Made It with Connor Tomkies

Jeremy Parker: after I sold swag. I had so many people, be like I cannot believe that sold so quick. I can't believe you. And I'm thinking to myself, how many years did I have of hitting my head against the wall and failing? it's all part of the long cycle.

it's never just like a success, beginning and end. it's a lifetime sport.

Jeremy Parker: That's what entrepreneurship is.

Narrator: Hey, co founders, welcome to my second million with Connor Tompkins, where we meet with badass entrepreneurs who've successfully exited their companies. In this episode, Connor chats with Jeremy Parker, a seasoned entrepreneur with a rich background in launching and selling businesses like swag. com. So without further ado, Jeremy Parker.

Connor Tomkies: hey, everyone. I'm here with Jeremy. He's, the founder and he started swag. com. I know that I was a customer of swag. com back in the day, but you also started a bunch of other things. So you started, out as a award winning, video filmmaker, and then you moved around quite a bit.

You did tees and tats for two years. Tip it. And then swag. com. I just want to hear a little bit about how you went from filmmaking to t shirts, essentially.

Jeremy Parker: Great question. I was a, documentary production major in college. And I made a movie with my brother called 1%. It was about the top one wealthiest percent of Americans, and there's a little bit of a twist to it, so I don't want to ruin it for people who want to see it. But, we were at the Vail Film Festival.

And I remember I was on the top of the mountain and half the room were these major celebrities everyone heard of and half the room were these struggling artists. And I asked myself a question, two questions really. Number one, did I love what I was doing? And number two, was I that good at it? And both answers were no.

It was like the slap in the face. I was 19 years old, I believe at the time. And I just came off the biggest highs of the world. I'm like, this is like the pinnacle of where I wanted to get to. And I woke up the next morning realizing I need to make a shift in my life that maybe this is not the right path for me.

It was like very weird for my family. what are you talking about type of thing? And I went back to college and I finished my Boston university got my degree. I had one more year to go and I wanted to start a business. I didn't know what I was good at. I knew from filmmaking, I was fairly good at telling stories and I felt like being a brander or I'll figure out what I was good at.

So I started a t shirt company called T's and Tats. Now T's and Tats was a high end. T shirt company, 200 to 300 t shirts. I'm not particularly fashionable. Like I don't really love fashion, but I thought it would teach me what I liked about business, what I was good and what I was bad at. starting a t shirt company sounds fairly simple, but you have to create a website and branding and design and manufacturing and PR and all these different things.

And we ended up launching Tees and Tats, probably the worst time in the market. It was 2007. And if your audience can rewind to 2007, the recession, especially launching a high end t shirt company. So all these stores I was hustling and selling to were all either going under or saying, of course, we're not going to buy or re up.

On your order of t shirts, and it was a very dark place when you're starting your first business and you felt like you didn't have even a shot because everything was against you. But I came up with this now a little bit gimmicky, and at this point I was 22 years old, but I tied the price of our shirts to the price of the DAO Jones.

So for every 100 points the DAO dropped, they would get a discount on their t shirt price. It was like a market related pricing model.

Connor Tomkies: How did you come up with this? that seems I would never even think about that.

Jeremy Parker: Yeah, I was just trying to throw everything against the wall trying to say no one's buying. Why are they not buying? Because they're scared about affording regular food. How can I get them to feel confident to buy from us that they would get a discount? It's like this progression. And, I wrote a letter to Mark Cuban.

This is early days. I was like, I guess A burgeoning entrepreneur, just trying to get out there. And Mark Cuban had this blog called blog maverick. And, I wrote to him and I said, this is the story. And he ended up within 10 minutes, responding to me and saying, I love the hustle, could you mind if I write about you in my blog, he wrote about us, it got picked up by ad age, they wrote about us and ultimately I got introduced to this guy, Elliot Pizer.

Now, Elliot Pizer is the founder and CEO of a company called Envy Sport. they're a large, very large company in the promotional product space. So I got introduced through this industry of promotional products that I never even heard of when I was 23 years old. I had no idea what this was, but I would start going to different trade shows and I would see this industry is massive.

It was over a 20 billion industry, but I noticed something at the time. All the buyers were 40 to 50 year olds. And I was by far the youngest person as 23 year old walking up and down these hallways. And I'm like, I guess this is just maybe how it's done and everything was broken and old and fragmented and presentation decks to close sales and all these different things.

And I said to Elliot, do you mind if I start a business under your label? And I pitched him this idea called vote for art and vote for art was getting licensed agreements with different college campuses. And we would do a graphic design contest at university of Maryland and the winning design would sell at the bookstore.

So we democratize collegiate apparel I don't know if you remember like thread list. It was these design contests back in the day. So we want to be in the design contest for a collegiate licensed products. And we launched at I don't even know how many schools, but nearly a hundred schools at this point, Purdue university, Arizona state, we partnered up with the schools that did design contests sold at the bookstore.

I learned a lot about the industry of promotional products, college apparel.

Connor Tomkies: how did you make that pitch to the CEO saying Hey, I want to do a subsidiary underneath your brand. You should trust me.

