The First Customer
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The First Customer
The First Customer - How To Ace Your Business Strategy with Co-Founder Andrew Watson
In this episode, I was lucky enough to interview Andrew Watson, Co-Founder of Igloo Media.
Andrew recounts his upbringing in Italy and England, and how his initial aspirations as a tennis player eventually led him to entrepreneurship in the U.S. He describes his collegiate tennis career, where he honed his competitive spirit, which later translated into valuable skills in the business world. Andrew emphasizes how the discipline and resilience learned through sports have been instrumental in his approach to business, particularly in setting high standards and maintaining a competitive edge.
Andrew also delves into his experience co-founding EBC, an electric boarding company that grew rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic, and later selling it to Agora Brands. This venture, driven by his and his co-founders’ desire to finance their tennis careers, unexpectedly took off as demand for outdoor activities surged during lockdowns. Following the sale of EBC, Andrew and his co-founder Alex launched Igloo Media, a marketing agency that helps direct-to-consumer brands with advertising, SEO, and site design. He highlights the benefits of having a co-founder, such as dividing responsibilities and leveraging complementary skills, and reflects on the value of building businesses alongside trusted partners.
Let's explore how Andrew Watson's passion for sports and a knack for e-commerce led to unexpected business successes in this engaging episode of The First Customer!
Guest Info:
Igloo Media
www.igloomedia.co
Andrew Watson's LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-watson-91b25b252/
Connect with Jay on LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayaigner/
The First Customer Youtube Channel
https://www.youtube.com/@thefirstcustomerpodcast
The First Customer podcast website
https://www.firstcustomerpodcast.com
Follow The First Customer on LinkedIn
http://www.linkedin.com/company/the-first-customer-podcast/
[00:00:27] Jay: Hi everyone. Welcome to The First Customer podcast. I was just talking to Andrew. Really lucky to have him on today. Andrew, co founder of Igloo Media. I want to hear more about that. how are you doing brother?
[00:00:39] Andrew: Good, good. Thank you so much for having me. It's an absolute, pleasure to be on board.
[00:00:43] Jay: I think we've got some, good stuff to talk about. where did you grow up and did that have any impact on you being an entrepreneur?
[00:00:50] Andrew: Well, good question. I actually grew up in a few different places. as a kid, I actually grew up in Italy for a few years.
entrepreneurship was not inside to that point. I strictly wanted to be an athlete from when I was pretty small. So, and then eventually moved to England and then from England, I think that's where, A lot of sort of, you know, the main components in life started to move, especially being sort of tennis was my big focus.
you know, something, we can go over, but likewise, the entrepreneurship probably kicked off more when I moved to States. you know, it was more when I went to university in the U. S. I was at Memphis and Tennessee, and that was definitely more of where I think some of that vehicle started to move.
[00:01:24] Jay: Was it a culture shock in Tennessee from all the other European travels?
[00:01:31] Andrew: Definitely a little. I think it helps. I think definitely being, having traveled a little bit as a kid. I mean, we all sort of traveled to play competitions and so you're thrown in this giant bundle of people from everywhere. So it definitely helps.
For sure helped. There were some bits that we had to make adjustments with, lifestyle for sure. I mean, the whole university concept in the States is like a foreign language. It's absolutely amazing. So definitely the sporting culture was, a whole new ball game.
[00:01:57] Jay: Interesting.so give me the elevator version of your tennis career.
I don't think I've had, professional golfers on, I've had a couple other professional sports folks on, but never a professional tennis player. kind of, you know, from, when you realized you liked it till you hit pro kind of, what was the in between?
[00:02:13] Andrew: Yeah, for sure. it wasn't the most illustrious pro career, I think.
but it was. I mean, ever since I was a kid, it was something you dream about. you know, like I suppose every kid dreams of being, not sitting behind a desk at least. So anything more exciting and tennis player was definitely in my sights from when I was a kid. So, it was really when I, just before I went to the States, probably when I really started to gain a bit of traction and become a better player.
A better tennis player, better athletes. and by nature, I think when you're pushed so hard for four years, it was when I graduated, that I was in a great place to play pro our coaches. shout outs to guys. They were unbelievable. actually gave us the chance myself and another teammate to play for six months on tour before we graduated.
