Fabian Geyrhalter:
Welcome to the show, Jim.

Jim Belosic:
Yeah, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Oh, I’m really, really excited to have you. We have so many founders of consumer brands, right? Consumer brands people know and love on the show like Liquid Death or JetBlue, but you are in the manufacturing space, B2B, aluminum sheets, usually stamped as pretty boring stuff. And that is exactly why I’m so excited to have you here because SendCutSend is actually a brand and it is a beloved brand for those who are familiar with it. Back in 2021, which sounds like super, super long ago with everything that happened since, Fast Company named you one of the 10 most innovative manufacturing companies. What SendCutSend does for my listeners who are not familiar with you, which may be a good amount of you, SendCutSend creates custom parts at any scale and delivers them in as little as 24 hours to the guy in the garage or to a small but growing startup like mine, like Toneoptic, or to giants of innovation like Disney, Waymo and Blue Origin. So how did SendCutSend start? I believe out of your own garage, right? You just needed to get custom parts made.

Jim Belosic:
Exactly. SendCutSend started out of my own needs. I was customer number one. I’m still a customer, but yeah, I’m a car guy. I’m a fabricator. I love working with my hands in my garage and I always had a few projects that I was working on and I love buying tools. There’s no better excuse to buy a tool than working on a cool project. However, even though I was buying tools like plasma cutters and bandsaws and like a Bridgeport mill or whatever, there came to a point where there were parts that I needed made that I couldn’t make myself. And when I went out locally to other shops, I’m like, “Hey, I need quantity one and I need it next week. Please don’t gouge me on price.” I got turned away again and again and again. And at the time I thought, “Oh, it’s because these legacy shops don’t have any software. They don’t have any technology. That’s why they don’t want to do low quantity. That’s why they have to charge so much for quoting, et cetera.” So at the time I was running a software company and I thought, oh, maybe I can just write some software and sell it to these guys and make manufacturing more efficient. Turns out if you’re a legacy shop, you don’t really want to buy any software either. So I realized if I wanted this to be done, I had to do it myself. So I bought some equipment and here we are.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Oh my God, that’s amazing. So lots of toys later, you decided you’re not going to buy one more toy and you actually have to get parts made, and legacy shops don’t even have a business card nor a website. So it’s like the last thing that they need because everything is word of mouth in these small shops. So the idea for them to go through a digital transformation is pretty unheard of. You, on the other hand, this is really interesting, the way that you’re talking about your company and how it started with this blend of manufacturing and tech. Today, you give customers the ability to make portals. You have a marketplace where creators can sell products they make using your materials on your website. You raised $110 million from Sequoia and the Stripe co-founders. Is SendCutSend a tech company?

Jim Belosic:
Yes. Yeah, 100%.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Disguised as manufacturing.

Jim Belosic:
Yeah. It’s funny. A lot of people think that we are a sheet metal company or a CNC machining company, but really we’re a tech company that happens to manufacture. And it’s very apparent when you tour our facilities because we designed our facilities and our equipment layout based on our tech and our software. And what a lot of typical machine shops do, or manufacturers, is they have all their equipment, they have their plant that’s running, and then they try and layer on tech on top of that. And it’s very, very difficult to do that efficiently. So not knowing anything about manufacturing when I started, I just did it the only way I knew, which was tech first, and it turned out to be a really good direction for us.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And that is the reason why you can keep your product at a price where it is affordable to both the guy in the garage as well as a small startup, I suppose.

Jim Belosic:
Yeah. The technology-first approach allowed us to eliminate a lot of the overhead that exists in legacy manufacturing. The main thing is quoting. If you walk into a manufacturing shop and you say, “Hey, I want to get this quote,” there’s going to be some guy who has to sit behind a computer or a drafting board or something like that, looking at your drawings, your prints. And it’s going to take a lot of time, especially if your bill of materials is, like you said, you could have 100 or 200 or 300 components on there. Sometimes just the quote can be thousands of dollars of labor involved. So a lot of companies will just no-bid. They’ll say, “It’s not worth our time. We don’t even want to quote.” So you get turned away a lot. We realized that if we could give a quote instantly using software, we could win a lot of work and say yes to almost everything that came in the door. And then we didn’t have all that overhead of 50 drafters sitting in a room trying to quote stuff and then you only win 10% of the work. So we flipped that on its head and that was probably the most crucial thing that we did.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Extremely innovative when you think about it. And it seems so on the nose, but it’s extremely hard to do. That’s why no one in the space would do it. And you came in from the outside having absolutely no clue whatsoever what you’re getting yourself into, I guess. And then you’re like, “Oh.”

