Growth Mavericks

In this episode, Adam sits down with Andrew Youderian, founder of eCommerce Fuel, the private community for 7–8 figure eCommerce founders. Andrew has been a key voice in DTC for more than a decade, building and selling multiple online brands before creating one of the most respected communities in the industry. This conversation dives deep into AI’s impact on eCommerce, how to build a durable brand, and what separates the winners from the noise in a world where AI does 80% of the work. Andrew also shares behind-the-scenes insight into taking a full year-long sabbatical, how he built systems that allowed his team to operate without him, and the biggest lessons from stepping away from his company. If you’re a DTC founder, operator, or anyone building in eCommerce, this is an absolute masterclass.

🔑 Key Topics Covered
1. Andrew’s Journey into eCommerce
  • Transition from investment banking into online retail
  • Building Right Channel Radios and TrollingMotors.net
  • Why he created eCommerce Fuel in 2012
  • Lessons from the early “Wild West” era of eCommerce
2. Community Building as a Superpower
  • How Andrew learned to create and nurture community
  • Why hospitality and inclusion matter more than tactics
  • The early flywheel that made ECF grow
  • What most founders get wrong about “building community”
3. Taking a Full Year Off From Your Business
  • How Andrew structured a 12+ month sabbatical (2024–2025)
  • Systems, SOPs, and the key hires he needed in place
  • Mistakes he made during hiring (and how to avoid them)
  • What it feels like to work only 10% while traveling the world
  • How stepping away changes your thinking forever
4. The Real Impact of AI on eCommerce
  • Where AI actually drives ROI right now
  • Creative testing, copywriting, and marketing iteration
  • Why AI accelerates the race to the bottom for mediocre brands
  • Why product quality + brand storytelling matter more than ever
  • How personal brand becomes the moat
5. Why “Small Durable Brands” Will Win
  • Why big ad-driven DTC models are collapsing
  • Why small, profitable, owner-led brands are the future
  • Examples of brands doing it right (PACT, etc.)
  • Why physical products may hold increasing value in an AI world
6. Life in Montana, hunting, family, and mental resilience
  • How Andrew and Adam approach outdoor life
  • Maintaining clarity and mental health as an entrepreneur
  • Why travel and physical challenge sharpen decision-making
🧠 Big Takeaways
  • Passion + Product Quality + Storytelling is the unbeatable trifecta.
  • AI will replace 80% of the operational workload — but the remaining 20% (human judgment, creativity, authenticity) becomes where value is created.
  • Community = long-term moat.
  • The best founders will build durable brands, not fast, funded ones.
  • Systemizing your business is the only path to freedom.
  • Sabbaticals change how you build forever.
🔗 Links & Resources

Creators and Guests

Host
Adam Callinan
Adam Callinan is the founder of Pentane, a financial and advertising command center that empowers brands to drive predictable revenue and intentional profit. Previously, Adam co-founded BottleKeeper, a bootstrapped consumer brand that scaled to $8M in sales within three years – without employees – and was later acquired in 2021 as an eight-figure business with a team of four, marking Adam's second successful exit.

What is Growth Mavericks?

This podcast dives deep into the tactical moves that drive business success, as well as the mental and physical resilience required to sustain it.

Hosted by Adam Callinan, a seasoned entrepreneur with multiple exits, an avid outdoorsman, and an family man with crystal-clear priorities, each episode unpacks real-world challenges, actionable insights, and the mental and physical disciplines that fuel long-term personal and professional growth.

Whether you’re scaling a startup or refining your mindset, disrupting your default is how business and life strike a balance.

Adam Callinan (01:04)
The conversation today is with my friend Andrew Youderian founder of eCommerce Fuel.

E-commerce fuel is a community for Ecom founders, seven to eight figures in revenue. And it's actually an organization I was a member of while operating bottle keeper. And I have been on their podcast over there now twice, once with bottle keeper and once with Pentane recently, which we actually re-aired here on growth Mavericks. Andrew previously was an investment banker. Then he went from there to launching a couple of e-commerce stores in the early Ecom days, which he sold and

Went down the path of starting a community to help other e-comm founders, which is what e-commerce fuel became. You can tell he has really deep domain expertise in community building. And we talk a lot about where that came from and how that developed, which started really at quite a young age. He talks a lot about sharing the hiring and systems that let him step away from his business for an entire year.

So there's some mistakes that he made, things that he would have done differently.

We also spent some time talking about the real impact of AI on e-commerce, where ROI exists from that now, where businesses may or may not get more valuable and why passion and product quality and storytelling and personal brand is really what will separate the winners from the losers in the world of all of this AI driven noise. So it's a fun conversation from a different angle of e-commerce that I find to be really interesting.

Let's dive in to this conversation with Andrew Euderian.

Adam Callinan (02:30)
and then I got like 10 minutes into an interview and I'm like, shit. Yeah, the odds are dramatically higher. mean, you're like, with archery, you gotta get to realistically 40 yards. know, I'd shoot longer the right distance for the right animal, but I mean, with a rifle, I don't know, there's this argument that at some point it just sort of becomes a video game where you have guys that are shooting things at a thousand yards or something like there's the animal doesn't, what's the sport in that?

Andrew Youderian (02:33)
Yeah.

Adam Callinan (02:59)
So I will generally try to get within at least 300, which is still, you know, when you just get done hunting archery where everything is up close and very, feels very personal shooting something from 250 yards away that has literally no fricking clue that you are anywhere near their vicinity is, yeah, it's much easier.

Andrew Youderian (03:20)
Yeah, it's the two guys coming tonight are both are both fairly big hunters one just got back from a hunt in North Carolina. He was hunting crocodiles. The other guy he's lived in. grew up in Bozeman and it's a big bird and elk hunter. So yeah, you guys will. I'm sure you'll have some some stories from the season so far to swap.

I'll just sit back and listen and enjoy and let you guys do your thing.

Adam Callinan (03:44)
Yeah. man. They'll if they're both being hunters, they will recognize the new injury that I have. I won't tell you about it and you'll get to see them uncover it.

Andrew Youderian (03:47)
Yeah.

is this a... Okay, I'll just, I'll let this play out. got a couple different ways this could go.

Adam Callinan (03:57)
Yeah.

It's, pulled

a major rookie move yesterday out in the woods after an epic. It was the most beautiful morning I've ever had in the forest. It was insane. It was actually out at Malcolm's house. It was unbelievable, like fresh snow on the ground, but everything is still green, like the light and the clouds and the sunrise. was unreal. Yeah, epic morning. I almost...

Andrew Youderian (04:17)
7.

That's cool, but that's where you got the injury.

Adam Callinan (04:26)
And I, yeah, I snuck in, like I bumped this group of deer. I was in there hunting elk. I mean, I was actually just in there to sight a rifle, because I hadn't shot this rifle yet this year. And it was such an epic morning and I got up there super early. I was like, I'll just go chase some stuff around. And I have a bunch of tags left. And I, I stalked in, I have this transition thing where when I go from archery season to rifle season, I like mentally can't get out of.

bow hunting mentality. So I feel like you have to get really close even though you don't, cause it's a rifle. So I I snuck in to this group of, of muhly's to like 45 yards, which is ridiculous for a rifle. mean, you might as well just like throw your gun at them. And, but I, where I ended up and where they ended up, I couldn't, I was like locked into the ground so I couldn't move. And I was in this really awkward cross body position, which with a.

