everybody. This is Stelly,

Ft. And this is heating Shaw and I think in true Stelly. And I guess heating forms Stelian me for him. We're gonna talk about something positive today. People like talking about more

than your sales and market. We just want a bullshit and chat about business in life. And hopefully, while we're doing them for my long value to be the best for people trying to get shit way don't want to give you feedback.

That's bullshit. You want you to do your best and something that that still he came up with, I don't know when he came up with it, but I heard about it right now and what it is is I think something much needed right now, which is a discussion about what we're seeing that's actually working in business right now, considering shelter in place, Cove it out of control. I think somebody called this Armageddon or something like that to me five minutes ago before I got on this. Really? Yeah. They call the army, get in there like, yeah, Are you doing with the current arm again? And Bubba blowin like I drink this fight as I can and definitely better than a lot of people. So I can't I can't really complain about anything. And so yeah,

let's talk about it. Like, I think the big thing was like, what? Businesses? What approaches are sort of working right now for people that we can kind of talk about.

Yeah, I thought that it would be good. I did just just some examples in our network or with with an offense so anywhere that we've observed that we've seen over the last couple months that we thought, Wow, this is inspiring. This is cool that somebody is creative or innovating or adapting and changing and succeeding in some way of finding opportunity evening in these difficult times just to give people inspiration to simulate them. And just because we have enough off the critical things that we read and hear about every single day. And so how about we want to do this? You can go first. I can go first with examples, and we go back and forth. Ouch. Special will come up with and be able. That's right. Yeah. Good stuff with people.

Yeah, go ahead.

Yeah. So the first thing that will bring up is Actually, I want to go outside of Tech, right? So when this whole at the very beginning, like the beginning off, Kobe being a bigger thing in Europe. I remember that in the first few weeks there was this shortage of masts, right? It's not a problem anymore. Like this is kind of a past problem. But while it was a big kind of surging demand in problem, remember, the people were trying to research and figure out where locally cannot buy some ass because I can't. Nobody could order anything online and get it. And I remember that I heard from a friend about a little store that was I don't know the English word for that. You know, those stores that do let the work they kind of fix your your shoes

or tailor a tailor like equivalent of that. Yeah, like

that is like, it is a small taylor in this town that's like 20 minutes from from where I live, that has and does masks just go to him. But go and you have to have time because there's a huge line that's out of this little store. Okay? And so I go there and you know the whole like shop window is full of these. All kinds of design mask all kinds of flavors for kids, for this for that. And there's a huge line outside the type that's a tiny store, really. So I wait in line. Eventually I get inside and I wanted to buy something so mass for my family, for kids, for for relatives. And I start chatting up the guy that was running that that Taylor store and the first thing that I noticed that as I entered there were all these like thank you at letters that he had hung up from local hospitals and doctor's offices. And I was like, Oh,

that's cool. Did you? Did you just supply all these people is like, Yeah, all these kind of possibles and, like medical professionals in the area, had a difficult time obtaining mass. Now, some of the mass that I do hit the medical grade, but I am not getting certification for it, right. That would be too difficult, but they still wanted them, so I've been donating them, and he's like, and the other reason I have this,

to be honest, is it's just good marketing, like people just feel good when they see this. And so, you know, I thought, Be a good idea. I'm not going cool. And then I asked him, I'm like, how many other tailors doing this? And he started laughing and he was like, Nobody does this except me And I was like, Why is that? He's like, Well,

the figures. Tailors are not very entrepreneurial. They're very risk averse and, honestly, what I'm doing, sort of maybe questionably legal, right? So he's like there was twice that police had shown up to talk to him to see if he's allowed to turn this into, like, a mask shop or whatever. And once they saw the all the letters from although, thank you letters from the medical community and they talked to him, they just left again, like at. This is kind of This is fine. He's just providing the services,

helping the community. It's cool. And he had, like, basically a bunch of women that would kind of built these masks in his Tim a store. He's like, I've never been busier in my life. I'm making a ton of money right now, and I don't feel like I'm taking advantage of people. I'm providing a service, giving people something I Feist, my mask that could price them three times the amount of people would still buy them, but I priced them it some margin where I feel like I'm making good money. But I'm also fared there, still affordable to people, and I'm just raking in it.

