In this episode of E-Coffee with Experts, Victor Coupé talks with John Roman, CEO of BattlBox, about how he grew a survival gear brand into a multi-million-dollar DTC business.
John shares how they went from relying heavily on Facebook ads to building a much stronger growth engine through SEO, content, and community. He explains how they scaled to $4.5M in year one without funding and how losing their ad account forced them to rethink everything.
John also dives into their SEO strategy (publishing 1,500+ articles a month), their short-form video playbook (20+ videos a week), and how they built a 120-person Discord creator network.
He shows how strong communities boost customer retention, from exclusive content to private Facebook groups.
If you’re a founder, marketer, or brand leader looking to grow without depending only on paid ads, this one’s full of real talk and practical advice.
Transcript from video:
Introduction
0:00 the digital world moves fast but real growth comes from real conversations this is E Coffee with experts where
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0:27 hey everyone Victor here back from the power outage in Europe you know yesterday this is a Tuesday actually
0:32 that we're recording this podcast but yesterday both Portugal and Spain lost its energy so we were without internet
0:38 without anything at all whatsoever which is strange you know because sometimes you think oh I can live fine without
0:44 internet but can you really because we couldn't call anybody we couldn't check the status of things we couldn't even I
0:50 don't know order water or gas so it is kind of difficult at the end of the day and I wish I so much wish that I had
0:58 myself a survival kit or something that in the case it got you know worse i was kind of expecting the apocalypse to
1:04 start not going to lie but in the eventuality of it getting worse I would at least be already equipped with
1:10 everything that I said that I needed to so therefore because of this I brought to the show John Roman he's the CEO of
1:16 BattlBox and Battlbox does literally deals with everything that I just said outdoor gear equipment gear everything
1:22 that you need in order for your travels your trips your trips to the woods to
Why John doesn't call himself an entrepreneur
1:27 the Amazon rainforest you got it covered and not only that power going out to the
1:32 power going out yes everything that you need once the power goes out you can find it over there but not only that we
1:38 also have here with us a fellow podcaster because John also has the awesome pod which talks about e-commerce
1:45 and I'm going to link it down below in the description for you to check it out as well as because this is a very nice
1:51 guest but as well as his own e-commerce newsletter for you to get in touch with everything ecom related at the online
1:58 queso so let's just introduce him to ourselves here make sure that he feels uh comfortable and settled down john
2:05 thank you so much for being the show how are you doing today i'm good Victor thanks for having me i'm excited we we finally got to connect exactly
2:11 especially again after the power outage it was the only thing that for sure today wasn't going to happen yeah yeah
2:17 but I'm I'm glad I'm very glad that this happened and I'm very glad to have here on the show the first thing that I'm
2:22 going to comment though is I was taking a look at your newsletters and I saw your latest post saying that you don't
2:28 call yourself an entrepreneur right now and I think this is a very interesting statement especially with the things
2:34 that you written over there but for those who don't know you yet and maybe can get you know interested in learning
2:40 more what can you tell us about this latest piece that you wrote yeah so you know I'm I'm quick to call out masses
2:47 just the masses in general you know with group think and I think the word entrepreneur for a lot of the similar
2:53 reasons you and I were chatting before about how also just CEO the term it's it's overused it's toxic you have um so
3:01 many people claiming to be it because they they think it's cool and then they give give it a overall you know a bad
3:08 rap right you know selling selling a course on selling courses you know where you're ripping people off and they're
3:14 giving you money and trusting it's not an entrepreneur right just like the um you know my my friend or your friend
3:19 that runs the ice cream stand that's just him he's not a CEO which is okay but you just have so much blurred lines
The problem with fake CEO titles and startup culture
3:27 um I don't want to be associated with the word and that that makes sense even to this day I would never forget back in
3:34 Brazil we had a lot of we have this movement where people were bashing others because they were claiming
3:40 themselves to be entrepreneurs head of something right and then you look at the head where's the body there's no body
3:46 there's no body it's just it's a floating head is it though like really are you ahead if there's no body for you
3:52 to manage we I 100% get where you're coming from and is this something that
3:57 you've been feeling for a while already especially after co or was it just something you know I think I've always
4:04 I've I've I've always felt always but you know in the the world of the Shark Tanks and then combined with COVID where
4:11 everyone was like "Oh I'm going to start I'm going to start an online business." I think it just it got it started to get
4:16 very toxic in front of mind at that point true well at least now we got it covered few watching us want to know
