In this episode of The Orita Podcast, Aaron Schwartz sits down with Alex Schinasi (Co-Founder of Hulken) and Lee Rotenberg (CRO of Hulken) for a wide-ranging conversation on building, pivoting, and scaling across both venture-backed SaaS and a wildly successful consumer brand. From startup war stories in the NFX days to turning an “accidental business” into a $50M+ brand with a seven-person team, Alex and Lee share the kind of operator wisdom you only get after doing it multiple times.

Together, they dive into:

• The pivots that shaped Ivy and what they learned from exits

• Why Alex & Lee love the 0→1 stage and how that founder energy shows up in consumer

• How Hulken became a viral, new-category product with an organic social flywheel •

The power of “pro” niches (thrifters, makeup artists, stylists) in driving brand adoption

• Going premium on purpose: partnerships, positioning, and resisting “utility brand” gravity

• Retail expansion lessons from Container Store to Target • Inventory planning, scarcity, and what happens when demand keeps surprising you

• The modern Shopify tool stack: what works, what’s noisy, and why consolidation is coming

• Where ecommerce is heading next

👥 Meet the guests

Alex Schinasi, Co-Founder at Hulken

Lee Rotenberg, CRO at Hulken

🎙 Hosted by Aaron Schwartz, Co-Founder & Co-CEO at Orita.ai

🎧 Chapters [00:00] Meet Lee & Alex: Serial Founders Behind Hulken [01:49] SaaS to Consumer: Why They Switched (and Why It’s Rare) [03:56] 3 Pivots + 2 Exits: The Ivy & Clay Origin Story [09:05] Hulken Was “Accidental”… Then It Took Off [13:35] The Viral Flywheel: How Hulken Grew Without Forcing It [18:05] Ops Reality Check: Inventory, Retail, and Scaling Lean [22:56] What’s Next: AI Shopping, Ecommerce Shifts, and Hulken’s Playbook [27:45] Founder Advice: Move Fast, Don’t Lie to Yourself

Transcript:

Lee Rotenberg (00:00.209)

you.

Aaron Schwartz (00:01.507)

Hey everyone. I am so excited to have Lee and Alex here today. I've known Lee and Alex from Hulkin for a decade, maybe a little bit longer. We were all in a startup group together called NFX, which is now just an incredible fund, but it was an accelerator program. And they've started multiple companies and had exits. And we're going to go into all that. We're going to go into building Hulkin and what that looks like and the tech side and the operations side and everything.

Lee Rotenberg (00:11.578)

longer.

Alex Schinasi (00:11.896)

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Schwartz (00:31.127)

I'm Aaron Schwartz, one of the co-founders of Verita. been in e-comm for a very long time when I knew Alex and Lee. I was running a watch company, which is kind of funny, which we can't watch marketplace. But now I slang AI customer segmentation for a bunch of Klaviyo's biggest brands. I was going to introduce the two of them, but I just, can't possibly do it. So I'm going to shut up now and let them go. And Lee, I'm going to put you on the spot first because you're the most reticent to participate.

Alex Schinasi (00:37.354)

Mm-hmm. You're the real deal.

Lee Rotenberg (00:54.573)

Alex Schinasi (00:54.574)

Yes, I like it.

Lee Rotenberg (00:55.92)

my God, Erin, I was saying I wanted Alex to intro me. So I am Lee. I'm currently in Brooklyn, New York. If any of you who are listening right now are in Greenpoint, you should stop by our office. You can join the live. We can have this whole community live going on. But before joining Hulkin as CRO, I built two software companies with Alex, Ivy and Clay, both in very different spaces. Ivy was essentially the back office for intro.

designers, architects, GCs. We were acquired by Houzz. And then a few years later, we built Clay, which was essentially a education tool for

preschools and daycares and we were acquired by kangaroo time and then Alex and I don't know how to not do anything. So we're like, let's join Hulkin full time. Alex's husband was running Hulkin and Alex was hustling Hulkin on her weekends. And I will now pass the mic over to Alex to tell a little bit about herself.

Alex Schinasi (02:02.71)

Yeah, so I'm Alex, co-founder of Hulken. And like Lee said, our background has always been in B2B SaaS. And I think we're the only founders to make the move from SaaS to consumer brands, which is interesting. talk to a lot of scarred consumer founders that made the switch to SaaS and are really happy. And yeah, we went the other way. And I think Hulken is unusual in that it was kind of an accidental business.

We were happily building software and doing it successfully, raising capital and doing that whole VC journey all the way to exits. when we saw the success of Hulken and how much fun it was to see how much it resonated with our audience, it was just this undeniable pull that we had to go all in.

so we both joined last year when Hulkin was already, you know, in the high, you know, above eight figures in terms of revenue, which was very much a side hustle for, for, for me for a while. And my husband was hustling on his own until we joined him. so we're having a lot of fun. It's, just very different and new and we kind of doing it very differently. And in that we didn't raise capital, we are self-funded and,

Lee Rotenberg (02:58.514)

Thank

Alex Schinasi (03:20.94)

and join that process of running a growing profitable company, which is not always the case in this space.

Aaron Schwartz (03:29.869)

And your husband is a musician, so he also kind of took a different path into running Hawkins. Is that correct?

Alex Schinasi (03:36.398)

Exactly. So he was a professional drummer for 25 plus years. And when COVID happened and he found himself without stages to play on, he kind of took this family product that my dad invented and put it online, created the website, started going to the post office and shipping orders from our New York City apartments. And one thing led to another and it grew to what it is today, which is a 50 million plus revenue brand.

very lean and mean. We're a team of seven full-time employees at this point and just doing things differently this time and really enjoying the process.

Aaron Schwartz (04:15.343)

The bulk of this conversation, we will come back to Hulkin. I actually want to go back to Ivy and a little bit about how the two you met. think, wasn't the first name Art Setter? Am I right? Am I getting this backwards? Okay, so it's Art Setter. So give me the founding story of that and then how it became Ivy.

Lee Rotenberg (04:26.31)

the art centers, yeah.

Alex Schinasi (04:27.564)

Yeah.

Lee Rotenberg (04:33.586)

Yeah, so Alex and I were both living in Tel Aviv and we were just enamored with the creative energy there. And if you're living in Tel Aviv, you either are working at a startup or you realize you have to start a startup. And that's essentially what happened to us. We initially started as a B2C platform. And we...

built the business on like a Shopify site, no experience, and we hustled, right? And we were able to raise a million dollars off that from VCs. And then we realized, hey, this isn't actually working. There's not so much of a pull. So that was where we did our first pivot. And we took art setters into, instead of selling to consumers, selling to other retailers. And we turned it into a B2B platform.