Andrew Youderian (04:56)
Yeah. Yeah.

you

Adam Callinan (05:20)
with a bow, that's natural. With a rifle, it's not really. And I was sitting on the ground, like in between this bush thing, and I couldn't really get up. so I did not take this shot on a deer, and I tried to readjust. And of course, in readjusting, they either winded me or saw me or whatever and bumped them out and they ran away, which is like, that's part of the deal. And on my way out,

Andrew Youderian (05:45)
So eat.

sorry, go ahead. You have to start. I would say for readjusting. So again, obviously don't do hardly any hunting, but even something as small as just readjusting the direction of your body could spook them at that far away.

Adam Callinan (05:48)
No, no, that's fine.

yeah, their vision is insane. I mean, they're like little crack heads. Antelope are the worst at this, like yeah, muleys and white tails. getting really, when you're, again, you don't hunt them with rifle like that. Had it been a bow shot, it would have been fine. It would have been game over. But it was relatively thick cover. I had a really good line of sight, kind of like shot window on them, but I had no cover because I bumped them. Like I didn't know they were there until I walked into this area and I saw movement and I got down.

Andrew Youderian (06:29)
you

Adam Callinan (06:31)
And so they were sort of, they knew something was out there, but they didn't know what it was. So I have like six deer looking right at me and my position, I'm on the ground, one knee on the ground, like one knee, I'm like sitting on the back of my back leg, front leg is up. And so I have this like awkward shooting position that's completely across my body, which the rifle scope is now like right here, which is a problem. I mean, I've shoot a 300 Win Mag, like it's a big chamber. like it's got recoil.

And so I didn't take the shot because I knew I was gonna smash myself in the face with this round, with the cartridge. So I decided I needed to adjust my shoulders forward. So I kinda like, I didn't stand up, but I sorta like had to get on my knees a little bit to adjust my shoulders forward and in doing that, that spooked them and whatever. So on my way out, I went to shoot that shot and smash myself in the face with my scope. I was like, I gotta practice. I gotta practice how to adjust out of that position.

Andrew Youderian (07:16)
Dang, that's crazy. What's cool?

Adam Callinan (07:28)
wild and then actually get the shot off. I mean, I did like barely nicked me, but like that's the thing that that's like hardcore rookie shit. That's when you know, there's a brand new hunter is when they get like a full ring, you know, on their eye from their scope, because like they were positioned weird or they just redo funny, funny stuff. So yeah, so at the very end of this epically beautiful day, I'm bleeding profusely in the woods out of my face.

Andrew Youderian (07:29)
on

Yeah.

Yeah.

It is amazing. I was thinking about the other day when we were out, we driving around somewhere. We went up to South Cottonwood and Andy and did a little mountain biking day there on Friday. I don't know that's the day you were out, but it was just like, sunshiny. There's still snow on the mountains. was just, it was just gorgeous. We had to turn around because it was, got really mucky up about a couple of miles in, but it was, I don't know if you were out Friday or a different day, but it was spectacular.

Adam Callinan (08:17)
Yeah, was out both Saturday and Sunday. Rifle opened on Saturday. So it was also, yeah, the opener.

Andrew Youderian (08:20)
Okay. Nice, man. That's cool. Well, we'll see if the we'll

see if the guys spot your your little telltale nose bridge mark.

Adam Callinan (08:27)
Yeah, it's really

it's mild compared to What you see and it's because of where it is like it's just I was trying I was practicing of course this like really awkward position because I next time I need to just take the shot I need to not adjust I need to be able to adjust my body enough without moving enough so I can just take the shot I Should have just probably taken the shot and I mean I would have ended up with the same injury, but I'd have an animal I'd have more meat in the freezer

Andrew Youderian (08:39)
Yeah.

That's all right. You get it. You get the rest of season. You'll be good. You'll get something good. So yeah.

Adam Callinan (08:58)
Yeah, well, not worried

about it. Cool.

Andrew Youderian (09:02)
We're

so glad you got so many people that signed up for demos and product and that's awesome. Really cool.

Adam Callinan (09:10)
I mean,

we've done, you know, I've probably.

been on 40 or 50 podcasts in the last two years. And part of it, like when you're building, you have all these things going at the same time and it sort of takes enough of it to line up for it to work. And that was the first.

Andrew Youderian (09:27)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Callinan (09:30)
That was the first sort of thing. I mean, I would even go as far as to call it as something like an inflection point. The first thing that happened where everything lined up the right way and that thing was like a big blip on the graph, which is awesome. Like, so part of it is timing. Like our messaging is getting better. The website and how we are dealing with questions is getting better. You know, all the content that now lives in all these other places is getting better. How we talk about it and explain what the heck it is and.

which is really just the story is getting better. So that was super, super cool for that to come out of that.

Andrew Youderian (10:03)
Yeah,

yeah, that's awesome, man. Very cool. I mean, it's good. It's a really good. And the timing, think, was good, too, because you're talking about how do you actually, yeah, like getting ready for Black Friday, people are thinking about it. How do I not just like, you know, shoot in the dark here? So I think timing and messaging was really good, too.

Adam Callinan (10:10)
That's a whole other one. Yeah.

Yeah, it's a whole other piece of the puzzle, timing. Timing's a huge part of it. Yeah, so then, so it becomes, you know, as like a thing that moved the needle, and this is not an ECF thing, this is just like, how do I go find more of that thing? Like obviously speaking really specifically to an e-commerce listener is important. And I have, we have not figured out, I've done a couple of them recently, but you know, that's a really important piece is just being really.

Andrew Youderian (10:24)
Yeah. Yeah, nice man. Bye.

Adam Callinan (10:47)
clear on who it is that we're talking to. So.

Andrew Youderian (10:50)
Yeah. If

there's other folks on the podcast front that I can introduce you to and vouch for you for. Yeah. have a couple of names in mind, like whether podcasts would be good. Like Andrew Ferris, he has a good podcast. Anyway, handful of other ones. So if you ever want the intros and just want to drop me a quick note as a little reminder, I'd be happy to introduce you to a couple of folks. think Hope might be able to get you in front of a similar style audience.

Adam Callinan (11:18)
Yeah, that's amazing. That'd be awesome. I'll definitely do that.

Andrew Youderian (11:21)
Cool.

Adam Callinan (11:22)
Sweet. Well, this will be fun. I'm excited to talk about you and your history.

Andrew Youderian (11:28)
What do you want to talk

about?

Adam Callinan (11:32)
I know you did a great

job sending me some questions. I don't very specifically because I like having the conversation and just rattle holding it. You find the coolest stuff just like going, ooh, what's that? Let's dig into that thing. And then, know, 20 minutes goes by and you're like, holy cow, we're halfway done.

Andrew Youderian (11:42)
Yeah.

Or

Adam Callinan (11:52)
Yeah.

Yeah,

I only did that one time. But yeah, that was like, gosh, what are we even doing in this conversation? Yeah, I mean, there's a number of things that I'm particularly interested in, in kind of digging into, part of which is around your capacity to build community. It's something that I have never.

Andrew Youderian (11:57)
Alright.

Yeah.

Adam Callinan (12:19)
figured out I have admittedly not spent a huge amount of time like trying to build domain expertise in that space. A bottle keeper community wasn't a, it was a thing, but it wasn't like a huge thing because it, you know, that business didn't, it just wasn't that kind of business. It wasn't a recurring revenue kind of like keep people engaged forever sort of thing. But it seems to be something that you were exceptionally good at. Have you always been like that or is that something that you learned how to do and develop?

