Nik Sharma 0:00

You have to pretend like you are hiring somebody for a quarter million dollars in New York City.

Ian Myers 0:08

Glad to have you with us Nik Sharma, famously of Sharma Brands and Beyond. Nik, you just want to introduce yourself briefly.

Nik Sharma 0:15

Happy to be here, Ian. Thanks for having me on. I'm Nik Sharma. I you know, came into the world of e-commerce by way of ad tech and beverage, got in, started an agency, ran that for about six years, sold that at the end of last year to a larger agency called Lunar Solar, which really expanded our capabilities and capacity. And since then I've been chief growth officer at Lunar Solar, kind of helping them on the strategy side of things, but also really focused on a couple of new projects that I'm excited to share and talk through later. So that's me, basically in a nutshell, direct-to-consumer e-commerce, now AI, as my areas of interest.

Ian Myers 0:55

I'm going to ask you an important question at the end regarding uh it because I trust your opinion, and I don't know anything, but would love to cover just your background and and you you kind of had a crazy you were very young when you got into the area of brands and and kind of made a name for yourself. I want to hear how you scaled Sharma Brands to be one of I think the best known names in the agency world for e-com, CPG, food and beverage, etc. And then obviously how those experiences have translated into what you're building today. But maybe we just start with what sets you on the path to growth, all things e-commerce, all things CPG, and and how you arrived at that industry and and that success early on.

Nik Sharma 1:41

Yeah, for me, I so I actually started my you know career, you could say, when I was in high school, doing social media for different celebrities. And I always thought that because I had bad grades, I wasn't going to get into any good college, so I had to figure out how to make money otherwise. So I was DJing in high school, like a bunch of private parties, and I'd show up with speakers and lights and set it all up and do that. And then I did social media for some celebrities.

Ian Myers 2:08

How did you meet these celebrities? For everyone who's listening to this still in high school wanting to do social media for celebrities, just two seconds. I want to know how'd you get some celebrities to try to hand over the keys to their social media account here?

Nik Sharma 2:21

Initially it was DMs and cold emails, and and then it started to move toward, you know, light introductions, and then the real big one happened when I actually went to an event and met a pretty big artist manager at the event, and then you know, she kind of like put me on by making introductions to other people. That was really how I got the big ones. But prior to that, it was just kind of cold, cold messaging to see if I could get a response. Once you're working with the big guys, it's all referral from there. So it's just basically like doing good work and trying to get the referral out of it. Very similar to how I focused on growing the agency, which was just how can we just do really good work and just be really proud of the work we do and put it out and let people see it or talk about it or you know, see that and get inspired about making something similar for themselves.

Ian Myers 3:14

And what just quickly bridged the gap for me between you're running these social media accounts for celebrities you're slowly hustling, and then suddenly you're the D to C king.

