YouSaid · the spoken record

David Heacock

lines on the record: 137
first: 2025-02-18
most recent: 2025-02-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Willpower is not a strategy. That's why kind of going back to your obsession point, the people that I think are really successful are obsessed because when you're obsessed with something, you're not like, you don't need willpower because it's just all consuming for you and that's what you do. And I think that's really why people need to lean into things that are more natural for them or interesting for them. It's not that, oh, follow your dreams and everything's going to be great. I think that's awful advice. But you do need to lean into the things that you enjoy and are genuinely curious about it. It's not like I enjoy air filters in and of themselves, but I love business and I love the puzzle of that. And there are lots of pieces of that that I can easily become obsessed with that are wrapped up in it. And so I think that figuring out where your natural curiosity is is super important.”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Accountability structures in order to hold me accountable. And so Dr. Gurner would be a good example. I realized I needed accountability within my And I knew that if I just relied on myself and my own willpower to make that happen, that it was something that wouldn't happen for me because I am obsessed with my business and I'm all in on that and I'm always going to find excuses not to do it. But I created that accountability with the trainer. And so I look for ways when I know that I'm weak at something to create the accountability to force myself to do it. So those would be like the general kind of self-principles that I live by and remind myself of every day”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to be persistent on that journey. Then resilience because bad things happen, like we talked about with momentum or like that prime day example. Bad stuff happens, but resilience is the muscle to know that, hey, I'm going to be able to solve it. There's no problem that is not solvable. And within business, I fundamentally believe that is your responsibility as the entrepreneur or the business owner to solve them. And that's where resilience comes in. And so when bad things happen, you just have to remind yourself that that's just part of the game. And you got to step up to make it happen. And then the last thing that I really live by is accountability and building accountability into my life and being accountable first and foremost to myself. But then having the self-awareness to know the areas where I'm weak and to build in the”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know what I mean by that when I say it is that things take time. It's not easy. But like you've got to, when you're focused on something, then you're obsessed with it. You're going to be persistently working towards that thing. And time and again, like I start off something thinking, oh, how hard can it be? Or I get this done in a few months. And takes a lot longer to get it done. I mean, it wrapped up with that persistence is really patience. I would say persistence and patience. I sometimes talk about them separately, but they're really the same in that for me in that things take longer than you want. You consistently overestimate what you can achieve in a year and underestimate what you can do in a decade. I say that often and I've lived it so often. And that's just a reminder to myself that it takes time to really build anything that's meaningful.”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All right, but it ended up being a big mistake. And I have a lot of examples like that. And every time that I've really refined my focus and kind of just kind of come back to the fundamentals as we talked about, I've been better off. And so that's why having the focus around my mission and why you hear me talk about it all the time, because I'm reminding myself, I got to stay focused on that. Like either every activity that I'm doing has to be towards that singular focus, or I should not be doing it. And that's what focus means to me and why the mission part of it is so critical. And I think people would be better suited to really be self-aware with themselves about what it is they really want out of life and be focused on building, becoming the person that gets them that. And so all those things are wrapped up in focus for me. Second kind of principle for me is persistence.”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, in doing this YouTube series, I've actually thought about this a lot. And so I do have a few traits that I can speak about that are important to me. But the very first one, which I recommend for everyone, but whenever I say these things is really a reminder to myself more than it is advice, although I think it is great advice, but it's focus. Time and again in my life, or really as an entrepreneur, I should say, I've had the tendency to get distracted by a shiny object or by potentially another new business model that sounds interesting or would be fun to pursue. And every time I've started one of those things, I realize it's a lot harder than it probably looks. And I end up shutting it down or refocusing on my core activity. And I'm always better for it. I started a freight business during COVID and that I could kind of squint and say made sense because I'm in the logistics business.”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To regain that momentum, if I repeat that consistently over some period of time. So it's definitely a muscle that you build. But that's how I feel about it. And I think so many people have bad things that happen to them. And like rather than going back to the fundamentals and like, hey, how am I going to start to dig out and get that, regain that positive momentum in this, they linger on it for too long and let it atrophy. And then it's much harder to get that momentum. So anytime I see things, whether it be in my health, a relationship or business, or anytime I see things that are like starting to show some cracks and starting to slow down a bit, then I'm very conscious of that and say, oh, what do I need to do to get back to fundamentals to be able to put myself back on the path that I want to be on?”