And in doing so, it helped set us up, which was great. We got some points on the board, and I was training for 18 months, sort of a mix between Florida and the UK. And that's where I met Alex, who I'm sure will come up as a co founder at Igloo as well, and EBC. And, yeah, so it was, great. I mean, it was the most enjoyable year and a half from a tennis perspective.
It was awesome. Like, the traveling and stuff was great. I think a lot of people think it's a lonely lifestyle. That wasn't, You know, I enjoyed it. You're on the road with your buddies every week. There's, no, denying that. and singles was good. I mean, I got to roughly 500 or so in the world and, you know, won a doubles title and a few singles finals, but you know, nothing crazy.
You definitely wouldn't have probably seen me on TV more so in the college days, but, still such a close community, so many close friends. So it's, very much still part of, my life.
[00:03:41] Jay: I love that. and what, obviously you did that and then went off and started founding companies. I'll ask you, I mean, maybe a question you've been asked before, if you've been on the show, like this is what from tennis and that journey. Did you apply as a business owner?
[00:04:02] Andrew: We do get this not a lot. I think it's actually Something that flies under the radar a bit, especially when it comes to recruiting new people for companies And I didn't really know how much value being an athlete had in the business world until you actually start to hire folks Until you start to sort of use your network and it's not ironic.
We've built businesses with other athletes, too like I think there's definitely Some underlying emphasis towards just competing, you know, and, if it's not competing on the court, it's also competing with other businesses and making sure that you take the extra time and you know, you're, really working very hard.
So I think it's definitely helped us from a motivational perspective. just being athletes in general has allowed us a lot workspace, and just expect pretty high standards from everybody we work with. So, we try and recruit likewise. Hopefully I'm not micromanaging. Some of the people in the team might disagree, but, definitely resonates and it certainly does help having that as a background for sure.
[00:05:01] Jay: I think that, kind of consistently relearning and reminding yourself to not micromanage is like a pretty good sign of a good leader. Because if you're not realizing it, you're just doing it and you're probably being annoying and not helping anything. but if you don't care enough to want to do that, then you're probably not invested enough in the business to really make a difference anyway.
So there's an interesting balance there between, you know, your hands in there or handing it off to people who probably do a better job than you anyway, right? If you do hiring properly.
[00:05:31] Andrew: I mean, there are pretty much all of our, team members will do a better job of me at the. ad level or at the operation level, like hands, hands down, it's mostly just sort of.
You know, making sure you're sort of oversight is like an auditor and also it's important. I think for a lot of founders to be involved in the operations of the company, especially when you're pitching to new clients, you know, it's important that you understand the fundamentals of the business. So, without micro managing, it is nice to make sure you just get your hands dirty from time to time.
You jump on workshops with the team. It definitely helps.
[00:06:02] Jay: All right. So tell me the electric boarding story. I am a proud owner of an electric skateboard that I love dearly. so I'm, interested to hear how that happened and who was your first customer?
[00:06:14] Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. Which, which board do you have?
[00:06:16] Jay: Backfire. My backfire guy.
[00:06:18] Andrew: Nice. Backfire is great. Those guys are really cool. We, work with them. They're US team. They were really nice guys. Yeah. So EBC was, yeah, definitely a Crazy, crazy ride, something none of us really expected. I mean, we, it was two of us at the beginning, a friend of mine also as a co founder from university, Illinois, and then Alex as well.
So there was sort of three of us were all tennis players at the time. And, we were looking for a way to help finance our careers. I mean, through the influence of some other friends who were just learning and getting into e commerce, it was completely foreign. I had no idea. You know, about e commerce, digital marketing, selling products online, you know, it wasn't even in my stratosphere.
So sort of through the influence of them, we decided to just start learning about it and sort of just understand a bit more about How you can conquer niches online and what this dropship concept that everybody started to talk about was You get pitched all these videos of guys sitting in private jets going Hey, you want to learn how to drop ship and it's all bs obviously, right?
I want to buy some private jet drop shipping. So we kind of got into this interesting sort of learning phase and decided sort of in 2019 to Start a business and see what we could do. And we all had different responsibilities. Mine being pitching most of the potential clients as a reseller. and ultimately from there building the site.
So it was a lot of stuff that was on platform and also with the clients was mostly my responsibility. And long story short, we was a very small business for quite some time. We didn't have a big catalog. We eventually expanded into e bikes and e scooters and water sports. So we had this monster catalog of these brands.
