Patrick Coddou’s entrepreneurial journey is impressive. In 2015 he launched Supply, a direct-to-consumer seller of razors and shaving goods, and then sold the business in 2022. He conceived the idea, hired staff, scaled revenue, and exited profitably.
His journey is incomplete, however. His talents apply to seemingly any industry, but his identity for years was tied to Supply. He’s now adjusting and charting his next moves.
Patrick is among the most popular guests on the podcast, starting in 2020 and followed by appearances in 2021, April 2022, and October 2022. In this recent conversation, he shares his post-Supply life, the emotions of stepping away, and looking forward.
Our entire audio is embedded below. The transcript is edited for length and clarity.
Eric Bandholz: Update us on what you’ve been up to.
Patrick Coddou: It’s been quite a journey. I was the founder and CEO of a shaving company called Supply, which I sold a little over two years ago. After the sale, I stayed with the company for about a year, running the business and seeing it grow. I’m currently the head of marketing at a snow ski startup called M1 Skis. It’s been a bit of a roller coaster, but in a good way.
Bandholz: You took a step back from social media, particularly X. Why?
Coddou: After the sale, I hit burnout. I didn’t consciously decide to leave X — I just stopped engaging. Burnout comes with apathy and disinterest in things that once excited you, and X was one of those things. I stayed involved with Supply for a year after the sale, though, and it was productive. We doubled our top- and bottom-line numbers.
I had built a strong team, especially a capable head of marketing, Trace Crawford, who took a lot off my plate. As the year progressed, I became more of a leader and less of a doer, which helped me navigate the burnout. That was a big part of the transition.
Bandholz: How does leadership change when you stop doing everything yourself?
Coddou: It helped that I no longer had ownership, so I didn’t carry the same emotional weight. However, I was still financially motivated, as an earn-out was tied to the business’s performance. That allowed me to guide the team without micromanaging. They knew what needed doing, and I let them figure out how. Our team was solid; no one left that year, and the company continued to perform well.
Bandholz: You’re now outside of Supply. How has your perspective changed?
Coddou: My earn-out ended in August, but I had already stepped away from day-to-day operations a year prior. Trace took over as CEO, and I stayed on as a consultant. My role now includes filming ads and offering strategic advice. I have zero regrets about selling the business — it was the right move for me, my family, and the company.
But stepping away did force me to confront my identity. I hadn’t realized how much of my self-worth I tied to being the “razor guy” until that was gone. After the sale, I experienced a sense of joy, followed by a profound period of questioning and even depression. After the burnout, I felt lost, unsure of what I wanted to do next, and hesitant to return to ecommerce.
Bandholz: Why do entrepreneurs feel unfulfilled after selling their business?
Coddou: Many entrepreneurs believe that selling their business will bring happiness, but that’s rarely true. I attended the Main Street Summit, where we discussed how money, success, and fame don’t bring joy.
I’ve realized that selling Supply has brought me financial comfort and freedom but didn’t provide lasting happiness. Work is essential for finding joy and purpose, and I’ve come to appreciate that I need to be building something, whether a business or a personal project, to feel fulfilled.
Bandholz: Tell me about your role at M1 Skis. Was this a deliberate direction or an opportunity that fell into your lap?
Coddou: It was a bit of both. I’m running marketing for M1 Skis, a startup in its early stages. When I joined, there was almost no public awareness of the company. I’m responsible for building the brand from scratch, which I love doing. I work part-time, remotely, and for a friend. It’s a perfect fit. Initially, I hesitated to return to work, but this opportunity was too good to pass up.
Bandholz: How do you approach marketing for M1 Skis compared to Supply?
Coddou: The marketing strategies are surprisingly similar. At Supply, we sold high-end razors, which required educating customers about why they should invest in a more expensive product than competitors. It’s the same challenge with M1 Skis.
Unlike anything on the market, we make our skis from solid aluminum. They’re more expensive than traditional skis, and people are skeptical about the technology. My job is to explain why our product is worth the investment and build customer trust through education and engagement.
The experience has been great. I get to focus on the things I enjoy — like building the brand — without dealing with the headaches of payroll or invoices. The best part is that I don’t lose sleep like I did with Supply. I’m still invested in M1’s success, but it doesn’t consume my thoughts 24/7. I can fully check out when I’m not working, which is a huge relief.
Bandholz: Could you envision starting another business?
Coddou: I could, but I would approach it very differently. I would create a small, manageable business with minimal stress. Something that aligns with my lifestyle, even if it means making less money. It would be niche, high-margin, and not reliant on constant social media or inventory management. I want a business that works for me, not one that adds unnecessary complications to my life.
Bandholz: You’re advocating for simplicity.
Coddou: Exactly. The complexity of Supply became overwhelming. We used 30 apps on our Shopify store and multiple social media channels. It was a lot to manage. At M1 Skis, I’ve kept things simple. We’re using Shopify Email instead of a more complex service like Klaviyo, and I haven’t installed any extra apps. This approach allows me to focus on building a great product and telling its story.
Bandholz: Where can people buy these skis and reach out to you?
The internet is connecting the world. As of July 2024, 5.45 billion people — 67.1% of the global population — were internet users. Among them, 5.17 billion (63.7%) were active on social media.