Jeremy Parker: Yeah. so after he, he reached out to me for this connection, we became friendly, we would bounce off ideas. I would go into his office legitimately like once a week and we have like lunch together and I would be, we just talk, we would freestyle different ideas and he liked my creativity. I think he just liked it from the T's and Tad's and the market relating pricing model.

He was like open to new ideas. He's a very open minded CEO and we just hit it off. And at some point. The more I kept learning about their business, they had MV sport, this college thing. They had weatherproof garment company, a really large outerwear company. It's a huge company. And he said to me, if you have any ideas that you would want to start under my umbrella, I would be happy to fund it.

and for me, it was amazing learning experience. I learned so much and I was, I guess they call it an intrapreneur starting a business underneath a bigger company. So but it felt like really like I was just keep, progressing and learning and getting better as an entrepreneur.

Connor Tomkies: people think they need to start from scratch. And there's a lot of other ways you can buy an existing business or even work underneath an existing business. And you probably learned from like their structure.

Jeremy Parker: I learned, what to do and not to do, how to maneuver everything. College of Power Licensing is very complicated. I don't want to go too deep on it, but if you want to do a contest for University of Maryland, you have to go to the licensing department and you have to win them over and make them feel confident, which is not an easy sell when you're saying we're going to re imagine your school logo through graphic design.

that's like a no, no, everyone said it's not going to work. And then once you get the licensing department to say, yes, you could do a contest, which is a miracle in and of itself, you didn't have to sell to the bookstore and they're not in the same department. They're actually oftentimes working against each other.

So everything had to work. And it was this process of getting licensing agreements and then getting the bookstore to buy into it. So it was a lot of learning and at 24, I couldn't have asked for a better experience. I left that after about three years. I joined my brother who had a company called Tip Media and we started, it was very crazy.

My brother had this amazing insight where basically he realized that, you watch American Idol and all the judges on American Idol are drinking out of a Coke can and obviously they're not drinking Coke and they're getting product placement. And then he was watching YouTube videos one day and he realized, all these YouTube stars were making no money living in their parents basement, but getting tens of millions of views.

Now, everybody thinks of that as everybody makes a lot of money now who YouTube stars, right? Instagram exists and everyone does product placement. But I want you to rewind, 13, 14 years ago when my brother was doing this, it didn't exist I think Twitter at this time, if you could put perspective, Pitbull, the rapper had about 4, 000 followers on Twitter at that point.

Now he has 40 million. So things were so early. And my brother noticed this and it was amazing. And he's let me get these big brand names like Statefarm, Colgate, Verizon into the YouTube videos. It was like this really key insight.

And when I joined. influencer marketing,

It was like the first, it was the first influencer marketing really.

And getting these YouTube stars, literally hundreds of thousands of dollars that they otherwise never would have made. And when I joined, it became a conversation with why are we just stopping at these YouTube stars? Why don't we buy up the rights to major celebrities and their Twitter and Facebook posts?

So we started reaching out to Pitbull and different celebrities and trying to get their rights to their social handles. And we started to buy a lot of celebrity rights and owning their rights. And ultimately that company got bought by a publicly traded company.

Connor Tomkies: What was shocking

about this is that it was such a short amount of time. this was happening in 2011. for that to go from inception to generating revenue to an actual acquisition. And that short amount of time is pretty remarkable.

Jeremy Parker: actually the truth is we, for that business, we didn't even have a business that sold anything yet. The idea was what got acquired by this public company was our contracts. So our idea was this very high level idea. This was the, and I think, I still think it's a good idea and it probably could have done if we didn't sell it. Our idea was this. What if we had a list of questions of a hundred different questions? what's your favorite toothbrush company? What's your favorite, snack food. And then we go to celebrities and we give them this list of questions and they fill out their actual answers. Like they're genuine, authentic answers.

Then we could go to all the brands that they list in that genuine, authentic questionnaire, and we could say, Hey Colgate, LeBron James loves you. Just throwing out a name, right? He actually wants to tweet about you guys to his millions of followers on Twitter and Facebook. Let's do a Groupon like deal where we do a deal where we get where LeBron says to his, LeBron wasn't a partner, but I'm just using his name.

For example,

LeBron says to his 30 million followers. Yeah, just so you know, you pay, you pay 50 and you get 100 worth of credit. And then based on the 50, us, the celebrity and the brand, I'll split it. and it came very organic, but this was so early. This was like Groupon was just coming out.

there wasn't anyone really connecting sub celebrities to this influencer at this point. and I did that for a few years. Then I had a failure. I started a company called Vouch. It was a social networking app based on what you love to do. And my partner was my brother and, Jesse Itzler, who's a very well known entrepreneur, started Marquis Jet, private jet company, Zico Coconut Water.

He's one of the owners of Atlanta Hawks. and we started a social networking app, which I think is really an amazing idea. Still. I just don't think we built the right solution. So vouch was democratizing Oprah's favorite things for everyone. So when we looked at Facebook's is massive platform and everyone's taking a bit and piece of Facebook, to build this dedicated experience.

Instagram takes the pictures and Twitter takes the status update. We want to own the like button and we felt like the like button is the most monetizable aspect of Facebook. But if we could build a really amazing. Platform where it's fun to vouch for your favorite things. People can follow their friends and celebrities and see what they like and get recommendations and be able to purchase within the app.