Jim Belosic:
It’s actually a gift. If you approach something and you have very, very limited experience, you might end up coming up with some new ways of doing something. The other side of that coin is we invented a lot of stuff that already existed and so we did lose some time. We thought that we were smart software guys and we were developing technology that had been perfected a hundred years ago. So we lost a little time there, but we also, not knowing anything, created some stuff that no one else had ever done either.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That’s amazing. Yeah, it’s a blessing and a curse, but I do think it’s more of a blessing because if you really want to stand out in an industry, most of the time you have to come from outside the industry to do that. And of course you’re going to fail forward, you’re constantly going to fall flat on your face. But I think that’s something that you talked about too in an interview that you posted on the SendCutSend website. You talked about constraints and you talked about how important they are to running your business. We were at a vinyl record conference, obviously, because it’s part of the company, half a year ago. And we had some pretty well-known DJs come and they tried out our product and they were awesome. They were just giving us feedback and they made some social content and all of them said, “Hey guys, I love that, but you got to make a smaller version of it. You got to make it for seven-inch records, for small records. That’s what we need.” And then we were back at that exact same conference last month and we just knew we had to have small units there, but we were in absolutely no place to start production of a new SKU. We were like, we are waiting on orders to fulfill because made in America, it comes with certain timelines, it comes with restrictions and we’re just knee-deep in this production hell. And yet we have to create this whole new SKU for these DJs to see because we’re back at the same conference half a year later. And that’s when SendCutSend came in. And of course, those DJs saw this new product that we did, even though it didn’t exist yet. It was just a prototype we made overnight. And they saw that we listened to them and they’re now huge brand fans. They’re constantly checking in and yeah, but it’s constraints. We had constraints and then you guys came in and you saved us. But talk more about constraints. Even now that you are a very sizable operation given your funding, do you still feel that power of constraints in your day-to-day growth?

Jim Belosic:
Yes, constantly. So at the beginning, the constraint was always cash. We bootstrapped this for eight years and being constrained on cash, it forces you to make really, really efficient decisions. You question every single move that you’re making. It’s like living on a knife edge. You make the wrong choice and you’re going to get punched really, really quickly. If you can’t make payroll, it’s absolutely crippling. So that’s in our DNA, some frugality and working within that constraint of cash. Then as we started becoming a little more profitable, we ran into the constraint of physical space, of square footage, and that taught us how to be incredibly efficient in a small building. We couldn’t afford to buy a brand-new building, so we had to make do with what we had. So we went vertical, we started stacking stuff to the roof. We got really clever with how we utilize forklifts and stuff like that. So there was the space constraint for many years. Then we got constrained on power. You add a bunch of machines into a building. Oh geez. Yeah, of course. You run out of amperage. And so we’re always, always fighting constraints, but I think it keeps you really sharp. Having a good constraint is like having a good competitor if you’re on a sports team. If you’re the best football team and no one else can come close to you, at some point you’re going to get fat and lazy. But if you have a team that you play and keeps you sharp every single day, that’s how you become the best in the world, and constraints do that. So the funny thing was, after we did our Series A and raised a bunch of money, we’re like, “Oh my gosh, we have no cash constraints anymore. What are we going to do?” And we actually thought the days of constraints were over, but we just found new ones. As soon as you kill a constraint, another one will pop up. And what we realized is we want to hire a lot of people really quickly. Well, we didn’t have enough recruiters. And then when we could hire, because we got more recruiters, then we couldn’t train them fast enough. So we had to build out an entire new training team. And then now we have all these people in the building. Well, now we’re out of toilets. So it’s always crazy. But you know what? I show up every day because I love solving problems. This whole thing is a puzzle to me. And if it was boring, I don’t think I’d be here every day. So I think it’s going to be an interesting puzzle for many, many years.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah. It’s interesting that money can’t fix that, right? Because everyone would think, oh my God, if I would just raise money, all these problems will go away. No, new ones are going to pop up. And they’re most probably going to be significantly bigger in size and in scale. And you never think about that, but that’s entrepreneurship, right? You’re going to laugh about the problems that you had a year ago and it just keeps going that way. So yeah, it’s an interesting dance, but it keeps us dancing. And I think it’s super important, like you said. I mean, I’m spending half my day advising Fortune 500 clients and then the other half of the day deburring parts and breathing in aluminum. And I’m like, I have to get through this in order to get to the other side. We already know all the products we want to bring to market a year from now, but first we got to put in these 400 holes and it has to happen in the next two days. So yeah, there’s always something. Are you moving as a company into a space where you would take on larger-quantity jobs? Totally selfish question, obviously. So basically do white-label manufacturing for companies, or is that not something that you would touch?