—
Worldwide retail ecommerce growth through 2029 will fluctuate, with the overall trend being positive, according to Statista. The food segment will experience the highest revenue, reaching an estimated $1.23 trillion by the end of the period.
—
In addition, Turkey will experience the most retail ecommerce growth from 2024 to 2029, with a compound annual growth through 2029 of 11.6%. India and Brazil are also among the world’s fastest-growing ecommerce markets, each projected to have a CAGR exceeding 11%.
—
Moreover, during Q2 2024, online shoppers worldwide spent an average of approximately $2.78 per visit across all categories. Health and beauty led in spending per visit at $3.27, followed by home furniture at $3.09 per visit.
To Dean Pohlman, long-term business success stems from a purpose. His is to help men improve their health and fulfillment through fitness and personal connections. That’s the mission of Man Flow Yoga, the company he founded in 2012, which offers memberships to workout programs and a paid community.
Pohlman, a former college lacrosse player, is an authority on yoga instruction for men and a published author on the topic.
He first appeared on the podcast in 2021. In this our second conversation, he shares client success stories, YouTube tactics, and the “why” behind his business.
The entire audio of our discussion is embedded below. The transcript is edited for length and clarity.
Eric Bandholz: Give us a quick rundown on who you are.
Dean Pohlman: I own a company called Man Flow Yoga. We sell memberships to Yoga workout programs for men.
I’m a former collegiate lacrosse player. I discovered yoga by accident but noticed its benefits after consistent practice. However, I saw that men weren’t engaging with it much, especially because it wasn’t presented in a way that resonated with them. So, I created a brand focusing on fitness-oriented yoga tailored for men. I initially launched a YouTube channel and a Facebook page.
Over time, I developed paid membership workouts for men — primarily those in their 40s, 50s, and 60s. They found they couldn’t do their regular workouts due to aging and needed to focus on flexibility and foundational strength. Our programs help with flexibility and alleviate pain in, typically, the lower back, shoulders, and knees. The ultimate goal is to enable men to stay active and independent as long as possible, whether playing with their kids or staying mobile as they age.
I’ve been interviewing members for our podcast, “The Better Man.” One memorable story is from a guy who weighed 300 pounds at the onset of Covid. He started a yoga program alongside daily dog walks and lost 75 pounds within a year. What stands out from these stories is the consistency people find in exercise. They enjoy it and feel good afterward, which encourages them to continue. This creates a ripple effect, where they start improving other areas of their lives like diet or adding in more physical activities.
Bandholz: What do your workout programs look like?
Pohlman: They can be as few as two to three times per week or as many as five or six. Our sessions aren’t long — typically 30 to 40 minutes. We have beginner programs that start at 15 to 20 minutes. People start noticing changes after just a few weeks, especially in how they feel.
For example, back pain disappears. These physical improvements motivate people to stay consistent. When you feel better and have more energy, it’s easier to continue instead of focusing solely on aesthetics, which takes much longer to notice.
Bandholz: You’ve done a great job of building a community.
Pohlman: I’m proud of the Facebook Group we’ve built, though it took a lot of time. It’s a supportive community of about 7,000 men who aren’t afraid to be vulnerable and share personal struggles. When someone posts about not being consistent with workouts, they’re met with understanding, not judgment. People relate to the same struggles, which fosters a sense of camaraderie.
I launched the group in 2013, and new members are always welcome. However, to maintain its quality, we keep the group exclusive to paying members — whether they join a challenge, sign up for a full membership, or purchase a book.
We consistently remind members about the community through emails, video mentions, and our 90-day onboarding series. The ongoing engagement keeps people connected and accountable.
Bandholz: How’s your YouTube channel performing?
Pohlman: Despite having over 500,000 subscribers, engagement is relatively low, although new videos typically get 3,000 to 10,000 views in the first week. Some go viral. Our morning yoga videos have recently gained traction. Short-form content is also helping with the algorithm. We went from gaining about 3,000 subscribers monthly to 10,000 last month. Certain topics, like sexual wellness, perform exceptionally well.
Bandholz: Do you collaborate with other brands?
Pohlman: Collaborations need to feel organic. I prefer working with people I genuinely connect with and would hang out with outside of business. One example is Anthony Balduzzi from Fit Father Project. We’ve been collaborating for about two years; our products complement each other. Beyond business, he’s a friend. These types of authentic relationships work well for long-term success, and that’s the approach I take.
Bandholz: What’s your long-term vision for Man Flow Yoga?
Pohlman: I want the business to expand beyond yoga into a broader men’s wellness brand. I’ve started introducing mental and emotional wellness topics on the podcast, but I want to incorporate more of that. We currently offer structured programs via an app and website, but everything is self-paced. I want to introduce more guided support — something more hands-on. While we have customer support and a Facebook Group, a more direct assistance model could benefit our members.
Bandholz: What’s the “why” behind your business?
Pohlman: Many men haven’t done the introspective work to understand their desires and what drives them. It’s about recognizing that the things I truly want — family, freedom, joy — are already within reach. I don’t need to wait for a business milestone to achieve them.
Most men believe they must accomplish something before feeling fulfilled, but that’s a trap. Once you realize you can have what you want, life becomes easier. Authenticity is key. People can sense inauthenticity, and I believe businesses built on genuine connections and purpose are more successful in the long run.