And I think the idea is really good and we made it cool and it felt different, but I think our biggest mistake, in hindsight, you only know this, while you're building it, you don't really realize this, but in hindsight, we built a very similar to Instagram where it was time based.

Connor Tomkies: So when people joined our platform and they vouched. For a hundred things that they love, they just vouch for all their stuff. By the second or third week, they don't really have that many things to vouch for left, right? Because they already pushed everything out There's no reason to re engage or to continue.

Jeremy Parker: Exactly.

It's a month later, they find another book that they read that they love. So because it was organized with like time based, people were on their feeds following people, and there wasn't a lot of content coming. Like we could have made a simple change and organized in a different way that I think could have worked, you live and you learn.

Connor Tomkies: whenever I look at Vouch and I look at Tip, there's some things that I feel like would work now. if you were to go out and do, Tip, 2. 0, and like the Influencer Economy, and what I like is that it's organic. you already like these things, you already like these brands, let's pair them together.

Jeremy Parker: That's exactly our idea. It wasn't about, just putting a random brand and trying to find a celebrity who looked good in the picture. It was about getting authentic. It was really, the idea was true authenticity. And I think we were ahead of our time, honestly. I think if we started now, it could really work.

vouch as well.

Connor Tomkies: Alright Jeremy, let's go. We

Jeremy Parker: yeah, next time, maybe not, after spending three years on Vouch and shutting it down, I really wanted my next business to be something where it didn't have to become this global phenomenon for us to make money because, social networking apps, we had hundreds of thousands of users for Vouch and it didn't take off enough.

and I just started swag. com. So it really takes me, it's like life, like it all worked. And with swag, it was one of these things where I had some industry knowledge for my earlier days under Envy Sport. And I had this experience over eight years after that of building products, not necessarily successful ones, but at least building products and seeing what works and figuring out the right brand.

And I figured if I could build the right solution for today's buyer, the buyer. 20, when I was 22 was 40 to 50 year old. The buyer today is a millennial. how do you build them the right solution for today's buyer? So we went all in on building swag. com and we grew, over a hundred percent, 300%.

every year it kept getting bigger and bigger until 2021. We were doing a little bit north of 30 million a year when we sold. November of 21. And now we're part of custom Inc. They're a much larger company. They're like the number one company in our industry. They're really focused on more consumer.

We were really focused on B2B and it was like this perfect pairing of, optimizing and using the same backend and infrastructure to really streamline the whole industry.

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Connor Tomkies: Hey podcast, listeners, we are currently looking for sponsors for this podcast. If you guys are looking to connect with other business owners that are scaling and growing their company, and you guys are interested in a spot on this podcast, uh, we're looking for you. So reach out to Conor Tom keys. com or operator equity.

com. And we're glad to help set you guys up with a spot on this podcast. All right. Cheers. Back to the pod.

This blew my mind because you're selling shirts. There's a lot of people in that

space. Um, and there's local players, national players, and for you to beat them out and have, I think you said 15, 000 companies that you sold to. It means that you just had to execute that much better than everyone else.

What was the marketing approach? How did you engage with this many B2B buyers?

Jeremy Parker: So early days when we were building the platform, we didn't really know the right solution. oftentimes entrepreneurs have some ego involved and they think they know all the answers and. I try to remove ego completely from the equation. Like I knew I wanted to go after B2B, I want to be going after companies.

I initially thought that the buyer within the company would be the marketing team. That was like my initial insight because marketing teams have huge budgets. They're not only buying, for their best customers are buying for leads. They could have a team of 10 people, but have million dollars, millions of dollars of marketing spend.

Cause it depends on who their customers are. But then when I was starting to talk to all these marketing. managers, and I would find them on LinkedIn and I discovered that everyone's going after the marketing team. how am I going to differentiate myself? there's literally 23, 000 promo distributors.

We're selling swag. How can I, with nothing, with no platform at this point with a coming soon landing page, how can I differentiate myself? And what I noticed talking to them is that really the office manager should be the one that should go after. No one was going after the office manager. And I, what I realized is.

Office managers might not be buying as much swag as the marketing teams. But if every single label inside the t shirt said powered by swag. com or swag. com, our tagline at the time was we made this, that would be like doing the marketing for ourselves. Like the office manager buys for the marketing team and for the sales team and for this office in that office, these divisions will now learn about this and ultimately say.

my company already uses them. The quality is great. Why don't I use them as well? So it was like our Trojan horse into the company to expand. And we went all in on this office manager persona and it allowed us to really scale fairly quickly. Other people start copying this eventually, but it allowed us really to be super differentiated early on.

Connor Tomkies: So were you guys doing cold walk ins to offices? Just being like, Hey, like I know you're working the front desk. Look at this shirt. It's incredibly soft.

Jeremy Parker: no,

even more than that,

even more than that. we were in the WeWork Times Square, me and my co founder, Josh Every day, literally every day. And I'm not the most outgoing person naturally, but I would have to knock on doors and put myself out there and who does swag and have conversations.