Jim Belosic:
Yeah, we actually do that today. We’ve done it for years. I think since we’re here to talk about brand and marketing, I think that’s probably a place where I’ve failed a little bit. We are known as the guys that support guys in their garage and the low quantities and the startups and everything. But the reality is the vast majority of what we do and sell is towards commercial and industrial and OEM-level quantities. So we’ll do quantity one, but we’ll also do a quantity one million. We think about ourselves like In-N-Out Burger all the time, where it’s a very small menu and it’s good and it’s fast and it’s inexpensive, but then there is a secret menu. And if you can access the secret menu, there’s all kinds of extra stuff that we can do. So in the last year, year and a half, our factory-as-a-service offering has been growing significantly. And that’s definitely like a white-glove, white-label type thing where we’ll dedicate equipment to your project, we’ll dedicate buildings to your project. We will basically become a contract manufacturer for you in order to hit your mission because sometimes people, they call themselves a manufacturer, but really they’re just a designer who ends up outsourcing a bunch of stuff, and juggling all those different vendors and everything is a huge challenge. So when we see that, we raise our hand and say, “Hey, do you want to let us do what we do best and then you can do what you do best?” And it’s really good. It’s a big part of our growth, not only in the last couple years, but in the next five years too.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I think this is the first time I had a guest on the show where the guest was subliminally pitching me a service that I really need desperately right now. I mean, I kid you not, we spent most probably in the six digits on equipment in the last two months, right? It’s like, no, we really need this 3D printer and it needs to be the best and we really need this. But then there are all the other things that we can’t do in-house, but we really want to bring it in-house, but we’re too small for it. So super interesting. Don’t want to bore anyone listening, but we most probably have to connect on that. Going back to the world of manufacturing before we move into the brand conversation, which I know you are very excited about too, because you come from that marketing background with your company before you started SendCutSend. But manufacturing, a lot has happened recently with the tariffs first, then with AI, but also with this analog and with the do-it-yourself movement, with the next generation that wants to get their hands dirty again. How do you see the future of manufacturing in this country?

Jim Belosic:
It’s accessible. Accessibility is the number one thing that I think about with manufacturing. When I think about when I was growing up in the ’90s, if I wanted to get something made, I literally had to go around and knock on doors in the industrial sector of town and just ask questions and be like, “Hey, I need this made.” And they’re like, “Oh, well, we only do wood, but there’s a metal guy two blocks over,” so I’d have to go find the metal guy. And then getting access to manufacturing was incredibly hard unless you knew a guy. And today it’s a hundred percent different. Anyone from their kitchen table can access manufacturing. We’re trying to be a big part of that. Some great tailwinds that we have too are AI. In order to get something made, usually you need to have a CAD model. You have to be pretty good in Fusion or SolidWorks or Onshape or something like that and design all this stuff. So that was a barrier for a lot of people. But today, a chunk of our business is from people who are just talking to an LLM and saying, “Hey, I need this bookshelf that’s made out of this material. It needs to be these dimensions.” And then something like ChatGPT or Claude or whatever is producing it, gets uploaded to our site, and then they can hold it in their hands within a couple days. So it’s really cool to see that today and knowing today is the worst it’s ever going to be. It’s just getting better and better.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah. I was waiting for that because I’m wondering how… I mean, you need to, to a certain extent, do some sort of quality control in order for you to actually print a part that is in any way usable, or do you literally take the files verbatim and no questions asked? But what if the LLM designed something that you can’t produce?