Ahead of abortion access, ahead of immigration, and way ahead of climate change, US voters under 30 are most concerned about one issue: housing affordability. And it’s not just young voters who are identifying soaring rents and eye-watering home sale prices as among their top worries. For the first time in recent memory, the cost of housing could be a major factor in the presidential election.
It’s not hard to see why. From the beginning of the pandemic to early 2024, US home prices rose by 47%. In large swaths of the country, buying a home is no longer a possibility even for those with middle-class incomes. For many, that marks the end of an American dream built around owning a house. Over the same time, rents have gone up 26%.
Vice President Kamala Harris has offered an ambitious plan to build more: “Right now, a serious housing shortage is part of what is driving up cost,” she said last month in Las Vegas. “So we will cut the red tape and work with the private sector to build 3 million new homes.” Included in her proposals is a $40 billion innovation fund to support housing construction.
Former president Donald Trump, meanwhile, has also called for cutting regulations but mostly emphasizes a far different way to tackle the housing crunch: mass deportation of the immigrants he says are flooding the country, and whose need for housing he claims is responsible for the huge jump in prices. (While a few studies show some local impact on the cost of housing from immigration in general, the effect is relatively small, and there is no plausible economic scenario in which the number of immigrants over the last few years accounts for the magnitude of the increase in home prices and rents across much of the country.)
The opposing views offered by Trump and Harris have implications not only for how we try to lower home prices but for how we view the importance of building. Moreover, this attention on the housing crisis also reveals a broader issue with the construction industry at large: This sector has been tech-averse for decades, and it has become less productive over the past 50 years.
The reason for the current rise in the cost of housing is clear to most economists: a lack of supply. Simply put, we don’t build enough houses and apartments, and we haven’t for years. Depending on how you count it, the US has a shortage of around 1.2 million to more than 5.5 million single-family houses.
Permitting delays and strict zoning rules create huge obstacles to building more and faster—as do other widely recognized issues, like the political power of NIMBY activists across the country and an ongoing shortage of skilled workers. But there is also another, less talked-about problem that’s plaguing the industry: We’re not very efficient at building, and we seem somehow to be getting worse.
Together these forces have made it more expensive to build houses, leading to increases in prices. Albert Saiz, a professor of urban economics and real estate at MIT, calculates that construction costs account for more than two-thirds of the price of a new house in much of the country, including the Southwest and West, where much of the building is happening. Even in places like California and New England, where land is extremely expensive, construction accounts for 40% to 60% of value of a new home, according to Saiz.
Part of the problem, Saiz says, is that “if you go to any construction site, you’ll see the same methods used 30 years ago.”
The productivity woes are evident across the construction industry, not just in the housing sector. From clean-energy advocates dreaming of renewables and an expanded power grid to tech companies racing to add data centers, everyone seems to agree: We need to build more and do it quickly. The practical reality, though, is that it costs more, and takes more time, to construct anything.
For decades, companies across the industry have largely ignored ways they could improve the efficiency of their operations. They have shunned data science and the kinds of automation that have transformed the other sectors of the economy. According to an estimation by the McKinsey Global Institute, construction, one of the largest parts of the global economy, is the least digitized major sector worldwide—and it isn’t even close.
The reality is that even if we ease the endless permitting delays and begin cutting red tape, we will still be faced with a distressing fact: The construction industry is not very efficient when it comes to building stuff.
The awful truth
Productivity is our best measure of long-term progress in an industry, at least according to economists. Technically, it’s a measure of how much a worker can produce; as companies adopt more efficient practices and new technologies, productivity grows and businesses can make stuff (in this case, homes and buildings) faster and more cheaply. Yet something shocking has happened in the construction industry: Productivity seems to have stalled and even gone into reverse over the last few decades.
In a recent paper called “The Strange and Awful Path of Productivity in the US Construction Sector,” two leading economists at the University of Chicago showed that productivity growth in US construction came to a halt beginning around 1970. Productivity is notoriously difficult to quantify, but the Chicago researchers calculated it in one of the key parts of the construction business: housing. They found that the number of houses or total square footage (houses are getting bigger) built per employee each year was flat or even falling over the last 50 years. And the researchers believe the lack of productivity growth holds true for all different types of construction.
Chad Syverson, one of the authors, admits he is still trying to pinpoint the reason—“It’s probably a few things.” While he says it’s difficult to quantify the specific impact of various factors on productivity, including the effects of regulatory red tape and political fights that often delay construction, “part of the industry’s problem is its own operational inefficiency,” he says. “There’s no doubt about it.” In other words, the industry just isn’t very innovative.
The lack of productivity in construction over the last half-century, at a time when all other sectors grew dramatically, is “really amazing,” he says—and not in a good way.
US manufacturing, in contrast, continued growing at around 2% to 3% annually over the same period. Auto workers, as a result, now produce far more cars than they once did, leading to cheaper vehicles if you adjust for inflation (and, by most measures, safer and better ones).
Productivity in construction is not just a US problem, according to the McKinsey Global Institute, which has tracked the issue for nearly a decade. Not all countries are faring as badly as the US, but worldwide construction productivity has been flat over the last few decades, says Jan Mischke, who heads the McKinsey work.