And when you're there, they can't really say no. It's harder for them to say no. They rather give you 10 minutes. And for me, it wasn't about selling. It was more about just learning why they would, why are they wanting to buy from us and why are they not wanting to buy from us? So we did that a lot.

I went to, Facebook was one of our earliest customers. I had a connection or somebody connected us. I forgot how it was, but we got into the Facebook office and we didn't really know anyone in the office, but in New York City, they have this amazing office. There was an empty room. We just literally put our stuff out there.

Like we were traveling salesmen and people would walk by the room and ultimately somebody would come in and say, Oh, you guys sell swag. And they probably assume we were allowed to be there, but we weren't.

Connor Tomkies: ended

just hijacked a conference room.

Jeremy Parker: Yeah, just walked in and we set something up and they bought, I think it was like 3, 000 worth of T-Shirts That was our first order for Facebook. And for me, I didn't care about making a profit. I think I probably even lost a little bit of money. Maybe we made 1 percent margin. It was about getting the logo in the beginning. For me, I thought of myself as a logo hunter. For the first couple of months, I wanted when people go to my website to say, Oh, they work with Facebook and WeWork and this company, and that company, because then it gives confidence to everyone else.

It didn't matter about making money early on. It was about learning the right product to build and also getting those early logos.

Connor Tomkies: I want to highlight the cold walk in thing because only a handful of people I know have done this and that's like working your way from the front desk to the back and just doing door to door, Taking a picture of a directory being like, oh, I want this logo and this logo, here's their approach.

Like it takes some stones to do that, but then also the feedback loop to your point is incredibly tight. I think more people should do that. There are people, they're used to door salespeople for like pots and pans, but they're not used to it for B2B. And most of the time, especially if you're younger, they're willing to give you a shot.

Jeremy Parker: totally. I always say to my team, do the unscalable things in the early days. there's so many things that we just don't do because it's like, Oh, we can't scale. We don't need to scale. Now we need to figure out, do we even have a product here to scale? and I'll talk about Swagspace in a bit, but I'm, I get my mindset back into the startup phase and I.

last eight years, I've been more of a CEO and it's a different mindset. I got to change my mindset to get back into where I was early on of being aggressive in many ways, but also adaptable and figuring out and doing things that are just so not scalable, but I get you to build the right solution.

Connor Tomkies: Whenever I look at your profile, the coverage that you get in the press, and then the brands that you're able to get, I think it highlights some of what you're talking about. even in your Ts and Tats, you're reaching out to Mark Cuban, you have these articles and Thrillist and L. A. Splash and, And tipped it was the same.

And then in vouch, you also had a lot of coverage. So is that a big part of your approach is you're not just collecting names, but you're also trying to get out in front of PR agencies or the right journalist at the right publication.

Jeremy Parker: I think to some degree, I think with vouch, a lot of the press, was probably more ego on my side, if I'm being truly honest, like it made you feel like something was happening. A lot of people, and I think a lot of young entrepreneurs, they get into press and they feel like they did something.

And I think I probably fell into that same bucket when I was younger, also like wanting to make myself feel better. So getting this press, getting a story out there, maybe it got some users. So you could say, Oh, this is good for users, but it probably is an ego thing, if I'm being truly honest with swag, it's different because for swag, it became important to get some press about swag because people Google, as you said, we're dealing with, we're competing as 23, 000 other companies who sell promotional products.

How can we differentiate ourselves? If people go to swag. com. Obviously the brand has to look strong and the website and everything has to be really good, but they might say, who else uses them? And if they see some articles of, Oh, these a hundred brands use them a thousand brands, it gives people confidence.

And it's like the self fulfilling thing where the more people that use you, the more people feel safe using you. And they start using you as well. So it's like perfect cycle.

Connor Tomkies: It's hard to build trust. everyone can build a amazing looking website right now and can generate content so quickly. And so how do you generate trust if everyone has a website, everyone has a blog, it's the brands and the PR or the community that you build around it, or your personal voice, like it's now expected for the CEO to go out and do podcasts or to share the story directly.

how did your job change from when you were going to door and doing the cold walk ins to being a CEO of a company generating 30 million in revenue?

Jeremy Parker: Yeah, that's a, a that's the main thing. when you're an entrepreneur,you're everything, right? you're the founder, you're the entrepreneur, you're the CEO, you're head of marketing, head of sales, head intern. I remember early days I would make delivery drives. I would drive with my co founder, Josh, four hours when we were making our early deliveries to WeWork summer camp.

WeWork big summer camp every year. We won the bid. we made no margin, it was okay because as I said before, every t shirt had swag. com and inner label. And we could just imagine them giving up 5, 000. We work t shirts. They're awesome printed with our logo. It will get us customers.

And it did, it got us a lot of customers who felt it. And it's we were accused as us. We should use us, but we didn't have any money. So we rented a U Haul. We drove four hours, we had my whole family, I picture here, like rolling t shirts for days. We had to roll 4, 000 t shirts. So I had my grandma, like doing everything.