Jim Belosic:
You’re dead on. So it’s like there’s more accessibility, so there’s more stuff trying to come over the wall. We also have to reinforce our walls so that we’re not just taking this crazy garbage that people are throwing at us. So we call it DFM, design for manufacturability. That’s where most of our investment is right now, in not only educating a human who’s designing something, but then educating an agent that’s designing something, educating the LLM. So it’s actually a battle right now because just because you can design it doesn’t mean that it can be made. And so we made huge investments in education over the years, like our YouTube channel, everything, but now we’re like, “Oh wait, we can’t just make a YouTube channel for these bots to learn how to make stuff.” So we’ve had to get a lot smarter and hopefully, if we’ve been able to educate some humans on how to make stuff, we can educate some robots on how to make stuff and then we’ll all win in the future.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Well, and it’s your robots telling the other robots how it’s done. I’m sure people upload stuff and you have a system that basically says, “Nope, red flag, red flag, red flag.” And that is all automated via AI as well. I mean, it must be super, super interesting. Well, let’s jump into the world of brand. You already brought it up a little bit when you said, “Well, little did I know eight years ago where we would be today.” It’s hard when you create a brand name in the basement or the garage. I mean, you have a beloved brand name, right? SendCutSend. It’s weird. It’s fun. It says exactly what we do. It says exactly what you do, or potentially what you did at some point. And so I’m wondering, is it still a fantastic brand asset or do you, as a marketer at heart, do you have any regrets that it’s such a descriptive name that was so awesome for so long, and now that you’re expanding and you’re doing definitely more than just cutting, does it corner, no pun intended, does it corner you in a little bit or not?

Jim Belosic:
Man, this is like therapy now. I know it’s therapy.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Listen, I have three books out. Well, two books out called Brand Therapy. So here we are. You’re on the couch, my friend.

Jim Belosic:
Oh man. Yeah. You’re saying some of these deep, deep thoughts that I have myself. So yeah, no, SendCutSend. When we first started, send us your file, we’ll cut it out of sheet metal, and then we’ll send it to you. But really where we are today is we are send, make, send. Send us your idea, we’ll make it and send it to your door. So luckily I own that domain name too.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Ah, good.

Jim Belosic:
But from a brand perspective, it’s like, do you really want to change the name of Coca-Cola even though there’s no coca in it anymore?

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Of course you do. Of course you do, because you changed it from Coca-Cola to Coke and you’re changing SendCutSend to SendMakeSend. The thing is, and I mean, I’m sure a lot of listeners are going to enjoy this conversation, but it is an evolution, right? It’s an evolution of a brand where the essence of the brand name is still there. But look, we make, we don’t just cut. You know that, everyone knows that, right? And I think if you have your tribe behind you, and for sure all of the large clients of yours, they’re like, “Oh, I’m so glad.”

Jim Belosic:
Well, maybe this podcast is the launch of SendMakeSend.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Here we go. I might have to hold on to air this for a half a year or a year until you’re ready.

Jim Belosic:
I agree. I love the evolution side and I think marketers and branding experts understand the evolution. On the customer side, they dig their heels in and they avoid change. I think about all these brand changes that have happened over my career. I remember when Instagram first changed their logo from the little Polaroid camera to the gradient thing and, oh my God, the internet lost its mind.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Uproar. Oh, an uproar for sure.