Beyond adding to the costs and threatening the financial viability of many planned projects, Mischke says, the lack of productivity is “reflected in all the mess, time and cost overruns, concerns about quality, rework, and all the things that everyone who has ever built anything will have seen.”
The nature of construction work can make it difficult to improve longstanding processes and introduce new technologies, he says: “Most other sectors become better over time by doing the same thing twice or three times or 3 million times. They learn and improve. All that is essentially missing in construction, where every single project starts from scratch and reinvents the wheel.”
Mischke also sees another reason for the industry’s lack of productivity: the “misaligned incentives” of the various players, who often make more money the longer a project takes.
Though the challenges are endemic to the business, Mischke adds that builders can take steps to overcome them by moving to digital technologies, implementing more standardized processes, and improving the efficiency of their business practices.
“Most other sectors become better over time by doing the same thing twice or three times or 3 million times. All that is essentially missing in construction.”
It’s an urgent problem to solve as many countries race to build housing, expand clean-energy capabilities, and update infrastructure like roads and airports. In their latest report, the McKinsey researchers warn of the dangers if productivity doesn’t improve: “The net-zero transition may be delayed, growth ambitions may be deferred, and countries may struggle to meet the infrastructure and housing needs for their populations.”
But the report also says there’s a flip side to the lack of progress in much of the industry: Individual companies that begin to improve their efficiency could gain a huge competitive advantage.
Building on the data
When Jit Kee Chin joined Suffolk Construction as its chief data officer in 2017, the title was unique in the industry. But Chin, armed with a PhD in experimental physics from MIT and a 10-year stint at McKinsey, brought to the large Boston-based firm the kind of technical and management expertise often missing from construction companies. And she recognized that large construction projects—including the high-rise apartment buildings and sprawling data centers that Suffolk often builds—generate vast amounts of useful data.
At the time, much of the data was siloed; information on the progress of a project was in one place, scheduling in another, and safety data and reports in yet another. “The systems didn’t talk to each other, and it was very difficult to cross-correlate,” says Chin. Getting all the data together so it could be understood and utilized across the business was an early task.
“Almost all construction companies are talking about how to better use their data now,” says Chin, who is currently Suffolk’s CTO, and since her hiring, “a couple others have even appointed chief data officers.” But despite such encouraging signs, she sees the effort to improve productivity in the industry as still very much a work in progress.
One ongoing and obvious target: the numerous documents that are constantly being revised as they move along from architect to engineers to subcontractors. It’s the lifeblood of any construction project, and Chin says the process “is by no means seamless.” Architects and subcontractors sometimes use different software; meanwhile, the legally binding documents spelling out details of a project are still circulated as printouts. A more frictionless flow of information among the multitude of players is critical to better coordinate the complex building process.
Ultimately, though, building is a physical activity. And while automation has largely been absent from building trades, robots are finally cheap enough to be attractive to builders, especially companies facing a shortage of workers. “The cost of off-the-shelf robotic components has come down to a point where it is feasible to think of simple robots automating a very repetitive task,” says Chin. And advances in robotic image recognition, lidar, AI, and dexterity, she says, mean robots are starting to be able to safely navigate construction sites.
One step in construction where digital designs meet the physical world is the process of laying out blueprints for walls and other structures on the floor of a building. It’s an exacting, time-consuming manual practice, prone to errors.
The Dusty Robotics field printer marks the layout for walls and other structures.
DUSTY ROBOTICS
And startups like Dusty Robotics are betting it’s an almost perfect application for a Roomba-like robot. Tessa Lau, its CEO, recalls that when she researched the industry before founding the company in 2018, she was struck by seeing “people on their hands and knees snapping chalk lines.”
Based in Silicon Valley, the company builds a box-shaped machine that scoots about a site on sturdy wheels to mark the layout. Though the company often markets it as a field printer to allay any fears about automation, it’s an AI-powered robot with advanced sensors that plan and guide its travels.
Not only does the robot automate a critical job, but because that task is so central in the construction process, it also helps open a digital window into the overall workflow of a project.
A history lesson
Whatever the outcome of the upcoming election, don’t hold your breath waiting for home prices to fall; even if we do build more (or somehow decrease demand), it will probably take years for the supply to catch up. But the political spotlight on housing affordability could be a rare opportunity to focus on the broad problem of construction productivity.
While some critics have argued that Harris’s plan is too vague and lacks the ambition required to solve the housing crisis, her message that we need to build more and faster is the right one. “It takes too long and it costs too much to build. Whether it’s a new housing development, a new factory, or a new bridge, projects take too long to go from concept to reality,” Harris said in a speech in late September. Then she asked: “You know long it took to build [the Empire State Building]?”
Harris stresses cutting red tape to unleash a building boom. That’s critical, but it’s only part of the long-term answer. The construction of the famous New York City skyscraper took just over a year in 1931—a feat that provides valuable clues to how the industry itself can finally increase its productivity.
The explanation for why it was built so quickly has less to do with new technologies—in fact, the engineers mostly opted for processes and materials that were familiar and well-tested at the time—and more to do with how the project leaders managed every aspect of the design and construction process for speed and efficiency. The activity of the thousands of workers was carefully scheduled and tracked, and the workflow was highly choreographed to minimize delays. Even the look of the 1,250-foot building was largely a result of choosing the fastest and simplest way to build.