But the reason why other tailors wouldn't be doing this is because they'd be too afraid if they allowed or not. If they get in trouble and they're just not flexible enough to be like, you know what? Nobody's going to come into the store to fix their leather shoes right now. But there is a huge demand for an item that nobody hasn't we could easily provide. And that was one of my favorite examples of just somebody being creative, being positive, adapting, changing what he's doing in crushing it. There's a four weeks there were lines out off the head persons shop and, you know, and the other benefit of that is I'm never gonna forget that guy, and I don't go to the tailor that often. But if I need to, I'm going to him. My this is going to that. Yeah, all right. So that's that's one of my kind of small local stories that I'd better really love than that was inspiring for me to see.

Yeah, I'm going to continue the trend. So and that's amazing. I mean that there's so many levels of that that are amazing. Like, you know, part of it is like he just didn't let things that he knew, you know, would get in the way of other people. Get in the way of him, Yeah, from doing it. And I think that's that's super powerful. I mean, legal or not, he was providing the service and people needed it right and that they're a product that people needed it. And it was their choice,

whether they took it from him or not, you know, and by donating it, I think he's is definitely screening a lot of things in a good enough way, right? And at a time like this, I think it's difficult for people to get in trouble on some small things like that, and kind of what matters more is that people are sort of taking care so kind of on that note, like I've been most impressed by the amount of restaurants that I'm seeing really literate than ones I was most impressed by are the ones that iterated super early their whole model, and they started doing like, take home meal kits and, like where you could make that spaghetti that you love from that Italian place at home, and they gave you all the ingredients to do it. And so that was what happened really early on, when even like food like pickup was not acceptable. And that was really crazy.

Like to see even like watching them iterated through a few different platforms toe help them sort of cell. I was kind of fun to see just being intact and all that and then lately, like like just the amount of creativity to be able to provide people with food that's of restaurant quality that you can pick up from restaurants and didn't do take out and the just watching the menus. Iterating like you could just tell like they were really focused on optimizing their business so that they could survive during this time and they were iterating it and kept changing things until they found things that worked and also used instagram heavily to do this. It's just been impressive to me to watch this. I even saw something else that was interesting, which is like, if one sort of restaurant figured it out, what you'd have is like, even had these things were like It feels like, let's say, a sweet shop, right that mostly sold sweets, vegan sweets or something like that. This is the one that comes to mind. They'd go partner with,

like a savoury shop, right, like somebody who made sandwiches, for example. And then they start bundling them together. And it's because one of them had ah audience and they were already buying from them. And so they decided to basically partner up. And you started seeing all these collaborations, so to speak, start happening and combinations of things you could buy. And these are just restaurants doing it right. So you kind of saw this sort of almost called arms and folks kind of like partnering up and then using Instagram for the marketing and sort of creating the equivalent of like bundling multiple products together and selling it to the audience Really, really cool. Another thing I saw of seeing is like just more, more focus on like, Oh,

these are items we use in our kitchen to cook with, whether it's like the special kind of canned tomatoes or what have you. And outside of even the meal kits and making your own meals, a bunch of these folks were just selling that stuff just like just like for a long time. And I think this is a pretty funny one. But people were selling their excess toilet paper right because because the commercial, the commercial category did not like had an oversupply and the consumer one had undersupply. And so they started doing that in kind of necessities, even though they're a restaurant. But they have these items that was really cool. Some of them started bundling it with the food. So hey, buy some food, get some toilet paper. Wow. So I think that was really cool.

And what other example I've had is there's a company. I know that that sort of is ah pretty popular tea shop in the Bay Area, and they they tried some of the iterations around, like meal kits and stuff like that even gave away, like gave away a certain item like every day whether you bought or not. So they were really like community community focused. They shut down all that stuff recently, but the reason they shut it down is there going to a full on, like, tea box, sell it online from their website model on and they call it going into hard hibernation. So they're going to hibernation with their stores and really focusing all their efforts on e commerce. I don't know. They've been setting that up for, like, the last one or two months,

because that takes a little bit of time, but they've been doing it really fast, like normally, it would be like a six month thing for them to figure out how to sell something like a T box or something like that for people or teeth, subscription and stuff like that, just because of branding and sort of things like that. Like they're not necessarily the fastest, because they really kind of think about a lot of these things and kind of doing well. And then, ah, I was actually speaking to them, and I just I just told them, like, do you really need to change the brandy? Why don't you just slap your own current logo's on it and kind of ship it and just figure out what the actual packages. Because,

like, I think, like, figure out what you put in the package and what people really want with you know, what kind of teeth they want on a subscription that they drink regularly and kind of they caught on to that and latch on to that and basically were able to ship this, like, in a month or two, the whole thing versus something that I know they would have taken six months to do otherwise. So it's that sort of like, you know, hustle so to speak that I find important right now and the ones that seem to be succeeding are the ones that are able to generate and figure it out and think about

it that way. Yeah, I love that. All right, So I think last example for my and and that will wrap up the episode, um, for today. So So it is similar vein, basically a a startup that was kind of building and selling mostly stuff that you would wear going to the gym so that the reflection of item would be like a gym back that you can also have used to go to the office with. So, you know, it has, like, all these cool hacks, have your laptop in their phones and everything, but also like the kind of the perfect back for an active professional. Somebody wants to go to the gym into the office and went one back.