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“from what we would have expected a few months ago. And that came from a conscious effort to really build momentum and all the building blocks that you know you need in order to get that momentum from marketing and from sales and all the things that go into that. And it's just day in, day out grinding and pushing all of those things forward. And then you wake up one day and you're like, wow, we're over indexing again. And it's because you built that momentum in your system to allow that to happen. And I've done it so many times in so many aspects of my life that I know inherently when I've kind of lost momentum or maybe I've lost focus on something that's important and I need to regain it and I can consciously push that momentum forward or do the fundamental things that I know I need to do in order to”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had to kill that deal just so we could go back to being viable. And, you know, normally we would have expected an incremental $2 million or something of revenue on that deal that we didn't get. But I use that as an example because we had a few things like that that happened that just stuff happens when you're in business. And we had a much slower kind of few months in the summer than we were expecting. And I hated it, but like I'd actually just hired a new CFO a couple months before and like he really took it personally and he was like he was I think maybe even a little bit worried. She's like wow like you know we had all these kind of problems stack up and like but for me I've been through that kind of situation so many times it didn't even bother me and like we've actually now as a business like gained a lot of momentum and like we're really kind of over over index”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The like I've actually experienced it some this year in that in a business, you kind of ebb and flow. I feel like you go through times where at least I experience times of kind of growth and you're pushing forward and you're, you know, you feel all this positive momentum you're doing things. And then for whatever reason, things kind of settle in a little bit. And then it gets a little bit harder. And then you have to reignite that momentum again. And we had a lot of technical issues over the summer, including on Prime Day actually did a short about this, but we had a big prime deal that was running. And by some glitch of the system, I got a call at 3 o'clock in the morning from someone at Amazon that our deal was not running. And they were looking at fixing it. I got up, started monitoring it. And by 9 o'clock in the morning, still nobody could purchase any of our product that was on a deal on Amazon. And I had to kill.”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Momenta is everything, and it's such an intangible thing at the same time. In life, and in anything, you're either progressing or you're regressing. There's really no steady state in reality. I mean, like our bodies deteriorate over time with no activity. There are just so many examples of this throughout life. And in business and in personal life or in health, I think it's very much the same. It's like you have these, you either are improving and building on something day in, day out, or you're declining. And the reality is that once you go through these periods of decline, even if it's microperiods of decline, it's oftentimes so hard to get your positive momentum to.”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the project itself, I don't know, but they're putting their name on it, and then they're bringing it into the US and using third-party fulfillment to sell it. And that's not direct to consumer. That's just a brand using e-commerce as a primary sales channel. And I think that's how it should be spoken about. And I actually have no interest in being anymore. I do not want to be considered a direct-to-consumer brand. I want to be an indoor air quality brand. I mean, that's really what I want to be because I think direct to consumer is so limiting. And I think, you know, words and categorization matters. And so you need to be really thoughtful about what it means if that's what you're pursuing.”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why would you be so proud of the fact that you're a brand that is limiting yourself to one channel? And I just find it to be one of these kind of mind games that is quite interesting if you actually think about it. Because what is direct to consumer at the end of the day? What it meant to me and what it still means to me is like if you actually are vertically integrated, you do all of your own manufacturing and you sell that product to the end user. That's how I would always describe my business early on when we were just an air filter business. I would say, you know, we are completely vertically integrated. We manufacture all of our own product and we sell it direct to the person who's installing it. That is what direct consumer means to me. But basically every direct-to-consumer quote unquote brand that I'm aware of is effectively manufacturing their product with an overseas contract manufacturer, putting their name on it and maybe they're doing some management.”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so when I started FilterBy, it was really at the time where you had a lot of direct-to-consumer brands coming to market, companies like Dollar Shave Club and Harry's were really big at the time. And you've seen a lot that have come out over the last decade or so. And my pet peeve is they call themselves directing consumer. And I'm not talking about any one specific company in this case. I don't know all of the details of how they do things. But for the most part, when I observe them, they're brands, but they're not really directing consumer because they are manufacturing their product in Asia and using third-party fulfillment to fulfill their orders. They're really just brands that are using e-commerce as a sales channel, which is actually quite limiting, right? Because we just haven't talked about retail and B2B and all these other potential sales channels. Why would you?”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Correct. We're a logistics business because the reason why we exist is because we're able to move, like we're able to deliver an air filter to an end user as cheap, if not cheaper than anybody else. I mean, that's my belief. There's basically no other company that's set up to that's purpose built just to do what we do. There are a lot of manufacturers of air filters. There are a lot of retailers and distributors of air filters, but there's nobody, at least at our scale that does the whole thing from raw material to effectively in delivery. And we've optimized that over the years. And we've also aggregated a lot of customers that give us the economies of scale to be able to do that.”