Felix: Today, I'm joined by Charles, Zach, and Skyler from Redfora. Redfora is the U.S.'s most trusted marketplace for the very best emergency preparedness tools, supplies, and planning guides, and was started in 2016 and based out of San Francisco, California. Welcome, guys.


Zach: Welcome. Thanks for having us.


Charles: Thanks, Felix. Appreciate you having us.


Felix: All right. I read offline in your pre-interview about how the company, as exists today, we talked briefly about this, comes from a partnership between two separate entities, two separate companies. Break this down for us. Tell us about how the company came to where it's at today.


Charles: Yeah, absolutely. This is Charles speaking. Skyler, Zach, and I ended up partnering together in early 2020. Our business now is under the umbrella of Ethos Preparedness, but Redfora, which Skyler and Zach started in 2016, is a leading online marketplace for emergency kits and supplies. And when the three of us first met, probably towards the end of 2019, we sat down and just whiteboarded and strategized the emergency preparedness industry. We really liked what both of our separate companies were doing, and we decided to partner together and build the Ethos Preparedness umbrella.


Felix: Got it. Now, where did the idea behind the partnership come from? What did you guys see with each other that you felt like, together, you guys could go further?


Charles: Sure. I was leading a business in emergency preparedness focused on moving nonambulatory patients in hospitals and organizational preparedness as well. What I really liked about what Zach and Skyler were doing on the personal preparedness front was their direct-to-consumer brand took a very practical manner in approaching the way that they were selling and inspiring people to get prepared. And we decided that we could bring our forces together, merge our teams together, and provide more, not only for organizations, but also for individuals and families, and just looked to grow together in this space.


Felix: Got it. Now, what did that look like? Once you guys did partner, what were some of the things that you were able to do under this new umbrella that let you go further?


Charles: I think, really, the biggest thing was just bringing a lot of smart people to the table, Felix. Their experience in the direct-to-consumer space mixed with our experience in organizational preparedness really allows us to provide more and brainstorm more and bring more products and services to the market.
When we think about what we want to do, our vision is to end up becoming the main brand and what people think of when they think of emergency preparedness. And our partnership together and bringing our two businesses together has allowed us to just bring some really smart people to the table who have a background in preparedness and in sales and in entrepreneurship. And with that, we've really just hit the ground running over the last year and built a new Ethos Preparedness website. We've made some new hires, and we're growing the brand together.


Felix: Awesome.


Zach: I would say another thing is, Skyler and I were entrepreneurs as we started our journey, and we love the creative side of things. We love building new things, we love communicating with our audience and really thinking on the creative side. And as Redfora as a standalone business started to grow, the administrative side of that business and the complexity of that business continued to grow as well. Really, that combining entities and creating Ethos Preparedness allowed us to leverage some of the strengths and skillsets of the organization that Charles had put together, which then allowed a lot more bandwidth for Skyler, I, and our team of creative entrepreneurs to continue to grow that side of the business, as any large organization starts to get a little bit more complex. That was another thing that helped us continue to level up. Instead of creating another set of redundant administrative positions in our organization, we were able to leverage the organization that Charles had already worked to build on his side.


Felix: Got it. You again mentioned that love the entrepreneurial, the starting, the creative side, communicating with your customers. And with this collaboration, with this partnership, freed you up to be able to go back to focusing on the things that you were more passionate about, that maybe were more strongly suited to you. Now, during this transition where you are going back now, or at least freed up to divert your focus to a different direction, what was that like? I know 2020 was the year that you started this transition, started this partnership. How has that transition gone?


Zach: Yeah, it's gone very well. I think we've been able to find the strengths of each side of the organization and leverage those. I think there's a lot of things that the Redfora team has brought to the table that now Ethos is able to leverage. And there's a lot of things on the organizational, operational sides that the Ethos team has brought to the table to make a much stronger organization that's going to be set up for success going into the future.


Felix: And when you come into a partnership like this, making sure that there's a lot of clarity, making sure that you know what each side is bringing to the table, any tips or advice for people that are also looking into either a near-term or long-term partnering up with other? What are some of the things that are important to discuss right off the bat?


Charles: I think having a really firm focus on what the vision of the combined entities is, and the vision that we have here is to become the leading brand in emergency preparedness. And all three of us completely agreed with that, and we've been developing a strategy and a vision over the last eight, nine months of working together. And it's put us into a really unique place to do great things when we start 2021 here soon.


Felix: Now, Zach and Skyler, when the business of Redfora began, tell the story about that. Where did the initial product, the earthquake bag, where did the idea behind the business begin with?