That was kind of the main seller, and then they had a bunch of other little items. But it's all around the idea of going to the gym and going to work. And then, you know, Kobe hits and nobody's going to the gym or toe work. So their sales basically went to zero, right? Yep. Nobody buying any any any of these items. And so what they did then was think OK, we have a customer base, right? We know these people. These are young professionals. We know that there really,

you know, athletically active, like they want to do sports. And now they're stuck home. And we know that they are always kind of stuff, optimizing and kind of like trying to prove themselves. What can we do? What can we offer these people to keep generating revenue to offer a service or product or something of that sort, and they think at first they try to figure out if it could come up with some like home gym equipment thing. But they quickly realized that all their kind of RD and development was in a such a different direction. There was nothing quickly that they thought they could both come up with an and successfully sell during that time. So they came up with a totally different approach. They send a survey to the customers, asking them a bunch of questions like what the current struggles and challenges are, what they're currently interested in. And then they came up with this idea to do to sell basically a I don't want you want to call it like almost like a virtual fitness boot camp of sorts,

where what you would do is, you would say, I'm interested in keep improving my my body and mind, even during these times and what I'm gonna get. It's basically a six month coaching program where, you know, whatever. Once a week I'm on a zoom call and you know I'm sharing some of my results in some of the data and I'm getting coached in these improvements and there's gonna be like, different themes. The first month is like about sleep and recovery, so they would ship you like a sleeping tracker band, and then they would review the data with you and they will give you suggest on how to improve your sleep and I'll check in with you. And then the second month is all about whatever nutrition. And then they would have a nutritionist who calls with you and set up a recision plan for you in a shopping plan and cooking plan. And check that the third month was about like the body workouts and that have this famous body workout guy that gives classes and does this and that and whatever. And there's like all these different.

They had, like, products from other vendors that it would ship you and tell you they had these other experts that would bring in to do coaching sessions Or do you have been ourselves sorts of something and then they would have these, like, one on one check ins, and it was basically like, Hey, during the next six months, you can go to the gym. You came to a lot of things, but maybe this is the time to change your life. And we're gonna go in kind of take note of everything from your sleep to your nutrition to your workout to your you know, whatever. They're all kinds of other things and they package it really nicely was just a pdf, but it looked really awesome, right?

And they sent this like as a rough idea to a number of people based on the survey results, and had, like, a ton of people that wanted to buy it so much that they would never. They wouldn't be able to supply that like because it was much more of a manual service. But it ended up being so successful that it basically is floating the company, paying for every salaries. It has been super successful, so they have all these great case studies. The people are going through the program, apparently love it, and it's kept the company a life and vibrant, and they through this process. They also now developing all kinds of other ideas for products and other things because they're doing much closer interaction with their customers, and they usually would where they would just ship them. The product basically a gym bag. And so I. I love that they just creatively went from selling a bag to selling kind of the whole change your life in six months and this and using other companies products are the experts and just packaging this in a way that seems super appealing to their customers and that generates so much money that nobody had to get fired. They didn't have to like clothes shop because they've had so many months of basically no sales.

That's awesome. Um, that's great story. I know a better way to end this.

Yeah, I think the common theme is really You said it with, like, hustle. It's just like there's people out there that are harder to discourage that are more creative in their thinking on solutions there are less inhibited by fears of business gonna be the wrong step, Or is this allowed, or how will people think about this? But they're just like, this is a time to get creative to, you know, and to get shit done and to figure out how we're gonna provide value to the world, how we're gonna make money. What do we need to change to survive in life in this environment? And, yeah, there is a ton of these people out there and there are shoots inspiration to all of us. And whenever any of us and we're all gonna hit a wall here and there during these times like, it's good to remember that with that type of thinking, you can actually create some amazing things, even during difficult times.

You said it there.

There you go. I think that's it from us for this episode. By the way, if you have a super inspiring example that you'd like to share with us, we love to hear from you and we can hear enough good use thesis. It's self if you want to. Email US H and Shah at gmail dot com. Stelly at close dot com Share your positive stories, your good stories, your awesome stories. We want to hear all of them until next time. That's it from us.