, let's first talk about how, you know, ROAS can be a BS metric. Like, let's just have that conversation. Right, so like if I toggle spend on different campaigns, right, I can take my ROAS from a 2 to a 20 or whatever, right, if I just put it all into retargeting. I, so then we have the incremental, the incrementality conversation. And then it's like, let's just project out existing trends. That's kind of like another useful way to think about it, right? Our discount rate, whatever, like last year it was a 10 % sale, this year it's a 15 % sale, but we didn't hit what we got with last year's 10 % sale, because we've trained people to expect discounts and all these sorts of All these sorts of things that can clearly show up in the P &L. They don't show up on some CAC line necessarily or some blended MER line. And so when we just start to think about, very basically, right, if you're going to be a brand that's 2X, 5X, it's pretty obvious that you'll need to get 10 more people searching for your brand name. And that's pretty inarguable data, right? Whether you want to call it brand awareness or I tend to not love survey-based metrics as much as just behavioral metrics of just people thinking about you and then taking some kind of an action. But those are like the real metrics that you can look at that are truly tied to, if I'm driving more of that, that's a good thing. If I'm driving more contribution, that's a good thing. If I'm driving more full price sales, that's a good thing. So it's just trying to align that like, and it requires a marketer to kind of like be like you guys, where it's like you're, you operate like P&L owners rather than a media buyer kind of thing, right? And so when we can talk like we're P&L owners as a CFO would, right? It actually becomes a productive conversation. Cause at the end of the day, right, we're aligned. We want more contribution dollars to cover our fixed costs and not just today, but over, let's call it rolling 90 day periods, if we're thinking on quarterly or biannual or whatever it would be. So just trying to think about, yeah, let's up-level it to ultimately what we're trying to do, and let's just call out the BS with the traditional, right? Because the fact of the matter is 85 % of Facebook's attribution data is modeled anyways, because everyone's opting out. Right, so that's just a truth. They really kind of like hide it in the ad platform, right? So you can't really see it, but the facts are the facts, right? So you think all of this attribution data is deterministic or like tracking every click. 60 to 85 % is just as modeled, you know, as any kind of model that you would create. So it's like, they've done a good job. The ad platform's at creating this semblance of truth, but the more you can just very simply call out, like, let's actually think rationally here, and let's look through the BS. Not that any of them are bad, right? It's just, let's put it all into context so that we can just think a little bit more correctly or aligned with, find the things that align with fundamental business value, like sustainable EBITDA growth. And just align around that.

Drew Sanocki

I had question about a little bit like you're working on marathon data and like you've got a methodology around measuring brand spend. Right. How but and you're also really well known for doing a lot of unconventional marketing like your your koozie palooza in your in your man model contest and all these things that like drove brand at Chubbies or built the brand? But how do you bet on those before you run them? Because I guess it ties into marathon data, but how do you bet on unconventional ideas like that, that you haven't run yet, you can't measure them beforehand? Do you have a system or an approach, or are you just throwing spaghetti against the wall?

Preston Rutherford

Great question. With a Cruisy Palooza, definitely spaghetti. That was really early on, and that's a funny story we could talk about in another conversation. But on those points, those are good points in that those are unpaid. Those aren't setting up an ad account and running those things. Those are some of those memorable moments that people can refer back to, depending upon when you came in contact with a brand. I guess the point I would make is, yeah, I mean, as we got more sophisticated, there would be some kind of a forecast put against it. But with those sorts of things, I think the thing I would always say is it's great to sell out. It's great to sell out. It's great to just crush it, sell out of all your product, and have people see that you're sold out. How good is that for building a brand? Because at the end the day, brand is quantifying desire, having desire be higher than the cost of your product, and just maintaining that delta as much as you possibly can. So I think that's the big thing that I would always caution. Because then we made the mistake of we sold out. We thought we missed out on 200,000 of revenue on this day or whatever. Then we buy into that. And then we're wrong. You know what I mean? Just great to sell out. Don't think you missed out on a certain number of revenue. Just know that it's valuable that people perceive you as selling out. And just do stuff where you're selling out. I mean, at the end of the day, that's great. And always just allow those sorts of situations to put you in a position where you've got more demand than supply. We've made this mistake of everything that happens to brands that is bad when you have a bad inventory position, right? So with a consumer brand, it's all about just the perception of there being more demand than supply. So do things like that, even if you don't have a solid forecast or even if you sell out right away and just be like, that's a win. That is a win because I have now created this association in so many people's minds. And even if they're pissed off and they're like, fuck you guys for being sold out all the time, I'm never going to buy it from you again. That last part, people have said to us a ton they bought from us. You know what I mean? They were just mad at the moment. So I think it's kind of like not the answer I imagine that would be. Well, maybe it's useful. Yeah, just embrace selling out all the time as a consumer brand. Now, you got to have evergreen skews. You got to do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But like being able to have a drumbeat of showing the world that there's more demand than supplies, I think a very, very valuable thing.