Skyler: Well, it really came from being a potential consumer ourselves. Honestly, it wasn't something that I personally had thought a lot about, emergency preparedness. In fact, we joke a lot that I think I'm probably the last person to naturally think about it. But that all changed, just like it does for most of our customers, it changes when you have an emotional experience or hear a story about dealing with an emergency or natural disaster that you can relate to, and that really hits home for you.
For me, it was something minor, just feeling a moderately sized earthquake, something that was large enough to feel, but not large enough to do any damage or anything like that. And it really just sparked a conversation among us and our friends around, "That was really wild, right? That was a crazy experience. What would you do had that been a much bigger emergency? Do you have anything prepared? I don't have anything prepared. I don't even know what I would have prepared." Really, it came out of that conversation, realizing that we had no idea what we would do in an actual emergency. And the further we went into it, we realized there was a lot of information out there, but it's pretty overwhelming, and it was for me, personally. It was overwhelming to think about what I would do in a scenario that I really hope never happens, but there's a good chance that I will have to deal with it. Started going further and further down that road.
Emergency kit is the keystone element of having an emergency plan in place, the first place that you really start. And I really just wanted to buy one, because I really didn't want to do the work to make it myself. Looking at what was out there, it seemed like there were two types of products available out there. There were either very cheap and chintzy emergency kits that were one-size-fits-all, and just being a casual hiker and camper, I didn't really have a lot of confidence in from a quality standpoint. Or there were really intense doomsday-prepper emergency kit solutions out there, and that didn't really strike me as a good fit either.
As Zach and I were talking about it, we realized, "Hey, there's a real opportunity for smart, thoughtful, well-designed emergency kit options that are customizable in the marketplace." And when you zoom out a second and think about society at large, being a resilient society, I think we've learned a lot about that in 2020, being a resilient society is important, but it really requires individuals that have a plan in place. And we realized the big blocker to that was truly just too big of a project for normal people to actually get it done. And if we could make that easier for people, if we could make that more approachable, and if we could message it in a way that felt a little bit more normal, we really felt strongly that a lot more people would take those basic steps. That's how we got into customizing emergency kits, and really, the company grew from there.


Felix: Awesome. You mentioned that, initially, when you were a potential customer early on, the information that you found online was just overwhelming. Now, in other spaces, this is certainly true, too, where there's just so many options, so many choices no one has come in and simplified. What does that do? What does that do for your position in the marketplace when you do come in and make the information easier to understand, more simple?
Skyler: Yeah. First of all, it's hard work. It's much easier to present a booklet of information that you pull from a bunch of places. It's much more work to boil that down into something that someone can digest in 30 seconds or a minute. And at the end of the day, we're all e-commerce professionals or aspiring e-commerce professionals. We know our job is to appeal to people that have a very short attention span right now.
For us, as we did that work, and it really took time to hone that story, to hone that message, to polish the message that we wanted to put in front of people, but as we did that work, we realized that it was something that people were interested in engaging with. People did want to solve that problem. People did want to have a plan in place, but they really needed someone to break down what they needed to do and how to do it in a way that just didn't take a lot of their time and didn't build their anxiety. For us in our specific niche, I think being accessible and being quickly digestible has been one of the major keys to our success in terms of being able to drive revenue and really build the company that we wanted to build.


Felix: Yeah, it certainly sounds like an evolving process to figure out and to learn what kind of information, what kind of education is relevant. How do you guys process this? How do you guys determine what kind of information is actually important for your consumers to know, your users of your products to know, versus what's confusing?


Skyler: I think it's a combination of two things. I think it's taking that project of figuring out what we want to communicate and pushing it through two different lenses and finding the right answer in between. On one side, we are always going to turn to the experts, to true emergency preparedness experts that have devoted their entire lives. There're a lot of really smart people putting together policy at a high level around how we should think about emergency preparedness as a society, as a country, as a community, from levels big down to small. We lean really heavily on turning to those experts for what they recommend and suggest will really create a truly resilient society across everything.
Now, it's our job to take that information, which to be frank, can be dry sometimes, and push that through the lens of how will people actually respond to it, what can actually capture people's attention and hold it long enough for them to take a very important topic seriously and give it their attention. And I think that, at the end of the day, is always an iterative process around putting that information in front of people as often as you can and testing that and seeing what actually resonates with people. I don't think there's a shortcut around that, around really doing that testing.
For us, getting started was really a slow process of finding and nurturing our customers one by one, and really getting feedback on an individual level so that we could find out what was resonating with people. And for folks that are just getting started, they know that process well. They're likely in the middle of that process of testing messaging, of putting messaging out there in front of folks, and figuring out what is able to capture their attention. And that process continues to grow. The larger your business grows, the more tools you have to access, the more data you have to access around fine-tuning that message, but it's really a process that never ends. I think, every month, we're trying to figure out, "Hey, how can we do a better job of messaging this in a way that will allow people to take it seriously and really appeal directly with our mission?"
Felix: How does this information play out? The education that you're giving to your prospective customers, where are people learning the most from you?