Nik Sharma 3:25

Yeah, so running the social media accounts after that's during high school. At the end of high school, I emailed this ad tech founder who's starting his fourth ad tech company, and basically said, Hey, you know, I've followed you on social media for a couple years through high school. I see you're launching your fourth company, I'd love to come work for you for free as an intern after senior year of high school. And that was a cold Facebook message to his personal profile. Next day we got on a call, and then the day after that, I was on a flight to San Francisco. And basically the deal was that if he got my flight and had a bed for me to stay in, then I'd come be a free intern basically. And so I flew up there. That lasted about probably four or five weeks, and then at the end of that, I decided to basically defer going to college for a year and stay there and basically just like work for a year. And the guy that who had started it was basically like, you know, if you stay here for a year, I'll like basically throw you into the bathtub and teach you how to swim and you know, kind of learn all these different things, mainly really about like sales, business development, communication, all that kind of stuff. So I did that, and you know, basically, kind of the same way that you know me to like figure things out now, I was doing that back then. So at first, you know, my job was basically figuring out business development on the publisher side of the business. How do we get different internet publishers and media companies to put our pixel of code on their site so we could extract first-party data from visitors on their site, and then we could use that data and sell it to advertisers like a Walmart or TripAdvisor when they're trying to target very specific segments of users. So, you know, the the way that they were teaching the business development people how to do it is you set up your you know Word doc, you write down all the sites you want to go after, you go and find the contact, then by Wednesday you have a list of people to go and email. By Friday, you follow up for the people who haven't responded, and you know, there was like no SaaS that existed back then for this type of stuff. So I randomly found on some podcast outreach.io, which is like a cold email and sales outbound platform. Yeah, this was when they were super small, and basically ended up figuring out like a cold email sequence. I watched a bunch of YouTube to figure out like how to write good cold email sequences and do outbound email, and wrote a really successful like eight-step drip campaign where I would basically every morning, so you know, I would have a Filipino friend help me get all of the leads while I was sleeping, and then by the time I'd wake up, I'd dump a CSV into outreach, those would send, and by the afternoon I'd start just booking calls for the week. And so, you know, kind of did that and basically maneuvered through and figured out business development and sales and follow-ups and closing deals and signing insertion orders. And then, you know, there's some stuff that happened with the founder of that company. So I ended up splitting or basically just leaving the company and didn't have a plan for what was next. So I started two things. One was basically media buying. So all these publishers that I would work with, what we ended up doing is we ended up also turning them into advertisers. So, you know, Refinery 29 would have like the holidays, 29 peppermint products you you must try. And the way that they would run that as kind of like a business is they'd say, okay, if we can buy traffic for three cents, somebody goes through six or seven slides, we make four cents or four and a half cents in revenue, you know, we're netting one and a half cents per person, and we do that at a scale of a hundred to four hundred thousand dollars a day in ad spend. And these publishers were running crazy arbitrage on display ads back in the day. So by the end of working at the ad tech company, I had turned a lot of our big publishers into advertisers as well. But then I obviously left because this guy had his own issues going on and I didn't want to be a part of that. So I left, and then some of these publishers were like, hey, where are you going? Like we had a good thing going here. We'll just, you know, basically pay you to freelance and like do some of this for us. So I started doing that, and you know, that was essentially how I like learned media buying as well. Was just I was just doing the sales before. Now I'm figuring out how to do the actual media buying, and I got really good at understanding like copy creative click-through rate, you know, user psychology there. At the same time, I was seeing that Snapchat geo filters were just becoming a thing, if you remember those back in the day. Oh yeah. And so Snapchat geofilters were becoming a thing, and I figured out a scheme where, you know, all these big mobile apps like Cooking Fever or whatever these like massive games were back in the day, these guys have like close to a hundred million users on their apps. So they spend ridiculous amounts of money, you know, a million to three million dollars a day acquiring customers, and somehow got in touch with the right people that run user acquisition of these companies, of course, based out in Russia. And I was like, hey, you know, what if we were to go and brand the upcoming iHeartRadio Jingle Ball Tour or the Justin Bieber, you know, purpose tour or whatever tour was going on, and basically just mean like, hey, I'll make a geo filter, it'll be branded for the concert, your logo will be at the bottom corner, there'll be some branding elements to that, and we'll just run it and cover the stadium. So when people are taking a uh a video or a snap and they swipe over, they're gonna see that there's actually a you know uh uh filter that's meant for that concert and they're gonna use it. And it worked really well because like you do a concert and you know overnight you'd have one to three million views sometimes, depending on who else was at the concert. And a lot of celebrities used to be posting on Snap back then too. Did that for a while until Snapchat found out that I was basically arbitraging the you know $49 geo filter and selling it for $6,000 to these gaming companies and amazing margin. It lasted like three months before we got a cease and desist, and then so that shut down. But I continued the media buying, which then turned into the founder of Hint reaching out and basically saying, like, hey, you know, I used to tweet about Hint Water all the time, and because we would have it in the at the office of this ad tech company. So she reached out and was basically like, hey, why don't you know you're clearly a fan, maybe there's something we can do together, since you're a fan of Hint and you're a marketer, basically. So I grabbed coffee with her, and then that turned into essentially an eight-month engagement where I basically worked with the founder to build her personal brand. That started to drive pretty good numbers in, and so that turned into the director of performance marketing at Hint. So now I'm joining Hint at 20 years old as their director of performance marketing. Within two weeks of joining, you know, I hit this honey hole jackpot of an acquisition campaign where, you know, they were previously doing like 80 new customers a day, started this advertorial campaign with the hustle, if you remember them, um, and basically blew it up. So we we got to 5,000 new customers a day in a matter of two weeks, and that became, and then it kind of normalized around a thousand or two thousand customers a day. And that was just like the new growth trajectory of the brand. That I would say is kind of where like I learned my e-commerce and direct-to-consumer chops and really was kind of again thrown in the bathtub and figured out how to swim. Spent two years there and then got recruited to an agency in New York. That lasted like three months, more one of those, you know, I can't be managed scenarios, and then went to consult and start my own, which started as more just helping out a friend with their brand, and then another person reached out, and another person reached out, and just added one person by one as I needed help. Fast forward six years, we did work around retention, acquisition, websites, email, sometimes helping brands figure out their hiring and staffing plans internally, post-launch, or as they're going through a new growth phase, and then exited that in October. So that's kind of the longer-ish version of a short story.