4:22 more about what John's think about it the online castle newsletter will be down in the description below but alas
4:28 let us work with the episode oh we know you right now as a CEO of Battlbox i
4:34 just introduced what Battlbox is and I'm very much a fan of the product already of the brand itself but let's
4:39 just take a step back and start talking about how it all came together uh how did you end up at Battlbox how was it
How BattlBox started: from investor to full-time CEO
4:47 at first what made you take your full-time into applying your brand
4:53 knowledge and your marketing knowledge in an outdoor gear product market sure
4:58 so you'd have to so we have to go back 10 years um so Battlebots started in 2015 early 2015 and I was initially just
5:07 just an investor i wrote a check i was going to be on the board very limited capacity and just offering you know
5:15 advisory you know we quickly realized so I I came on board um a week and a half
5:20 two weeks after launch so very very very very early it wasn't anything like it is
5:26 today but we quickly realized you know a lot of its timing we had lightning in a bottle if you will well you had uh at
5:32 the time you know Battlbox when we first launched was only one thing it was a subscription box and you had the
5:38 subscription box craze of 2015 2014 2016 um and then you also had um just the
5:45 cool vibe of outdoor gear and survival gear was starting to get some momentum too um at the time we also included
5:52 tactical gear which was also having momentum and then the other secret sauce was that it didn't exist already so I
5:58 invested initially not necessarily because of my love of the gear being completely honest was my love of
6:05 reoccurring revenue subscription membership i came from from software and
The real reason John got excited: subscription revenue
6:10 you know the wonderful thing about software was you know you're you're selling a a business this software and
6:16 they're going to pay every month or they're going to pay every year and when you have reoccurring revenue it's much
6:21 easier to forecast it's much easier to scale and that was the exciting part right I knew wow with subscription it's
6:27 a lot easier to identify lifetime value you can your customer acquisition costs
6:32 can be significantly higher because you know you're going to have them for a set amount of time so that's what got me
6:38 going and somehow along the way I I also fell in love with the idea of just being prepared for stuff in general that's a
6:45 nice one and when you were thinking about it about all the good sides I imagine you were also maybe a little bit
6:51 skeptical or scared about some of the bad sides of having a company such as Battlebox out of investing at a company
6:57 such as it now let me ask you this were there any challenges that you still remember fondly to this day that you
7:03 even used to advise people not to do the same mistakes for example yeah so there were there was definitely some mistakes
7:09 along along the way when I look back on on the two biggest mistakes the biggest
7:14 mistake was was learned luckily very very early so we were scaling fast just
7:20 to kind of give we went from $0 in revenue in February and if you look at
7:25 of 2015 we finished the year at 4.5 million which is pretty high direct to consumer first
Scaling fast, then losing it all to Facebook ads
7:33 year without like institutional investing or anything like that we did almost all of it the first year
7:39 exclusively on a single channel Facebook wow that's crazy when Tik Tok wasn't
7:45 around by the time right no yeah tik Tok you know is five five years away i mean I guess it's not even it's 5 years away
7:52 from musically which then would become Tik Tok i mean so we got it was a
7:57 mistake because you got to be diversified in your lead sourcing that's from B2B that's from direct to consumer
8:02 you can't be 100% dependent on a single platform and we learned that the hard way we were going into Labor Day weekend
8:09 um and it was going to be our biggest weekend ever biggest sale ever it was going to be our biggest revenue and Friday around 6:00 our ad account um got
8:18 shut down deleted sold kicked off i mean we went from went from you know all this
8:24 traffic to 99% of the traffic was gone and you know we were when we were offline on Facebook it was kind of a aha
8:32 moment wow and we really shouldn't be dependent on a single lead source so luckily we learned it pretty early and
8:38 then from there just diversified the other the other lesson was not one we learned right away um and it's just the
8:44 importance of having good business partners and a single bad business partner can ruin everything um and we
8:50 had we probably had some financial challenges in the early and it's just from from having the wrong business
8:56 partner wow wow and do you right now I imagine you're still investing depending on the situation absolutely perfect and
Biggest early lesson: don’t rely on one traffic channel
9:03 do you right now have this bad partner radar just like pinging all the time
9:08 where you can easily understand if somebody just by I don't know watching
9:14 them work watching them talk you already know that they're not going to be a fit yeah for for the most part so now we
9:19 invest in a couple different ways i I personally will invest but we also have Battle Ventures which which is our fund
9:27 to invest in B2B SAS companies and then also JV projects with other operators
9:34 for brands so the the prereg for all of it is we're an active investor so we are
9:40 involved whether that's a board seat whether that's for the software we have to be using the product it has to be a