Skyler: Are you talking about tactically, what type of content are we-


Felix: Yeah. It sounds like people are coming to you as almost an advisor of some sort to learn about how to prepare in general. Is it blog posts, emails? What tends to work best when you're communicating this kind of information?


Skyler: I think this is key, and Charles might even have something to add after this. But for the most part, we are very committed to combining products with knowledge and information. And for our business and our type of product, and I would argue really any product, this is a smart business strategy, and it's also a responsible stance to take as a company that wants to sell a product, is combining true information and valuable content.
For us, that has taken two main forms. That's taken two main forms. On one side, it's taken deeper content. For us, that's been a series of Redfora guides that are around keystone concepts around emergency preparedness. Our guide to creating an emergency plan for your family, our guide to building your own emergency kit. Really committing to giving people the information that they need to put an emergency plan in place, whether they become one of our customers or not. And of course, as you know, and probably a lot of your audience knows as well, having that strong content strategy ends up converting a lot of those folks into customers at some part of the funnel. That's certainly been a core element. We've wanted to provide... I'll call it deeper content, but really interactive, easy-to-understand content that solves a keystone problem.
The other section of content that we provide is very, very snackable and very, very quick to digest and quick to understand. How can we give somebody value that they can really increase their level of personal preparedness if they only have 30 seconds to give to us right now, or a minute to give to us right now, or three minutes? Really focusing on how we can add value in the most efficient way possible has been crucial for our e-commerce strategy.
And I'll open it up if anyone wants to add anything there. That's a philosophy that goes directly to how we handle our e-commerce business tactically, but it's also philosophically really important about our entire company.


Charles: Yeah, Skyler, I think you said that really well, from jumping into what you guys do after nine months of working with you. You can go to our website, redfora.com, and we have a lot of emergency kits and supplies. But at the end of the day, we're selling peace of mind. We're providing a lot of knowledge to back the tools that we sell and generate revenue off of, but at the end of the day, getting a family prepared, having someone know that they have what they need in their own house or in their own care or at their own office, they have what they need to face any of the challenges based on what geography they live in. Peace of mind is something we speak about a lot, because at the end of the day, that is what we are selling.


Felix: I think this is important about how you're selling peace of mind, the true desire of the customer, rather than just some equipment or some bag. You're not just selling the features of the product. How do you make sure that this is upheld, that you're not just listing out technical details and actually speaking, again, to the true desire of having this peace of mind that brings your customers to you?


Skyler: Yeah. I think the key to that is just being very, very intentional about that from the beginning of your business and your process. And finding ways to make sure that that's front and center for you and your whole team as you're putting out content or ads or you're building out your site, making sure that that's really a guiding star, a north star for your design process and your messaging process.
For us, that was doing a deep dive into our initial reviews and our initial customer interactions and just doing a study of what they were referencing most often, what was most important to them, and trying to take something that is incredibly qualitative around how somebody feels about a purchasing process and turn that into something that's quantitative that we could actually make smart decisions off of. That can be a difficult process, but finding a way to really quantify what your customers are telling you about their needs, their desires, and what they value.
We did that deep dive and that study pretty early on, and we were very focused on creating customer personas based on the words that came out of our customers' mouth, not what we hoped they felt about our product. And then, just taking that data and making sure that that's at the forefront of every decision we make.


Felix: Yeah, I think that's a really good point about how there is a qualitative and quantitative side to understanding how to speak your customers' language. Like you mentioned, you went straight to your customers, straight to your prospective customers to hear from them, what they were saying, down to the reviews that they were writing. Now, when you were first starting out, you mentioned that you did this very early on. Did you have a good source, a good quantity of reviews to look at, or were you interviewing people that were not customers? What was the process to pull out what was important to your prospective customers?