Ian Myers 11:25

No, a lot of that I hadn't heard, man. That's that's pretty wild. I mean, a few things stood out to me. One, you have always done the work, so the hustle is really important to like prove that you can you can make it. I think a lot of especially agency, like people who want to, you know, who do a similar trajectory to you that are like, I've come from a big company, I have this knowledge, how do I turn it into working for myself? Don't often realize just how much work the BD part of it is and like the drumming up engagements constantly. And like I had a friend who came from a big AI company last year, left the company, wanted to start his own like AI consulting thing, did it for like six months, was like, I hate driving business so much, I'm going to join a big company again. You know, it's like yeah, so you learning that must have been crucial. It sounded like also you, you know, you're always trying out the latest technologies and looking around for that, which I think translates into your current kind of interest in what you can do with with AI, which we'll get to at the end. But before that, you mentioned you found outreach.io and you had a friend in the Philippines who was putting this stuff into CSV for you. So to me, obviously, given what I do, it sounds like, and this was 2014, 2013, I mean this was early on, you've been working with offshore talent for a really long time. This is something you and I have talked about over and over again. But specifically as you were scaling Sharma brands, how did that factor come into play and what worked there, what didn't work there? And obviously, you know, it a lot of it's carried through to your next role, so probably had a positive outcome ultimately.