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ring panels and other things that we don't actually market online, but we're able to manufacture to sell into B2B businesses. And so basically their filtration market is mostly you're either commercial and you focus on that and a lot of brands you've probably never heard of or you're 100% residential, which is 3M is by far the biggest in that, but there are a few others. And we're unique in that we play in both in our distribution allows us to play in both. you know, the kind of nuance difference between us and the...”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The cost structure for us versus them through that network is very different. And my opinion and in my opinion that a lot of these big companies actually subsidize companies like 3M maybe unknowingly to compete on price online on some of these products because the economics of shipping them and putting them through their distribution networks just would not make sense. Again, that's my opinion, but have studied the market pretty closely. But their market is mostly retail, whereas we're traditionally directing consumer, but more and more direct to businesses. And so we sell, we have school systems where we may sell $500,000 a year of filters too, and we have other types of non-pleated air filter products like the V-Sale HEPA filters.”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so 3M, you know, best I can tell it if they want, but they mostly sell through retail, so like places like Walmart, Costco, and whatnot. And that is their major distribution channel. And, you know, until this year, we did literally zero retail. So they did that and they sell online, but that's basically the extent. And when they sell online, they're basically doing it through Amazon and Walmart and other retailers, which means they're effectively trucking in product to a distribution center. Then that distribution is taking it off the truck, taking it out of the case packed box is likely, then moving it around the country to their distribution network, then putting it back on the shelf, and then picking it again and putting it in another box and sending it to an end user. All of those are steps that we do not have in our supply chain, which means that”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The reality is that there are a lot of homes that have multiple sizes. And so if you have one odd size and you have all these other standard sizes, then we ultimately get your business because we have the whole catalog and we can get it to quicker. So there are a lot of little factors like that to make a huge difference.”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think online, one of the reasons why we have been able to gain so much market share is because a lot of those commercial people see that and end up purchasing our product. But you combine that with the fact that we manufacture 300 different sizes as standard and we have a team in aggregate of 50 or 70 people that make custom filters all day every day. So like if you have a crazy size filter which in the US is quite common you know that you don't have a you can't go to the store and buy and if it's not one of even the 300 sizes that we have then we will make it for you and still ship it same day so you get it next day or two days depending on where you are and so we have the infrastructure”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stand up even if it was put on an outside air handler unit. But that's the exact same product that we're selling to residential and to consumers. And we're able to do that at a comparable and oftentimes cheaper price than 3M. I'm not knocking them at all. I'm not looking for a fight with it. But they and a lot of the other companies that sell into the residential world only sell like residential grade or filters that are not really made for that commercial use. And so when they're putting them in stores, they're basically limiting themselves to residents, to homes, same way with online. They're basically limiting themselves to homes. When 70% of air filtration is actually commercial. And so 70% of air filters that are purchased are purchased for commercial setting. And so”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like how you put in versus 3M, our arch enemy, at least they think so, although we're actually in very different games. You know, there are a lot of factors, and it's a simple question that is a little more complex. Take a little bit of a step back. You know, one of the things that makes us the most unique, I think, is that we sell to both the residential and to the business-to-business market. So business to business is actually our fastest growing segment now where we sell direct to hospitals, hotels, you know, gyms, you know, you name it. And all of our product that we manufacture is geared towards that commercial customer. And so it's a higher quality beverage board and double-sided frame and like little nuanced type type things that really make it a quality product that can”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have all these people that are now being exposed to our brand that maybe weren't being exposed to it before. And so that's really the motivation for going into retail.”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Filter, whether it's wrapped in four or one, it still takes up these same amount of truck space. We can give them one packs and they can compete in retail with our four pack per unit price on the one pack on the shelf. And so they're offering a different value proposition to the customer. The customer obviously has to go and pick it up and they have to do that extra work themselves. But if they're already there, maybe it's something that they would like to take. But for me also as a brand, we now are selling between 10 and 20,000 units a week in Walmart and that's 10 to 20,000 new potential new to brand customers a week that we are reaching just in our kind of trial 505 store period in Walmart. And so for a brand, you know, that's a huge potential future customer acquisition channel for us, right? Because”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, like I just said, 84% of transactions still happen in a store, whether you like it or not. And I just realized that, you know, I know I keep coming back to it, but I truly am mission