Alex Schinasi (05:10.99)

Mm.

Lee Rotenberg (05:22.33)

And we actually brought on additional investors. And after we did that, we heard about NFX. And we told our investors, hey, we want to go to NFX. And they're like, OK, but if you do that, don't change your idea. Because every time someone does an accelerator, they end up changing their idea. And we're like, we never will. We have the greatest company in the world. Like day two of NFX, were like, Art Center sucks. It's not a real business. We sold ourselves lies of dreams that we thought it was going to work.

We were really honest with ourselves largely because I think James Currier is really powerful in showing you the truth. And we're like, we need a pivot. And so we pivoted, was the third pivot we did. And we turned into basically back office, as I mentioned, for Home Remodeling Pros and we named it Ivy. And I think that really, that early journey with Alex is really such a, it just is so symbolic of everything that comes next. Cause Alex and I are never,

tied to one idea. We're always pivoting. We're always moving. And we often never know what we're doing. We're never in an industry that we have any experience in. Like everything we've ever started, we have no idea about that industry. And we literally have no idea about any of it until we start going after it. And I think that's, it's kind of in our secret sauce.

Alex Schinasi (06:34.84)

Yeah.

Aaron Schwartz (06:47.929)

What are, and Alex, maybe for you, what are some of the things that have kind of like pulled you forward, right? A lot of times you're talking to a founder and she's got this deep experience in the space and it's like, this is the problem I have to solve. But obviously, art setter to Ivy, right? And then we can talk about Clay and obviously Hulkin, right? One of the things that you kind of said was like, art setters wasn't a real business. Like again, it's defined by you guys, right? What are the things that get you excited when you're figuring out what problems to solve?

Alex Schinasi (06:59.982)

Mm.

Alex Schinasi (07:04.471)

Mm-hmm.

Alex Schinasi (07:11.16)

Mm-hmm.

Alex Schinasi (07:16.426)

Yeah, and I think what you say is really true. People usually assume we come from that background. So people always assume we came from the design world, right? Because we tackled it. And I think what motivates us... can you hear it? Guys, hear me?

Lee Rotenberg (07:26.546)

I know if we do here.

Lee Rotenberg (07:34.93)

I think, yeah, I think we lost you for a bit.

Alex Schinasi (07:35.01)

Are we good? OK. So I think what motivates us is the problem solving piece and kind of figuring out the product market fit in the process. More so than a deep expertise, I think if this journey taught us anything is that we can actually, we can tackle any industry and

Aaron Schwartz (07:36.409)

We can hear now.

Alex Schinasi (08:02.014)

do it, you know, do a decent job at it.

Aaron Schwartz (08:06.095)

And then so with Ivy, right, eventually you guys sold it to Houzz. You stuck around for little bit, think, correct? What was the decision for you guys to sell the company? How did you make that call? Yeah.

Lee Rotenberg (08:12.626)

two years.

Lee Rotenberg (08:19.93)

I mean, it one of those things, it like, it was a no-brainer. It made sense to our investors, it made sense to us, it made sense to our employees, and I think it made a lot of sense to our customers. It was the right time, we hadn't gone out to raise our Series A, right, so it only raised a seed round.

And it just made a lot of sense on that. And I also think, Alex and I, correct me if I'm wrong, we'd love to be billionaires, but we're not someone that's gonna work 100 years to make an idea happen. This is one reason why I think we love the consumer space right now. I have to say, if there's a bug on our website, it's not like we're doing open heart surgery or trying to change the way X, Y, and Z happens. No, we're having fun, we're doing things. like...

Ivy was amazing, but I think by year, like four, me and Alex are like, okay, like, let's, let's change it up. Like that's just who we are in a lot of ways of what we do. So I think beyond it just being amazing, think Alex and I were like, okay, yeah, it's not like we were born to build an S &B software for home remodeling pros. It's like, no, we built something great. This is amazing. It's working. Let's pass it on to someone that can bring it to.

Alex Schinasi (09:30.52)

Mm-hmm.

Lee Rotenberg (09:34.518)

hundreds of thousands of more customers.

Alex Schinasi (09:39.062)

Yeah, no, I completely agree. think we just have this. This is the type of founder we are. We love to get our hands dirty. We love to figure things out. We love to get that, get to that point of just getting that freaking pool from the market. And I think it took a lot of pivoting to get there with Ivy and Clay, by the way. And sometimes that's what's a little bit different with just running a consumer brand is that, you know, it's less about tech and iteration and kind of

moving with that speed and more like, okay, now we have inventory and we have more of these hurdles in a way, but we just love building. And this is the stage that we like the most is for that point from zero to one. And when we enjoy it so much, I think you just figure it out.

Aaron Schwartz (10:26.179)

What was the original market poll of Hulken? To your point, it was your father's idea, right? And then it's like, it grew and grew and grew and sounds like pretty steadily and your husband was working, you were moonlighting. But what was it that actually like kind of struck a nerve that started pulling it forward, even before you get into all the operational headaches?

Alex Schinasi (10:34.35)

Mm-hmm.

Alex Schinasi (10:44.608)

Yeah, I mean, I think the product itself, the fact that it's an entirely new category of products that had never been to market. We were really lucky that we had a product that was built for social media. It's shiny, it's big, it has wheels. You want to put things in it, you want to climb into it. So it just, it is made to be filmed. And so from day one, we had this very organic viral flywheel that started happening.

Lee Rotenberg (10:58.172)

Thanks.

Alex Schinasi (11:14.274)

because people just loved filming it, but also people loved, like found instant gratification from using it. So it created this aha moment, the minute people started using it, that then in turn created a social media moment that we could capitalize on.

Aaron Schwartz (11:30.863)

What was the turning point for you to decide to go all out? Was it you guys sold clay and you were able to escape or was it something else pulled you in?

Alex Schinasi (11:45.943)

I think we had just exited and vested and when we saw the excitement around Hulken and where it was kind of on its own without us, it just felt like the natural next step to get into it. And

We welcome the change and we'll welcome the challenge. Now we're, you know, we're running a consumer brand and that's new for us. And I think we're always kind of looking and stretching that comfort zone a little bit. so we're in, in our era of fun and doing things differently and it just fits that box.