To a construction executive like Suffolk’s Chin, who estimates it would take at least four years to construct such a building today, the lessons of the Empire State Building resonate, especially the operational discipline and the urgency to finish the structure as quickly as possible. “It’s a stark difference when you think about how much time it took and how much time it would take to build that building now,” she says.
If we want an affordable future, the construction business needs to recapture that sense of urgency and efficiency. To do so, the industry will need to change the way it operates and alter its incentive structures; it will need to incorporate the right mix of automation and find financial models that will transform outdated business practices. The good news is that advances in data science, automation, and AI are offering companies new opportunities to do just that.
The hope, then, is that capitalism will do capitalism. Innovative firms will (hopefully) build more cheaply and faster, boost their profits, and become more competitive. Such companies will prosper, and others will begin to mimic the early adopters, investing in the new technologies and business models. In other words, the reality of seeing some builders profit by using data and automation will finally help drag the construction industry into the modern digital age.
In late 2020 I interviewed a developer who had launched a Shopify app to send manual text messages to cart abandoners. Eighteen months later we spoke again, this time to discuss his sale of that company and purchase of another, an app for creating upsells in a Shopify checkout.
By early 2023 he had sold the second company and launched a third one, a coupon-leak recovery app.
And that brings me to my fourth conversation with Dennis Hegstad. He has shut down the coupon-leak business and started his fourth, a data provider for the ecommerce industry called Internet Research Unit. What, exactly, is Internet Research Unit? I asked him that question and more when we recently spoke.
The entire audio of our conversation is embedded below. The transcript is edited for clarity and length.
Eric Bandholz: Give us an update on what’s happening in your world.
Dennis Hegstad: In 2021, I sold LiveRecover, our SMS app for Shopify. That was our first exit in ecommerce. Then I sold another app, OrderBump, just 100 days after buying it in 2022. That sale was pretty much luck.
In 2023 I launched Vigilance, a coupon-code leak protection app, but that business failed. Shopify updated its checkout system, ultimately killing Vigilance, so we shut it down. We offered to return the investors’ money, but they said, “Try something else.” That’s when we started building Internet Research Unit earlier this year. Those same Vigilance investors are part of it.
Bandholz: What’s Internet Research Unit?
Hegstad: It’s a data platform for the ecommerce industry. Our primary users are brand owners, agencies, app developers, and financiers. Brands can track competitors’ revenue, units sold, popular SKUs, app stacks, and more. They can set up alerts to track competitors’ sales or app usage changes to guide product launches or strategic decisions. Agencies and app developers can use the data for lead generation — tracking which brands use specific services or technologies, such as Klaviyo, and which don’t. Financiers can assess trends or identify struggling companies they might want to invest in or acquire.
Our product is high-end, priced around $500 a month, so it’s not for beginners. It’s aimed at established companies who want to fine-tune their strategies.
Our data is public; brands cannot hide it from our platform. We can track compliance-related issues, like price manipulation or accessibility compliance, so companies can address potential problems before they lead to lawsuits.
We have ways of accurately estimating sales and breaking it down by SKU. For example, if a brand sells leggings, we can report which colors and sizes are selling best. That way, competitors can focus on high-performing products.
Bandholz: The front-end design of your software apps, including Internet Research Unit, is terrific. What’s your design philosophy?
Hegstad: We don’t use professional designers on the site. My co-founder and I handle design and prioritize aesthetics. Stripe pioneered the trend of beautifully designed SaaS platforms, and we follow that approach. Software should feel exciting to use, not boring or outdated.
We aim for a cyberpunk vibe with Internet Research Unit — something that feels futuristic and appeals to tech-savvy users. We even started selling a bit of merchandise — shirts and hats — with designs inspired by this aesthetic. We did hire a designer to create cyberpunk-inspired shirt art. One says “anti-algorithm” because we feel like everyone’s life is ruled by algorithms these days. It’s a fun way to rebel against that.
We’ve considered other branded products, such as ZYN-style [nicotine-pouch] cans with USB drives inside. But we’re focused on growing the software business before diving deep into merchandise. If the software performs well, we might reinvest some of the profits into the brand side.
Bandholz: Is the platform fully built?
Hegstad: There’s more to come. We launched in March, and we’ve slowly onboarded users. In November, we’ll open it to the public. We want to add funding data so our users can find brands that have raised capital but are underperforming. That would help venture capitalists or merger and acquisition teams identify struggling companies that need help.
We’re not trying to shoot for the stars. We want to build something fun and keep it going. Reaching $5 million in annual revenue would be great. We love the business — it feels challenging, and there’s much to learn.
I’ve interviewed hundreds of entrepreneurs for this podcast. Most are problem solvers and optimists, confident in their ability to fulfill a need.
Take Lloyd Armbrust. He’s an editor turned software founder, having launched OwnLocal, a Y Combinator-backed portal for local newspapers.
When the pandemic hit, he observed doctors and nurses struggling to get protective gear. He thought, “This is ridiculous. How hard could it be to make these things?”