Nik Sharma 13:04

Yeah, I mean, so I've always been very intrigued at the concept of offshore hiring. You know, at the companies I worked at before, I never really had any exposure to that, and I don't think really there was any of that kind of happening at like the ad tech company or at the beverage company. But even then it was always like, wow, these guys are really smart, you know, they're not like off quote unquote offshore people, they're just people who live in a different country, but they have just the same number of skills and capabilities. So I'd always been intrigued by it, and then probably year, you know, it was probably like 2021. Was that when COVID was happening? But it people started kind of still like it started to open up a little bit. It was maybe 21 or 22 into an office, and that was about the first time I'd hired first like the first couple offshore people for Sharma brands. And you know, at the time I didn't know I didn't I wasn't really super educated, so I hired from the Philippines and had hired using kind of one of the different like services to to find somebody in the Philippines, and you know, was kind of like sold this dream at the beginning, and then the actual execution of how that person played out was just didn't live up to where I thought it should have been. And so, and then I tried it with one or two other services after that, you know, some of them supposed to be more specifically focused on marketing or e-commerce, and again just found that the quality of the talent was, and maybe it was just me not properly onboarding these people, or you know, there was something flawed in how I was doing it back then. But I was just finding that like the same success stories I heard from other people that I wasn't getting anything near that with the talent that I was hiring. Then I get lunch after a workout with Austin Reef, and he tells me about his CFO who is living in Sri Lanka, and you know, he's like, these people are these people are basically educated to the same level, like that you would have hired somebody in New York, except they live in Sri Lanka, and he was basically like, you know, you should really give this a shot because you could use somebody like an EA plus, is I think the term it used to be, which was basically like uh executive assistant that can do a lot more for you or or try to fill the gaps in other places kind of across the board. And so I gave, you know, Oceans a really complicated list of. I think this time what was actually probably also different was I started with a list of outcomes that I wanted out of this person. So I didn't write a job description that said, you know, this many years of experience and this person is gonna help me with X, Y, and Z. I literally wrote out a list of by Friday every week, what is expected out of this person? And also are there caveats or things that I should mention like, you know, this person might have to work a Friday night. They might have to be on on a Saturday or Sunday, unexpected. They're gonna have, you know, there's no such thing as like an extended vacation or a day without your laptop type of thing. They have to have iMessage so I can, or an iPhone so I can iMessage in FaceTime. And honestly, I wrote it thinking there's no shot you guys are gonna find somebody. And then two weeks later, you know, you texted me and basically said, I think we found somebody who might be good. And that's how I found Rameez. And Rameez was basically like a one-call close from what I remember. And you know, what was really cool was like he went to college in Colorado, went back to Sri Lanka, worked at Ogilvy on the Nestle account on e-commerce. So he had full context of what it was to live in my world or kind of be in my shoes to some degree. He understood beverage, he under, which was a lot of the work I was doing back then. He understood e-commerce, he understood agency, he understood American culture and American advertising. He had been in the back ends of Shopify and the back end of Facebook, he understood Google Analytics, like then, and then he also had the whole EA skill set as well. And so, you know, I was like pretty impressed out the gate. We hired Rameez, I start working with him, and basically decided to tell him very upfront that listen, the only way that this is gonna work is if I'm brutally honest with you about everything that you're doing right and everything you're doing wrong, and everything that I like enjoy about working together and everything that I hate. And till today, we still operate like that, where I'm directly blunt with him. There's no sugar coating at all. And so for the first, definitely the first month, maybe six weeks, he just pretty much observed how I worked in addition to starting to add him to different tasks. And what I was really intentional about was making sure that he understood my context. So the people I talk to, the email, you know, the types of partnerships I have, the clients we have, who are the different people at these at the clients that I'm talking to or that are important, how to prioritize my to-do list based on, you know, what is the context within each task or the priority of each task. And the goal was that, you know, I wanted to basically turn Rameez into like another version of me. So he could be somewhere and I could be somewhere. We could essentially divide and conquer. But, you know, to do that, I had to basically dump my brain into him, which was probably a total of about a three to six month process. But it it was it's the best investment I made. And I always tell people too, when they bring on offshore talent as well, like they you have to almost overinvest in the onboarding process and the knowledge transfer process, because a lot of times I think people hire offshore talent and just assume that, okay, they're an assistant, so they're gonna go and figure it out or they're gonna go learn it, but they and they also don't give direct feedback. So, you know, they're they're kind of like operating blind or feeling like they're doing stuff and things are are getting done or checked off the list, but the you know, their their employer is not happy with it. So yeah, that's my rant, I would say, on on the the Rameez story. After we hired Rameez, it was just like, okay, well, how do we get another one? And then we got minul, and then it was like, okay, well, could we have somebody maybe help us with media buying for some of these larger accounts where we want to have, you know, maybe a full-time dedicated media buyer to one massive account or a full-time dedicated media buyer who's doing nights and weekends support because you know, these clients don't care if we're going to sleep at 10 o'clock. They expect somebody to be there when they're spending, you know, five to ten million dollars a month. And so so then we started hiring more roles, and I think we ended up with, you know, Rameez and Minul were kind of my core team day-to-day. We had probably three or four project managers. You know, initially I was thinking each kind of senior lead or senior person at the agency could have an oceans person, but then we ended up doing it more departmental. So we had people that helped on the media buying side, we had people that helped on the creative side, we had project managers, and it's bit it was it was a night and day difference from when I did it before.