Aaron Schwartz (12:28.409)

I like it. Lee, how did you get suckered in? Give us a story about you joining Hawken.

Lee Rotenberg (12:31.856)

I mean, we just do fun things like the before like we like when we're just doing it for fun, like we'd dress up in like turkey outfits and give away hulkins on the corner of like a street in Williamsburg. And that's fun. And it was ridiculous. And then I was like, this is like, I could do this full time, like dress up in like an inflatable costume and just like give out hulkins on the street and just create strange moments. Sign me up. was, it.

Alex Schinasi (12:42.542)

you

Lee Rotenberg (12:58.898)

I think the one thing I can say is that after two venture-backed businesses, I'm really not in that era right now. It's exhausting to have that. I was looking for something else. I'm a mom.

I realized like if I'm going to be spending time away from my kids, I need to really enjoy my day. I think at the end of Clay, like there would be moments where I'd like physically just lay on the bathroom of the handicapped bathroom of WeWork and just like lay down being like, my gosh, like this is just miserable. Cause it was just raining. It was just like so opposite of what...

Alex Schinasi (13:25.581)

Mm-hmm.

Lee Rotenberg (13:43.282)

a fulfillment and vibrancy and just life looked like to me. And so when I was like manifesting, what do I want to do next after this? Yeah, it's dressing up in an inflatable costume, giving out Halkins on the corner of Williamsburg, right? And that's kind of like what made me like when Alex and I were talking about like what's next.

Like when I was like flirting with this idea of like, well, maybe it is doing Hulkin full time. It kind of just was like, yeah, like why would I not? Like it's, let's try it. And it's been so fun.

Aaron Schwartz (14:22.831)

I do appreciate how viral it is that I'll have you I was at a conference last week in New York and I post a lot of terrible content on LinkedIn but my first photo was literally walking down the street when I landed and seeing a hulkin and I was like, well this is exciting. I was very shiny and they looked so happy pulling it and it was just like lightweight.

Lee Rotenberg (14:38.0)

That's amazing. Yeah.

Alex Schinasi (14:39.982)

Right? It becomes an iconic New York moment. Now, every time I go back to New York, I'm counting the minutes until I see my first Hulken after landing. It kind of became, yeah, it became this iconic New York product. I mean, we now sell the container store on Sixth Avenue. It's one of their top five best selling products.

Lee Rotenberg (14:45.458)

Thanks.

Alex Schinasi (15:01.74)

for a reason, it's really made for New Yorkers. That's where the brand started. It's really where we feel at home and now we have an amazing showroom in Greenpoint. But yeah, the virality that you get offline with Hulkin, I think is what supercharged the growth on many levels.

Aaron Schwartz (15:18.125)

Yeah, I I actually want to dive in a little bit on the marketing front. obviously like viral brand, you guys have scaled, you've got celebrities, you've got all that. What are, are there any like specific points that you've seen? Maybe one that was like, holy shit, I didn't realize this was going to work or this just happened. And then one where you guys actually put in the work and you were creative that you got the impact that you were looking for.

Alex Schinasi (15:37.486)

Mm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, definitely. think on the kind of, my god, this happened and turned out to be a great thing for us.

Lee Rotenberg (15:41.074)

Mm-hmm.

Alex Schinasi (15:48.791)

We realized that Hulken became an essential work gear tool for a lot of different professional niches. And it started with thrifters and thrifters that would buy and sell on Poshmark, for example. They would use the bag to go sourcing and then they would use the bag to take their packages to the post office. And the thrifting community is extremely active and engaged on social media. So then from thrifters, it moved on to professional makeup artists. And professional makeup artist is an incredible niche to tap into

because they interact with celebrities, interact with other professionals that schlep stuff, like fashion stylists and prop stylists. And so you go on any kind of TV set in the States. When I do TV, I go backstage and I see it filled with Hulkens because it became that work essential, again, for a community that is so active and engaged on social media. So then it moved on to interior designers and professional organizers and musicians. And so these professional niches that...

use Instagram as their primary marketing engine for lead gen, were using Hulken and displaying it as a core work essential. So this was crucial in the early days to kind of embedding ourselves as a must have within these communities was instrumental

because it created that, it started that flywheel. But then of course, you know, Hulken can be used for many other things. But getting that credibility from pros was huge. And then on the more intentional front, you you see the bag and you think, okay, so grocery bag on wheels, is it an Ikea bag on wheels? And we always took a very conscious decision to not be a supermarket bag. You know, we could sell it every supermarket state side, but we actually decided to, no, we're going to actually be a premium brand that partner

with the New York City Ballet. So we did this extensive campaign with New York City Ballet because their dancers actually use Hulken to go in and out of the Lincoln Center. And it's not a move that a typical kind of utility brand would be doing, but it's a move that we wanted to make and we're very intentional to partner with brands that bring this more premium value.

Aaron Schwartz (18:04.151)

Lee, is there anything kind of cooking that you want to add to this?

Lee Rotenberg (18:08.478)

I think what's special about Hulkin is most of our biggest brand moments and growth moments were not paid for. Right. And I think that's really important because I think that comes to like when I talk to a lot of brands that are trying to like make it right. They pay crazy amounts for PR and they do X, Y and Z and

I think that's like going back to even like when we knew to pivot right from Arts Center to Ivy is because we're pushing, pushing, pushing and every time we push really hard, we'd see a little bit of growth. But what's amazing about what we saw at at Hulkin, we're seeing at Hulkin, what we saw at Ivy when we knew we really had something is that when you push just a little.

it would grow so much more than you even pushed. And that has come a lot through organic moments, right? Like the Kardashians reaching out, right? Like all these different elements that a lot of people are, know, supreme collabs, things that a lot of brands would just like.

like do everything to make happen, they come organically to Hulkin. I think that's when you kind of know like you're on to something, right? When these really powerful moments are being attracted to your brand.

Aaron Schwartz (19:25.711)

You guys are building out your of like your wholesale presence, right? Like Alex, you mentioned the container store, which I used to live a couple of blocks away from, so I know exactly where you're talking about. Or obviously Target. What are the impacts kind of of building out this distribution that you're seeing kind of like, is it also impacting your D to C side? Maybe what are some of the surprises that have happened as you've kind of built out your chain of partners?

Alex Schinasi (19:32.638)

Yeah, same. Yeah.

