Ten Thousand - The Only Training Shorts You'll Ever Need

The Story of a Brand

Ramon Vela

Business, Entrepreneurship

5 • 145 Ratings

🗓️ 3 August 2020

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Being an entrepreneur is no easy task. There are myriad challenges every step of the way and nothing is guaranteed. Success doesn’t come easy, but in the eyes of Keith B. Nowak, Founder and CEO at Ten Thousand it’s really quite simple: work hard, know your why, and keep going.

That is exactly how he was able to build a brand equipped to compete with the big boys of men’s sports apparel. Tune in and find out how Ten Thousand has incorporated fitness training keystones of efficiency, simplicity, and dogged determination to build an amazing product. This is the story of a brand.

In the first part of the Feature Keith gives a rundown of his personal journey that led him to co-found Ten Thousand. He reveals how he was able to find a co-founder that perfectly complimented his strengths. He goes into detail about the steep learning curve he encountered in the early days, and why spending two years creating the perfect prototype paid off big time. All this and more...

In part one of this feature, Keith talks about: His early days working as a VC and learning the ins-and-outs of direct to consumer businesses and brands; How he merged his professional experience with his personal passion for competitive sports; playing soccer professionally in Italy; The problem he encountered as an athlete that needed solving; sub-par buying experience and poor quality of training shorts; Why he is choosing to seek out the “owned retail” channel over wholesale as the next step in expansion; Why he faced a steep learning curve in the early days of building the brand; finding his co-founder and how they complement each other; Why he feels it is important for entrepreneurs to hit the ground running- benefits of learning as you go; What he feels is the differentiation of his brand; simplicity, quality, versatility, personalization, brand community, and more.

Join us while Ramon Vela interviews Keith in Part 1 of this episode and listen to him share the inside story of a brand.

For more on Ten Thousand visit: https://www.tenthousand.cc/

Fenix Commerce - https://www.fenixcommerce.com/

MarketerHire - https://marketerhire.com/ (code: SOB)
Retention Science - RetentionScience.com

Transcript

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0:00.0	Recorded at Retention Science Studios, this is not your average entrepreneur or e-commerce
0:10.9	podcast, and he's not your average host.
0:14.3	This is The Story of a Brand with your host, Ramon Vela.
0:21.1	The way I can think about it is, you know, you don't sit out to run a marathon, but I think
0:24.7	about 26.2 miles, right? You start off by taking one step, and then another one,
0:29.5	then another one, right? It's cliche, but it's the way you get to prioritize and execute.
0:34.3	It just, you've got to break it all down to small bits and do that thing.
0:38.3	And then take that becomes, you put two blocks together. And you got, and then you have four
0:41.8	blocks and eight blocks or whatever, right? And you build that foundation. You don't set out by
0:46.1	trying to do it all out of the gates. And I think, honestly, I think that's an advantage.
0:51.4	I think if you use that as a strength becomes an advantage in building a company. If you go out again, you're like, I'm going to go, I've got
0:57.3	extra years of experience in industry. I'm going to go raise a bunch of money from B.C.
1:00.0	to navigate. Go do it this way. I mean, bring a huge headcount or do all these things. I know the
1:04.4	process. A lot of those companies don't work out because, you know, they're not forced to think differently about the process or the output or
1:11.8	how they're going to deliver a product. They miss that essence or that differentiation, right?
1:16.9	Or they become too bloated and they can't make the numbers work, you know, too soon enough.
1:22.8	And so I think staying small, staying tight, thinking about incremental improvement day to day is really how you can use it as not a weakness.
1:32.3	It's not something that you should shy it from.
1:34.3	I think you should embrace that approach and really use that to your advantage.
1:39.3	And you know, it's David and Goliath, right? That's the same concept.
1:42.3	So how do you lean into what might seem like a weakness and turn it into a strength and use that to differentiate and win?
1:54.4	Every day a different brand tells me that they need to hire a market or ASAP, but they can't find someone they trust. That's why I refer
	...

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