When COVID hit, during COVID, I was looking for other jobs. I was like, this is not sustainable. This isn't enough money. Frankly, I just need to do something else. When I'd actually flown to the States for interviews and COVID hits and the U. S. went into lockdown and really quickly. Everybody wanted to get outside.
No one was able to get outside at that point. And everybody wanted their 1 hour a day or whatever the policy was to go and cycle or to go and need board or whatever it was. So, we went from doing like, 100 K in our best month to doing a million, like, 3 months later, it was crazy. so, with the team of 3 people, so it was extremely, extremely.
Stressful. and we had not managed this kind of volume before, so we didn't really know what to do. So it came with a lot of problems. a lot of good things, but a lot of problems as well. So definitely a challenge. And then we had our own warehouse in Tampa. Eventually we grew, you know, at our peak, we probably had 6 or 7 members in the team and we eventually sold the company.
So in November of 2021, we closed the deal to a wonderful group called Agora Brands, who are D2C founders from Hubbell Contacts and some big businesses. Amazing, amazing guys. And, from there, that's, yeah, that was sort of a really, felt like quite a long time, but it was only really two years. EBC was, a thing. So, yeah.
[00:09:10] Jay: How did you get your first customers there?
[00:09:12] Andrew: Yes. Sorry. first customer I remember, and he bought a backfire X two. I don't know what board you have, but he had
[00:09:19] Jay: I think the Z two.
[00:09:22] Andrew: Nice. Yeah. So he had, an X two, so he, it was 130 bucks or 140 bucks. I think this, sorry, thousand, 1200 bucks. It was very expensive board.
It's an, it was an all terrain board. Delbert client. I remember his name. Shout out. I have no idea if you hear this, but yeah, it was the first, customer. And it was the first time we'd ever started running ads. We had no idea what was going to happen. And Alex was. You know, doing his thing and, yeah, as our first, first customer and I remember thinking, it's so cool.
We've actually sold something online. and eboards was the only thing we had. We sold like two brands backfire and another one for like the first few months. and so we eventually realized we, had to expand, but, yeah, that was crazy.
[00:09:59] Jay: All right. let's get into Igloo. where'd it come from? I mean, you guys sold the company, the, boarding company.
And then what happened? You guys put right out and started a marketing company.
[00:10:09] Andrew: Yeah. As simply as that pretty much. Yeah.
[00:10:12] Jay: Just a snap of the fingers and you LLC and you're good to go.
[00:10:15] Andrew: Exactly. Yeah, no, we, I mean, through, the, I mean, we started spending a lot more time with people in the VC space with people as founders, like, you know, Alex and I were on board with Agora, not only to run EBC on an earn out, but likewise, while it was pretty much running itself, we were.
Doing consulting for brands we want, they wanted to buy, you know, basically explaining to them what life is like at Agora and how it's like working under the parent company for a change. And it was happy days. I was a master student. I was like, it's great. Like, why wouldn't you want to work with a big company with really cool entrepreneurs?
So like, I didn't have anything bad ever to say, which, made it kind of great because these calls were awesome with some of these founders I'd never met before. And we realized they were outsourcing a lot of the fundamentals that we did in house advertising, SEO, site design, everything.
Basically, we're being outsourced to agencies and founders were very operational heavy with, with their focus. So, I basically said back to Agora 1 month, I said, you know, if you guys thought about bringing in an agency to run your portfolio, it's going to be significantly more cost effective for you to do that when you have a lot of companies under 1 roof and likewise, If Alex and I can actually independently help some of these clients, it might improve their PNL and make them better prospective acquisitions for users.
In doing so, it just sparked the idea for us to start something new. And with their blessing, we, did. I mean, Alex and I wanted to help these companies at the ad level. We wanted to help these companies at the operational level, if we could. They've been an amazing referral funnel for us. you know, shout out to a lot of those guys on Agora's board.
They're just, you know, continuously, you know, Peppered by amazing founders from around the world who want to meet them. And you know, for those that need marketing help, they often send them our way. So we've grown tremendously over the last two years. We have about 20 people in the business now. And, yeah, so it's been, it's pretty much a hundred percent of our focus at this point.
And, yeah, real mix of amazing founders from all over the world. So crazy going from like the brand to the agency side. I prefer it much more actually. but it's, yeah. Been an interesting journey.