9:46 part of our tech stack and for the the JV brand side we're we're involved we're
9:51 doing we're owning a bunch of parts of the business from fulfillment to finance
9:56 we just have to ensure we're involved when it comes to identifying bad business partners it's not black and
10:02 white it's not super simple we do a couple of things to kind of test it assigning small pieces of homework
10:08 without it coming across us that way just to see how people follow through follow up um just to understand them as
10:14 a as a the psyche of them as a person but it's still not it's not science it's not easy sometimes someone seems like
10:20 they're going to be a great partner and they end up not you know it's not it's not it's not a perfect model that's life
10:26 overall right i have I have had a couple of girlfriends before I came to my wife so you know you can't learn you can't
10:33 know this beforehand you need some time in order to understand it you don't find out until you're in it yeah yeah for
10:39 sure for sure that's how it happens and even talking about your at first dependency on Facebook I imagine this is
10:46 not the case anymore you even said so yourself like we shouldn't depend on a single channel so as of today 2025 how
Their massive SEO play: 1,500 articles a month
10:53 was the mix looking for you in regards to Joe's channels yeah so you know unfortunately and there's been es and
10:59 flows but if we're talking about right now unfortunately our dependency on on
11:05 meta Facebook and Instagram is higher than I than I would like okay it's still
11:10 probably um I would say probably if we're looking at top ofunnel it's
11:15 probably maybe 20% um which doesn't seem like a lot but if we're trying to be
11:21 super super diversified um you know there might it might be 30% of top of funnel one one month and to me that's
11:28 we've gone the extreme right we want to be fully diversified we want lead sources everywhere but you know no one's
11:35 really cracked the efficiency of meta advertising i mean it still is the it's
11:40 the go-to place they have the biggest audience they have you know constantly increasing their pricing but no one's
11:46 really come and like grabbed Lion Share there's always promising uh new ones on the horizon you know app
11:54 11 is making some noise right now because a lot of people are are testing there and seeing success will it be a
12:01 meta who knows right it's it's too early to know but no we are diversified and it's funny we went from 99% to you know
12:09 2530 depending on the month and that still gives me indigestion because we just want to we want to have it yeah
12:16 yeah even I'm just going to ask because a lot of our audience utilizes SEO to this day even SEO how is it for you at
12:23 Battlbox when considering the keywords that you have more of a niche market is
12:28 this something that you're still applying a lot of effort even a lot can be interpreted in several ways but is
12:34 this something that helps you at the end of the day or is it more of a hustle to take care of um no seo is big for us um
12:41 oh that's nice we're really really really focused on SEO from both external and internal on on the external side
12:49 with like the traditional back links articles linking back and then you know the same version flavor of that
12:54 internally on on backlinking other parts of the site we're populating a large
13:01 amount of articles typically about 1,500 a month okay that's a big number yes
13:06 yeah it's it's big big number trying to get very as granular and niche you know we're able to quickly with with you know
13:13 a decent amount of articles we can own maybe a less popular keyword but just
13:18 have the front page the entire page and then just capture the vast majority of
13:23 that that search term it's a big big focus it's also interesting as we've seen CEO you know get older and develop
13:31 you know now there's and you know some people are very opinionated on it but there is ways to use AI to to assist you
13:38 further and then you have the craziness of like Tik Toks and YouTube shorts where now they're ranking um SEO so it's
13:46 a whole different approach of us you know creating videos and adding meta metatags to it and adding stuff in the
13:53 videos so that the search engines pull it and then you have the leading current trending thing of of treating AI as like
14:01 the AI platforms as SEO opportunities in addition to the traditional copy and
14:06 text and video now you have how do you chat GPT to help people find your
14:12 product it's it's it was just getting deeper and deeper and deeper yeah a lot of things are evolving especially again you started at Battlebox in 2015 or 10
14:20 years from now I imagine so much has changed so much content creation how content is perceived right away how it's
14:27 being shared as as you said so there wasn't Tik Tok at first now everybody actually the jamz's there are over there
How short-form video powers their top of funnel
14:33 so let me ask you this right now talking about even you said so yourself YouTube shorts and Tik Tok this type of format
14:40 this type of content can you elaborate quickly just to give an an idea of how it is the strategy right now and the
14:47 impact in the customer engagement and the acquisitions in towards your subscription or even the products that
14:53 you sell sure so so it's really interesting in early 2021 so in February
14:58 of 2021 and arguably we thought we were behind and late to it it turned out we
15:04 were still early but we when we were doing it we were like man we missed this by a year talking about short form video