Andrew Youderian (12:45)
Yeah, well thank you. I think not always been good at it. I think I always had a bent toward it. Growing up, my parents, particularly my mom, was pretty good about...

Bringing people into our home from a hospitality standpoint was pretty good about having conversations with us about social dynamics. It was pretty good about trying to help us be inclusive of people. Like, here's this person that's kind of in the fold, out of the fold. How do we bring them in? So that was good early training, I think. then I think, college, went and spent a couple of years in Great Falls, Montana, which is a wonderful place, but not really a bastion of young people and activity.

Adam Callinan (13:21)
you

Andrew Youderian (13:21)
And so I was very much forced to, if I was going to have any kind of social life or connections to get out and make that happen. yeah, so that very much was something I had to do and ended up building some community there, some sports groups, some other groups. And then it kind of built over time, I think, with e-commerce. So I would say, like anything, not.

born with it, but had some positive role models and experiences that helped shape it.

Adam Callinan (13:50)
Did you, when you were building then, like before ECF, we'll certainly get into that a little bit. Did you see building community as a means of just sort of expanding your own like friendship group? Or were you like actively getting people from all these different walks of life to kind of go into a singular thing like baseball cards or whatever that was for you?

Andrew Youderian (14:15)
Yeah, no, think it was more just I want to hang out with good people and where are they?

And so trying to use it as a way to selfishly enrich my personal life. uh, like I remember example, going back to the great falls thing. I remember. You taking a job there and after like five or four or five months, I hadn't met hardly anybody. And I remember when I'd be like, okay, I'm to go out. I'm going to hit that. just going to go out Friday night, go into some bars, try to meet some people. And I remember walking into one bar and there was like two old guys that were like, you know, classic.

you know, kind of end of near like, you know, 70 year old cowboys at a bar hanging out, nursing a beer. And I was like, and I was it was the whole bar. And I just, I just turned out walked out and, and so I don't know why that image sticks with me so much, but really it was just trying to build in that facet. was, it was, there was an necessity. I really wanted to meet people and connect with people and, that wasn't there. So if I didn't build it, it wasn't going to happen. So that was the big driver.

Adam Callinan (15:15)
Yeah, personal issue in scar tissue generally is quite motivating.

Andrew Youderian (15:21)
Deep, loneliness is an amazing driver to do things, Yeah.

Adam Callinan (15:25)
Yeah, that totally is.

there, I know the answer to at least some of these things, but I think it's important to tell as part of your story anyways. Post college, I mean, you went to MSU, what did you study? Remind me.

Andrew Youderian (15:38)
I started computer science, had a ill-advised semester in film, realized that was not going to be the next Steven Spielberg pretty quickly, and then finished with a finance degree.

Adam Callinan (15:47)
I can't believe they have a film school at Montana State. That seems like an odd program to have there, but great.

Andrew Youderian (15:52)
It's actually pretty

good. Yeah, it surprises me too. It actually is pretty good. I a couple. Yeah, I know one guy that I was in classes with, he actually stuck with it and now he works in Hollywood. He's a hilarious guy. So does a lot of good work.

Adam Callinan (15:55)
Is it really? Okay.

That's awesome.

Cool, that's awesome. So post college, what was your first college after college job?

Andrew Youderian (16:13)
first and only post college job worked for a company called D.A. Davidson in Great Falls in investment banking. So I did that for about two and a half years.

Adam Callinan (16:23)
Got it, I didn't know that. That's a good one. I know some guys over there now out of our Bozeman office here.

Andrew Youderian (16:26)
Yeah.

really? Who do know over there?

Adam Callinan (16:31)
Jake Werner, he's been there for quite a while.

Andrew Youderian (16:34)
Bless, don't know Jake.

Adam Callinan (16:34)
There's

one other, yeah. That's good. So how did you venture into entrepreneurship? Was it you're just like, I'm out of the investment space, get me out of here?

Andrew Youderian (16:43)
Bye.

Yeah, was, you know, it's, it's, there are things in your life you are very glad you did, but you would never go back and do them again. And I think investment banking was one of those. Like I learned so much. I came in and it was kind of painful thinking about some of the stuff I didn't know and mistakes I made early days. And so it was very formative for me from teaching me how to work hard, giving me a good sense of what quality looked like, understanding capital markets, understanding finance, financial modeling.

It was great way to save money. came out of college just stone cold broke like most people are, you know, and I think it was the reason I got into entrepreneurship was pretty quickly I identified, hey, I don't want to do this for the next 20 years, let alone five years. I just looked at the lifestyle. I looked at kind of, you know, where the people, my bosses were. And when I quit, it was kind of affirming because all of the

wives or girlfriends, mostly guys I worked with, people I'm working for are male. so the partners came up to my girlfriend at the time and kind of in a sidebar conversation where like, you're so lucky he's getting out of this career. This is, you you're, escaping, you know, like, and anyway, so I wanted to do my own thing. And I think a lot, one of the most powerful things I think you can have when you start a business is something that you are running away from as I think running away from things in general is not a good

motivator for life as an MO. But I think in terms of fire to get you to build something on a limited time scale, it's incredibly motivating. So for me, that was kind of driving that.

Adam Callinan (18:14)
Yeah, that is extremely important and powerful. And I have absolutely had some of the biggest, I mean, the biggest win I've ever had in a business setting, which was Bottlekeeper today was absolutely done running away from something that was like, holy shit, I have to get out of here. Set this up to like, here's my ejection point. I am gone. I'm going to do it so differently than that. So yeah, I, that's a very

and really strong advice, particularly for people thinking about starting that first thing, the first next thing.

Andrew Youderian (18:49)
Yeah, you with Bottlekeeper, was it a job or was it a previous business? I'm trying to remember for you what that was.

Adam Callinan (18:56)
It was both in the same. At a college, I went into a medical device company. I was not an owner of that company. I was the first outside family employee and it was fine early. This was a situation where, we know that money is an accelerant. It is like fuel on top of whatever fire you burn. If you are an amazing, kind-hearted,

Andrew Youderian (19:02)
That's right.

Adam Callinan (19:17)
exceptional person before you have money, you will be more of an amazing, kind-hearted exceptional person after it. If you are a greedy sociopath before you have money, like you might be able to hide that, but you start getting money, it tends to get bad. And this was that situation. And yeah, and I ended up as a partner in a business and it was literally, I had to build all sorts of creative strategies to force them to buy me out of that and let me.

Andrew Youderian (19:32)
you

Adam Callinan (19:45)
go away into the distance because it was so bad. my gosh. Yeah.

Andrew Youderian (19:48)
Yeah, it's

I'm always impressed with people who kind of build a business on the side and then parlay it. Or then they kind of go into it when they hit a certain tipping point where financially it makes sense. And I think the I think the reason that impresses me is when you go all or nothing when like it's the sole thing you're working on one is your sole focus and two, at least for me, and think a lot of people who do it full time, there's a window, right? You've got a certain amount of runway and

It's incredibly motivating. Like I have never worked as hard as I did the first 12 months of my business. Cause that was just like, have, I have 12 to 18 months to create a life raft to sail me away from, you know, this, this kind of nine to five or, you know, eight to eight to eight kind of job, that was very fresh in my mind. And anyway, yeah. So I'm always impressed when people can do that because I think it's paradoxically much easier if you have the stress of going all in. So.