You're so hands on in the early days. and then CEO becomes a totally different thing. people management and different layers in between and there's different types of problems and you're working on optimizing this and that it's like becomes more of an optimization and improving and cost efficiencies.

and for me, it's not truly what I love to do. I love being a founder. I like creating something out of nothing. And I knew that often founders put themselves or they get put in the CEO role. And it's hard to break out of that. Like it's very rare. I don't know that many, founders who are CEOs who then, willingly step away from that CEO role, pre exit or pre like being forced out.

it seems like a, it's not a very common thing. And I think founders and entrepreneurs just get put in that position and then the role has to change, but it is a completely different job. a hundred percent, a different job.

Jeremy Parker: Totally.

one of my advisors in college, his name was Bob Metcalf and he created the ethernet cable for three com. And that was one of the stories that stuck with me is he was like, I invented this technology. I was an entrepreneur, the company was growing really fast, but then I had to find another CEO that had done that stage of the journey and could do that CEO job.

And he was like, I was the entrepreneur, but you could tell that, he's. This is 30, 40 years ago for him. And yet he, you can still see that there's like a little hint of even though there's like wisdom there, that there's a little bit of hurt, it's hard to say that something isn't for you or that you're not the right person to take it to that next stage.

And I think there's an attachment to that CEO title for founders where you're like, chief executive officer, I built this team, I built these leaders up and I'm attached to all these different employees. And you see your fingerprint on like a bunch of different stuff, but for you to move on from having your identity wrapped up in a company to being something different, you have to let it go and you have to delegate.

it's almost like the final seat you have to delegate. and I think there's a difference in mindset between a manager and an executive and the CEO and an investor or a serial entrepreneur. would you change that? Like for the next company that you do, how would you do it differently?

Yeah, it's challenging. I mentioned this earlier, even before the podcast, but my new role is I founded this new company called Swagspace underneath the parent company at Custom Ink. So we got bought by Custom Ink in 2021, I was the CEO of Swag. com, up until about a month and a half ago.

And I had these internal questions and I love being an entrepreneur. I love creating something out of nothing. my identity was very much tied to being the CEO of swag. com. in every conversation people come up to me like, Oh, this is the CEO of swag. com. This is the swag guy.

it's everything. It's all encompassing. And you have to really look, I had to look myself in the mirror and say. Number one, am I even the right person to be the CEO of this company? is there somebody even in my company or outside my company who could do what I'm doing way better?

And I believe there was, I don't know if I'm the number one ultimate best CEO. That's not my skill set. It's not what I truly love to do. We have this woman on my team, Gita. I found her on LinkedIn. I hired her two years ago. She's unbelievable. And I talked to her and I said, I think you could probably do better job than me as being the CEO.

I think you could take the business from what we're doing now and double it and triple it way more efficient. And I think you would actually enjoy that over me. I think it just makes more sense. And for me, I know that I want to start something new. So I told my boss, Mark, the CEO of custom Inc.

And I said, I think you're getting a lot more value out of me being a part of this company. If I could just start something new. So I came up with this new idea called Swag Space. I'll briefly give you the run, the idea. And I think it could be amazing for your audience. Everybody really that this the high level idea.

So there's 22, 000, promo distributors in our industry. 90 percent of them are mom and pops. They do between 500, 000 and a million dollars a year in sales. We do a lot more. there's companies who even do way more than us, but they, the average is about a million dollars, 500, 000 to a million dollars a year.

They have no technology whatsoever. They have no resources. They're doing all of their sales, very fragmented and broken. The old, I call it the old school way, but it's really the current way that they do it. They do presentation decks, back and forth emails, contacting different suppliers, waiting on hold to see inventory accounts, creating invoices, collecting sales tax.

Every single thing is like an annoying process. And when you really think about how much time they focus on selling versus the time they focused on. The bullshit, frankly, of getting the orders fulfilled. It's about 20 percent of their times on selling and 80 percent of their times on everything else.

Getting the orders through the funnel and then fulfilling the orders and all this type of stuff. Swag. com, we spent eight years and tens of millions of dollars through profits reinvested back into the technology. We've made it really easy for companies to buy swag. that's what we're really good at.

It takes like less than a minute. Honestly, you can find what you're looking for, design it, buy it, build boxes. Buy in bulk or hold an inventory for individual distributions. What if we could white label all of our technology and give it for free to the whole promotional product distributor network to allow them to have the best technology in the industry to start selling swag to their audience.

And then we take it a step further. Once their customers actually check out through the site, it hits our backend and we become the de facto supplier. So that 80 percent of wasted time can now be 100 percent focus on the selling and we handle all the processes. So that was like the initial idea.

And then we kept thinking, who else does this work for? There's 22, 000 screen printers. They would love to sell swag. They can't, now they can. Event planners, party planners, graphic designers. Imagine a designer creates a logo for somebody. and now that person who just has a logo goes to a different website to buy swag.

Why don't, why doesn't the designer handle the swag and make heavy commission on everything? so we just trying to make it really easy for anyone who wants to sell swag, whether it's their core business, like distributors, promo distributors, or promotional product adjacent, as we think of it. Who could sell swag and add another 30, 000 revenue stream.

it could be a local mom who has a charity in her network and wants to sell her charity 000 for the stuff and allow her to make 3000 and we give 30 percent commission on the top line. So it's very heavy commission, structure. We handle all this collecting the sales taxes. we handle everything.