15:10 content luckily we were wrong and we were super super early still it's it's a big big big focus so we have we're a
15:17 little bit different in the fact that we're a brand with a full-time creator we have secondary team members that are
15:22 also creators we have three full-time video editors wow that's great so we're we're we're creating at minimum 20 uh
15:30 short form video uh short form videos vertical a week to to spread on across
15:36 different channels yeah for Tik Tok YouTube shorts Instagram real it's our top of funnel um it it truly is our
15:44 organic content is is more of our top offunnel than anything else and then traditional digital advertising it's a
15:50 little bit top offunnel but for the most part it's really midfunnel end of funnel people are discovering us through
15:57 organic content you know making maybe getting shoved through the funnel through through advertising it's uh it's
16:03 it's interesting because Tik Tok is is our largest channel from follower count it's our only channel with over a
16:09 million followers but then YouTube because of shorts quickly quickly almost caught up but that's that's how people
Why TikTok + YouTube Shorts drive serious growth
16:15 ingest content and we're not selling to them we're just talking about products educational entertaining we're just just
16:21 being and no hard sale especially talking about YouTube certainly those that are watching us I mentioned over on
16:28 email about how one of your products reminded me of a weapon in the game Metal Gear Solid which I'm very much
16:35 fond of and right now what I usually see taken a little bit out of your market
16:41 but still kind of similar is for example lightsabers being showcased by different
16:47 YouTubers who are like hey I just got this lightsaber from Battlebox let's just pretend you sell a a lightsaber and
16:54 I'm here to show you like a review a review of the product but not so in a way where it's like a car review or a
16:59 smartphone review where you go through each spec and you go through the size the dimensions no more of like a feeling
17:05 review is this something that you also have like a community who's also creating such content for you still
17:11 casing the benefits of your products yeah yeah so yeah so there it's it's funny in the last couple years we've
17:17 seen this shift where if you go back to you know 2015 part of our original go-to market strategy we sent um about 50
17:25 battlboxes out to YouTubers um and all of those reviews were traditional reviews right they're going specking it
17:32 out they're explaining each item um and now we've seen this shift where that still exists and that still has value
17:38 and people some buyers are still searching for content like that but now you know we're we're we're doing
17:45 influencer seating where we're sending the product out to these creators that are that are making more the feel uh
17:52 review content and and that that works too so we have uh uh so we've created a
17:57 a Discord um where we have about 120 um content creators they're full-time
18:03 creators super nice they're not affiliated with Battlebox at all they're not exclusive to us they're just 120
18:10 content creators we we have relationships with and we have contests in there and it's really cool because
18:16 like we can we can drop a new product and does anybody want to review it and ship them out um and I think you're
Building a Discord network of 120+ content creators
18:22 going to see more and more of that where businesses and brands are successful because they're able to curate a creator
18:30 network because of influencer seating and those feel those feeling reviews it's it's definitely you know you could
18:36 argue it's the future of selling i don't think it replaces all selling but uh it's definitely has a has a large sect
18:43 of buyers that want to see content like that before making a decision that is true i'm one of them i search everything
18:50 on YouTube before I buy even if it's like a $10 thing on AliExpress and I'm still in
18:56 doubt you're gonna get you're gonna get some unbiased reviews if you do that which is great that's what you want you don't want Exactly you don't want to
19:02 read the reviews on the product page right we know they don't typically put there are some incentives for you to say
19:08 good things in the product page right right so it's good to have the flat one this reminds me there is this huge tech
19:15 YouTuber MKBHD Marcus Brownley where he I think he's top one in regards to smartphones
19:21 technology and he has this secondary channel where he reviews cars and maybe
19:26 three months ago he did the Rivian review the electrical car brand called Rivian and they say because of that
19:34 video such a huge range of people were watching the video because of that the company went bankrupt so some sometimes
19:41 it is kind of a how can I say I can understand some companies being a little
19:46 bit afraid of sharing their products especially as we were talking about the
19:52 entrepreneurship/ a CEO title which can also be a scam sometimes we know that some products are also a scam so my
20:00 question is even to this day especially and talking about those companies that
20:05 are asking for your help your advice your investment is this still a very nice formula to follow or is there
20:12 something else that such brands should appro should follow when they're approaching brand building where they're
20:18 creating their awareness and they want to talk more about themselves is this a nice way for them to go or should they