Adam Callinan (20:44)
Yeah, I think it's, I think it's depends on the situation. I think doing it, you know, we talked about this in our conversation on your podcast, doing it with kids and a family is a totally different situation. What you can tolerate from a risk standpoint is not only a personal decision, but it also changes when you have other things you're responsible for. But there is something incredibly valuable about having constraints and money.

is a very powerful constraint. And it can force you to do some crazy things, but it can also force you to innovate and solve problems in a really creative way, which is generally where a lot of the value is in building, right?

Andrew Youderian (21:23)
Yeah, totally.

Adam Callinan (21:24)
So how did, so you went quickly go through, I know you started a couple of companies, started and sold a couple of companies after that experience.

Andrew Youderian (21:32)
Yeah.

So got done with finance and ended up starting a company selling CB radios, like drop shipping CB radio equipment. I had never even used a CB radio in my life, but just was one those classic market analysis. Where do I feel like, you know, completely mercenary approach? So sold CB radio, started a CB radio business called Right Shell Radio, still around today. Started a business called TrollingMotors.net.

And kind of caught my teeth in the e-commerce world that way. So they were modest e-commerce businesses, learned a ton, was able to operate them full-time, which was great. And that was kind of what set the foundation for all of e-commerce fuel and everything that came after.

Adam Callinan (22:12)
What year roughly were those two econ businesses for reference?

Andrew Youderian (22:15)
Oh, you're

me date myself here. 2008 was when I started the CV business. think 2010 was when I started the trilling motor business. And then 2012, 2013 was when I started EconFuel.

Adam Callinan (22:19)
Ha ha ha.

So in 2008, what were you building on? This wasn't pre WordPress, WordPress was.

Andrew Youderian (22:39)
I don't even know if was. I was using ZenCart. So ZenCart is this open source shopping cart that was built on OS commerce. It's all PHP based. Yeah. And I have a fondness for it. was real. I mean, the original website was so, you could use the go back, way back machine and pull it up. Yeah. Laughable by today's standards, but yeah. So it's using OS commerce. And then I use for trolling, what was it? used Magento, which was a nightmare.

would not recommend that. Partially because I was trying to code it myself, which I did, and that was a hack, just an absolute hack. But I got it done. So yeah, always come over some Magento.

Adam Callinan (23:12)
It's amazing. By the time in Bottlekeeper, by the time that started, it was like WordPress with WooCommerce and you could like there were drag and drop editor-y things. I was able to build something with no development. It's a wildly different experience.

Andrew Youderian (23:25)
That's so nice. It's such a blessing and a curse because I remember in the early days, had pretty complicated shipping with the different... Shipping is always kind of funky, right? And especially shipping long antennas that are four, five, six feet long. Your shipping rates could vary dramatically based on different packages and there's a lot of quasi advanced logic that went into it. So it's nice because you could go into OS commerce and...

I could code up some basic PHP and build a little customized shipping app, which was really nice. On the other hand, when you are able to do something, you're much less likely to let someone else do it because you're like, hey, I can do this, what's the big deal? And then you end up using way more of your time than you should on stuff that you really should be paying a programmer to do versus the things that only you can do to move the business forward. So was good training, but also suboptimal at times for sure.

Adam Callinan (24:09)
Yeah, I totally see that. That's sort of the dichotomy of vibe coding things today. So you end up in these awesome rabbit holes and then it's like two days later and you've been working on this one thing that you probably could have paid a developer $400 to do. And it's not the...

Andrew Youderian (24:23)
Oh, you always underestimate it,

right? Like how long it's gonna take. It's like, you're a sauna guy. The sauna that we had, guy, the electrician came over to give us the quote, to hook it up. And on there was a line out for $350 to dig like an 18 inch deep trench, like two feet. And I was like, $350? That'll take me like 20 minutes. I'm gonna that. You know.

Six hours later in the pouring rain, I'm out there, you know, digging and it's just, it's that trap you always underestimate how long it's gonna take.

Adam Callinan (24:54)
Yeah, yesterday I go out in the garage with my four year old son and we're gonna change the glow plugs in the Land Rover because it's winter and now we gotta deal with that. And I'm like, oh, this is gonna be super simple. It's literally four bolts. No, an hour later, I don't have one bolt off. Not one bolt has come off an hour later. I gotta take the air conditioner compressor out. I got it like, holy cow. Yeah, you're 100 % right. That's the difficulty with.

Andrew Youderian (25:09)
Yep.

Adam Callinan (25:21)
wanting to do all these things yourselves as they always take 27 times longer than you think they will. A lot of validity there.

Andrew Youderian (25:27)
Yeah. And I,

and I feel like there is a good, there's a really good balance. think the trick is to learn how to do that stuff for a short period of time and then have the discipline to hand it off to somebody else. Because like knowing how the system works is super important, whether it's a land Rover or whether it's your tech stack, but being stuck there as a specialist forever is also not. anyway, I think being able to move between those two pretty quickly is a pretty important skill if you want to be able to grow.

Adam Callinan (25:56)
Yeah, totally agree with that. So ECF came about then in roughly 2012, 2013. Was that organic?

Andrew Youderian (26:03)
It did. Yeah, it was.

Yeah, what do you mean by organic?

Adam Callinan (26:08)
Did you intend to go and start a community or did it just kind of start to happen and you grabbed ahold of it?

Andrew Youderian (26:13)
A little bit of both. I would say it was more master planned. The way I started it was I really spent a full year just trying to build up some name recognition and a mailing list and a network because I didn't have that in the e-commerce space. I remember spring of 2012, we went and took a vacation to Prescott, I rented this cabin.

like for two or three weeks. And I spent every day for two to three weeks, just putting together everything I knew into this PDF, this like PDF on how to launch and pick an e-commerce niche. And my thesis was if I put together something that's a really world-class guide, at least for the time, then people will share it and spread it. And it will be this, you know, like the original lead magnet idea. And it worked better than I could have hoped. So that helped me kick off the blog.

Shopify was in the early days and I ended up stocking their editor over there and building a relationship with him and getting some guest posts. And I think they helped me build probably 50 % of the early readership. So I spent a year developing a little bit of a presence on that site and then explored doing a course and also doing a community and ended up going on the community route. Cause I just felt like A, be more fun B, I could add more value there and C be more sustainable. So a little organic, but mostly kind of a top down plan.

Adam Callinan (27:34)
Yeah, there's something beautiful in...

spending a full year doing, you know, just building like the underlying framework. Like there's so much required patience to go and do that. If you had today in 2025 to go back and restart EcomFuel again, how would you do it? Would you do it differently?

Andrew Youderian (27:56)
I would do it exactly the same with one exception, because I think if you're to build a community, you have to...

You've got the early stages of a, people talk about a content flywheel, right? And you have the same thing with a community, you have a flywheel community, but the early stage of that flywheel, the people that come in and connect and talk and share and respond to people, they're doing it in the early days because they have rapport with you because you're spending social capital to ask them to help. And so you need to build that up. So there's no way to do it apart from the slow, steady,

one-to-one approach in the early days. The thing I would do differently is I would go through and a lot of the content that I was creating, I would put a lot more paid spend behind amplifying it. I've always been an organic guy to a detriment. I think we've talked about this in the past. Clicks and advertising was so much cheaper than it is relative to today. I had some capital to put behind it and I didn't because I was dumb.