We handle the entire process and we make it really easy. So just launched this about 20 days ago. We have about a hundred users signed up and people are making a lot of sales through the platform already. we're really starting to build this up. But if you think about the numbers, if you get a thousand of these guys and there's literally hundreds of thousands of opportunity, people who could use this, the average is doing 500, 000 to a million.

this is a, a billion dollar a year business you could get with getting very few, promo distributors on board.

Connor Tomkies: I'm looking at this. You guys have pretty good traffic to the website. you guys have a few thousand people. How are they hearing about this? Is this just from swag.

Jeremy Parker: I guess maybe some swag or from, Me being ran up in different things. We haven't really done marketing for Swagspace at all. We just, we're very beta. Everyone has to apply for membership. We're not accepting everybody. our idea is really not to have more than 150 this year, because if we get 150 and they actively use our site, that could be 50 to a hundred million dollars in our first year of business.

So we don't need to have that many people, for this to work. We just really want to make sure we have the right product that we're working with.

Connor Tomkies: I like that you're democratizing it. I like that. You're also doing fully custom boxes, so does that mean that people can essentially make their own, subscription box for folks?

Jeremy Parker: Yeah. So let's say you're Jenny promo. You have a promo distributor, your clients, Facebook today would want to buy, let's say custom boxes to onboard their new hires or to send to their best customers. Jenny promo today can't really do that because Jenny promo would need to have a 3PL warehouse to consolidate things, to box things.

And most of these mom and pop shops don't have that. Now they can now with our site, Facebook could go on to Jenny promos, white labeled version could find the products, upload it to cart, build boxes effortlessly, all automated, and then check out. And by the way, if Facebook didn't want to do it themselves, cause maybe Facebook doesn't want to do it.

Jenny promo could build the carts for Facebook, do all the work for Facebook and create a link and just share the link with Facebook. So all Facebook has to do is put their credit card in and check out. So we make it really simple for both the customer to do it. And also the promo distributor to do it for their customer, but really the whole system is set up, streamlined.

Connor Tomkies: this is fantastic. I signed up. So hopefully I get into the beta

for Swagspace. this is exciting.

[

Connor Tomkies: Hey podcast, listeners, eight years ago, I started a company called support Ninja. It's an international hiring, training, managing, outsourcing company to help you find the best talent anywhere. If you guys are interested in hiring international talent, check out support, ninja. com. Cheers.

All right. So you're a post exit founder, you sold a company, you're relaunching inside a new company. Is there anything else that you're excited about potentially launching in the next three to five years?

Yes,

Jeremy Parker: Yeah. I have about 10 and a half months until, my next thing because I'm incubating this idea and I'm trying to get product market fit and build the team and hire my replacement technically, so I can then move on to the next thing after this. And I have so many different ideas, like I just write down so many ideas, but it's hard to come up with an idea of an industry that you're not in. Like you don't really know the pain points unless you're really in the industry. I saw the pain points and why I built swag. com because of my time at MV sport 10 years ago. And I saw that the buyer changed. So it was like this key insight that was a little bit different.

but to just be like, walking on the beach, I live in Miami and think about a whole different idea.I don't know what's good and not good. And then I kept thinking, maybe I just stay in the promotional product space because. I have connections here and I have a reputation here and I've, and I know this industry inside and out.

And there's definitely opportunity that still could be done here, but there's things like non competes and this. And so it's like, where'd you even begin? and for you, like after you had your exit, like, how did you think of what you did like afterwards, like, how do you even know what to do and what's the right thing and what you want to focus your time on?

Connor Tomkies: I was CEO of this company and running it day to day. And I just went through that list and I started highlighting the things that I was motivated and excited about. And then also, as soon as I exited, other people would reach out to me and say, Hey, I have this idea that I'm excited about.

And, you would talk to them about it. And some people approached me about buying their business. And so I started a mini, essentially a venture studio for those who don't know. It's essentially just, an incubator where you can either launch your own ideas or buy other companies. And so I started doing multiple things, all at once and not necessarily picking one thing.

whenever I got excited, I just moved. so that being said, Jeremy, I might not be the right person to answer this question because I went from Having 14, 18 meetings a day to having no meetings and then all of a sudden having 14, 18 meetings again and then trying to make sure that everything is organized and structured.

so I'm involved in this music lessons business. I'm building it as like a alternative to private equity company that I'm really excited about a low latency audio , product that I think could be fun. I just bought a marketing company, last week that I'm really excited about.

I'm watching a community for entrepreneurs, so I'm just running around and doing what I find is interesting.

Jeremy Parker: That's cool. So I think for me, I know I have a finite time where I need to make a decision. And what I'm realizing is my whole life since 22, I've been an entrepreneur and I've had some success and some failures and then some success again. And I never gave myself a break to stop.

And even after vouch, failed and we shut it down, I'd never had that time to I just jumped into the next thing because it was, I was 30 years old and I was single. And I had no money at that point. I burned through it. Like I had, it was necessity to actually build a new startup and build something.

And now I don't really have the same stresses that I had before swag. If that makes sense. So now I'm like, maybe I should take six months off and just talk to people and have conversations and listen. Maybe there's opportunities that will come to me that if I just jumped into the next thing too soon, I might regret it.