Alex Schinasi (19:54.509)

Yeah, mean, Lee, you're the wholesale queen. You can take that one. Lee can tell you the story of how she got us on Target shelves in four months without any sort of retail experience at that scale. I mean, it's highly unusual for any brand to get on Target shelves that quickly. So Lee, take it.

Lee Rotenberg (20:11.674)

Yeah, thank you. Well, I think how we approach, first of all, like 95 % of our business is still D2C. And I think how we think about retail is it either goes towards our brand or it goes towards volume. That's how we even make a decision on where we go. think, you know, even looking at the container store and Target, I think those are incredible for Hulkin's brand, right? It allows us to gain brand awareness by just having customers in their store.

So even outside of a sales channel, which is wonderful, right? And really important to diversify your sales beyond just your website. I think what's really powerful about retail channels like a container store or a target is we aren't having to pay as much online.

to acquire customers or have them get familiar with our brand because when they're walking down the aisle they see the hulking box they're becoming familiar with it and that I think is what's really exciting about looking into 2026 this year is that right we entered Target in Q4 and we're now able to have brand recognition with so many customers that we otherwise would have never reached unless we had paid a lot of

to try to reach them.

Aaron Schwartz (21:35.567)

So you built the partnership with them, maybe diving into the operations of it for a minute. And I'll come back to the DTC operations, but what has been the biggest wake up call for you guys on a wholesale operation side where you're like, man, I did not.

Lee Rotenberg (21:46.818)

I mean, I think the target thing is just like the miracle of coming from like early stage SaaS tech companies is because Alex and I are used to like moving very fast and not being like, okay, this takes like half year, let's plan for the full year. So when we had that meeting in June and they were like, hey, like usually this takes like a year. They're basically like, hey, like how fast can you get into here? And we're like, tomorrow. No, but really like.

meeting in June and we were all of our boxes were picked up in October. It's unheard of. Why? We didn't even have retail boxes, right? Like we literally had to design retail boxes, manufacture retail boxes. We had to switch to a 3PL that could handle a target volume. We had to design an end cap. We didn't even know what an end cap designer was. I actually did not know what an end cap was until June. Like literally I had no idea when they were like end caps. I was like, yeah. And then I was like, thingy like,

I need to Google what an NCAP is.

Alex Schinasi (22:46.264)

You got a crash course in a wholesale. That entire...

Aaron Schwartz (22:46.595)

which we all, which we all are.

Lee Rotenberg (22:49.068)

Maybe what was? Like I had no idea. I like had to answer those questions. I think that's really one of the, I think, secret sauces of Alex and I in the consumer space right now. Because when you're used to tech, you can build things and change things on a dime. Like we're used to being like, hey, let's add this feature. Let's do this. And maybe we can't do that with our product, but we can do that with our partnerships and with our platform and with every way we think about

like growing, hulking besides like changing our product. But we do change our product really quickly in more ways than one as well.

Aaron Schwartz (23:28.791)

If I'm channeling, excuse me, James Currier in tech, you guys move extremely quickly and speed seems to really still matter for you. Where, Alex, if you think kind of maybe, and this might be on the operations side, it might just be even when you're a part-time, where do you think speed has actually screwed you guys up being in the consumer brand space, like where you've moved too quickly and you actually should have waited or not moved as quickly? Any examples?

Alex Schinasi (23:35.475)

Yeah, we got that somewhere. Yeah.

Lee Rotenberg (23:36.816)

Yeah. yeah.

Lee Rotenberg (23:52.594)

That's a great question. I'm curious what you're going to say Alex.

Alex Schinasi (23:53.837)

Hmm.

Yeah, I don't know. Do you think of anything?

Lee Rotenberg (24:00.923)

I think speed is always a benefit because if you can, like, if you make a mistake, then you can't remedy it quickly. It's worse to wait around.

Alex Schinasi (24:05.1)

Yeah.

Alex Schinasi (24:09.004)

Yeah, I agree. I can't think of anything specific. Maybe on the op side, it might have screwed us over on something. we could have... Listen, did we optimize every single dollar on these boxes? No, but it was at the cost of speed, right? Like we knew we had three months to get them boxed up and shipped to Target and...

Lee Rotenberg (24:15.26)

Yes, for sure.

Lee Rotenberg (24:21.648)

Yeah, exactly.

Alex Schinasi (24:29.376)

We know for the next time that we can probably optimize that for cost efficiency. It just wasn't the case. So yeah, we move fast. We probably wasn't as cost efficient as we wanted it to be, but we did it. And that for us is more important.

Aaron Schwartz (24:42.937)

Well, I think that's the point is like, actually was more important for you not to be cost efficient, but for you to be quick in stores and then earn the right to optimize after you have a big enough business to like where that matters. Alex, when you and I first talked about Hulkin, this was a while back, I think you guys are going through like an inventory issue. And I don't remember if it was a manufacturing issue or if it was tied to tariffs. Can you walk through that experience and kind of what you've taken away and how you've tried like as a business has grown, maybe made the business more robust?

Lee Rotenberg (24:46.914)

Exactly.

Alex Schinasi (24:50.316)

Yep.

Exactly, exactly. Yeah.

Alex Schinasi (25:04.289)

Yeah.

All of it.

Alex Schinasi (25:13.142)

Yeah, so I think for the first three years, we never had a Q4 where we were in stock. So we were constantly selling stock that we didn't have. So essentially doing pre-sales and then having people receive their bag a month or two later, mostly because we didn't expect this big of a demand. So the supply wasn't ready.

Then finally 2024 comes around fully ready, fully stocked for Q4, had a record breaking holiday season. And then 2025, again, we didn't expect this target PO coming in in the middle. And of course we find ourselves without our full stock in Q4 2025. So all the growth we're seeing is being held back a little bit by these inventory planning issues. Part of it is

you know, just our inexperience, frankly, and us not being able to plan properly on the skews are best performing. But also because we keep on, you know, we're, it's like a hose down our throat. We're like, we have this insane growth coming our way. We have retailers that now, you know, we play with bigger players that require larger volumes because what we also found out about retail is that there very few of them that one are healthy and viable and to bring volume that is

interesting enough at our stage in the business. When you're looking at a $50 million brand, for any sort of retailer to make sense, the volumes that they need to bring need to be significant for us to give the attention that it deserves.

Lee Rotenberg (26:32.284)

Yeah.