Skyler: I'd say it's an evolution. It's something that we're constantly thinking about and working on. But there were two major phases to that that were really important in creating our approach, and I think the first phase of that was the very beginning of the business. How we got started was Zach and I working on this really as a side hustle. We both had full-time, pretty demanding Silicon Valley jobs, and we were working on this project Wednesday nights and Sundays. That was our cadence.
And what that meant in the beginning was very limited tests. We were selling just to where we lived, which is San Francisco. And when people would order, we were not only making their emergency kits by hand, we were also delivering by hand, too. And we would show up, and we had questions. We wanted to A, let them know that we were really thankful for their order, but B, we were incredibly curious about, "Why did you order? What were the considerations that you were looking at? Was it something that you'd been thinking about a lot, or made you think about it and sparked that action?"
Every business is different. Some businesses, that's possible to do. Some, it's not. Whatever your version of that is, I really encourage entrepreneurs to find that. There's no shortcut to just straight-up talking to your customers about their needs and about what they're looking for, and being curious and asking questions.
In the beginning, our first 50 orders, we did that exact process. And as many as possible, we were dropping it off when they were there so we could have that conversation with them. At first, it was really anecdotal, and I think that's the rule of e-commerce and digital marketing. In the beginning, you've got to take educated guess based on small amounts of data, and as you continue and continue to get traction, you have more and more data and can make better choices. But even having a handful of conversations where you're just really curious about the drivers of your customers can crack open some major insights in terms of what they're looking for, and can really inform your messaging and your approach.
And then, the second element of that, the second phase of that was, after we had been in business for maybe a year, something like that, where we did have a statistically significant amount of feedback if you combined our reviews, you combined our customer communication and our comments. We had to pull that information from a lot of different places and find ways to mush that together into something that we could really study. But about a year in, we had that data that we could pull from and then level-up our assumptions that we were making.


Felix: Were there certain assumptions that surprised you when you had these conversations, either in person or through just reading reviews as you got more and more, that there were certain things that you might've overlooked if you didn't hear it enough from your customers?


Skyler: Yeah. There are two things that come to mind. I think this is probably a common mistake that a lot of entrepreneurs make, because we are trying to approach our business in a logical fashion and put together a business that functions logically. It's easy to make the mistake that your customers operate based off of pure logic, and Zach referenced this earlier, or Charles. But either way, at the end of the day, we realized what people were really looking for was peace of mind versus looking for the best hand-crank flashlight, radio, phone charger, or whatever that supply might be. It was an emotional journey that we were tapping into for people. And if we could establish trust, they wanted to trust us to tell them what to buy, as long as we were willing to do the hard work upfront to gain their trust there. I think that was one element of it.
And then, the other thing that was, I would say, surprising was that a lot of our product ideas have come directly from customers, and have been things that, honestly, we would've never thought of, just because everyone has their own perspective. My life is a certain way, I live in a certain place, my family looks like this, I live in this type of house, and we all have those different angles. I think just being open to listening to our customers cracked open a lot of product ideas that we would've never thought of or come across, and we were really grateful that we had customers that were willing to raise their hand and say, "Hey, have you thought about this?"


Zach: To add to that, how do we figure that out from a tactical standpoint, too, is Shopify. It's relatively easy. There's multiple live chat plugins that you can get for Shopify. We use Chatra as one that we've used for a little while now. But yeah, making sure that you not just set that up as a robot that's going to respond, but if possible, have a live person fielding those chats. For the longest time, for the first year or two of the business, all those chats went straight to Skyler and I's cell phones if we weren't able to grab it on our computer. And we would really try to engage with the actual customer as much as possible, and if appropriate, we would ask them, "Oh, great. How did you hear about us? Why'd you decide to get this done?" It's after helping them with their question, concern, whatever it was.
And a lot of those live chats that we had in the first year or two that we personally took on really helped formulate, "Wow, this is the pain point they're trying to solve, or this is the feature that they would actually like to have, or this is the part that's really confusing about the information that we're putting out there." Everyone at this stage of the game is doing social media advertising, and I would take the same approach to engaging with every single ad and every single comment that you have out there, especially early on. Not that you can not do it later, but that's where you're going to get those little nuggets of wisdom and you're going to get feedback at scale. It's not even necessarily from the customer, but from the prospective customer, or the person that you thought was going to be your customer but ended up not. They might leave that comment or might chat with you.
We made sure we had a phone number on our site from the very beginning as well, so that they could call in and have a real conversation. And we learned so much from those handful of conversations about people that just literally walked us through exactly what they were thinking and how we could help them. And we've formulated a lot of our business and strategy around that exactly.
I know some people will be like, "Oh, I want to automate it, I want to send it to an FAQ. Or I'll send it to a phone tree, or I'll even outsource the phone." I would say lean into it, because that's where you're going to learn the most about your business early on, so you're not going to continue to make a mistake over and over without the proper feedback loops. I would say lean into that, and lean into early on, because you're going to make a lot smarter decisions. And with Shopify, there's a lot of really easy ways to do it as well.