driven. I really live that. And I just know if I want to achieve my mission, that I need to be where the customers are. And a lot of those customers are in retail. And as I tell the retailers, they offer a very different value proposition than we do. And I think it makes sense that they exist and we exist and that for us to get our shipping economics down, we incentivize customers to buy a four or six pack at a time because that's where you really get the best value or we can deliver the best value to a customer. So online, on average, we ship five and a half filters to a customer and any one transaction. But in retail, because it costs us the same to ship every single”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Big goals personally, you know, I really am going all in on brand and on building the roles leading into air quality company and we're getting into the service business and doing some other things. And so for me, the next kind of step of marketing is building top of the funnel brand awareness. And that's part of the reason why I'm going so public now. And then we're going to start alongside me, I'm going to have people doing the same thing for the core filter by brand that may appeal to different demographics than I would appeal to. And we're really kind of going all in on that top of funnel brand awareness. We gave away last year. We're doing big giveaways every month. We're doing things that are not related to air filters, but that get us into a customer's mind. That's kind of where our marketing is going in almost all of that's done in-house.”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's mostly internal. We do have an agency that we work with that I hired a few years ago that does manage some of our ad accounts that are more on autopilot, but it's just keeping best practices and keeping things together. Like I built out all of our, like all of our intent-based ad campaigns, our budget next year is $42 million for our marketing in general. So we've spent about $42 million item for us, at least going to next year. I think it was $38 million this year. So it's a big line item for us. And we manage most of it internally, but what's so interesting still to me, my marketing team may not like to hear me say it, but it's like most of that money is still built on ad campaigns that I effectively launched 12 years ago and honed over that period or 10 years ago in Amazon's case. They rolled out their advertising a bit later. But it's not like those things have shifted all that much.”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Early on, I would spend some time thinking about that, and honestly, I realized, at least in our case, and maybe everybody's different, it's a fool's errand. I mean, it's like there's a reason why customers choose to buy on Amazon. I mean, there's a funny story. She'll maybe get mad at me for telling it, but I will about two years ago, we needed some air filters at our house. And my wife actually ordered our air filters on Amazon. And it really irritated me at the time because I said, how in the world, why in the world would you go on Amazon and buy our air filters? But for her, she was just doing a chore and she was looking for the easiest way to, or she wanted to solve that problem and we buy a lot of stuff on Amazon. And so she just went and clicked order on Amazon. And so that's my wife that made the decision to go and buy our product on Amazon. So I quite frankly gave up on spending any energy and worrying about it.”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know that that's where the customers are. And so I think anybody that kids themselves and says, oh, I'm too good to sell on Amazon or I want to ignore it, it's just incredibly naive.”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are selling a product that you, for whatever reason, say, oh, I don't want to sell on Amazon, then you are basically ignoring 60% of your potential buyers. And so from the beginning, and a big motivation for me starting this business and the way that I did is I wanted to build a brand and a product that I could work with companies like Amazon rather than trying to compete with them. And when you own a brand and you own all of your manufacturing, then we're in a unique position to be able to do that. And it goes back to that earlier experience I had. I told you in 2009, a long time ago, we sold six and a half, or I sold 6.5 million dollars of office supplies primarily on Amazon. Like that was where I saw all these people were buying stuff. And so to me, the opportunity was, you know, I want to find a product that I can sustainably sell on Amazon as a channel because.”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you are a brand, if you're a CPG brand, your goal should be to sell and be wherever your customers are. And I shouldn't care where you buy my product. I just want you to be buying my product. And so like 60% of product searches start on Amazon. That's just a fact. So if you”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, you don't get their email address. But I know the question you're asking, and I think it's the wrong question. And I'll tell you why.”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“is how we built the brand we have today. I mean, you fast forward now on Amazon, we know because we have access to the data that's pretty public between one in four and one in three filters purchased in the furnace filter category on Amazon is one of ours. So we really taken a ton of market share in that specific category just off of that long-term marketing strategy.”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Price is just not something you don't build a brand that way. But I knew that because of that, I had the kind of staying power from a marketing perspective and an intent-based marketing perspective to suck all the oxygen out of the rest of the market. And I did that even when it was hard early on, but I knew that if you were searching for an air filter or something related that we needed to be the obvious choice based off of the taking over all the add spots that would be related to that. And so that was effectively the marketing strategy that got us to where we are today, more or less, right? I mean, that combined with great product, quick delivery, great branding, great quality, you know, all of those things combined with sucking all the oxygen out of that intent-based marketing world.”