Ian Myers 20:00

On the media buying side, you know, I've obviously worked in the Sri Lankan market for a long time, and yes, there are the Ogilvis of the world there, there's the Densus of the world there, there are big agencies who are training people to work well. But the budget, you know, it's a smaller country, smaller amounts of money, smaller budgets handled. What gave you the confidence to take some people from Oceans who had you know been doing like $25,000 a month on media buying and be like, here you go, here's $500,000 a month client and let them run at it?

Nik Sharma 20:37

At the time, I think we actually had found one media buyer who did have pretty high spend, uh, monthly spend. For the other ones, I remember we were trying to find it, but I think we felt like it was taking longer to find those people, so we lowered that threshold. And the way we approached the gap there was basically bringing them in and just putting them through almost like a mini internal training. So it wasn't necessarily like one or two sessions, but just tighter management, understanding what they're doing, making sure we're setting up like education set sessions, which we did kind of across different departments on Fridays, usually, essentially just be more attentive and kind of coach them up to a place where they feel confident spending more money. Ultimately they were able to do it. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Definitely ultimately able to do it. And you know, like media buying is also one of those things that kind of gets easier and easier over time. So it's definitely possible. But, you know, between like the full team setup that we had and the ability to do knowledge transfer and teaching one another and setting up these workshops, it was probably, you know, a couple months in terms of getting them ramped up.

Ian Myers 21:44

So it sounds like the thesis on investment period holds and it actually applies across a lot of different categories and verticals that, you know, if the people are which has always been our hiring methodology. Like we hire for raw intelligence education. Drive and you know adjacent experience. And if you have all those things and the client is willing to put in the time, they're gonna get a great outcome, which I think happened again and again and again with your team. So, and so all that contributes to Sharma brands being a smashing huge success. Everybody knows about it. You're handling some of the coolest, biggest brands in the space. I mean, every time I'd go to your website, I'd be like, oh, those guys too. I mean, you're working with some of the biggest players in in D2C. And I'm actually looking out on the lawn that I was standing at when you called me and told me you were selling the company, ready to do something different, you know, and and basically our call was about, hey, what happens to people I have, you know, I have with with Oceans. And I'm kind of curious as to what was it that made that necessary. I mean, a lot of people would just be like, all right, well, the acquirers take my people and that's it. But as far as I understand, you just took some folks from Oceans with you to your new role, and I'm wondering why, you know, why have they been so important in helping you launch your new ventures?