Michael Epstein

So I like the hot take we had earlier. I think we need like a hot take sound effect. Maybe next time, Drew. We'll put that in in post editing. Yeah, exactly. One more hot take to take us home. I think you've talked about your position on AI being a little bit controversial and generative AI. What's your take on the generative AI phenomenon and what that does, how brands should think about using it or not using it right now and in the future.

Preston Rutherford

The first thing that really scares me, just like honestly, legitimately scares me, is when you train any model on the wrong dependent variable or definition of success or whatever, whatever, right? Because that's the whole idea here, is that you train it on your best hands, but when the definition of the best is the wrong definition, you're just accelerating your path to death. So this thing that really kind of scares me is like, with all this generative AI, I'm going to create 10,000 ads and they're all based on my highest ROAS whatever's like that scares me like that accelerates people going out of business because you then don't have time to adapt and learn all of the hard fought lessons I think the consumer brands need to learn so when you're trading a model off of a skewed definition of what good is you can get yourself in a very nasty position so So I think it's very important just to define what good is and have that definition be very closely tied to contribution growth over long periods of time, which is not what I understand to be training these models. So that being number one. And then number two is when you're a brand, my humble opinion, it's not about doing more. A lot of the generative AI thing is just do more, come up with more variance, more, more, more, more. It's about doing right, you know? Out of, yeah, you need shots on goal, but at the end of the day, it's like two or three things that you do over a decade, people remember, you know? And maybe that's not two or three, but it's a small number of things that, and yeah, you have to fail a lot, but when you're just doing it to do it and you're like, I need to, I need 15 different cloud backgrounds or whatever, that's, I think, a waste of time. That's motion, not progress. And I mean, I've made all of these mistakes, to be clear. But just less, do less, have them be, I want concept variation. And yeah, maybe you could use AI for that. Maybe I'm not good at prompting. Maybe I just suck at prompting. But I don't know. I tend to think that just spending time asking ChatGPT for ideas or whatever it might be is not as good a use of time as just truly coming up with some interesting ideas, talking with people and bouncing ideas, because context is so hard to give. Like, and I know a lot of companies are solving that and it is a problem that will be solved, but like long-term nuanced textured context on what the thing is that is so special about taking someone from like, that's like, yeah, we're following all the rules of content to like, that's fucking awesome. I'm going to share that. I'm going to put my reputation online and share that piece of content. I don't think that's totally been solved yet. All of this will be solved. I'm a huge fan of AI, I mess around with AI all the time, blah, blah. But I just kind of want to provide a little bit of a counter take to just be like, let's call out some of the bullshit and let's just continue to keep our heads about us and be cautious, right? Because it is very shiny object-y. And we just need to be cautious as it relates. Like at the end of the day, we want to reach people and we want to get them to remember us so that they seek us out, come direct to us, buy us at full price. That's all we have to do. And let's just keep remembering what that is. So how do we get those memories, that fame, all that kind of stuff? AI can probably help, maybe come up with some variants, but just remember that stuff.

Drew Sanocki

This was awesome. We really appreciate. Yeah.

Michael Epstein

Yeah, love your stuff. Love your stuff, man. Appreciate it.

Drew Sanocki

We'll let you get back to deadlifting, but really appreciate the time.

Preston Rutherford

Cool. Awesome. All right, dudes. This was fun. Thanks. Let's do it. Talk to you guys soon. Bye.

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