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“See us, and that's been the case for about a decade. Early on, my strategy was I wanted to suck all the oxygen out of the market in that I knew we were vertically integrated and that means that our cost of delivering a product to a customer is as cheap or cheaper than anybody else as possibly could be. That's part of the nuance of our business model because we are completely vertically integrated and we're really into logistics business, not the air filter business. We manufacture an air filter for about $2 and sell it on average for $12. Unfortunately, that's not all just profit between the two. There's a lot of logistics involved in getting that product to the end customer. But because we've optimized all of that, I know that there's basically nobody that can compete with us on price if that was a deciding factor that I wanted to go out and compete on. We don't compete on.”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A good experience is completely wasteful because especially if you're in a high customer acquisition type business that you need that recurring revenue or that repeat revenue in order to be able to make it into a business, you have to have a good product and a good customer experience. So a brand all starts with that, just like a reputation. It's like building that over a long period of time and all the elements that go into that. But then from a marketing perspective, the business originally was built almost exclusively on what I would call intent-based marketing. And so, you know, basically if you search for air filter or any iteration of an air filter like 20 by 20 by one air filter or 20 by 25 by 5 air filter or furnace filter or AC filter, HVAC filter on Google or Amazon or Bing, then you're going to”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And a lot of our competitors, especially early on, didn't do any packaging at all. They were just putting generic filters into a box. And we really gotten more and more much better over the years at really differentiating within our brand. And we've actually rolled out some new media with a partner with Kimberly Clark to do it. And we really kind of innovated and worked to make sure that we have a best-in-class product that people see they resonate with it and ultimately led us to launching in Walmart two and a half months ago, which retail I think is something you may want to double click on later. Anyways, branding was extremely important to me from the beginning. And marketing to me is anything to raise awareness about that brand. But marketing without a good product or without”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you don't build a brand overnight. It's much like a reputation. It takes a lifetime to build and it takes a second to ruin. And that's just true. But from the beginning, we really focused on, I really focused on branding.”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So branding and marketing are two very different things to me. And we can go as deep as you'd like on it. But I actually would like to start with the brand a little bit in that I, from the very beginning was focused on building a brand. To me, like if you look at any big company that stands the test of time or has real value, it's really the brand. Nobody is searching for, or there are people that are searching for shoes and there are people that are searching for Nike. You want to own the company that is Nike because then people, you have no competition if somebody's searching for Nike. They're only looking for you. If somebody's searching for shoes and you have to compete with all those people that are selling shoes, that's much harder game and not likely to stand the test of time. And so I recognize that early on. And it was important to me to build a brand.”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is easy to get impatient, but if you do it over a long period of time, you'll be shocked how far you can go. But it would not be fair to say, oh, I just woke up and learned marketing skills on this day. It was something that I had been interested in and kind of toyed around with for years and ultimately honed them more and more and still in them. Still am homing them today. It's a never-ending process.”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Skills that I had already started to build, and then I just continue to build them, and I see opportunity, and I lean into that opportunity. And I think that that is the reality of how most successful people operate. And I think that people are always looking for that cheat code or that aha moment that's going to then change their life forever. And if that happens for people, I've certainly never experienced it. For me, it's more of a slow evolution and a compounding of skills and a compounding of knowledge over a long period of time, but with a consistent focus that's long term, that is immutable. And I think it's so hard for people to hold both of those things to be true. I know it's been hard for me in the past, but it takes a long time to compound to something meaningful and for skills to compound.”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The energy to continue to do both. So I shut it down. But the reason I give you that answer, and it's something I talk about a lot with people, is people always talk about money being the limiting factor in starting a business or doing something new. And I think that the reality is the limiting factor for most people is the skills and the curiosity. And I, from an early age, was building those skills, building the online marketing skills, building the entrepreneurial skills that ultimately I'm still honing today. And it's just been an evolution over that long period of time. So it was something I was curious from about from an early age. And so by the time I actually started the business, it was just a culmination of me, of all those.”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of money to be made in this kind of world, wouldn't it be great if I own the whole offer, like rather than being an affiliate if I owned my own product, so to speak? And I started a company called My Office Delivered where we were effectively dropshipping office supplies. And in 2009 sold, you know, six and a half million dollars or so of office supplies, primarily on Amazon. And when I looked at the actual underlying data of it, about 60% of that was either air filters from a small company in Creole, Alabama called Filters Now or ink cartridges. Those are the two big markets or the two big things that drove a large portion of our revenue. So then fast forward into 2009, like the financial crisis ended up being great for me from a career perspective. And I got promoted and my career really took off and I ended up shutting down that business because I didn't have.”