[00:12:15] Jay: I love that story. it's I mean it's the ultimate kind of friends and family plan, right? Like I say that a lot when people get to start their business, it's somebody they know, it's somebody they whatever.
But you guys built this for an existing use case, which is cool. And they were like, sure, of course, it makes sense because you're going to save us money. Working with those individual companies, I think was a great angle of like saying we can improve their bottom line, which will improve your bottom line, which is just kind of a great strategy.
I love that. I don't think you've started a business without anybody yet, unless I missed it somewhere. it's been two co founders so far or the same co founder, you know, twice. give me the pros and cons of having a co founder.
[00:12:51] Andrew: Yeah, definitely. I think it's really challenging running a business solo just because not just volume of things to do.
I just think it's. Impossible to cover every area of skill set without having to be out of pocket to do something. And I mean, as you know, I'm sure like, you know, you always start a business generally with the skill set that you can apply to a use case by learning it yourself. And then eventually inheriting whoever it is that can do the stuff that you can't do.
Alex has a very analytical mind. so Alex is my co founder as well and EBC and all things. So Alex is very, very focused, with detail. He he's got incredibly high standards at the advertising level. he's extremely versatile. He's done a lot of things at EBC that I needed help with and less so vice versa.
You know, I, couldn't do a lot of the things he did or have time to learn. So the positives are definitely just covering more real estate. Like, I mean, you can just cover a lot more with somebody that focuses on new tasks. And it's also more fun. I mean, I think doing things by yourself is challenging. on the bright side, he's a pretty good tennis player.
So we have, you know, a lot of time when I'm in Tampa to go and strike a few pools, but I definitely think it's being able to separate your skill sets and focus on your, core areas and not getting bogged down with like what I'm doing and why isn't he helping here or, you know, he could think the same.
And so it's more just like focusing on what, you know, you can do really well as, two founders and then just conquer those avenues really well. and you trust the other person to take care of their Avenue and, and it works well. So likewise, we do a lot of pitching and a lot of the client facing stuff together.
Anyway, we do share quite a few things. Yeah.
[00:14:27] Jay: Great. all right. Mystery question for you, my friend, or somebody who's done a bunch of stuff and lived in a bunch of places, if you could do anything on earth, And you knew you couldn't fail, what would it be?
[00:14:40] Andrew: Good question. From a, a business perspective?
[00:14:42] Jay: That's a great, question to my question because The caveat to that is always non business related. If you do anything on earth and you knew you couldn't fail, what would it be? So thank you for the clarification. I almost gave you an easy one there, right? Cause I had to change it. Cause everybody would say, well, I'm going to want my business to be the best in the world or whatever.
So I said, let's just ask about personal stuff.
[00:15:03] Andrew: Yeah, I don't, think being, I think the novelty of having the best business in the world isn't like my. idea of like a perfect life or a perfect world. I think if I could do one thing and no, I wouldn't fail. Like I would just probably be a better athlete.
Like, wouldn't, everybody want to just travel the world and compete and not worry about emails and stress and just get paid a ton of cash to go and have a great time with teammates. Like, it sounds awesome. So 100 percent like I would take the life of some of these athletes. I think it's not to be taken granted for.
[00:15:37] Jay: I like that. I've heard professional athlete a few times. I don't think I've heard, you know, professional tennis player, but I mean, that's fitting for your background. So, all right. If you want to find you, Andrew, how do they do that? And if they want to find Igloo, how do they do that as well?
[00:15:49] Andrew: Yeah, for sure. So Igloo Media, you can Google us Igloo Media group. There's probably other igloos out there by now. But, yeah, igloomedia, you can find us or you can LinkedIn me, either way it works. if you're founders or if you're just anybody and you want to hang and you want to learn about e com, like we're always game.
So, should be fairly straightforward. If it's not Jay, they'll be bugging you instead.
[00:16:10] Jay: Yes, they will link everything and they'll definitely be reaching out. So, Andrew, it was great meeting you the other day. It's great talking to you again today. I, love the story and thank you for being on. We'll catch up again soon. All right.
[00:16:20] Andrew: Yeah. Thanks for having me. Thanks Jay. And congrats again on the, on number six. That's awesome.
[00:16:24] Jay: The 15th kid. Yes. just keep coming. Thank you, brother. I appreciate it. Have a good one, man. See ya.
[00:16:29] Andrew: Thanks.