20:24 also be careful about it i mean I think you could argue that they need to be careful that there might be something
Community, reviews & influencer strategy that works
20:29 fundamentally wrong with their product which means make a better product right now with the with the Ravian example I
20:36 think ultimately the the cars the vehicles are supposedly good vehicles
20:42 they were very top tier yeah and I' I've I've never been in one i've seen them and they look cool but I think you know
20:48 you've got to be don't I I think brands starting off you should absolutely do it because the reality is you're not going
20:54 to get that guy that has 50 million followers doing your product because you know if if he gives it a a scathing
21:00 review you could be in trouble i I think we've always had the most success with with they used to call them micro
21:07 influencers now you know half of them are that half of them are creators we're not looking for celebrities right i
21:13 think there's inherent risk with that i think there's also it it's sometimes tough to get an ROI on True it's more of
21:21 a brand awareness play but at a very very very expensive price point so it's it's interesting i'm a I'm a big
21:28 believer in creators and the creator economy i think it has potential i think all brands when they're launching it
21:34 should be part of their strategy because they're not they're not trying they're not going to hit a home run with a big name at first some some might if you've
21:41 raised money or you have the connections but 99% of brands aren't going to be able to get it in front of those people
21:47 it's going to be much smaller creators with with smaller influence so I think it's a it's it is always a safe point it
21:54 is it is and if even sometimes okay so it's a small brand let's just say it's rising right now we don't get a lot of
22:01 creators talking to us or they don't want to sponsor us in their channels or they just don't want to waste their time
22:07 so sometimes we have to go to the users right to those small community base that you already have there are buying
22:14 especially in your case which is you have the subscription based channel and you have the overall product D2C channel
22:20 as well it is a mix at the end of the day right you have to be careful of several different I don't know maybe
22:27 aspects of the business itself that one can go super right in a channel but the
22:32 same one can go super wrong in the same channel so we were we talked about influencer we talked about briefly about
22:39 SEO we talked about pay ads focus a little bit more on the community on the battle boxers i don't know how you call
22:44 them do you have a name for them perfect the battle boxers customer engagement this is something that a lot of people I
22:50 tell my friends what my perception about it is especially after co you have a lot
22:55 of needy people just wanting to have a receive a hug at the morning or a well
23:00 done in the afternoon or a thank you for being our customer in the evening so there's a lot of ways where we can make
23:06 our customers know that they are important that they are heard that they matter to the object how do you do it
Inside their private Facebook group for customers
23:13 nowadays sure so so part of um you know that there's the the obvious that that
23:19 anyone can see of just us interacting with them on public social media channels but you know with with the
23:25 membership so the membership which includes the physical box each month that's still 80% of our business it's it
23:31 is the lion share yeah with that comes um exclusive access to to our active
23:37 members of our community it used to be a a battlbox forum.com which was old
23:42 school traditional like Reddit style we actually moved it over to Facebook which is an interesting choice because not
23:49 everyone's on Facebook but so it's a Facebook private group so I think we have uh 11 in there we have five
23:56 moderators that are not employees but once customers that are just active on there and and we manage it that way and
24:02 we're able to interact with the customers that way i'd say on any given day there's probably a dozen Battlbox
24:08 employees that are in there just engaging with Battle Boxers they can tag me they can tag anybody and they know
24:14 they know you know tag Shay for product ideas tag Brandon for this tag Richard
24:20 for this we do a good job showcasing the entire team in there so they know they can engage with the right people and I
24:26 mean there's not many brands where you can you know tag brand tag the face of the brand Brandon and and get a response
24:33 from him on his on his phone and same with you know the all the other members of the team so it's a it's just a very
24:39 personal relationship when you can truly interact you know we're still a small business at the end of the day but it's
24:45 very unusual for a small business our size where gentleman customer of ours Scott he sent a Facebook DM to me and
24:52 Shay who runs procurement for us with a product idea and we responded and we took it and we put it in the funnel
24:58 like I would be happy to see your email or reaching me back you know it would be like we're responsive which which you
25:05 typically don't get that kind of responsiveness it's it's important right it's part of part of what you get when you're a Battlbox member is you you get
25:12 access to the community perfect perfect and not only that but especially nowadays I imagine it isn't something
25:19 important to you to keep them around to keep them coming back not canceling their subscription making sure that