Jim Belosic:
And then Cracker Barrel recently. That was a good one. Gap changed their logo, Walmart changed their logo, and everyone’s up in arms and there’s chaos. And Jaguar had that big brand fail recently and I’m like, “Oh God, I don’t want to rock the boat too much.” So I guess my challenge is how do I balance evolution with maintaining that brand recognition and the customer love? And I don’t want them to think that I’m selling out or doing change just for change’s sake.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And I mean, listen, and then we’re going to finish this subject on air. I mean, we can always continue it over a call later on. But I feel that what’s going on with a brand change when it’s abrupt and when it’s night and day from what happened before, it comes as something that is disruptive. And people are like, “Wait, the thing that I loved so much and I thought I knew so much, suddenly it’s different, and different is weird and it’s unfamiliar and I don’t see eye to eye with that.” That’s what happened with all of these brands that you mentioned. And some of them just did really crappy work, right? I mean, Jaguar, right? There were some that just, Gap, right? There were some that were just completely failing. But if you have a name and you keep the essence, and I’m literally working with a client through this right now, and they’re a national chain that is very beloved, and we have to make sure we keep at least one of the two words. And it’s literally, that’s what we’re going through with that client right now. So the idea of SendCutSend, that the cut part evolves because you have evolved and everyone can see it on your site and everyone has felt it, it’s something that I don’t think there would be any uproar. I think people would actually be excited, like, “Oh, finally, makes sense. Yeah, that’s what you’re doing now.” But we talked about other people’s ginormous brand fails. Let’s talk about you building this brand for the last eight years. And I know there’s a lot of ups and downs when it comes to building a company and just the growth that we already talked about, but was there any brand fail? Was there anything going on that you went through from a marketing perspective or a brand perspective or even a company perspective where it was just, you kind of look back and you’re like, “Shoot, that was really bad.”

Jim Belosic:
Yeah. I think in the early years, we marketed towards the wrong customers. We marketed towards the customers that were easy to grab, not necessarily the best ones. So I think maybe we were marketing towards some junk food and it was easy and it was high calorie and the sugar rush felt good, but really we should have been investing our efforts in the Whole Foods and doing some pushups and doing what’s hard. So the wrong customers were the stuff that photographed really well and it was really easy to get UGC because it was a maker or a hobbyist or something like that. And they’re like, “Yeah, please, please share my work.” When you’re working with a Fortune 50 and you’re like, “Hey, I want to show off these parts that I made for you.” They’re like, “Hell no. We signed NDAs and everything.” So it’s very challenging to market towards those guys. The other issue is I was kind of marketing towards what I know and not what I needed. I’m a hobbyist. I’m a guy in my garage. I was just like, “Well, I know how to sell to those guys, so that’s what I’m going to do.” Really what I needed to do was broaden my horizons and say, “Okay, even though I’m not an expert at marketing and branding towards these Fortune 50s and enterprise clients, I need to learn how to do it and put in the work and go for it.” But I kind of got distracted for a few years.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Well, and I would take it pretty easy on yourself with that because, I mean, what you created is, you couldn’t have jumped into the Fortune 50 world from day one, right? I mean, it’s like there’s so much learning that you did with the company to get to a place where you can actually work with them and where you can have a pitch for a Series A versus, we have a couple of machines in the room, do you want to give us money? I mean, it’s a totally different company. So to me, from the outside at least, it seems like such an evolutionary way to start with quantity-of-one, one-off orders, to growing into this new field.

Jim Belosic:
Yeah. What I was told by one of our investors, they’re like, “Oh, you have a bottoms-up marketing strategy.” I was like, “I don’t even know what that means.” And they’re like, “Oh no, you go to the everyman, but then the everyman has a real job. They might work at a rocket company or they may work at a huge automotive company or whatever.” And that was our Trojan horse, really, to get into all these companies. We got in through the human first, not through the weird procurement process. So even though I just said that it was the wrong kind of marketing, it actually ended up working across a very long time span.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It exists, right? It’s an actual thing that people do as a strategy and you’ve done it subliminally.

Jim Belosic:
Yeah, I had no idea.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It doesn’t matter if it works, that’s a startup. So it sounds like you had customers that were the people that work a nine-to-five and then come Friday night or Saturday morning, they go in the garage, they do their crazy fun automotive, whatever project, they need a part. And then on Monday they go back to SpaceX or Blue Origin or Amazon or Google or whatever, and they tell their colleagues about how awesome SendCutSend was. Is that how it went down?

Jim Belosic:
Exactly. Yeah, exactly that. Everyone, if you can make them happy in their personal life, they will try and bring you along to their work life. I think another analog of that is maybe racing, automotive racing, where in NASCAR they say, race on Sunday, sell on Monday. And if Chevy is out there doing really good, it helps the Chevy brand and then maybe people want to buy a Chevy. So if I can solve their issue where some guy’s trying to make a folding bicycle in his garage, but then he has an issue at his submarine company, maybe he’s going to think about us when he needs some parts.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Amazing. Super, super cool. In your journey as an entrepreneur and building your brand, obviously you are in the business of data at this point, I’m sure. I mean, it’s all data. I mean, it’s the reason why you can do what you do so quickly and fulfill these orders because you’re most probably a data machine. But very early on, did you get any customer data with any research that you did or questionnaires in the beginning, email surveys, and yet you did not believe in it and you did a totally different thing just because your gut said, you know what? I know that’s what the world wants, faster horses, but you give them a car. Did they want something and then you did give them something totally different? And were there any of those stories? I always love those stories of founders.