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And actually in 2007, I had just moved to the trading desk from my economics research desk. And that was the beginning of the financial crisis. And I saw a lot of turmoil and saw a lot of people around me starting to get fired. And I was convinced I was going to lose my job. And my wife was in medical school at the time and we had not taken on any debt for her medical school because I was paying for it. And I was determined not to take on any debt. And I started a side hustle where I was effectively an affiliate for StubHub and it was quite scammy what I was doing. I was using Craigslist as a traffic source where I had a team of guys in Vietnam who were helping me to basically spam Craigslist to get traffic to a site that then ultimately would lead them to StubHub and I would get a commission. But in 2008 I made about half a million dollars that year just on the side hustle doing affiliate marketing. And at the time I realized that there's obviously”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not hundred percent true in that I've been an entrepreneur since I was probably ten years old and I was born in 1983 and really came of age in the 90s when the internet was just starting to come up and so I always had side hustles and things that I was working on and my teenage years I was you know basically assembling computers and selling them on eBay and my eBay screen name was Momentum Corp. And I've always been a believer in momentum I guess from the early days and because I just think momentum in life and in business is so important and I fight to maintain momentum always and anytime I lose momentum I hate it but then I remember I got to go and create that momentum again we can maybe dig into that later but you know I always was kind of tinkering around with online businesses”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That actually exhibited that and used that as a kind of coaching mechanism or as a way just to reward somebody who is living up to our values. And so once I realized how powerful that could be, then I really became. And it's great to be aspirational, but if you're not willing to actually live by that, you yourself first, but then also if you have somebody that maybe is a high performer but is clearly not consistent with your values, you have to be willing to part ways with them, even if that's going to be tough for a while for your company. And we take it to that level of extreme because it's to me it's extremely important. And I think if you want to be successful with this, that you have to have that level of commitment.”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The reality is that in my example, they're so personal to me. And so like I've been able to build this business on my own and, you know, I think that's unique and I would not recommend it for most people. I actually think for most people, or I don't know what's right for most people. I only know what's right for me. And so once I realized that I could kind of personalize it and then get buy-in from the people around me because they saw how these values that we exhibited were the differentiator for us in growing this business and we have tangible examples around each of those once I got the buy-in from that then it's much easier to articulate and show to everybody within the company that hey we actually take these seriously and we have we give out an employee of them month award now that we started earlier this year where we highlight somebody that actually exhibited one of our core values we pick a different core value every month and we find someone”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was the big kind of aha moment for me, actually, was realizing we actually had a problem with a particular person. When I was doing, when I was building these values and just kind of going through the motions with it, we had a problem with an employee that on the surface, you would say, well, you know, was there really anything they could have done? But like I knew there were actions that they could have taken that would have taken a little more effort to get it done. I thought, well, this is the great example where if we have a biased action in this example as a core value, it's a coaching moment where we can say, hey, this is what we stand for. This is what is important. You're going to be reviewed on these values that we have. And we take them seriously, then all of a sudden that gives you a way to frame it with an employee.”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Expect and that is why the value piece of an organizational structure or the operational structure is really ironically the most important. And two years ago, if you had told me that, I would have said, oh, that's just a waste of time. Or why am I going to waste my time going through this? I mean, like, I would not have, I would not have thought much of it because I always figured, oh, I own a whole business. I'm going to go just kind of figure it out as I go. I don't need to be so rigid. And I think that that was a real mistake.”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do this thing, right? Like, you know, that would be an excuse that somebody may come and give you, but then you're like, okay, how do I actually coach you on this? Because what am I supposed to say? He didn't call you back. So you failed, right? Oh, it's not your fault. That would be one way of approaching it. And it's a hard thing to refute. But if you have a core principle or a core value of bias to action, then you can say, well, you know, we at filter by have a bias to action. And what that would mean is in this example, you need to call him if he didn't call you back or you need to make sure you're following up with him and doing everything you can to get that fixed because that's just what we do and we use that as an example. And so the reason the values are so important in this goes across department is that that is what allows you to frame all of your discussions with employees or with partners or whatever the case might be in the way that you as a company or you as an organization”
2025-02-18 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · David Heacock: Building Filterbuy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source