Felix: Yeah. You speak about wanting to lean into this earlier on. This is a spectrum that I seem to see, where there's that hyper-focused entrepreneur, think of a Steve Jobs or Henry Ford, that notoriously touts that they know more about the customers' needs than the customers know themselves, versus the other end where you are much more flexible and much more of a humble servant, I suppose, to your prospective customers and admit to yourself that you don't know all the answers. When you started this business, were you on one end or the other? Did you learn over time to be more flexible and more open to this data? Where would you say you sat on that spectrum?


Skyler: Zach, I'm curious as to your thoughts on this, too. But I feel like, Zach, you and I have had different instincts and found a middle ground that has actually served us really well. At the end of the day, you can't really have either of those approaches in any black-and-white fashion, where you decide you know more than the customer 100%, or that you're just going to cater to what the customer tells you directly. At the end of the day, I think, as an entrepreneur, you do serve your customer. That is your greatest responsibility, and it's where you are fitting into society. I think all of us add value to our community in some sort of way, and if you're an entrepreneur, your choice is to add value to the rest of humanity by trying to come up with clever solutions to problems that people actually have.
From that perspective, there's no getting away from following the needs of your customer. But at the same time, I think there's a way to think about it that's slightly different, in that Steve Jobs direction, where people don't always know what they want. I think that is very true. You've decided to go deep down a rabbit hole on one topic, so you should be the expert in terms of what's possible and how to curate that for people. If people knew exactly how to do that, they wouldn't necessarily want to pay you to solve those problems.
The way I think about it as an in-between space is I think that we are the advocate, we are the representative, almost like an attorney. You don't want an attorney that's going to do exactly what you tell them to do all the time, because you hope that they have a little bit bigger of a perspective on what's possible and what's important. But you do want to make sure that your attorney understands exactly where you're coming from, exactly what your needs are, what your perspective is, and the problems that you're looking to solve. I see our responsibility as seeking to understand 100% where our customer's coming from, taking some of the granular feedback with a little bit of a grain of salt, because we can take those things and say, "Hey, at the core of it, people are looking for A, B, and C, and that's the most important. And now, it's our job to structure the best possible way to deliver that, which very might well be in a way that they would've never imagined."


Felix: Makes sense. What is that product development process today? You mentioned that you take advice, take this seed from your customers to expand upon and develop more products, and now services, under the new Ethos Preparedness umbrella. How do you roll out new products and new services to your customers?


Zach: Yeah. We're constantly looking at our customers and how can we better serve them, and what are the challenges that they face. And sometimes, that'll come to us from people recommending like, "Hey, have you guys ever thought about this? I wish your kit had this feature or that feature." But oftentimes, too, it just comes from looking at are there gaps in the marketplace, or looking at ways to expand our footprint as well, outside of just what our current core customer is and the current core products. I think a lot of the iterations that we get on our current products, a lot of that does come from feedback and ways that we can enhance things. And then, we're also looking at ways to expand, and problems that maybe we didn't solve initially, but we have the unique perspective and resources and knowledge on how to solve some of those problems.
When we started thinking about just San Francisco when we first got started, it was a lot of thinking about earthquakes. Since the past years, we've started to expand that well beyond that, and now, we sell coast to coast. And people are thinking about hurricanes, or people are thinking about house fires or wildfires, or they're just thinking about general home safety. And we've begun to expand that using some of our knowledge, skills, expertise, and resources to make really complementary solutions out there. It was really looking at not just what the customer is asking for, but also looking at where we can leverage our skill sets to fill other gaps in the marketplace.




Felix: Speaking of expanding your customer base. Along the West to East Coast, different use cases, hurricanes, there's earthquakes. What about in terms of awareness? Are most of your customers people that have learned, I guess, the hard way, the way that you guys had learned with the earthquake, the personal experience you had? Or are you able to capture a market that hasn't really had any serious scares to motivate them into looking into it? I think you had mentioned, too, that a lot of your content is meant to be informational, but not fear-monger. How do you balance this to capture an audience that might not be that aware of the potential dangers of how unprepared they might be?