His solution was Armbrust American, an Austin, Texas-based manufacturer of personal protective equipment, which he launched in May 2020 and remains viable despite the dramatic drop in demand.
He and I recently spoke. He shared his lessons in manufacturing, ecommerce, and family-first priorities. Our entire audio is embedded below. The transcript is edited for clarity and length.
Eric Bandholz: Tell us who you are.
Lloyd Armbrust: My background is in media and software, but most prominently, I started a U.S.-based personal protective equipment manufacturing company in May 2020, at the onset of the pandemic. We produce U.S.-approved surgical masks, KN95 facemasks, and gloves. People said manufacturing couldn’t be done here and had to be in China, but we proved them wrong — though it’s been the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
When the pandemic hit in March 2020, my software business, OwnLocal, was slowing down. I saw how doctors and nurses struggled to get protective gear — some wore raincoats in emergency rooms. I thought, “This is ridiculous. How hard could it be to make these things?” So, I started researching and quickly learned it was much more difficult than I assumed.
I come from a software background, and I often say pushing pixels is easier than pushing atoms. If you want to scale software, click a few buttons on Amazon Web Services, and you’re ready. Manufacturing is a different beast. Yet we launched on Shopify and made a $1 million revenue in the first week, mainly because no one had masks in stock.
Bandholz: Did you have inventory ready, or was it a scramble?
Armbrust: We were producing masks but underestimated how hard fulfillment would be. We didn’t have a shipping system or proper label printers. I bought a label printer from Office Depot and tried to fulfill the first 100 orders. We had thousands of orders coming in, and it felt impossible. It took about three months to catch up.
This wasn’t about money. It was about solving a problem. Our mission from the start was to bring strategic manufacturing back to the U.S. All profits have gone back into the company. Today, consumer demand for masks has dropped significantly. We’re down to about $1.8 million in sales over the last 12 months compared to $7 million in January 2022 alone.
Bandholz: How do you manage a company with such a revenue drop?
Armbrust: It’s tough and demotivating. Scaling up and scaling down require the same skills — cutting costs and being ruthless. In the early days, our system was inefficient. We had 27 assembly machines, with 100 people running them to produce about a million units daily. Now, we’ve got five machines, each run by one person to output 200,000 units daily. So, we went from 27 machines and 100 employees to five machines and five employees, with the same production capacity.
We got lucky with our lease. The facility had been used by a defense contractor. When the pandemic hit, no one was leasing manufacturing space, so we got the space at a fraction of the cost. The owner wanted $50,000 a month for the space. It was really beautiful and big. We started at $5,000 monthly and worked up to $20,000, which they agreed on. Still, it was an 18-month lease. But by the time demand for PPE dropped, we were in prime real estate, right next to Amazon and Elon Musk’s Boring Company. We eventually moved to a facility on my ranch to save costs.
Bandholz: When you built that facility, what were your revenue projections, and where are you now?
Armbrust: We’re down to $1.8 million in annual consumer sales, but that’s only part of our business. We also manufacture for the government and other companies, but those contracts come with tighter margins — about 10-15%. The consumer side is more profitable and keeps us afloat.
When I built the facility, I had no idea where the bottom would be. China sells masks at prices lower than what it costs us to buy raw materials. They deliver masks to the U.S. for 1 cent each, while my raw materials cost more than that. The Chinese government subsidizes their manufacturers, covering costs like machines and even offering rebates. We can’t compete with that on price.
Ninety percent of medical gloves in the U.S. come from Malaysia and China. But before the pandemic, the U.S. didn’t produce any of these critical items.
Bandholz: You run the manufacturing business and OwnLocal, the publishing portal. You have six kids and a wife who also runs a business. How do you manage it all?
Armbrust: It’s all about priorities. My wife is at the top of my list, followed by my kids, and then making sure there’s money in the bank. I rank tasks every morning. I don’t focus on something that isn’t on that list. That can annoy some folks, but it keeps me sane. Work came before everything else in my first marriage, and I was unhappy.
Now, my family comes first. If my daughter wants to sit on my lap during an important business call, she’s in the meeting. I don’t apologize. I’m focused on enjoying life.
Bandholz: Where can people support you and reach out?
KPMG’s new “CEO Outlook” summarizes the survey results of 1,300 heads at large companies globally, including 400 in the United States, on their three-year outlook on enterprise and external economic growth. Per the report (PDF), U.S. CEOs remain optimistic about their companies’ long-term growth despite economic instability and geopolitical tensions.
–
Global CEO views on their organizations’ biggest risks reflect the rise of artificial intelligence technology and worldwide instability.
–
Also, when asked about the key trends that could hinder their organization’s success in the next three years, U.S. CEOs ranked aspects of AI as the most significant.
–
CEOs most commonly highlighted three key functional areas where their organizations plan to invest in generative AI over the next three years.
Lori McDonald is a pioneering B2B ecommerce developer, having founded Brilliance Business Solutions, an agency, in 1998. In February she acquired Norsland Lefse, a direct-to-consumer food manufacturer.
Now revving up Norsland with new tools and strategies, she has agreed to share the journey with us. In July, she discussed her rationale and goals for purchasing the business. In this conversation, she addressed customer feedback, holiday sales preparation, and more.
The entire audio of our conversation is below. The transcript is edited for length and clarity.