25:25 they're looking for the newest product that you're going to be selling making sure that something out of it comes out because otherwise like okay uh I have
25:32 this amazing subscription i got this amazing knife out of you but then I I don't hear from you i don't know who you
25:38 are i don't know your face and then I receive I don't know some a sponsored post about a competitor of yours who's
25:45 charging 25 less 25 for new wire so I'm just going to jump ship because I don't have any relations to Battlbox why
25:51 would I stick around at such a company that doesn't care about me yeah we want to we want to build the relationship and
25:57 a big thing is and it's been this way for several a couple years now we we want to provide value outside of the
26:04 physical product cuz I I think you you know you nailed it talked about during the pandemic but I think it just in
26:10 general there's this you know it's moving towards this and it's been moving towards this co definitely shot it you
26:16 know a little bit faster but but consumers want to feel some kind of connection to a brand you know commodity
26:23 is probably different right but if it's like if it's your you know additional wallet share on stuff that aren't
26:29 necessarily you don't need them you don't it's not toilet paper or toothpaste per se but it's like what
26:34 you're spending your extra money on you want to you want to form some kind of connection right and that's why full
26:40 circle that's why creators are having the success they're have having because they're talking about a product that
26:46 they like and if I like that creator that influencer well if he likes it I'm going to give it a try yeah super super
26:52 interesting times they are for sure they are look you just mentioned that 80% of your revenue right now comes from the
26:58 subscription model that you guys have so I I imagine again a lot of those that
27:04 are watching us will be interested to know a little bit more about how it is running nowadays so let me ask you this
27:10 talking about the subscription model itself and talking about as I just said a while ago about other companies doing
27:17 the same and wanting to steal your battle boxers how do you structure I don't know a highly effective
27:23 retargeting funnel for a subscription product how is that even possible nowadays how do you make it happen yeah
27:29 so you know we're because we were first to market it's a little bit you know the reality is it's a little bit tough for
27:35 anybody to truly truly compete um and that's for a bunch of reasons right so like one no one's going to have the
27:41 purchasing power that we have um and be you know part of the model even though we don't we don't showcase this by
27:48 design uh and talk about it a lot because we'd never wanted to be about this but at at a surface level you know
27:56 you're paying us $200 a month and you're getting $350 $400 worth of product if
How they retain subscribers with exclusive value
28:02 you went and shopped it on your own so we're passing a big amount of the saving from that purchasing power to the
28:07 consumer but we don't hype we talk about the other things the community the content you know I was mentioning ways
28:13 we provide value outside of the physical product we have something called the battle vault so if you're a active
28:19 member and you're on our site and you click on battle vault you have access to um probably about 1,000 to,200 products
28:26 that are all outdoor related centric um at the best price you will find it
28:31 online or in person we will be better than everyone hands down and we're make it's not it's because we're not even
28:37 treating it like a big profit we're treating it as a hey let's just give them the value because they're going to
28:42 stay members longer and we we'll make it make the money over here let's just make this a loss leader but let's hook them
28:49 up so you have things like that there's probably about 30 other companies that we feature in the Battle Vault with
28:55 exclusive coupons or discounts or offers that because you're a Battle Box member
29:01 you know we're going to give you three free months of this if you want it and just try to provide the additional value
29:08 perfect that's so you see even though I I mean I'm not going to say that I don't
29:13 have the need of a battle box but yesterday showed otherwise I'm just right now I'm feeling like bro I need to
29:19 I need to be a part of it because everything you just said sounds looks and is so natural for you that that's
29:25 why you managed to create such a success out of battle box and having a knife is so cool you know just having like a a
29:33 jungle knife so cool it's it's such a nice thing to carry around now John since we're already at the end of the
29:39 episode let me ask you more a little bit more towards your investor side i think Battlbox is pretty much clear right now
29:45 and thank you for sharing so much it was not going to lie very much interested to know how it works nowadays but talk
29:50 about you specifically and Battle Ventures if I recall correctly right what advice are you guys giving to any
29:57 real entrepreneurs who are looking to scale their business or looking for an investment and not only that but they're
30:03 looking to make a profit or even exit the investment itself in a successful way yeah so there's a lot there to
30:09 unpack two different pieces of advice depending on on what type of business it
30:15 is if it's if it's in the software world so you know if we're investing in in
30:20 software as a service we've got to use it in our own tech stack we've got to believe in it we've got to think that it