Alex Schinasi (26:46.612)

So the growth keeps on happening in the most unexpected ways, sometimes planned, sometimes not. But now we've obviously invested more in our ops side of things. And we have a head of ops that just joined us in Q4 last year. part of her job, probably most important job, is to make sure that the planning on the inventory side can meet the demand more properly for the rest of the year.

Aaron Schwartz (27:13.465)

Peace.

Lee Rotenberg (27:14.418)

And I just want to shout out to Yon at Operating Crew, because they actually really helped us find Ali, who's our new head of ops. And that's where it looks like we didn't know, like we didn't even know what type of operations person we needed, right? We didn't even know what holes we were missing because we're so new to this. And so that's where we were like, OK, we need to move really quickly on this. This is another one was like, we want to have the speed to do it and bring on someone really quickly. But we know we don't have

Alex Schinasi (27:41.998)

Mm-hmm.

Lee Rotenberg (27:44.528)

We know you don't want to hire like too quickly and that's why we're such a small team. We haven't done that. But we need someone who has operation experience to kind of tell us like, what are we missing? Who is that person to hire? And so we found this amazing guy, from in his business is called Operating Crew. And they have been incredible in helping us navigate hurdles that come up along the process. So if there are any brands out there that are kind of in this growth moment and they're

about to tackle a new like era of growth and they don't really know like how to best do that I highly recommend you reach out to them because they've been fantastic.

Aaron Schwartz (28:25.057)

One of the things that's very clear though is you guys are also very conscious of cash and to your point, like, look, you've been on the VC treadmill, right? You're not trying to raise for sake of raising. And so Alex, like I'm also empathetic to the, yep, sometimes we're gonna run out of inventory and like you want to be ahead of things and maybe you need to be ahead of things for Target because you don't wanna lose that account. But on the DTC side, sometimes you're just gonna miss and that actually may be okay. Like that is a constraint that you put on yourselves.

Alex Schinasi (28:40.494)

you

Alex Schinasi (28:50.424)

Maybe okay and also maybe an advantage. think that scarcity has actually worked in our favor in many ways. People were like, my God, you got to grab it while it lasts. And, you know, it wasn't intentional, but it did happen. And I definitely see that as being interesting on the marketing side because people want to make sure they get their hands on it.

Aaron Schwartz (29:10.071)

If you think about like a year from now or two years from now, right, you made the comment that you're 95 % D to C. What do you think is the right balance for Hulkin a year or two from now? And of course you reserve the right to change your opinion, but from today, what do you want to happen in the next year?

Alex Schinasi (29:25.646)

I think it's inevitably going to shift, not 50-50, but somewhere 70-30, 40-60 along those lines. think at our scale, the expansion opportunities are either omnichannel, like diversifying our sales channel to include retail. And again, there aren't that many that can...

bring the volume that will be significant. But that's one. The second one would be product expansion and the third one would be global expansion. And so we're looking at all these different kind of growth channels as being critical to the next stage of growth. What's going to take us from 50 to 100? I think it's diversifying the sales channel. Sorry, my son keeps on calling me. Diversifying the sales channels as well as expanding the catalog as well as growing globally. We're now launching in Japan, which is really exciting.

Aaron Schwartz (30:07.075)

You're good.

Alex Schinasi (30:17.93)

has been a really exciting market for us. We're big in Taiwan and South Korea already. So that's kind of where our heads are at.

Aaron Schwartz (30:26.349)

Lee, what's the next thing that's gonna keep you interested? So you don't hit that cliff in a year or two and you're like, cool, what's the next problem to solve? Like, what are you most excited about for the next stage?

Lee Rotenberg (30:33.81)

I mean, get like right now we just there's it's like just the beginning like Hulkin is really just in its infancy. Like if you look at our skews, we have basically one core skew, right? We're introducing new skews. So I think that is this really exciting moment. And as Alex mentioned, right, there's all these hurdles and fun hurdles that we need to do like develop products we love just as much as our signature bag.

expand globally, know, build out these wholesale relationships. Yeah, but I think continue to have fun. Never have VCs like going down our throat, like trying to tell you what to do when they have no idea what they're doing. I cannot, I think I need to go to a PTSD person because I'm just so, when a VC even talks to me, I'm like, oh, like stop it. Like, no, I don't care. You might've gone to Stanford by late.

Aaron Schwartz (31:26.895)

I now need to go to bat. We at Arita have actually like an awesome group of VCs. I was talking to a founder yesterday.

Lee Rotenberg (31:32.338)

I don't know. I don't know. I'm sure there's many great VCs out there, but I'm just like, I'm kind of just like, just like I'm over the bro culture. I'm just over this culture. Like if you went to Stanford, congratulations. Tell your grandparents, don't tell me. I literally don't care. I actually don't. To me, it's actually like a mark down on them. I'm like, oh, like Erin, did you go to Stanford? I'm like, congratulations. I like, don't like, honestly.

Alex Schinasi (31:32.816)

Yeah.

Aaron Schwartz (31:38.575)

I hear you.

Aaron Schwartz (31:45.583)

you

Alex Schinasi (31:49.134)

you

Alex Schinasi (31:57.139)

just checking. Yeah. You did go to Berkeley though, right? I remember that.

Aaron Schwartz (32:02.296)

I did RIO education.

Lee Rotenberg (32:03.256)

Also, I think that I don't have as much issues against that. But I'm just kidding, I love VCs, but I like, the end of it, I can't stand the networking of it. It's just like a pony show. Like I'm sick of being like, talky. But I think it's more just the trauma, the PT. Alex and I have never been good.

Alex Schinasi (32:11.532)

We love Stanford.

Aaron Schwartz (32:16.834)

I hear you. Look the...

Alex Schinasi (32:20.429)

Yeah.

Lee Rotenberg (32:23.702)

Fundraisers and so I'm sure if I was a great fundraiser I'd be like I love VCs like oh like Andre said But like no it's just I'm kind of like I want to sell bags. I'm not trying to change the world I'm just trying to change the way you schlep and for now, that's that's a lot of

Aaron Schwartz (32:40.079)

I think that is the quote of the episode. So thank you very much for that. Look, think the thing that I've deeply appreciated about the two of you over your journey is that you are very strong operators, but like also quiet operators. And you're just like, look, we're each month, we're going to be better and like the business will be better and we'll learn and we'll move quickly and we'll iterate. And I think that is a really special skill. And I love that you've brought it into consumer brands.