Practical Ecommerce: In February, you acquired a D2C food manufacturer. Give us a rundown of the first seven months.
Lori McDonald: Yes, we acquired Norsland Lefse in Rushford, Minnesota. The company manufactures lefse, a traditional Norwegian flatbread similar to a potato-based tortilla, and sells other Scandinavian foods and gifts. It’s been an exciting year, and I’ve learned so much.
We’ve migrated to BigCommerce from Wix, and that process has gone well. We no longer sell certain products on Amazon or our own site because they weren’t making enough money. I’ve learned it’s crucial to have systems in place to track profitability on every item.
Sales in August from our own site were more than double last year. A top goal of the acquisition is to grow direct revenue because we have higher margins there.
Our advertising is increasingly efficient. We advertise on Google and Meta (for Facebook and Instagram). We’re seeing great responses to Meta campaigns especially.
Our email campaigns with Klaviyo are going well too. In addition to sales promotions, we have email campaigns that invite customers to return and review products. It has helped us to collect some great reviews on our products and provide feedback for improvements. For example, some reviewers had experienced our lefse flatbread sticking together. So we started packaging the lefse with wax paper sheets between them.
PEC: Do you manage ad campaigns in-house?
McDonald: We’re working with OX Optimal, a creative agency. They’ve designed and tested ads. The best performers include photos of the lefse itself, like when coming off our manufacturing floor, to see how thin it is and what it looks like.
Early on we brought in a photographer who provided some terrific images that we’ve used for ad creative on and on our website.
PEC: How do you manage inventory and profitability on Amazon?
McDonald: We haven’t integrated Amazon with our BigCommerce backend. We’re tracking our inventory and profitability in Excel and updating the item quantities on BigCommerce and Amazon. It’s a manual process. We’re looking at automated solutions, such as Feedonomics, owned by BigCommerce.
There are different ways to manage multichannel selling. We’re looking at the best options for our situation. But our priority now, in September, is ensuring we’re ready for holiday sales.
PEC: It will be your first busy season!
McDonald: Yes. It’s critical we we make enough lefse for that period. We will start producing it in early September. We can freeze and store it for up to a year.
Sales in November and December have historically been 10 times higher than the rest of the year. So I anticipate being really busy. We’re just trying to ensure that we have the staff in place to make enough lefse and that we’re efficient in our process.
We’re improving our product descriptions so folks can understand why they should buy our lefse. We’re making improvements on our BigCommerce site, such as including categories in site search, moving out-of-stock items to the bottom of the page, and implementing better analytics.
We launched an exit survey using Hotjar that gives us feedback on the user experience and helps us understand why visitors leave our site. That’s provided us with some good information.
It’s so important to listen to customers. A frequent feedback item is that our shipping costs are too high. We’re now looking at better communication — shipping perishable goods is expensive. We’re also reassessing our shipping charges for accuracy. We offer free shipping for purchases of $200 or more. We ship via FedEx 2Day. We recently implemented ShipperHQ to help manage it all. We use a local carrier for nearby orders and XPS Ship to print all labels. It integrates with BigCommerce and Amazon.
We won’t be able to do everything I dream of by this holiday season. Our goal is to implement what we can, learn from it, and improve next year.
PEC: You’re also the founder of Brilliance Business Solutions, a busy B2B ecommerce agency. How has the lefse acquisition impacted that company?
McDonald: It’s largely positive. We’re all learning a lot and incorporating those insights into how we help our development customers. Based on our lefse experience, we could develop specialty themes and features to help those customers, for example. The analytics capabilities we build for Norsland Lefse could help them too.
Norsland Lefse has helped me become more focused while creating opportunities at Brilliance for our fabulous team members. Many have stepped into doing some of the things I used to do.
The International Trade Administration, an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, projects global B2B ecommerce sales to reach $36.2 trillion by 2026, a 50% increase from 2023. The ITA’s mission is to promote trade and investment, strengthen the competitiveness of the U.S. industry, and ensure fair trade and compliance with trade laws and agreements.
Gross merchandise value is total sales over a specified period, typically measured quarterly or yearly.
–
The ITA projects B2C ecommerce revenue to reach $5.5 trillion by 2027, a compound annual growth rate from 2024 of 14.4%. Although fashion and consumer electronics are the largest sectors, pharmaceuticals is the fastest-growing category.
– Statista tracks the leading online shopping categories by revenue, both globally and within the United States. Electronics account for a substantial share of global ecommerce sales, with projected spending reaching $922.5 billion. Fashion and apparel follow, ranking second among the top online shopping categories.
–
Per Statista, the top ecommerce categories in the U.S. reflect global trends, with fashion emerging as the top revenue category, projected to generate $162.9 billion in revenue in 2024.
David Heinemeier Hansson is the creator of the Ruby on Rails software framework, the co-founder of Basecamp, an investor in multiple tech startups, a race car driver, and a family man. He’s a modern-day polymath.
Yet his workday calendar is not full of appointments. He abhors managing employees and attending meetings. His is a maker’s schedule, he says, with much uninterrupted time dedicated to solving problems he cares about.
In our recent conversation, his second in 16 years, Heinemeier Hansson addressed the rise of Rails, Basecamp, and, yes, time management.