Jim Belosic:
Yeah. Actually, because we were serving consumers and makers and hobbyists and everything, some of the early data showed that we were selling into these enterprise-level companies and the enterprises would reach out and they wanted really weird stuff. They wanted super special stuff. They wanted materials we didn’t have, capabilities we didn’t have. They wanted to pay us in 120 days instead of with a credit card. They wanted all this crazy stuff. And we said no. I wanted everyone to have the same experience. It was important for me as a brand so that Joe in his garage gets the same experience as some guy from the Navy or whatever. They can do everything the same, which means in order to give that enterprise-level service, I had to give it to the consumer too. And it ended up being great for our consumers. They have the best security, the best customer support, the best machines, the best staff. Everything is at their disposal because that’s what the enterprises demand. So even though we said no to the enterprises, it ended up working in everybody’s favor, I guess.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That’s amazing. That’s really good. And I love how you said, no, this is exactly how we do it. It’s kind of like the DNA of the company. We’re not going to change it around depending on your budget or depending on your size.

Jim Belosic:
Well, and it’s so hard to do because especially when you’re early and you’re trying to make payroll and someone’s throwing around a big contract at you…

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Net 120. Yeah, no way.

Jim Belosic:
Yeah. But you know that it’s going to cause you so many problems. It’s really hard to say no to that. But in the end, they end up coming back, or it takes a little bit of time to build that infrastructure so that you can say yes, but then you do it for everybody and everybody benefits.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah. I really like that about the company. You very much have a fist-in-the-air kind of approach to, we really help everybody. And I heard you on another podcast, it might have been the same video on your website, where you talked about, “Hey, I know that that guy needs his part on Friday in order to do his project on Saturday. Let’s just rush it over, or we shouldn’t be able to do it because he didn’t get the cutoff line or whatever, but we’re going to do it because we know we’re going to make him happy.” And I think there’s something about that that everyone feels on the consumer side. And it’s the heart and soul of the brand. And that should be the exact same for a Fortune 100 that places an order, where they feel like they’ve got my back, whatever happens, as with the person in the garage. And it’s not easy to achieve. So bravo.

Jim Belosic:
Yeah, thank you. Yeah, it’s hard, but if you do what is right for just a human and you don’t care about where they’re working or what their project is, if you just do what’s right in order to make that person happy and have them achieve their goal, achieve their mission, finish their project, it doesn’t matter where they work and it doesn’t matter how big their team is or how much money they have to spend. The guy spending 30 bucks is going to be just as happy as the guy spending three million. And as long as you can always come back to that center and remember that, it drives all decisions going forward.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah. Well, now that we’re deep in the heart and soul of a brand, which of course encompasses everything from how you talk to people to how you behave internally, and of course then it’s like the logo and the name and all of that stuff. But after eight years of running this business and running other businesses before, including helping others with marketing, what does this very misunderstood word of branding, what does branding mean to you?

Jim Belosic:
Brand means reputation to me. I think that’s the easiest way to define it. Your brand is your promise. It means, are you going to do what you say, say what you do? Are you authentic? Do you show up when you’re going to show up? And you can have a reputation for being funny or fast or inexpensive or whatever, but that’s your reputation. Then you have to do that all the time and you can never let up. If you start missing whatever that reputation is, then all of a sudden you have no reputation. So we think about that all the time. Our reputation is to be good, fast, inexpensive, accessible. That’s our reputation. And that drives us, drives us in all decisions. It drives us with every single package that we ship out, every single time we talk to a customer, we have that reputation in mind. So it all comes together as brand.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Absolutely. 100% agree. And I think it’s so interesting with reputation, with that word, that people always feel reputation is past, it’s past tense, but reputation is future. And so the idea that when you start your business, you know exactly what you want your reputation to be in the future. And I think that idea of having yearly resets or whenever, but that idea of, okay, so this is our reputation so far in the marketplace, what do we need to fine-tune? Where do we want to be? What do we want our reputation to be in the next two, three years? Which might shift, but we have to put in the work to get that reputation. And that really is branding, it’s marketing, it’s advertising, it’s all of that combined, but it’s really deep and it’s really philosophical. And I think it’s really interesting, at least that’s why I do what I do.