Alex Schinasi (32:59.758)

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Schwartz (33:05.441)

I deeply miss running a consumer brand. think there's the joy to it that you kind of mentioned. There's also like the weird personal connection. Like I still have a bunch of letters that people wrote us. It was very strange. People would be like, my God, I love this. I got this as a gift for my kid, whatever it was. And it's just like, it was great. And the flip side though, is you can ruin somebody's Christmas, which sucks. And it's like, there's also the stress of that one-to-one relationship on the consumer brand side.

Alex Schinasi (33:09.944)

Mm.

Alex Schinasi (33:15.032)

Yeah.

Lee Rotenberg (33:15.171)

Yeah.

Lee Rotenberg (33:24.316)

Thank you.

Alex Schinasi (33:27.799)

Yeah.

Aaron Schwartz (33:31.267)

But yeah, we at some point will be raising more money. So any VC listening to this, don't, go sign, we'll leave that.

Lee Rotenberg (33:35.666)

I love it!

Alex Schinasi (33:35.886)

Invest in Orita. We love it.

Lee Rotenberg (33:39.122)

The difference is like I'm telling you if we were great at fundraising we're just bad at like so I like this is just our like I remember someone told me when I was living in San Francisco and I was like I don't really like San Francisco and they're like the only people who don't like San Francisco are the people that can't be successful in San Francisco I was like, that's probably true. So like point B is like that was when I was like in the the hard days of building a startup I think why I've set a repulsive attitude towards VCs is like we got so

Aaron Schwartz (33:45.411)

Yeah. I hear you.

Lee Rotenberg (34:09.126)

many no's like so many no's like thousands and thousands of no's. So I'm sure if I got like a yes I would have been like yes love it but you know once you're like kicked at like a dog for so many times you just have the wounds now I'm like now I'm like I hate VCs but it's like nothing to do with you I hope you get all the VC money in the world.

Alex Schinasi (34:13.07)

Yeah.

Aaron Schwartz (34:18.723)

Yeah.

Aaron Schwartz (34:22.895)

No, you just get to build. I love it.

I mean, I'm not a VC, so I'm not offended. You now just get to build a business that actually makes money, which is pretty delightful. All right, I wanna use the last little bit of time to actually talk about the e-commerce side, because you guys are obviously exceptional at it. So we talked a little bit about the marketing and the operations. I'm curious, like, on the e-commerce side, this is also new to the two of you. Maybe what have been some of your biggest surprises and what have been some of the things that have worked really, really well, whether it's a tool or just like an approach you took or, we did this one photo shoot and it worked.

Alex Schinasi (34:57.955)

Mm.

Aaron Schwartz (35:00.075)

But I kind of want to leave this broad. What have you learned kind moving into e-comm?

Alex Schinasi (35:03.062)

Yeah, I'll start with how we started and then I think Lee, you can take it on the tools that we've been using that have been really successful. But actually what surprised me is that for the longest time, we didn't invest anything into the website. So we got to $15 million, literally with the Shopify site off the shelf theme, no investment in branding, no investment in, you know, redesign of the website, barely any optimization outside of, the basic Shopify stuff.

So, I mean, maybe we were lucky, probably there's a piece of luck here, but also I think there's great, people sometimes overthink that piece of the puzzle. And now we're obviously in a different place where we're able to invest a little bit more into the website and we're using a set of amazing tools that help us optimize. And obviously we see that every

percentage point optimization makes a drastic impact on the revenue. And I think that's kind of the stage that we're entering is how to optimize that revenue for every traffic visit that we get.

Aaron Schwartz (36:07.228)

anything you want added.

Lee Rotenberg (36:08.44)

Yeah, so I think what's been really fun is that there are so many, especially if you're on Shopify, there's so many different tools you can use to kind of just tweak the success of it. I think that what I find overwhelming and I think is a blind spot is to really understand.

how those are actually making an impact because each of those different tools will give you different KPIs of how they actually converted X, Y, and Z revenue. And after a while, you're kind of like, you almost just call BS on a lot of the reporting that they give you. And it actually makes you lose trust in even the like...

accurate reports. I think Shopify could actually do a better job in giving a better picture of like revenue allocation in a sense and even understanding a user's journey. Especially for those that you know don't have like an in-house analytics person like we don't. And for me to use like you know Microsoft Clarity it's it's complicated for me to really understand that picture.

And oftentimes, know, like every day there is a tool that's trying to sell to me and we use some amazing tools like Pretty Damn Quick, like Arita, Echo, Rebuy. But I do think in this next year or two, what's going to, there's gonna have to be a consolidation of what tools we are using, right? Because a lot of these tools are actually just kind of stepping on each other's toes and building out features that

Alex Schinasi (37:42.222)

Mm.

Lee Rotenberg (37:44.166)

that other ones have. So I think that will be really interesting to see. sometimes I'm just like love the person and we keep on using their tool because we love them. But I think there is going to have to be a consolidation. And there is going to be a point where Hulking can't be running 10 different apps. We're going to have to choose a lane. And so that's where I think it's really helpful to have.

Alex Schinasi (37:46.211)

Yeah.

Lee Rotenberg (38:09.254)

very clear, basically, A-B testing capabilities for a tool. So you can really tell that story of how that tool is driving revenue. And also, we often are much easier to say yes when a tool says 3x ROI guarantee, or your money back in three months if you don't see a difference. If a tool can't give me that promise, I'm just not doing it. it's going to be incremental revenue growth no matter what. So it has to be a pretty compelling.

Alex Schinasi (38:29.315)

Mm-hmm.

Lee Rotenberg (38:39.208)

offer for me to say yes.

Alex Schinasi (38:39.278)

you

Aaron Schwartz (38:42.383)

One of the things that's been interesting for me, right? So after Modify, I a shipping company, great. After that, I was at Loop. And so Lee, I mean, obviously you and I can chat whenever you want about the Shopify tech stack. Like this is the only thing I know decently well. The interesting thing for me about Arita, right? We co-founded two years ago, is I'm history major in MBA. What schools I went to doesn't matter. Let's not worry about that. But like, I don't want to get yelled at by Lee, but both of my...

Lee Rotenberg (38:46.951)

Yeah.

Alex Schinasi (38:55.598)

Yeah.

Alex Schinasi (39:06.892)

Let's not talk about it.

Lee Rotenberg (39:11.762)

Yeah.