So I think I'd do everything the same except for taking advantage of what, especially now, is incredibly cheap advertising and amplification.

Adam Callinan (29:00)
Yeah, that was okay in like 2015. That's a totally different situation today.

Andrew Youderian (29:04)
my gosh,

my gosh. Yeah, it's just, pains me to think about it.

Adam Callinan (29:09)
Yeah, that's an interesting learning.

So you've been operating ECF since then and you took off, I don't know the timeline here, but I'm very interested in it. You took a pretty significant period of time off and did like a full year hiatus. What year was that?

Andrew Youderian (29:26)
was this last year? So we are recording this fall of 2025 and that was January, excuse me, June of 2024 through about August of 2025.

Adam Callinan (29:29)
Yeah, okay.

There's so many questions that I have about that piece of your life. Let's start with what are the things that you had to put in place so that ECF didn't come to a stop while you did that hiatus, assuming the hiatus was like a full disconnect and correct that if it's not.

Andrew Youderian (29:54)
Yeah.

Yeah, it wasn't a full disconnect, but there were periods where I was disconnected probably 80, 90 % of the time for probably a couple months at a time. The things I had to put in place were two big ones. One was a hire. We had one person who was our community director, director of community, and he was running the community. He was also acting as our kind of COO and CTO, and I was helping out with some of that stuff.

And if I was going be out of the picture, we really needed someone who could focus on tech and infrastructure and kind of operations and someone who could focus on the community side. So we had to make one big hire there, which I totally botched and had to hire in like a month and a half before I left, which we can get into if you want to later. The second one was hiring an assistant on the personal side. So someone who could help out with monitoring inbox and paying bills and helping coordinate things when I was out of the loop.

And also help with logistical planning when we were traveling. So those were the two big hires that I had to make. We had a lot of good systems in place from a community standpoint, from other perspectives, but those two were ones that were critical to get done before we set off on that.

Adam Callinan (31:39)
What got botched? These are great learnings. All the good learnings are in the shit that falls apart.

Andrew Youderian (31:41)
Hahaha!

Yeah, so I think I went through when we when we first hired for that director of For that one position What got botched I Think the thing the biggest learning to distill everything I learned from that it was a very involved process We had like 300 400 applicants. We narrowed it down. I did dozens of hours of interviews You would think this would be the process that would

yield the candidate that was best. And the problem was, I don't think you can ultimately know how someone's going to pan out until you actually get them in the seat and working. And I think a huge part of understanding if they are going to work out is cultural, it's work ethic, it's their attention to detail, it's all these kind of things. Anyway, so you can't, I...

I didn't have good references for that person and it took two or three or four months. And we realized pretty quickly, okay, shoot, this person that we hired is not going to work. And I'm leaving in a month and a half. And so I ended up doing exactly the opposite for the hire the second time around, which was going through and trying to find someone who I knew through my network had the skills and the attributes and the character that I needed for that role. And I could shortcut that because actually trusted the references.

that I knew they weren't gonna BS me. And that worked out much, much better. So I think for me, the biggest learning was I've always been hesitant to hire like really good friends. And I still will not hire someone that I'm not gonna hire my brother, my best friend. And some people works out really well for, I really like having a distinction between personal life and business. I'm never gonna hire someone that I can't let go. But I do think using that network to vet people in the early stages is for character, for skills, for work ethic is...

something I will rely on much more heavily in the future.

Adam Callinan (33:24)
Yeah, I learned a very similar lesson when I had a lot less on the line, certainly than you did hiring salespeople in that medical device, early medical device company, that it's basically, you never get the real version of that person until they're in the role. It's all, everything is an act. Everything is an interview. Doesn't mean it's bad, doesn't mean it's good. Literally, it's just not reality. So get them in there as fast as possible.

set the framework so that if it doesn't work, you can move quickly.

Andrew Youderian (33:55)
One thing I found too, the woman that is in this role right now, I ended up getting a chat with her. So she applied for it originally, did not get offered the position for not good reasons. Anyways, we were able have a chat later and I called it, in retrospect, we call it the secret interview because we went out and we were meeting for something that was outside of the role. And so I just got to ask her,

without her thinking a job was on the line, hey, what do you love to do? What are you hoping to do in the future? What really lights you up? Like these questions where if you're in an interview, anyone who's halfway decent is going to like frame their answers to meet the criteria for the job, You know, um, where in this, in this environment, she just was completely natural. And so anyway, what it made me think too is like not just using your network, but it made me think more about not just running an interview process, but thinking more seriously about recruiting people that you know are doing a great job already. So.

Adam Callinan (34:48)
Yeah, that's great advice. What did you do for that whole year? And is this something that you always wanted to do or was this a spontaneous, let's get out of here.

Andrew Youderian (34:56)
you

No, it's something we've been wanting to do for like three or four years. So we were planning for it for quite a year or quite a while. What did we do? We did a bunch of stuff. We split up the year kind of between four quadrants. We spent about roughly a fourth of the time traveling in Asia, roughly about a quarter of the time traveling in Europe, about a quarter of the time in Bozeman, Montana, and then a quarter of the time in Tucson. And so when we were traveling, were

doing all sorts of fun, amazing traveling adventures with the family. And the goal really for the whole year was like, our kids are getting older. This is the last year before our daughter goes into middle school. Gets exponentially harder to take big chunks of time off once your kids get into middle and high school. And you rarely regret making time for big family adventures and experiences. And so that was kind of the thesis and the why behind it.

So on the road, we did a bunch of cool stuff, which I can happy to get into details if you want to get into nitty gritty. And then at home, we were homeschooling them the whole time, which was good and also a challenge. We were, was working probably, the goal for me was to work about a day a week. When I was on the road, I probably worked, was, you're talking about constraints and forcing functions. Traveling was wonderful because when you were traveling and moving around quasi regularly and you have three children and the time zone is different.

very difficult to spend a lot of time working. And so as just with with just those guardrails, if you want to call them that, I didn't work a lot. So I'd say it works maybe 10 % of the time. And then at home worked probably close to 40, maybe even 50 % of the time when we were stateside. So we did, yeah, a lot of all that. It was a really, really good year. So

Adam Callinan (36:38)
Did you find in that 10 % of the time that you did work, that your efficiency or productivity in that time was different? Like did you put out a ton of product in that 10 % or did it just feel like more work?

Andrew Youderian (36:49)
Yes!

Now, I would say that was the 10 % on the road was more like answering big questions or, we have a really big issue we need your help with, major communications. It was much more maintenance than putting out fires versus, hey, let's actually move this company forward kind of stuff. There wasn't a lot of that happening on the road for sure.

Adam Callinan (37:17)
Yeah, totally different period of time. And I wasn't doing this with kids, but in the early bottle keeper years, the point of that company is that we could operate it from anywhere in the world with internet. So we took advantage of that. my wife, Katie and I spent four to six months a year out of the country for the first seven years of that business. And I found in European time zones that I really appreciated the time differential. Cause you could be in Copenhagen in a cafe and do

Andrew Youderian (37:26)
Yeah. Yeah.

Adam Callinan (37:44)
two hours of work and it's the middle of the night in the US. So it's like, nobody is sending you anything. Nobody's trying to get your attention. Nobody's trying to get you on a phone call. And I was able to be a lot more efficient in that time period as a result of the time shift.