I might hit that first roadblock and realize. I don't even love what I'm doing. why did I do this? So I'm trying, I'm planning on taking a good six months off next year. but I do have some ideas, and if they're still there after the six months, then I think they're worth it to continue.

Connor Tomkies: That's true. Sit on it. See if you're still excited about it. I did not give myself that space and I wish I did. And whenever you talk to other post exit founders, they always talk about taking that six months to a couple of years off and how they're grateful that they did. but on the other hand, I've been talking to more entrepreneurs now than I ever have in the past.

So like on any given week, I'm talking to three to seven different entrepreneurs. Hearing about what they're excited about. It gets me excited about my ideas. sometimes bouncing things off each other helps. but I'm really big on this idea that entrepreneurship is a cycle and it's really a career and it's not a linear thing.

You don't sell your business and you're done.

Jeremy Parker: It's exactly true. And it's funny. It's like after, after I sold swag. I had so many people, so many friends, be like I cannot believe that sold so quick. I can't believe you. And I'm thinking to myself, how many years did I have of hitting my head against the wall and failing? it's all part of the long cycle.

it's never just like a success, like beginning and end. when I sold my previous company in seven months with contracts. And then I had four years of losing all my money while I burned through it while I build another company that doesn't work. And then this company doing six years and selling, it's a lifetime sport.

That's what entrepreneurship is. And I want to get into the habit of thinking that way. So even if you have successes, that doesn't mean the next company is going to succeed either.

I'm just trying to learn and get better every single day and just try to make the right decisions and try to avoid decisions and things I've done in the past that haven't been the right thing.

as being a successful entrepreneur, I think you naturally get better at it because if you're successful, you see a lot of what goes into building a startup. But I think also failure teaches you also a lot of things as well. So I think it's actually important to have both sides of it.

Connor Tomkies: I had a company that failed called Delegated that we sold for parts and it didn't work out, but there's a direct line from Delegated and everything else that I did. I can't imagine without it. And so if you're going into an endeavor or a startup and you feel like you're learning as you go through the process and you're stretching yourself and you're developing, whether that company works or not, you always have that experience.

if you were to pull yourself out of that company, there's only a handful of people that can recreate that company and a fraction of the time using all the stuff that you have built and learned. So I think that's something special because there's no shortage of ideas.

There's no shortage of capital that can go into those ideas, but there's a shortage of operators that are willing to execute and try, even if it might result in failure. So I think there's. We still have that with us, right? It doesn't go away. Jeremy, there is one thing I wanted to ask you.

And so Y Combinator came out with this thing called request for startups, and it has a bunch of different stuff that they're interested in either investing or inviting some people to join their incubator in different spaces. So just reading off this list, you're talking about machine learning and robotics, defense technology, which might make sense considering the global climate, climate tech, spatial computing, a lot of it's pretty hard core science.

One of them is even a way to end cancer, which is like a pretty big, broad shot. Is there any of these that kind of stand out to you or anything that you think might be exciting for those next two or three years of development?

Jeremy Parker: my background is so much into B2B and focused on that. And all these are very much, huge moonshot type of ideas.

Connor Tomkies: Yeah, I'm just looking at like machine learning to stimulate the physical world and it's what does that even mean?

Jeremy Parker: I think the people who know what this stuff means are the guys to actually solve it. They're like, okay, that makes sense to me. I'm looking at this stuff. I don't think, I don't think Y Combinator wants me in their program.

Connor Tomkies: so we need to find like the super smart person that understands what machine learning to simulate the physical world means. And then they need to work with us because then we need to work with a B2B. Yeah, exactly. You can be like, yeah, I sold them t shirts once and I can be like, yeah, but they outsourced with us and it worked out great and they should use a solution.

we're both in the B2B space and in some ways I find it easier to start a business sometimes B2B, I'm a little bit more comfortable with that. I'm a little less comfortable with some of this hard science. And how to take it to market. It just seems so variable that you're not just betting on whether you can run and execute a business well, but whether the science will pan out and whether the unit economics will pan out.

And I can't even imagine B2C.

Jeremy Parker: No, B2C. I've spent a lot of time in B2C and it's much harder, honestly, than B2B. it's just so fickle. there's no way to know what's going to take off or what it feels like way more of a crap sheet, but at the same time, which kind of like the crazy thing with it is that everyone has B2C ideas, like B2C ideas.

You could come up with. Anytime, because you're just like, you're living in the life. And it's it comes up like, Oh, wouldn't it be cool if you had this or that, like in my apartment building in Miami, we had to pay people tips, for Christmas and, but they gave us a list, a sheet of all the people's face, no one's faces, just their names.

And I don't know half these people and I'm giving tips based on, I don't even know who they are. It'd be great to have an app where you could tip it and you could see their face and there's just obvious things that should be there, right? It's much easier, but Actually executing it and getting it out there and making it worthwhile and making it work is so much harder like b2b it's a lot easier You could really just narrow it down than exactly the customer the type of customer and just learn as much as you can about that And try to build them a solution that works for them and most likely will work for other people like them and then just keep Iterating and it keeps you super focused.