Jim Belosic:
I like focusing on reputation because it’s actually something that you can listen to. If I say, oh, I want to know what my brand is, I don’t know, that’s a little more like meta in my mind. If I say, I want to know what my reputation is, I can see that in our reviews. I can see that in our customer support chats. I can see it anytime I go to a trade show and I talk to people. So it’s a great way of getting instant feedback too.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Absolutely. Absolutely. If you would take the SendCutSend brand and you would put it through a filter and out would come one word and one word only. So if you take the entire brand, which is everything, it’s operations, it’s customers, it’s the product, it’s everything. For Liquid Death, it’s mischief. For Coca-Cola, it’s happiness. It’s like night and day, but they’re both canned drinks. What is one word that can describe the SendCutSend brand?

Jim Belosic:
Oh boy. I think it’s authenticity. I think we are who we say we are, whether you like it or not. Like you said earlier, we have that kind of fist-in-the-air mentality where we say, “Hey, this is who we are. This is who we’re not, but we’re not going to lie to you. We’re going to maintain our reputation. If we say we’re going to do this amazing thing for you, we’re going to do it. And if we tell you no, we’re going to tell you why, but at least we’re not lying to you.” So people who see our advertising and our marketing and our videos and they meet us in person, they’re like, “Oh my God, you guys are the same people that you are on your YouTube channel in real life.”

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That you say you are. Yeah, exactly.

Jim Belosic:
And it’s like, “Yeah, we’re not faking it. I don’t have time to fake it. You either love me or you don’t. And if you love our company, then we’re good to go. But if you don’t like how we’re running things or you don’t like our offerings or whatever and you run away, that’s great. We both dodged a bullet. I don’t want to try and tell you something just to win your money and then disappoint you. I’d rather tell you, I can’t do that.” And some people are disappointed, but at least we didn’t have a transaction first.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah. Yeah. No, 100%. And I think that authenticity really comes through. I wrote a book called Bigger Than This a while ago. It must be eight years or so ago. And I went on a whole speaking trip with it. And one of the slides was this ghost walked in and the guy was like, “Oh, come on.” And he took the blanket off of the ghost and then there was nothing underneath it. It was just really a ghost. And it’s like this thing, you got to be who you say you are. And everything will be so easy, but it’s really, really hard to do that. And especially with you, I mean, I see you on YouTube through SendCutSend, and it must be a big thing to say, no, I am not the face of the brand because I want to be. I’m the face of the brand because it’s authentic and I got to talk about my stuff and I’m passionate about it. And it doesn’t matter if I have five employees or if I have 5,000 employees, it’s just who we are. But it takes a lot to do that. As we’re slowly coming to an end of this conversation, do you have any brand advice potentially for founders or even for other brand builders as a takeaway, something that you learned along the journey?