Andrew Youderian (37:58)
I can totally relate. Previously, there was some time we spent in Spain and Europe before we had kids. And same thing, I remember you get so much done because nobody would bother you. And then there would be this flood of activity that came at the end of the day from like three to five or something like that. And it was wonderful because all the stuff would come in.

and you could take care of it and then close the laptop and, and, it was great. It wasn't paying you throughout the day. It also though, one thing it reminded me of is there is a very real dopamine hit that comes from that inbound. Like we like to think it's a bad thing and it is a bad thing from a productivity standpoint. But I would also remember being excited at like three, four o'clock is like the world woke up in the U S and like emails came in and there's things happening and there was energy.

And yeah, which I think is even more potentially difficult from a productivity standpoint, because if you don't have it, you miss it and your mind wants to go looking for it, which I always remember that.

Adam Callinan (38:53)
Yeah, I lived that for a bit as well. That's great. There's so much beauty in the traveling and the experiencing other cultures and all that stuff. So it's a thing we wanna do with our kids for at least a year. My daughter's right on that age cutoff. For right now, if she goes to college, she's doing it at 17. And we're gonna take advantage of a year abroad to intentionally, unintentionally hold her back a year. So that's in our master plan as well.

Andrew Youderian (39:15)
Wait, wait, wait.

So she's going to hopefully graduate a year early and then you're going to have a year with her to be able to go do stuff. that the plan?

Adam Callinan (39:23)
There's one of two versions of the plan. That is one of them is the you're taking gap year after high school, but let's be clear right now, she's seven. So we have some time for that. We may also do it like next year or the year after when she's in fourth grade and she'll come back and be in fourth grade again. Some version of that.

Andrew Youderian (39:32)
you

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Why not? Yeah. So you would take the whole year off. You wouldn't do the homeschooling. You'd come back and put them in the same grade again or put her back in the same grade.

Adam Callinan (39:52)
She would absolutely get, no, she would come back, if we did that thing, she graduates, or I say graduates, which I legitimately, they do like graduate all these things now, it's such a joke. It's like their race to the bottom on accomplishment. I have strong opinions on that. Going to my kid's kindergarten graduation where they have caps and gowns on makes me insane.

Andrew Youderian (40:09)
Thank

Are you the guy protesting in the back with the sign? They're like, who said that? It's just like, no kindergarten graduation.

Adam Callinan (40:16)
Yeah. ⁓

Yeah, that's me, 100%. Going,

yes, yeah, we could spend the whole podcast. know that Katie, my wife loves it too. She's a big fan of me complaining about kindergarten graduations. That, oh man, yeah. No, it would be like she finishes a grade, we go abroad, we would do homeschool of some sort. And I mean, we spend more time. You know, I'm a nerd as you may have come to know. So we spend a huge amount of time. I just love educating her and.

Andrew Youderian (40:29)
⁓ Great for social interaction with teachers, know, making friends. Yeah, yeah.

Adam Callinan (40:48)
She's like a sponge for information on, you she did her first, did her first differential the other day and we're doing calculus stuff and it's so great. They're just so smart and so spongy at that age. So she will definitely be educated, but then we would come back and she would be in the next grade, but she would have missed a year. ⁓ Meaning she'll be graduating high school at 18 and not at 17, which I think is a thing to consider, not everything, but a thing to consider.

Andrew Youderian (40:48)
Yeah.

Got it. Got it.

Yeah. one of the things, I mean, there's kind of two views of the world with education, right? Like you have the world schooling, right? Where it's just like, hey, just go out in the world. We'll teach you what you need to know. And you don't need a formal education and you really need to know what you learn it. And I think that's pretty, I think that's a hard sell if you really start thinking about that. And then you have the other side where it's like, okay, you 12 years in a classroom. And I think that's also kind of ridiculous. Like you're talking about kids with sponges.

With a little structure, there's so much about the world you can teach kids. Like we were traveling, we went from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima in the course of about a week and a half. And just these amazing bookends to teach World War II is the defining event of the 20th century, right? To teach your kids about that and have them there. They'll remember that for rest of their lives in a way they won't if they were learning about it in class. And there's just a million other things I could point to in that vein.

It is cool. It's an amazing time to teach kids stuff experientially that I think you, yeah, it sticks with them.

Adam Callinan (42:21)
Agreed. Shifting gears a little bit.

You've been in Montana, you know, in and out of Montana for a long time. So I'm interested in your, what are your extracurricular activities and how do you use them to keep your brain like in the game? I mean, ECS has been going for a while, so maybe it's on cruise control, maybe it's not, like what are the plans there? And then what are the things, practices, all that stuff you do to help deal with these like crazy ups and downs of entrepreneurship?

Andrew Youderian (42:53)
Yeah, good questions. I'll start with the ECF question in terms of cruise control. Coming off of a year, kind of the family gap year was on cruise control, at least for my involvement for a bit. And so definitely need to come and put some energy. Someone said once you can only coast downhill. And I think that's true. And I think if you're not continually putting energy and life and refinement into something, it's going to get stale pretty quickly.

So very much a year of investing in that we're investing a lot in like trying to really think about where we can add help solve our members problems the most. We're building out some kind of in-house cool AI stuff that I'd be happy to get into if you want to later. In terms of extracurriculars, I think, the things I love to do being a Monta, I love to bike, love to get out and mountain bike. I, last couple of years have gotten more into fitness and strength training, which has been a really

helpful and beneficial thing. Started recently to get a little more into rock climbing. I've always done some of it and never loved it, but it's been a kind of a fun midlife thing to go back and revisit, both from a strength perspective, from a challenge perspective, from like a camaraderie and friendship perspective. That's been really great. I do very little, much less than I want to, but music, is something that playing music, especially like guitar is something that

touches a part of my psyche and soul that most other areas can't. I would say, and then investing too. I love investing. love thinking about, I'm a betting man. love, I love thinking bets. And I always, love arguing. Like we're talking about the job. My first job favorite part of that job was that everyone that was hyper competitive and there would be afternoons when we were sick of working about our, our, our pitch books or our models. And we'd go out to this tiny little nerve hoop.

And instead of just playing the game and seeing who could make the most shots, we'd spend probably 70 or 80 % of the time arguing about the odds of eight given shots. So you pick a pot spot on the floor and then you spend 10 minutes arguing about is this 10 to one odds? No, is this four to one? Is this three to two? And then you would take your shots. And it was such a fun way to think about risk and reward trade-off with, you know, with that, without a whole lot of risk. lost, I was definitely a net loser in those games to my

superiors, but I think it was good training for different risk rewards, know, bets in the future with that more than paid off for it. Anyway, that's a little bit of rambling, but those are some of the things I love to do. And I think they're just, they're good from a mental perspective. They're good from just kind of diversity of getting your mind off of things and having avenues to be able to pour into when you're not working. Skiing is another big one for the gap year. We've got our whole family passes. We've been skiing in Arizona for a while, but

coming back to Bozeman, gotta have like a legit ski season with all the kids, which was awesome. And taking the kids on adventures, I love, it's really fun, like you mentioned, teaching them and watching them learn, but also taking them out and watching them grow in different areas. So yeah, I guess that's probably more than you were bargaining for, but those are some of things that come to mind.

Adam Callinan (45:46)
That's perfect. Did you go to Bridger or Big Sky? Which direction? East or West?