The entire audio of our discussion is embedded below. The transcript is edited for clarity and length.
Eric Bandholz: Give us your pitch.
David Heinemeier Hansson: I am a co-owner of 37signals. We make software products. Our original tool is Basecamp, a project management tool we’ve been running for over 20 years. Hey.com is the email service we launched a few years ago and an alternative to Gmail. I also write a lot with my business partner, Jason Fried.
We’ve written four books on starting a business, running a business, and thinking about business. We published “Rework” in 2010, which sold a million copies worldwide. We also wrote “Remote: Office Not Required,” “It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work,” and “Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application.”
As part of building Basecamp in 2003, I created Ruby on Rails, the web framework behind Shopify, GitHub, and Airbnb. It was the original Twitter platform and about a million other prominent websites and applications worldwide.
I still work on that. We’re just putting the final touches on Rails 8, a big upgrade for a framework that’s also been around for 20 years and is powering 10% of worldwide ecommerce. That is what Shopify is responsible for. If you add on whatever else in the ecommerce world runs on Rails, it’s probably a higher number. Shopify is the largest Rails application. It’s 5 million lines of code and a huge portion of all ecommerce worldwide.
In my free time, I like racing cars. I’ve been driving race cars for about 15 years, mainly endurance events. The 24 Hours of Le Mans is my pivotal moment.
Bandholz: How do you prioritize your day?
Heinemeier Hansson: From the outset, Jason and I were on the same page about setting good habits early. We had seen so many entrepreneurs try to do the mode switch and fail. They’ll work 80, 100 hours a week in the early days and get accustomed, if not outright addicted, to that style of working.
We designed the business from the get-go so that we would work 40 hours a week, eight hours a day. That’s plenty. Negative things often happen when you push beyond that when you are so focused on work that you miss other things. You don’t have the right perspective on stuff. And you also think it’s all about input, which it’s not. It’s all about output.
After dropping my three kids off at school in the morning, I have a block of time and make it count. I’ve found and seen repeatedly from entrepreneurs who take pride in bragging about how much they work. It usually means sitting in front of a computer for maybe many hours, but what’s the output of those hours?
The way I make them count is through long stretches of uninterrupted time. I try to be on a maker’s schedule most days of most weeks. That’s not a luxury I can do every day or every week, but it is surprisingly easy to structure your business so that you don’t have a day full of meetings.
When I look at my schedule, very often it’s empty. It’s full of one long, beautiful block of uninterrupted time that I can dedicate to solving the problems I care deeply about, and that requires me to think for more than 20 minutes here or 40 minutes there or whatever crumbs are left over. We’ve designed 37signals not to need that level of constant minding and intervention.
We don’t have status update meetings where we sit around in a circle and tell each other what we’ve done. We use Basecamp’s automated questions. It’ll ask every employee on Monday morning, “What will you work on this week?” They will record it for the whole company to know, not just to their manager, not just to me, not just to Jason, but to everyone.
So the entire staff is in the loop on what’s happening in the business. At the end of every day, the system asks, what have you worked on today? That clock frequency allows me to check in on the business, to develop trust that the people we’ve hired are doing the work we intend for them to do and that they’re going in the right direction without me constantly supervising them.
It is incredible how much time you have in a 40-hour week when no one is constantly bothering you. Forty hours is a luxurious amount of time to make progress, but most people don’t see it that way because they squander it. They cut it into little bits, and then they end up Friday afternoon going, “Oh, man, I was so busy this week. What did I get done?”
Because we don’t work like that, we have room for kids, racing, hobbies, vacations, and time off while still progressing on Basecamp and Hey. We’re working on two new products simultaneously. I’m working on Rails 8, and I write a bunch. I can clear the decks and get stuff done.
Bandholz: How much insight are you looking to get from your team on those daily updates?
Heinemeier Hansson: I’m expecting a story. It can focus on whatever you want to emphasize. This is one of the reasons why we collect this information in an open text field. It’s not derived from what to-dos you’ve checked off or the files you uploaded. It’s not automated. It is an opportunity to reflect on what you did today that was important and that you would like to convey to others. Sometimes, the answer is pretty mundane, “I worked on this same project. Here’s a quick anecdote about an issue I encountered and why it was hard, and why it sucked up a lot of my time.”
Often, those anecdotes become conversation starters in the comment thread for that update. Maybe I’ll chime in. “I hadn’t seen that problem or seen it elsewhere, and here’s how I solved it. Maybe you can do that too.” Or someone else from another part of the business goes, “Actually, we had a customer ask about that.” The updates in Basecamp are public to everyone in the company. If you work in an office and occasionally have that hallway or water cooler conversation, it’s usually contained to your team. When you do it on Basecamp, everyone gets to see everything. We’re 60 people, and it works excellent.
Bandholz: You’re not reading all 60, right?
Heinemeier Hansson: No, I scan. I usually scroll through most of these check-ins daily or weekly. Something will catch my eye, and I can scroll back up. I can consume the status updates of 60 people in about five minutes.
We have zero full-time managers. Out of the 60 people we have, everyone, including Jason and me, treats management as a second job to put on only when necessary.
Bandholz: Where can people follow you?
Heinemeier Hansson:Dhh.dk is my website. I’m also on X, @dhh.