Zach: Yeah, I think that's a great callout, because it's easy, if you're in the middle of a rainstorm, to sell someone an umbrella. That's easy. Anyone can probably do that. And what's interesting about the emergency preparedness industry is that it does go through different cycles. When Hurricane Harvey happened, that was the only thing that was on all the major news stations for a month. There were some pretty horrific things that happened there, there were a lot of communities that were greatly impacted by it, and emergency preparedness was a very hot topic at that time. We also saw the same thing at the beginning of COVID-19 and the current pandemic, where everyone was thinking around masks and things like that. Those are the areas where a lot of people will jump into the market or will start to offer solutions in the marketplace.
We do see our sales go up during those times as well, but when we started our business, we knew we didn't want to be fear-mongering. You can scare people, and that's a really easy shortcut that you can take. And you'll get sales by doing that, but that's a very short-sighted way of growing a business. And when we started looking at it, we saw a lot of people in the preparedness or survival space that were doing that, and we very intentionally wanted to avoid anything that would even look like that. We had a five, 10-year vision of what this company could look like, and we knew that it was going to be taking the average person, no matter where you live, and trying to present education and content to you to help you become aware of the potential risks that are in your area from a very practical standpoint, not overly fear-mongering.
But if you live in California, you should probably be aware of some of the risks that you have with an earthquake. That just scientifically may happen. It could happen tomorrow, but it could happen in 20 years, but regardless, you have to have a basic game plan in place. Or if you live along the Gulf Coast, making sure that you have the basics in place for hurricane preparedness. But also, if you live in the Midwest, there's tornadoes, there's all these different things.
And if taken the right approach, you can get the average person that normally is not thinking about emergency food storage for five months or building a bunker in their backyard. These are just the normal parents and people that are out there, and you can get them to think about it when they wouldn't have before, and get them to say, "Okay, maybe now's the time for us to take a few steps in that direction." And if you nurture them the right way, it doesn't have to be, "Hey, buy a bag right away." It might be, "Hey, here's a quick checklist, and this is going to help you on getting the journey started." And when the time is right, you can get that transaction, that customer to turn into an actual paying customer at some point.
We’ve taken this practical preparedness approach and not a doomsday approach, people that normally wouldn't have gotten into this space or thought about preparedness have now been getting into it. And I think it's been very approachable. Again, that peace of mind that we're offering has resonated with a lot of people from coast to coast. We definitely do see upticks when there are things that are directly impacting people, but our mission has been, we don't want to have to bank on that to happen for our business. How do we engage with people 365 days out of the year, not just when it's on the front page of every news outlet?


Felix: Yeah. I can imagine that, during these heightened periods of natural disasters or the COVID-19 pandemic, there is going to be a lot more demand. But then, I'm assuming there's going to be lots of competitors or fly-by-night flooding into the market. You see this all the time with everybody selling masks all of a sudden on their websites that might not be on-brand. How do you handle this kind of situation where there are a bunch of people coming in? The information's probably flooding the market about what to buy, who to buy it from. How do you make sure to stand out that you're a tried, true, and stood the test of time brand in this space?


Zach: Yeah. I think some of the big things around that are really having the long-term approach, because knowing that when people come into this space, they're like, "Oh, this is a goldmine," because everyone's thinking about it. Those times come and go over a short period of time, and if you're not planning for the long term, people aren't going to be there down the road. That's one part of it.
The other part of it is that investment that we make in the customer experience and the reputation that you are building and making the right partnerships. Those are the things that are going to give you the longevity. Every review that comes into our website, we respond back to. And we try to build that customer relationship so that if you have one interaction with us, it's not going to be your last interaction with us.
Hopefully, you buy an emergency kit and you don't actually get into an emergency and you have to use it and buy another one because you've used all the products inside of it. Hopefully, we can give you an awesome customer experience, and you're now going to look at us as your provider for anything emergency-related. The person who maybe is trying to get the fly-by-night, one-mask sale during a pandemic, those folks aren't going to have the benefit of the lifetime value of a customer.
And we look at every customer as a lifelong customer, not just a one-time transaction. And that's why our reputation, our reviews, and the level in investment that we make in customer service is so important, because we know that one customer is going to turn into another customer, or they're going to tell a friend, or they're going to buy it for a gift for someone else. And I think that's been a big differentiator for us, versus anyone who's just coming into the industry and trying to make a quick buck.


Felix: Speaking of the long-term vision approach of the business, one thing you mentioned to us was around scaling, and mentioned to us that lots of lessons learned about having the right people in the right seats. Tell us more about this. What are some of the lessons that you've learned along the way about scaling, especially when it comes to hiring and getting the right people into the right places?


Zach: Yeah. Me and Skyler started this business as a literal side hustle from our day-to-day jobs, because we're really passionate about entrepreneurship, but we both had full-time jobs when we first got started. And this was something that we did everything on our own. To get started, we worked on Wednesday nights and Sunday afternoons. That was our only dedicated time to work on the business. When we were in that phase, we were delivering products ourselves and building our first Shopify site.
But then, very quickly, as demand came in, we realized, "What are our core competencies? And what are we actually really good at? And what is a really important part of the business, but maybe is not our core competency?" The first hire that we brought in was our customer success manager, and their job was interacting with every single customer that came in, making sure that our orders were getting fulfilled, making sure everything was going through there.
And as we continued to scale the business, we ran into a few of those times where Skyler and I became bottlenecks. Either we weren't true experts in it, or we just didn't have enough time in the day. And we were very scrappy in the beginning and worked long hours, all that. But realized it was actually more impactful to either outsource certain things, whether that was graphic design, or whether it was email content, things like that, customer service. And then, when that became not a great move to continue to outsource it, and it was strategically important, we would bring those people in-house.
But yeah, that was Skyler and I's evolution. But I know Charles has built obviously a larger organization now with everything, so that is a process that continues to evolve. Yeah, it's been our philosophy getting it up to the first five years of the business.