30:25 it's it's it's accomplishing something right it's either providing the same services or more at a lesser cost or
30:32 it's some kind of new never done before piece of tech um on that side my advice
30:38 is is involve the community again community but you know it's a site it's not a consumer community we're talking
BattlBox’s top-selling survival products
30:44 about thought leaders in the space businesses where where you know the the leaders are vocal on X and LinkedIn i
30:51 think community involvement is and having a path to that is what gets you the win it allows people to want to give
30:57 it an opportunity and then on the same on the brand side is you've got to have a content plan you have to have a
31:04 community and content strategy and that's not easy you know at the end of the day it's more than just the product
31:10 you have to have good product right you can have a crappy product but it used to be a good product was enough and now you
31:16 need a good product but you need content and community because it's very competitive right it it doesn't cost
31:22 much money to pull your phone out record a video and post it and everyone's doing it so it's very very very busy um so
31:29 you've got to have a good strategy to to be able to stand out in the signal um and in all that noise great to know
31:36 great to know those that are watching us right now looking to start their own things be mindful about it community is
31:41 very much important as we were saying across this entire episode let me ask you my last question and then we'll be
31:47 over if somebody was to go to Battlbox's website right now they are not looking for the subscription model
31:53 yet but they want to get a product just a single one which one would you recommend maybe your best seller and if
31:59 so what is your best seller or is there something extra a product that doesn't sell that much but you just have a
32:06 passion about it maybe so there's there's there's two that come to mind immediately one of them is is not our
32:13 best seller on our website we sell a lot of website but it's it's typically our best seller most months on Tik Tok and
Advice for founders on scaling and brand-building
32:20 Amazon that's great so it's it's both of these are very low low price point so
32:25 one's called the GTFO wrist literally a little a little bracelet $20 ships um
32:31 140 countries and the cool thing about it is it has two use cases one highly unlikely you're going to have to ever
32:38 use it but it does have a handcuff key so you know you ever in a bad situation you have a handcuff key the the main
32:45 thing is it's a little piece of carbide that can break glass so take it off and
32:51 it's it's you get stuck in a car you get maybe just keep it in your car or you're in a situation where you need to get out
32:57 of a situation you need a GTFO it's going to break break any sort of glass that's very nice yeah the other product
33:04 is very similar it's called uh Rescue Me but it's R E S Q ME and it's a Rescue Me
33:11 vehicle escape tool and it's 10 bucks you keep it in your car very similar to
33:17 the wristband that it'll break glass except you don't have to do anything at all except press it up against glass and
33:22 it'll shatter and it shatters so you just keep it has a little clip car 10 bucks you hope you never ever have to
33:29 use it but if you get in a situation it's it's a survival gear is it the name
33:35 it's in the name of the thing itself the survival gear so if it happens if down the line I need something I'd rather
33:40 have it in my car and never use it but have it over there than having the need of using it and drowning with the car in
33:47 the river and thinking to myself damn I wish I had that from Battle Box yeah for 10 bucks that's that's the feeling john
33:54 thank you so much for sharing all of this it was amazing having you on the show it was amazing knowing more about your company about your success for
34:01 those that are watching us I always invite you to tag the links down the description below below the like button you're never going to regret it and of
34:08 course let's come back in the future to talk more about the survival gears and the need of more survivability gears as
34:15 the years go by because even yesterday people were thinking was the start of a war people were they were concerned
34:21 maybe this is the third world war coming maybe I I need to restock on water i need to restock on stuff but you also
34:27 need to restock on survival gear because water is not going to save you from drowning any further right no but we
34:33 sell like purification so you can take any water that's so nice you see that's so nice you thought about it all i I
34:39 know I said it was the last question but where do you come up with such brilliant products overall like with such creative
Final thoughts on community and content-driven growth
34:45 products we we have we have an amazing team that's nice so yeah so several ways
34:51 one we have an amazing team that are always they're going to conferences they're looking online they're scouring
34:56 for cool products but that's half of it the other half our customers our community we we make it very very very
35:03 easy and we reward people that do bring us products so we have forums all over
35:09 our website we have forums in our private membersonly group bring us the products nice help us do better yeah
35:16 that's it and we have a nice community you know it's a given already you're always going to have good products
35:21 absolutely wow what a lesson John thank you everyone else see you next time