Aaron Schwartz (39:12.303)

both of my co-founders are machine learning engineers. And the thing that has been really fascinating about going back to this side of the house, right, I've been on the ops and logistics side for so long, is everybody grabs attribution and you can go make a number dance however you want to. And the question is, would somebody else have gotten that number not? And so the framing that we use, and again, I think this is like abstract way for every single company that you guys are inspecting, is not like,

Alex Schinasi (39:22.093)

Hmm.

Lee Rotenberg (39:29.19)

you.

Alex Schinasi (39:30.392)

I know.

Aaron Schwartz (39:41.807)

did you make that impact? But it's like, that impact have happened whether you like, if you did not exist, right? So it's not, is Alex likely to buy a Hulkin, but is Alex likely to buy a Hulkin because a text was sent, an email was sent. She went through this personalized journey on her site. Again, you look through it. The hard part to your point about attribution is we, when we started, we would do it. I mean, we still do all the statistical testing, but that's what we would present to brands in a

Lee Rotenberg (39:51.771)

Yeah.

Aaron Schwartz (40:07.851)

CRM manager at a generic brand is not going to understand statistical. It's like the exact right way to do it. And it's what you would do in meta or like any other company, but you're like, did my email number go up? This is the only thing I care about. And you're like, I can make that number go up, but your business will go down. And I think that is like the tension that happens, like from the brand side.

Alex Schinasi (40:08.142)

Mm.

Lee Rotenberg (40:14.182)

Yeah. Yeah.

Alex Schinasi (40:18.093)

Yeah.

Lee Rotenberg (40:20.774)

Yeah.

Alex Schinasi (40:25.74)

Mmm.

Alex Schinasi (40:30.218)

It is the tension. And it's who we get. We advise a lot of startups. Obviously we get outreach by a lot of, you know, early stage startups trying to find product market fit. And a lot of times it will come with these very elaborate,

Lee Rotenberg (40:31.91)

Yeah, totally.

Alex Schinasi (40:44.334)

kind of data points and it's kind of like, okay, you're gonna deal with, like you said, a CRM manager or someone in marketing that's gonna have exactly a minute, not even like 10 seconds to look at this and digest it. And there's a lot of very smart tools out there, but it's true that the delivery isn't necessarily straightforward.

Aaron Schwartz (41:01.702)

enemy

Lee Rotenberg (41:01.814)

Like is there a tool, Erin, maybe you know like, because also a lot of these apps we use, you have to go into the unique dashboards to even see it. Like there should be a Shopify tool that aggregates all the different tools you're using and then almost like assigns like add to, I how they do it.

Aaron Schwartz (41:18.275)

I mean, look, you can go look at Triple Whale or Northbeam, or there are a bunch of different attribution tools. Yeah, yeah.

Lee Rotenberg (41:24.658)

Those are too cheap for triple oil. I'll reach out to my spouse all the time like, honey, we are a family business. We are cheap. We are too cheap. We'd rather be blinded our numbers than pay them. OK, thanks.

Alex Schinasi (41:29.976)

We're cheap. We are cheap.

Aaron Schwartz (41:33.251)

That's right. I was going to say, I'll message the founders. The thing that will be very hard, even if you look at those, is it will tell you next post facto what happened, but it doesn't give you the guide on what to do.

or how to do it. So if you go use some attribution tool, I might say spend more money on Meta, but it doesn't say within like what segment to spend more on. It's like Meta is working better or hey, you should do, like she's excited about getting an email, but it's like how many emails at what frequency? And so it's almost like you're 100%.

Alex Schinasi (41:49.293)

Mm.

Alex Schinasi (41:55.98)

Yeah, sure.

Lee Rotenberg (42:06.244)

Even all the tools, you see what I'm saying, Erin? Like, I don't want meta. I want to know like Echo versus Rebi versus Arita versus X, Y, and Z.

Aaron Schwartz (42:14.967)

We can show you with very good depth where we fit and I can probably help you figure out the rest. This is good. There are two more questions I actually want to bring to you guys. One is about what you're looking forward to on the D to C side, like e-commerce, AI, how you are thinking about building for the next year or two. Before I get there, I actually want to have a more tactical one. I've seen you guys post multiple times about pretty damn quick.

Lee Rotenberg (42:21.843)

Yeah, this has been the greatest podcast of my life, because this could be the best.

Aaron Schwartz (42:42.871)

Can you give us all like a minute about what they do for you and why it's such an effective tool? I don't know anybody there or so not, you know, I'm like trying to set this up, but like I'm very curious.

Lee Rotenberg (42:48.635)

Yes.

my gosh, this is so fun. Okay, yeah. So first of all, what I love about Pretty Damn Quick is they allow us to very clearly test out.

different flows, different features on our checkout page, they do a great job of A-B testing, right? So they're not like making it hard for me to understand if we continue with that feature on our checkout page or not. They come up with the different tests we could run. they'll give it, know, every two months they'll come up with like six different tests we could run. Let's say how we display shipping and X, Y, and Z for different cohorts. And then we can say, hey, let's run this. And then after that test,

they'll decide like if we launch it or not and so they just make our lives really simple in ensuring that we're always optimizing that checkout page and they're not shady with how they show us the numbers.

Alex Schinasi (43:46.446)

Thank

Lee Rotenberg (43:47.622)

But that's another great one. also, I love rebuy, right? But in a sense, rebuy and PrettyDamnQuick are doing very similar things. So this is where it's kind of like, rebuy theoretically is doing what PrettyDamnQuick is kind of doing. PrettyDamnQuick, there's much more handholding. And currently PrettyDamnQuick does not go to really the rest of the platform, whereas rebuy, use it largely on our product page. And PrettyDamnQuick we're using on our checkout page.

Aaron Schwartz (44:12.173)

One thing that I think is really impactful though is kind of, they're not biased to what the right answer is. They just want to get the right answer. And you guys can see it in the data.

Lee Rotenberg (44:15.206)

Yeah.

Exactly. Yeah. And so, and that makes a huge difference. Whereas we've used it, I won't name the tool, but like we use another tool where it's like when they're AB testing, it turned out they were like literally AB testing on like, like not a really a 50-50 split. they were, yeah.

Alex Schinasi (44:32.546)

It was a 95-5 split. Like, it wasn't a real A-B test. It was clearly skewing that A-B test, which obviously made us lose faith in the process entirely.