Felix: Awesome.


Charles: Yeah, Zach, I think you said that really well. And Felix, what I loved about what they had built was their ability to stay lean and stay very focused on their mission. That really meshed well with what were doing at our side of the business and upon the merger as well.
And as we look at the future of this business and what we really want to accomplish in achieving our mission and goals, having the right people in the right seats is huge. We're always identifying some of those bottlenecks that Zach and Skyler saw at the beginning, and we do fill those with outsourced partners where necessary, whether it's graphic design or content creation. Anything that's going to allow us to keep focusing on our mission, we do look for potential outsourcing. And when it becomes something that's a daily need, then we look at that as a full-time hire.


Felix: There's two stages that I would love to talk about. This first stage, where you had mentioned finding the gaps and fill them. Straightforward, much harder to do once you recognize that that's the strategy. And you mentioned that the gap is between what you're not good at or you don't have the bandwidth or time or resources to do, but necessary for the success of the business. When you're starting out early on, how do you develop this self-awareness to be clear about, "Hey, we're not good at this, I'm not good at this, but we need it?" How do you identify those opportunities?


Skyler: I think part of it is we were lucky to have two founders, which I think is a lot easier than starting something on your own in some ways, and then harder in a lot of other ways, too. But for us, I think that was really valuable, because we had worked together before, we had a relationship and some trust with one another, and could be honest about each other's skillsets, which can be tricky and can be difficult. Being able to do that and do that well was really important for us really early on. I think we'd had some shared experiences where we really understood the value of feedback and were willing to accept it. And not only to accept it, but to really seek it out, and be proactive about seeking feedback from each other to make sure that we were leading with our best stuff.
Yeah, just that attitude of, my goal isn't to be right. It's to get it right, however that happens. And whether you're in a situation like us, where there's two founders that have a relationship before that, had worked on projects before. Or even if you're in a silo, but you've worked with people in the past or you're working with people currently or they're freelancers or whatever it is, I think the key is just being very proactive about asking for feedback regularly and consistently and keeping an open mind about that.


Zach: Yeah. I was just going to add to that. Ego's the one thing that's probably going to slow you down more than anything else. You're an entrepreneur who wants to be the guy that's busy 24/7, or is taking on every aspect of the business, there's just no way. That mentality is not going to get you that far, so you need to be able to rely on other people and realize that you're not going to be the smartest guy on every single topic.
Know your area that you're going to be like, "Hey, this is me, I got this," and those other areas that, "Yeah, I'm not going to be a good bookkeeper, and I need to outsource that. Or I'm not going to write the best ad copy or pretend to know what I'm doing on Photoshop to create the best ad creative. There's other people out there that are going to do a better job. I can provide insight to that and give my opinion on it, but there's just..." You're only going to be alone. Now, you have to be responsible with how much money your company's bringing in and you have to do it appropriately, so start lean. But you're only going to go so far alone.


Felix: How do you make sure that this egoless-ness scales when it's just two people talking to each other every day and having this open, honest conversation? But when it's company-wide, how do you make sure that awareness exists where you're able to identify, again, what's the weakness and what needs to be filled?


Charles: Yeah, that's a great question. We have a really distinct set of core values within our business, and I think Skyler started touching on it, but having that feedback-driven culture is incredibly important. We like to say that we challenge each other directly and we care about each other personally, and when you have that level of respect and trust amongst each other, you're willing to provide that feedback amongst each other. I think that provides that atmosphere and that arena of not having a big ego and knowing that you can take a lot of swings, and people are going to provide feedback on those swings, whether it's critical feedback or whether it's patting you on the back saying you did a great job.
I think that's one thing that our team does incredibly well, and I think Zach and Skyler did that incredibly well as they built their business into a team, and now have merged into a new team. I have to say that their ability to be open to feedback jumping into a larger organizational structure has been absolutely remarkable, and it's been a great way for the integration of the two businesses together. Without that, we would've had a lot of struggles during this first year operating together.


Felix: I want to talk a little about the website. For each of you, maybe the answer is going to be the same, what would you say is the most favorite part of the website?