Nik Sharma 23:08

Yeah, I mean, so so there was definitely some that transferred over with the acquisition, and then I, yeah, it specifically asked to take Rameez and Minul out of that. And so, you know, the main reason for that, honestly, was like at this point in my life, anybody who knows me personally knows Rameez and Minul. Like, this trio is basically represented as me, but it's really a trio that is kind of working behind the scenes always. And, you know, that like basically the stuff I'm doing now, so just to give context on on how you know impactful Rameez and Minul are, I do a little bit of very light strategy consulting for a few different brands that basically just need little quick fixes that I can kind of help with. I have a couple brands that I'm working to bring to market, which will hopefully launch by the end of this year or Q1 next year. One is kind of an athlete-focused product, and one is a supplement focused on South Asians specifically. And then, you know, I've got my newsletter and podcast that I still run actively. I've got the e-com founders events that happen twice a year. You know, those are kind of like big conference events that happen in New York. And then just anciliary stuff. So, you know, a little bit of investing here and there, you know, working with a couple of different portfolio companies at any given time on helping them here and there, you know, maybe throwing a dinner with some brands, whatever it may be. There's kind of just a lot of different things happening. And so for me to do that as a solo person, you know, is pretty, pretty daunting and would would just take a lot of time. But because of how ingrained Minul and Rameez got with me personally, and I'd say mostly Rameez at Sharma brands, Minul was still, he was ops for, you know, kind of admin and ops stuff, but he was really still focused on Sharma brands. So HR and payroll and onboarding and you know IT management and all that kind of stuff. When he moved over to just work with me, it shifted a lot more to being ops for me. So ops meaning, you know, my basically my inbox, my Slack, things that are expected of me as it relates to any sort of like consulting work. And then he actually also manages, helps us manage our side quest of DJing and making music, you know, whether it comes to like tour dates, making sure there's a photographer at the event, releases on Spotify, SoundCloud, whatever. And then Rameez is basically helping me. Rameez is essentially another me. He can help make sure that the e-com founders events from start to finish are handled. If there's something I can't be on, Rameez can be there in my place and make decisions on my behalf because he understands what decisions I would make and why, and and to a really exact level almost. Also, how we've set up our internal systems, which is like every day we have a daily check-in call that's usually divided into two parts. One is like once I wake up, and then one is kind of like an hour after or an hour and a half after. Then we have, you know, we we use internal AI tools. So whether it's, you know, Codex or Chat GPT or Claude Code, I also have a couple of Hermes agents that I've set up. Uh, and all of our memory and all of our context and all of our basically conversations are all in sync with one another. So there's no lag of information from one person to the next. So for example, if something comes in and is requesting something of me that Rameez knows, you know, let's say it's like a request to put together a landing page wireframe based off of all of the things I talked about on a call with somebody, right? That's actually something that Rameez can go or Minul can go and execute using Codex now because my entire landing page brain has been dumped into a 30,000 line document, and there's all the context from that call that's already been recorded and transcribed from Fireflies into HQ, which then Codex goes and pulls from. So there's like this crazy thing, I don't even know what to call it, but it's just like the the output and what we can do as a group because of these tools combined with their deep knowledge of and context of the stuff that I'm doing, we have tremendously maximized output and what we're able to do. So, yeah, that's the end of my research.

Ian Myers 27:24

So you've I mean you've set this up really in an incredible way. You've got yourself, two core people from Oceans, the triangle, the triad, whatever you want to call it, and and you spent a lot of time at Sharma Brands investing in those relationships to the point where you know it's one for one for one of what you would do on a daily basis. You've added in some incredibly powerful tools to make that relationship easier. That's not something we hear from a lot of people. A lot of people don't put in that effort, a lot of people don't even necessarily go down those paths in the first place. There's a lot of trepidation about it. What I mean, you're still working with a lot of econ brands, a lot of founders. What are the most expensive mistakes they're making with talent today, kind of across the board, in the in a world in which the role of people is increasingly uncertain and unclear?

Nik Sharma 28:18

I think people's opposition sometimes to look into offshore talent costs them more money than maybe like money they're mistakenly lighting on fire. There's two brands I work with. They're both over a hundred million in revenue. One is basically, you know, they hire agencies in the US to kind of manage everything, and you know, they'll pay top dollar for different agencies, not because they want to, but because they just haven't figured out a different way to do it. The other brand is extremely efficient. You know, one person for basically media buying, they might manage an agency or a contractor. They have, you know, one creative strategist who then works with an offshore person to then help execute a lot of that work or kind of project manage. They do their email with an offshore person and AI. So like they've figured out how to leverage offshore and AI in a way that basically, you know, if you think about the cost of the offshore person plus AI compared to a $10,000 or $12,000 a month email agency, you can see right away that, you know, one is $12,000, one is maybe 20% of that or 30% of that. I think there's more things that happen like that where people have a lot of opportunity to cut costs, but just haven't gotten around to doing that. I do see people hiring talent here in the US. There's just a lot of poor hiring. I think the outcomes versus job goals and responsibilities is a big reason why. Like a lot of people are focused on what are goals versus what are actual deliverables you need to hit every Friday or every month or every quarter.

Ian Myers 29:49

So make it digestible, make it understandable on shorter time horizons than six months from now, you're gonna have to do this.