Andrew Youderian (45:49)
We were

Bridger guys, Bridger family. So it's hard to beat the 30 minutes. So yeah, and the kids aren't exactly, know, skiing off the tram every lap at this point being, you know, 12 and seven. So we got to wait us before we ski out the terrain at Bridger.

Adam Callinan (46:06)
Yeah, totally get that. I've been having some conversations, this has come up a couple of times, I'm really interested in your perspective on it, given your both deep domain expertise in e-commerce, as well as obviously access to community. How do you think about AI and the value that AI builds or has the capacity to build in e-commerce? Does it make it more valuable or less?

Andrew Youderian (46:33)
I think it... I wouldn't say...

I wouldn't use e-comm as the razor necessarily, or if you did, would break it down. I think it makes brand owners and people who have something unique and a product that is truly theirs and something they're passionate about. I think it makes their business more valuable. I also think it makes businesses that are team heavy and staff heavy.

significantly more valuable because when I look at what AI, we're using it for what our community members are using it for. They're using it to be able to get out creative more quickly, to be able to iterate on creative more quickly, to be able to iterate on marketing campaigns and messages more quickly. They're using it for copy that's with the right investment. know AI copy gets a lot of crap. And when you do it without a decent investment,

It's well deserved. But I also think there's a way where if you put in the time and energy to build a really good AI copywriter that's trained on your brand voice, it's an incredible asset. So I think it really depends. If you have something you love and a killer product that's got a little bit of a moat behind it, I think, or you've got a lot of operational and staff expenses, I think AI is going to make your business more valuable. If not, I think it's probably going to make it less valuable. So.

That's a little more of a nuance to answer, but I think it depends on more on the e-commerce business structure than just e-commerce in general.

Adam Callinan (47:53)
Do you see, let me back up. If we go back into the late 2010s, like 18, 19, 20, we had this sort of frothy M &A environment into 21. We got really lucky in the bottle keeper acquisition that we got kind of the tail end of that frothy environment. And then we had this zero interest rate period where there was still like a ton of free money just floating around all over the place. And that has all largely changed. The result of which is that.

Andrew Youderian (48:06)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Callinan (48:20)
this, the M &A, particularly around, I mean, in total, but like specifically around CPG and DTC brands, you know, kind of went through the floor. It seems like, from my perspective, it seems like the fact, if you're creating and innovating on a physical product, that it, like a service business, and I mean, that's like a plumber, like a construction worker, where you have to put your physical hands on some thing, it seems like AI,

would make that a lot more valuable over time and that we should see some resurgence of those &A values. Do you agree with that?

Andrew Youderian (48:56)
You're saying because it's insulated, it's less digital because of the physical products. It's going to be fewer people are going to be coming in and using AI to streamline those. so is there for going to be more valuable, just like a plumber would be more valuable because it's in a defensible state from AI. Is that kind of your thought process and thesis?

Adam Callinan (49:15)
the fact that it's a physical product, AI is not gonna pop up a physical product. So yes, yeah.

Andrew Youderian (49:19)
Yeah.

I would say a little bit, but if you think about, like think about when you're running Bottlekeeper.

how much of your time was spent on the actual design. The cool thing about e-commerce, there's a lot of really hard parts about e-comm. I would say you can make an argument that e-comm is one of the hardest business models you can pick. But one of the cool things about it is once you figure out a widget and you get it made, you can just pump those widgets as assuming you have a reliable manufacturing partner and

You still have other things that change in marketing, et cetera, et cetera. But it is much less of a living, breathing product than say software is, right? Software always is changing, always breaking. You're always iterating on, there's new features coming out, API connections are breaking, operating systems are changing. It's always something you have to invest in, whereas a bottle keeper, you know, people are probably going be able to use it unless they redesign the way they ship us here into that 12 ounce glass container or Budweiser that's going to be the same.

So I would say maybe a little bit to your point and your question, but when I think about how much work goes into the actual physical product of touching that, even when you think about managing a warehouse, today, much of that is digital, right? Like you have warehouse management software. Yes, you have people moving things around the warehouse and pick and pack, but there's an enormous digital layer there. Your marketing is all digital, your software that runs your cart or your plugins are on digital email marketing. I mean, I would say,

you're probably looking at 80, spot check my hair, you've run a physical products business more recently than I have, 80 % is still digital. So maybe it gives a little bit of the margin back, a little bit of the &A multiple back because it's insulated from AI, but I would say only on a small degree.

Adam Callinan (51:05)
Do you think that, let's use that as an example, the 80%, as AI is created and manipulated to take over and automate that 80%, which is not gonna happen tomorrow, it is gonna happen in five years or 10 years or 50, like whatever that is, pick another, it doesn't really matter, we don't know, it's Magic 8 Ball at this point. As that,

Andrew Youderian (51:18)
you

huh.

Adam Callinan (51:27)
part gets taken over that remaining 20%. I mean, number one, there's sort of two, there's like a dichotomy in this question. There's two kind of directions we could take it. One is my position is that that 80 % becomes a race to the bottom because now it's just like everything is AI versus AI versus AI. And in which case everybody's largely putting out the same thing and doing the same thing. So we need jerk back to human in my opinion on that, but like.

Andrew Youderian (51:35)
Yeah.

Adam Callinan (51:50)
The fact that that remaining 20%, like in SaaS, I'm building in SaaS and because of AI, I have to think about what we build and how we build it and the motes and durability in the business because of AI. So I have to construct the model and the system around that and think of things entirely different. In consumer, in that space where you're making a physical product, like a bottle keeper, that 80 % might go to complete AI, but that remaining 20 % is still a human being that's involved in

the iteration and some people are still making it with their hands. Maybe that's, know, Optimus robots at that point. But how do you, I mean, I just rambled for like five minutes. I don't, it just seems like there's a really defensible important position there with physical product.

Andrew Youderian (52:28)
No, I- I- I said-

I see what you're A bottle keeper you can touch, the SaaS software runs on your computer and it's more abstract even if it's on your screen. I still don't think it's that different. because like, even going back to bottle keeper or any physical product, there are some exceptions. I think if you had a product that required an insane or an above average or very meaningful amount of field testing or extensive

you know, in the field testing or compatibility or whatever it was where you did have to use it with your hands. And any good product is going to have that, right? You're going to, you're going to use it, you're going to play with it, things like that. But even still, I would guess that much of the process is not necessarily the using it in person. A lot of that can go pretty quickly. You get a prototype back pretty quickly. You can determine is your prototype, Hey, is this working well? Is this better? Or this, is this worse? You know, maybe it's an afternoon. Again, there's exceptions, but you can fairly quickly tell what's working. What's not when it's in your hand.

And so much more of process is like, how do we design this? How do we think about how these go together? How do we build the model, the CAD model for this? How do we communicate with the factory and all these people? Even the design phase, if we're going to extrapolate AI out to be becoming five times better in five years, probably is likely where you can say, hey, maybe there's a version of chat GPT or of CAD works or whatever it is that you design things with where you talk to it.

Talk to it for three or four or five or 10 or 20 minutes, that spits out a model and you tell it, just like you would use cursor for coding, they'd have that for CAD that almost certainly will come out. You're almost certainly gonna spend more time playing with that and tweaking with that than you are giving that feedback on the prototype. So I do see what you're saying, but I still think that so much of the process is still digitally enabled that maybe there's a little bit of an edge and a moat with physical products, but not a big one.