Skyler: I'll start. For me, it goes back to what we were talking about earlier. I think our real mission and the value that we've wanted to provide has been to allow people to customize their product. And that requires a lot of work on the front end in terms of our website, it requires a lot of our work on the back end in terms of the website, and it requires a lot of work on the back-back end in terms of fulfillment and operation. That was a hard challenge to overcome, and I'm glad that we've already overcome it and we can talk about it in the past tense. But I think that's allowed us to give a customer experience on the front end to allow people to really choose an option that makes the most sense for them without overwhelming them with choice.
I think that's something I'm probably the most proud of in terms of the site, in terms of the experience that we've been able to navigate and figure out specifically with our product. That's always a tricky challenge with any product, but with our product in particular, it feels like it's something that's really important to pushing forward that mission of just helping regular people get prepared.


Zach: Yeah, and I think we'd all probably say the same thing there. It’s the customization.  When we first started, our initial website was earthquakebag.com when we only had a standalone product. We had an off-the-shelf theme that we worked to customize, and used some basic plugins or just some of the different variant options to try to create a somewhat customized experience. And then, as we realized that was something that we wanted to really lean into, we leveraged some custom development work when we launched redfora.com. And that was our parent company brand that housed the earthquake bag within it, and we leveraged some Shopify developers to create a more customized experience as you're going through your purchase process. I think that's something that continues to pay dividends for us and provide a great product and great experience for our customers.


Felix: Speaking of customization, I think, Skyler, you hinted at this, which is that it's a gift and a curse to give this power to the customer, where you give them customization, but then you don't want to overwhelm them, which is something that you guys had to address as something you want to be cognizant of reducing. How do you balance that between giving them the ability to customize what they want, but then not get them into this analysis paralysis hell?
Skyler: Right. In terms of Zach and I's background, I think our sales backgrounds really helped here, because when you're in sales, your job is to take a complex set of possible outcomes and communicate it in a very easy-to-understand way for a customer, while advocating for what you believe to be the best option for them. For us, we got into this business, one of the reasons was because we did want to take that experience and that toolkit that we developed working in sales at various parts of our careers and scale it, and that's what e-commerce allows you to do.
I think it's very similar, where it's our job as entrepreneurs to navigate the 60 different ways that we could potentially solve a problem for somebody, but boil that down into two or three very easy, very clear decision points that we can walk the customer through. Even though, on the back side, there are a million different ways it could go, we really only need to present them with a very short list of questions to be able to determine what the right option is for them.
That's the key in terms of avoiding that sense of being overwhelming. It's just doing the work upfront to think about how can you be as efficient as possible in asking questions that are truly customer-facing to figure out where they should be, and then how do you translate those decision points into the cleanest user experience possible? I think a lot of that comes down to the use of visual hierarchy. I think design plays a really big part in it, as well as really tight copy, which all comes out of just iterating and testing.


Zach: I would say, from a data side on there, there's an interesting balance, because we've experimented a lot, too. You had to find the happy medium of what is customization that's going to increase conversion rate, because we're solving legitimate pain points for people, and what's the amount of customization that's going to decrease conversion rate because of that analysis paralysis? And we did a good amount of A/B testing with different versions of the site when we first got started, and also using tools like Hotjar and things like that on the site that hep you do heat-mapping and getting a better sense of what consumers are doing on the page.
And that was pretty helpful early on to understand what that happy medium is, because you can definitely offer too many options, and all of a sudden, no one's buying from you because it's a homework project or research project just to make a purchase. We've tried to work really hard to strike that balance and cut away any unnecessary decision-making to make it an easy purchase, but one that you feel extremely confident and glad that you made.


Felix: Redfora.com and ethospreparedness.com are the two websites. And I'll leave you this last question, which is, what has been the biggest lesson from this past year that you have learned, personally or as a business, that has led to changes that you want to implement moving forward?


Charles: Yeah, that's a loaded question, given the nature of 2020 and given the merger of our two businesses and partnering together. But for me, I think the greatest lesson that has come from everything that's happened over the last year is that your team and the resilience of your team is number one. Economies have ups and downs. There's going to be good years, there's going to be bad years, there's going to be challenges, and I think we've seen that in every way, shape, and form in this calendar year. But our team sticking together, focusing on the mission, focusing on what matters, focusing on putting the right people in the right seats, and really just maintaining the course and staying resilient has been a huge lesson for me, and I think everyone on our team would agree with that.


Felix: Awesome. Thanks so much, Charles, Zach, and Skyler. Again, redfora.com, ethospreparedness.com. Thank you, all, for coming on and sharing your story and experience.


Zach: Thank you.


Charles: Thank you, Felix.


Zach: Thanks for having us.


Charles: Really appreciate it.