Nik Sharma 29:57

Yeah, basically, and also shifting from this concept of goals to just actual results.

Ian Myers 30:04

And what so for the folks that you you see are struggling to hire, stalling hiring offshore, what's your advice to them to get through it? What's the best way to jump into it?

Nik Sharma 30:14

You have to pretend like you're hiring somebody for a quarter million dollars in New York City or, you know, a major market. You have to go in with the mindset that this like hiring somebody doesn't get easier just because, you know, they make less money or they're not, you know, in New York City and you know, maybe not as demanding. I think that kind of lends itself to make sure that somebody is actually very attentive during this process. They're very intentional about the interview, the resumes they're screening or looking at. They're very intentional about asking the right questions or gathering context on interview calls. I think a lot of times people actually don't even ask the right questions on on interviews because they're worried to, you know, push the boundaries or or offend somebody if they don't know something. And then I think the onboarding process and like the context dumping or knowledge dumping, knowledge transfer is the other big piece. Because I see a lot of people will hire somebody who, you know, definitely checks all the boxes as you make the hire, but then they don't do a good job of being direct with that person about what they need to get better at, how they're doing, what they could be doing differently, or how they should think differently, or and even why they should think differently, right? Like if people understand the why, then their next decision gets even better. So the hiring process is one, and then I think the onboarding process. Those are probably the two places I think people just it's not that they maybe neglect it, but they don't put as much effort as they should. And you know, if you think you have to put a hundred percent effort into both, you should put like 400% effort because you know, wherever that nets out is probably what it really takes to get that person on board.

Ian Myers 31:51

That's great advice. We see so many people who, especially if you're going through an agency or working with a company like ours, that they would rather give us the feedback than give it directly to the people they hire. And just time and time again, I'm like, please just be direct with people because otherwise you're not gonna get the results out of them you need. And if you do, it's only because you've taken way too long to circumvent you know those direct conversations, and so there's a lot of benefits to hiring you know with an agency, obviously, but if you are not then treating the people that come in the door like your actual employees, you're gonna see a step down in output and a step down in trust. And I would say that you know, just from what I have observed over the past couple years working with you, the fact that you didn't do that, that you took everybody on board immediately, just dunked them into the Sharma brand's cool-head soup, and was like, here's what we're doing every single day, and and do this, don't do this, I like this, I don't like that. By the end of three to six months, you've had a killer employee who you are, you know, I can't imagine you without at this point. I mean, it'd be kind of weird if uh anybody. If I just got an email from Nik and nobody else, it would be like super strange. Totally. But before we we wrap up, what's next for Nik and Nik.co, the Nik Sharma world, anything you can share? I mean, I know you're running a ton of different projects you're doing with a three-person team, two in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and then yourself, which is super impressive, but what's the ambition?

Nik Sharma 33:30

Well, the ambition would be to, you know, bring some more products to market where you know I'm not just the agency and actually running these things. So hopefully next time we can record a podcast in maybe four or five months, I've got something to update and share with you, and I can walk through the process of how we did it actually, and kind of like how we use the team in order to do that. But yeah, for right now, really just working on bringing those to market and doing some light consulting on the side.

Ian Myers 33:59

Yeah, I mean, if you could if you could do some stuff in my category, that'd be great. I mean, not that I'm sure you're it's gonna be amazing things, but if you're building stuff for athletes or supplements for South Asians, I'm not gonna really participate in those as neither of them describe me pretty well. Oh, thanks, man. Yeah, sort of like a mental athlete, like uh like yeah, the books. The athletes, yeah. Um well, not even really that. I I struggle with basic division, but thank you for the confidence. Nik, it was great to talk to you. I appreciate your time, and I know everyone is kind of waiting to see what you're gonna uh come up with after selling Sharma brands. So hopefully we can check in a couple months and and have some more stuff to talk about.

Nik Sharma 34:42

Amazing. Thanks for having me, Ian.