I think b2b keeps you a lot more focused.

Connor Tomkies: One thing I didn't like about starting out as entrepreneurs, I spent so much time pitching and doing some of the stuff like reaching out to PR outlets and trying to do some of the things that I thought looked right. Because it's the lag indicator or something that is more of an effect of other successful companies.

So I was trying to almost reverse engineer it. And I spent so much time pitching on the companies that were not successful compared to the ones that were, where my head was down and I was actually working. I think it's a little bit of a trap and I think I can see that a little bit in my background, whenever I look at some of the companies that I did, I was wondering if you have any traps that you saw that might be helpful to younger.

Founders or people that are just starting out.

Jeremy Parker: Yeah.

I think a big trap that I found myself early on and I even found it myself and it was swag Is even a couple of traps raising money people always think raising money means that you made it in some ways It's like this weird thing because like you read text TechCrunch and everything is about the raise It's not about the success or they don't really highlight, bootstrap companies at all.

It's all about somebody raised 5 million to 7 million and they put this beautiful picture of the founders on it. And it makes you feel like they're celebrities. And I just think that's a big trap. I think honestly, it's a big trap. most companies that give VC funding fail and the VCs, I don't think they necessarily care about every company they want the best company to work and then they really get paid back with one company has this ridiculous, amazing exit and it pays for everybody else.

that's just my experience. So like with swag, we initially thought of ourselves as like a VC backable company and we pitched to a lot of VCs and after time, we're like, we're profitable. why don't we just reinvest the profit and grow it how we want to grow it and control it and not dilute ourselves.

and that was a big, I wish I had that knowledge earlier on in my career. Cause I think I wasted a lot of time trying to, I don't know, make it people like, I don't make myself feel better by getting somebody else to buy in and give their money. I don't think you necessarily need that for most startups.

Connor Tomkies: If you guys are listening to this, profit is the key word there, being able to build a profitable business that where you can reinvest the profits and the unit economics work, and you're challenging yourself because you're not doing things that are.

Burning through cash, your customer acquisition cost isn't ridiculous. there's something there and with Support Ninja, I wanted to be in a place where I didn't have to accept outside funding for any part of the journey. But whenever I did want to go raise funding, there would be a line because people saw how profitable the business was and they knew the unit economics made sense

And they knew that this was going places. I wanted to be in the situation where they were coming to me and not the other way around. And I think if you can be in that circumstance, it might sound idealistic, but you can buy profitable businesses. You can focus more on a bootstrap methodologies rather than pitching your heart out several times a week.

Jeremy Parker: I think there's a, there's just a trap in general for entrepreneurs because it is a lonely game. even if you have a founder or co founder, it's lonely. there's not many people understand it. And usually people in your regular life probably think of you as like somewhat of a failure until you're a success.

It's Oh, they're just doing a project. that's not a real job until there's success. So there's this lonely place to be in that oftentimes. At least I can speak for myself. I try to overcompensate with trying to boost up my ego in some ways to make myself feel like, I wasn't necessarily that failure or I was making things happen.

I think it's just a natural tendency as an entrepreneur to want to get validation, whether that's validation from like PR and getting written up in press or validation from a VC, big VC who bought into it. It makes you feel somewhat special. Like you're actually not wasting your time. And I think if you could remove the ego from the equation.

In general, as an entrepreneur, you're going to do things, not only it's just a healthier way to live, you're going to actually be focused on the business without focusing on outside, opinions or thoughts or how other people perceive you. You're going to really just think about, can I make this business successful?

and I think with swag, I didn't care what anyone thought. I was just so much about heads down and growing it. That was really all I cared about is growing it and growing it profitably and making it work and building the right solution and talking to thousands of customers and doing everything I need to do, whether it was driving cars or rolling the t shirts or knocking on doors to make this business successful.

It didn't matter. Nothing else mattered.

Connor Tomkies: the next thing you do is going to be so much easier, for all the hand rolled t shirts that you have done. Jeremy, where should people, go to find you and see what you're up to? Is, do you have a handle that you prefer?

Jeremy Parker: yeah, I'm not really super active on Twitter, but feel free to reach out to me, email Jeremy at swag. com, even though I'm no longer CEO, I still have that email. or check us out at swag. space. we'd love to help you out if you think it could be useful, think it could be a cool side hustle.

If you have a designer in your network or an event planner or a promo distributor, screen printer, we know we'd love to help them and show them how easy it is to make sales. And, we just feel like this is gonna be a really game changer for a lot of people.

Connor Tomkies: That's awesome. I'm watching this thing called founder at work for entrepreneurs, and it would be nice if I could send them a box just saying Hey, welcome to this community. you're loved. Here's a book that we recommend. Here's some swag. I just think it helps set the tone. this is awesome.

I'm gonna go check this out. Jeremy, thank you so much.

Jeremy Parker: Thank you for having me.

Narrator: That wraps up today's episode with Jeremy Parker. For more inspiring stories and valuable lessons from successful entrepreneurs, be sure to subscribe to our podcast. Thanks for listening, and stay tuned for more episodes on navigating the thrilling path of entrepreneurship. Until next time, keep pushing boundaries and chasing your next million.