Lee Rotenberg (44:42.738)

So I think you have to be really honest. think the better that people can show how their data works in a way that doesn't require a PhD from Stanford, easier it is. You need to do the non-IVY, just the liberal arts education folks. Build that takeaway for that, and I think that you're winning the salt. Yeah, non-IVY.

Alex Schinasi (44:58.348)

Yeah, right. For the non-IVs like us.

Aaron Schwartz (45:02.479)

You guys started a company literally called Ivy, so I just want to point this out, ironically. All right.

Lee Rotenberg (45:05.202)

Yeah, that's true. It's probably. You see, I have imposter said I wanted to go to Ivy League school so badly. Yeah, there you go. Yeah.

Aaron Schwartz (45:11.727)

Go get, just go get your PhD. You'll be fine. can get there. Well, so then I think the last thread that I just want to pull on, even if it's just for a minute is like, how are you guys thinking about building Hulkin for this next phase? Right? The last couple of years, it's like, Hey, we're building a brand. We've to the operations right. And now we're doing, but what happens with like AI, AI shopping? Like, how are you thinking about this? If at all right now, or it's actually like, look, it'll happen. And we're just going to keep building a great product.

Alex Schinasi (45:28.545)

Mm-hmm.

Lee Rotenberg (45:38.054)

What's funny, I recently just told Alex, was like, listen, in two years, you're not gonna have a website. Like websites don't make sense. And I know we have dynamic landing pages, but I really don't think we're gonna have landing pages. think how you're going to be, like I think what we'll be doing is building out like the Shopify backend with all the details so that then you're like AI shopping assistant, whichever one you're using will then feed and recommend Hulkin. We're obviously not there yet, but when I think about like the future of e-comm, I don't see it.

as a website or even a dynamic landing page. Alex, what do you think?

Alex Schinasi (46:14.22)

Yeah, I think it's one of these things, it's on our mind, it's obviously what everyone talks about and every tool that we work with optimizes with AI and I think it's there. We obviously do a lot of SGO to capitalize on it and we do a really good job at that. So we're at the forefront of that, but we also kind of know that, you know, we'll move quickly when we need to move quickly on these things.

We're not doing anything proactive outside of the standardized kind of search optimization work. But yeah, it's exciting to see where that goes. I think also in the ad space and the marketing space specifically, we'll have to adjust based on how it evolves.

Aaron Schwartz (46:56.025)

Thank you. All right, my last question is for you guys. And maybe I'll give you the choice if you want to target this towards brand owners and operators or the tech ecosystem. Any last takeaway piece of advice you give to founders in either one of those sides? Lee, I'm going to start with you first because you got to open and then Alex will end with you.

Lee Rotenberg (47:19.44)

mean, I think move fast. It doesn't even matter what you're doing. think At the end of the day, if you're building something and you're not already like a massive enterprise company, I think your biggest advantage, and we learned this at NFS, right, Aaron like is speed.

And I think overthinking and being meticulous and like having everything perfect, like, no, like don't like it's not going to be perfect. Like you have to just get, you just have to get stuff out there. Right. And also I'd say my other advice is like, don't lie to yourself. Like if it's not working, it's not working. And so often I meet founders who are like lying to themselves and they have to cause they're going through that fundraising round where you're essentially just like delaying that inevitable

Alex Schinasi (47:50.254)

you

Lee Rotenberg (48:06.36)

of your business shutting down and you could actually be an inflatable turkey costume hustling hulkins on the corner instead. Exactly. You don't know what's happening.

Alex Schinasi (48:12.79)

Selling rolling tote bags.

Aaron Schwartz (48:15.907)

Are you hiring now that you've graduated beyond Hustlen? Are you hiring a Turkey person?

Lee Rotenberg (48:21.574)

No, I really hope not. hope it works. No, I love it. Yeah.

Alex Schinasi (48:21.952)

No, but you know what? We'll never leave the turkey suit. I think that's what makes us so unusual and that would be my advice to founders is like don't take yourself that seriously. When Lee and I are outside of Whole Foods in Brooklyn giving out bags, people assume we're interns. We're not. We're literally the C-suite of the company and we'll never stop doing that.

Lee Rotenberg (48:35.697)

Yes.

they only realize that because they're wearing like a turkey face. They don't actually see how old we actually are. But they're often like, we're like literally in inflatable. So they think we're like hired like 18 year olds. And we're like, no, we're like old ladies. Old ladies selling, like doing this for fun.

Aaron Schwartz (48:52.719)

I think we can end this podcast. We're all about the same age and serve the same number of companies and I look 40 years older than you. Great. This has been really fun for me. Thank you. Thank you both. All right, Alex, last word to you. Where can folks find Hulkin? Where do you want him to look, learn more about you guys?

Alex Schinasi (49:00.44)

Yeah.

Alex Schinasi (49:09.152)

Yeah, find out about hulkin online go to our website hulkin.com look us up on instagram It will give you endless inspiration on how to use hulkin who to gift hulkin to I mean there's basically our goal is to for every household in america to have a hulk and there's no reason why not There's a million ways that you can use it gift it look us up online. You'll love it. You won't regret it

Lee Rotenberg (49:13.138)

Thank you.

Aaron Schwartz (49:31.087)

Thank you. I think you need to be more ambitious and go with two Hulkinsboro household. I remember when I was slinging watches and people were like, big's your market? And I was like, well, there are 300 million Americans, which meant 600 million wrists. So that's, that was it. Well, thank you both. This was really fun. I learned a lot, which is great, given that I've known you for so long and I still took a couple of pages of notes. So thanks for taking the time.

Lee Rotenberg (49:35.41)

Yes.

Alex Schinasi (49:37.582)

Maybe you. Bye.

Lee Rotenberg (49:42.308)

There you go.

Alex Schinasi (49:43.959)

Love it.

Alex Schinasi (49:52.578)

Thanks, Erin. Love being here.

Lee Rotenberg (49:52.956)

Thank you. Thank you, Erin.

🌐 Check out Orita.ai for more episodes of The Orita Podcast, where we sit down with the most interesting operators, marketers, and founders in e-commerce to talk about what’s working right now. Hosted by the Orita team. Orita uses machine learning to help brands send smarter, more profitable marketing, by figuring out who actually wants to hear from you and when. 🚀 Get your free email audit from Orita, turn segments into superpowers: https://orita.ai 🎧 Listen on Spotify & Apple 📩 Subscribe for more founder‑grade retention intel