Adam Callinan (54:20)
Shifting on that, what?

differentiates the winners and losers in a world where an AI or a sequence of AIs are running 85 % of the company. And they're giving you the ideas on the things to create and they're telling you how to innovate it and they're telling you what the consumer wants because it just has access to some unlimited amount of information.

Andrew Youderian (54:32)
Yeah.

I think this is maybe a cliche answer, I think I believe it the last couple years I've been much more interested in building out a personal brand of name right this name has name recognition behind my identity and also doing things that I'm actually interested in care about I told you earlier I was a pure mercenary when it came to selling CB radios. There's no way in the world I would start a CB radio brand today even if I had a great

advantage on it technologically or factory connections or whatever it was, because I don't care about them at all. I think we've gone from a world, at least on the e-comm side, where passion used to be a liability. And it didn't let you think critically enough to now passion being something that actually people can smell and taste and feel. And it gives you an edge on building better products because you actually care and are deeply invested in them. So I think passion

storytelling. One of the things I tried to do this last year on the gap year was improve my storytelling skills. And I did that through some segments on the podcast that were focused just purely on not necessarily hardcore business tactics, but more life things and experiential. And I use actually an AI feedback loop to try to like improve and critique my storytelling and kind of iterate and do better versions of that. But I think passion is very tiny personal branding.

I think going back to the personal branding thing, like if you look at, I'm not sure if you've played with Sora too very much, but it was interesting because I could see after playing with that for just a couple of hours, there's these things called, not avatars, cameos, I think, and you have a handle so you can scan your face and then you get this more or less handle, like a Twitter handle, but where people can use your likeness.

that has been saved into Sora by a little 3D scan of your face to be able to create videos. And you could see things like Shaquille O'Neal, he had a ton, and I think it was his actual account where he made it available for his likeness publicly available for people to use. And he was on videos all over the place. And so I think people who have personal brands, who have celebrity, especially who are open to letting other people experiment with their likeness, which sounds kind of weird, but I actually think that can help with their...

their reach and visibility. all those things, think is less quality. think your product quality, of course, is table stakes. But I think once you have those things, the storytelling, the trust, the brand, the passion, all those things are what I think are gonna set physical products apart.

Adam Callinan (57:08)
Yeah, I'll take that a step further and say, think that's what's gonna set everything apart. I mean, I think that we just will continue to experience a massive knee jerk to human and understanding who you're buying from and who they are and what they're interested in and that you have some personal, even if it's not direct connection, will continue to become more more incredibly valuable. So we're on the same page there.

Andrew Youderian (57:29)
Yeah,

I've been talking about, I've kind of used this term for about 18, 24 months down the podcast. This concept I call small durable brands, where I think brands that are, it's going to be harder than ever to build a brand to maybe five to $10 million. But I think the brands that get there, because they're doing it the old fashioned way, because they're doing it with not necessarily on the back of sheet Facebook ads, but based on more they love it.

real customer trust the old fashioned way, they'll be able to build brands that stick around longer. Like I think about, I think about Malcolm, fontiers company packed bags, like he's a mutual friend of ours and, he has, he just builds really good products, really good bags and, the branding is good. Their story is good. He's a guy who also kind of lives it out. Like he does a lot of really fun things and puts it to work and his lifestyle embodies it. and I love wearing.

his products, partially because they are really high quality. And one of the bags I got from him has a lot of features that are very well thought out. So the product quality, again, like that's kind of table stakes. But I also love the fact that like, I know who he is and I know that he also uses these things for the things he says that he designs them for. And they are good because he is using them regularly, right? Like there's that, you know, symbiotic back and forth that, that, that helps.

And so I just see like companies like his is really being the future of sustainable Ecom because he loves doing it and he's going to be able to be doing it for if he wants for another 10 plus years because obviously it's a lot of work, but it's work that he loves and there's huge gains and advantages to compounding over time. So anyway, I'll stop rambling about that, but I think he's a great example of brands that are really well positioned for the future.

Adam Callinan (59:10)
Yeah, I totally agree. there's a conversation, obviously I love Malcolm and what they do at PACT and they've played a huge role in the Pentane story. He's an exceptional product designer because he's not only just a really good product designer, but he is building on the back of experience. those conversations that we have with early stage operators, there's let's say sub 5 million in revenue. They almost feel like they missed the boat.

Andrew Youderian (59:20)
in

Adam Callinan (59:37)
You know, almost like you said earlier with they missed the heyday of the paid Facebook ads. And my position is like, I mean, you did, but you also dodged a bullet. I mean, we built bottle keeper entirely on that revenue model. And it was great when it was great and it was awful when it wasn't. And unfortunately, yeah, it was great. was, you know, it was like a typical curve until it hit the top of the curve. And then it was just downhill to continue to grow. And even just to continue to maintain because our revenue model was so dependent.

Andrew Youderian (59:53)
You

Adam Callinan (1:00:08)
on that stream. to your point, doing it in a much more, in a way that takes much longer and might feel more painful creates such a more durable business and revenue model.

Andrew Youderian (1:00:20)
Absolutely. I think we really have come full circle in a lot of ways on e-commerce and on marketing. And those are the brands I love. Those are the brands I love to support, that I love to buy from, that I would want to buy as an investor if I was investing in one. yeah, it's easy to look back on, I I did it already in this episode, on the cheap days of Google and Facebook traffic. And I'd go back and I'd definitely milk it for more.

during that time if I could, but it doesn't mean I think that e-comm is dead. And I'm pretty confident of a couple of things. I'm pretty confident people are gonna keep buying things. I'm also confident that people are gonna probably continue to buy things more online than offline. So I think e-comm, the future is bright and it looks good, it just isn't gonna look a little different.

Adam Callinan (1:01:04)
Agreed. Andrew, this has been awesome. Where do you want people to find you and ECF?

Andrew Youderian (1:01:11)
Yeah, best place is at ecomfuel.com. So E-C-O-M-F-U-E-L. We're a community for seven and eight figure brand owners. if you've been at Ecom, you've got a business, you want to chat with over a thousand other people in your shoes. Our biggest values are forms. We just have a fairly robust, active community where you can get detailed answers to your questions pretty quickly. The podcast, I've been doing a podcast for a while. It's the Ecom Fuel Podcast.

I talk a lot about e-commerce, similar topics to this. Also like to talk about things that are a little more ancillary, but that I think are of interest to operators in terms of lifestyle and travel and things that matter. So those are the best two places, either on the podcast or at ecomfuel.com.

Adam Callinan (1:01:55)
Yeah, and to the listener, if you are in that e-comm world and at Seven Figures, you should definitely check it out. I was a member in our later years at Bottlekeeper and it was valuable then. I can't imagine what it's like now with the growth that you all have experienced and adding the layer of the forums and everything. So really, really cool.

Andrew Youderian (1:02:13)
Yeah, well, thank you. And thanks for the insight to come on. It's been super fun to reconnect and have you just down the road here in Bozeman. So looking forward to more chats and appreciate you letting me come on the show. Thanks, man.

Adam Callinan (1:02:24)
Yeah, absolutely, we'll do it again. Hopefully next time we'll figure out how to do it in person. I think that'd be a whole other fun rabbit hole twist to throw in here.

Andrew Youderian (1:02:32)
it's super fun. In person is the best when technicals don't blow up. yeah. Thanks, Adam.

Adam Callinan (1:02:37)
Yeah, of course. Thanks, Indra.