Jim Belosic:
Yeah, I think it’s kind of what we were just talking about. It’s be authentic. It’s be yourself, even if it’s unsexy. If being yourself means that you’re losing customers or not getting as many sales, maybe those weren’t good customers anyway for you. You have to be yourself and then find the customers that love you for who you are. I think especially as a startup, when there’s startups out there and you’re trying to make ends meet, you try and exaggerate a little bit and you try and say, “Oh, we’re bigger than we are. It’s not just me and my kitchen. I’m embarrassed of that. No, I actually have a team of 10.” No, just be honest. Just be like, “No, it’s just me at my kitchen.” But the reason that that’s good is because you’re going to get all of my focus. And if you have a call, it’s going to be me. Or if it’s the opposite, if you’re a thousand-person team and people are worried that they’re not going to get one-on-one service, just be authentic about it and say, “Yeah, we’re a thousand-person team. You may not be able to talk with the same person every single time, but you can talk to a person 24 hours a day no matter what, someone’s on vacation.” So whatever your honest attributes are, showcase those. It’ll prevent a small fraction of customers coming to you, but the remaining fraction that comes will appreciate it and they’ll be more loyal.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Very, very wise words that work in every industry. And I mean, even with Toneoptic, we got ourselves in big trouble the last couple of months where we’re trying to ship the product and we can’t. And so we’re at this point where we’ve got hundreds of pre-orders and I keep telling everyone the exact same story. I’m like, “Sorry, no news.” But somehow I must have done it, or we as a company must have done it in such an authentic way, that when finally one of them received the product, because we shipped them out one at a time out of our tiny little factory, they received it and they’re like, “Oh my God, this was the best day. I received the product. I’m so excited. The quality is amazing.” And then he continues and he’s like, “Too bad, one of the feet is broken and I only received this part and this and this and this.” And he’s like, “But you guys are awesome.” And I’m like, “What?” So he waited for half a year for an order, right? Then he receives it and one part is broken because, of course, it shipped to Europe and we have no business doing this right now and we paid three times as much and all of that. But they feel that. They know that we’re going out of our way and that the actual product is amazing. And even though they’re small little details, which, like, “Hey, we ship you a new foot overnight, don’t worry, and here’s how you install it.” But for me, it was this big moment where I’m like, “Oh shoot, we actually built a brand.” People love us even though we screw up, they still love us because of how we do it for them. And to me as a brand builder, I’m very on the spot with this company and I’m like, “Oh, I’m actually, it’s working. I’m building a brand and it’s really exciting.” When was there a moment when you built SendCutSend where you felt like, you know what, this is actually, even if you had a couple of employees or whatever, at some point where you felt like, “You know what? This is turning into a brand. It’s turning into something that people really love and it’s a name and a mantra that people start repeating.”

Jim Belosic:
I think the first time I saw someone out in public that wasn’t an employee and they had one of our T-shirts on, I was like, “Oh, that looks like a SendCutSend shirt.”

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Was it a homeless guy and he got it from Goodwill?

Jim Belosic:
No. It was at a gas station. I’m like, “Oh, I wonder if he works for us.” And I didn’t recognize him and I was like, “Hey man, that’s a cool shirt. Where’d you get that?” And he’s like, “Oh, it’s this company called SendCutSend and they sent it to me and I wear it all the time. It’s my favorite T-shirt.” And I was like, “Oh man, when people are wearing your merch, that’s a pretty big brand moment.” I think the next moment is probably the first SendCutSend tattoo.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah. It will happen, I’m sure.

Jim Belosic:
I don’t think we’re there yet. We may have had one or two.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
You need the icon. You need the icon to support the logotype, then you will have it. That’s a wonderful story. Listen, this was so great. What’s next for SendCutSend? I mean, what are you excited about in the next six months or so?

Jim Belosic:
Oh boy, more, more, more.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Constraints, constraints, constraints.

Jim Belosic:
Constraints, more constraints. It’s more of everything. We just crossed 700 employees. That’s going to become 1,400 here pretty quick. We’re opening up new facilities in the U.S., more capabilities. We just got into CNC machining about a year ago.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Amazing.

Jim Belosic:
And now our CNC machining arm is growing incredibly rapidly, so more capabilities there, more materials. Really the future of SendCutSend is, like I said at the beginning, send, make, send. We want to be able to take your entire product and deliver it to you at scale and do it over and over again for everyone in the U.S. So we got a lot of puzzles to solve.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Or in other words, the future of SendCutSend is more toilets. Many, many more toilets.

Jim Belosic:
Yes. More power, more toilets, bigger cafeterias. Yes.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Exactly. Amazing. Where can people follow you on YouTube, the website, you personally? Where do you want people to go to dive into the world of SendCutSend?

Jim Belosic:
Yeah. YouTube is great. Our SendCutSend YouTube channel has over a thousand videos, a bunch of them educational and some behind-the-scenes stuff. And then Instagram is great too if you want to see a bunch of customer projects and little things that we’re working on. So we’re just /SendCutSend. And then you can follow me on Twitter. I am Jim Belosic.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Fantastic. Jim, this was amazing. Thank you so much for spending so much time with us in the middle of the week where you’ve got a lot of stuff going on. Great insights and a really delightful conversation.

Jim Belosic:
Cool. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.