- Hey, everyone. Welcome back.
I'm so excited for today's episode.
After we reviewed the ESNTLS website, Jose's Zuniga
has agreed to come on the show.
He's the YouTuber behind teaching men's fashion
and the founder of ESNTLS.
I can't wait to pick his brain about
growing a YouTube channel to 5.8 million subscribers,
but also how to leverage those subscribers to create a
really successful e-commerce brand. Let's jump into it.
Hey brother. Thanks so much for coming on the show.
- Yeah. Thank you for having me, man.
This, this is an honor.
Yo, I've been seeing you pop off lately dude,
and I've been up up-to-date to every single video.
Like you are legit helping so many dudes out right now.
- Means a lot coming from you, man.
I'll give some context. So I think it was four years ago.
I hadn't even done an e-commerce sale and I was looking into
influencers that can market products.
I was like, oh, how do I sell this?
And I started watching your videos and you had so many
subscribers then, and it's just like,
it feels like a lifetime ago and it's still,
you're still absolutely killing it.
Absolutely amazing story, man.
- Small world. Talk about that.
Like, so when I first reached out to you,
I had no idea that we hadn't worked in the past.
You know, through other like streams or other people,
other connections. I mean, this guy's a G.
He's been working with so many big companies
and like you said, four years ago,
I was, I was starting to pop off.
I had like whatever, two or 300,000 subscribers at the time.
And we were working with a specific company that you were
working with and now four years later,
we connect again just completely random. Small world.
Like it is really a small world.
- Yeah, I didn't think we ever chatted
or had any connection,
but it was because I was in the influence of department,
but I didn't know that they were working with you and your
kind of their top influencer in terms of codes.
And I was like, how do I do this?
I was still trying to figure out e-commerce and now,
and now we're here. So it's a, it's a crazy story.
How it all just kind of linked up like that. I'd love to,
I'd love to jump in. And maybe if you can just,
just tell us a bit of your history and,
and a little bit more about yourself.
- Yeah. So started out as an influencer, like you said,
that that was the biggest thing I started when I was,
I think it was like 16, 17
that I started like posting videos online.
And it was, it really was never supposed to be a career
or anything like that. It was just for fun.
Like, I really liked the idea of dressing
or trying to better yourself.
It was around that 20 16, 20 17 area that I started,
like lifting off and I'm like, yo,
like this can be a career just being,
just posting videos that you like to do already.
At that time, you know, we started scaling.
And what we noticed is that through the help of brands,
like what some brands don't realize is that they
actually, when they sponsor your content,
they're actually helping you scale too,
because now you can like, quit your job.
You can start hiring editors.
You can start doing things that you need to do to really
start pumping out more and better content. Right.
So when I started realizing this,
we went just full throttle. I remember I quit my job.
I was around like 19, 20 at the time I quit my job.
I go full throttle on videos and it was just,
it paid off. Like the return was like instant.
And you could just see the subscriber growth growing up.
And then we started hitting like a peak around like 2018,
I think it was. Where we were like, all right.
Kind of like what you said.
We were working with a lot of big brands
and we're talking like bigger brands at this point, right.
Like these big, like established brands.
And in our heads, we were like, man,
if we're providing them this much value,
they're paying us X amount every single month.
What could we do if we did it for ourselves? You know?
And that's where we started to kind of like pivot in, like,
instead of creating,
like merge brands that a lot of influencers do,
can we create independent brands that I will work as an
influencer for to pump them up
and then whatever revenue they make,
we continue to hire other influencers for it.
And so we kind of really went down that rabbit hole.
Started creating a bunch of brands.
We currently own four and are part owner of one.
And yeah, it's just been scaling since then, you know.
- That's amazing, man.
It's such a, such a great way to go about e-commerce.
Cause you're owning your own channels.
You know, we're constantly battling Facebook,
CPMs and all of that.
And you've just got this solidified community
that you can always rely on and grow.
So it's, it's very impressive.
And I think one of the main takeaways
that I get from your story is, you know,
you started when you were 16 and you're still going
and it's just like things just take time to build.
And you know, there'd be so many, YouTubers out there
that start that have everything that it takes
and they do one year at 16 and then they give up.
But it's just like, you gotta keep, keep going hey.
- Yeah. And even now we're not even,
and I'm sure you feel the same way too,
you're 26, 27?
- I'm 26.
- Yeah, same age, I'm 26.
You never feel like you're there. Right.
You always feel like you're battling problems.
And like, I still feel like, I don't know enough.
It's been 10 years.
And I feel like there's so much more to learn,
to do, to fix it never stops.
It's a never ending process.
And like you said, too many people quit.
Quit early because they want that fast success
or that fast dopamine effect of having cash
or growth or whatever it is really, really quick, you know?
- So true.
So put yourself in a 16 year old's shoes
and they're just starting now,
how would they grow their YouTube and their community?
- I just think it hasn't changed.
For me it's always been two things,
just an immense amount of value.
That's the first thing, right?
I almost, I always see videos as creating a product, right?
Because some people don't correlate
creating videos into a business.
But like it's really a product.
Where the product that you're creating is the video. Right.
And the currency you're getting back is people's time.
And time is the most valuable currency.
Therefore, the product that you have to create
needs to be incredible, right?
So immense amounts of value, right?
Like you can't,
it can't be ego stroking or something that took you really
quickly to just copy paste, throw it on.
Right.
So immense amounts of value and then just tons of content.
Like you have to overflow it with content. For example,
with me, my type of content is very evergreen, right?
It's stuff that works today, works two years from now,
and it's still be relevant three years from now.
So the lifetime value of my content is very long.
Therefore the more I can pump out,
the more organically I'll start appearing
in search engine results. Right?
Because a lot of my stuff is how to date a girl,
how to dress better,
how to get a six-pack.
It's standard stuff that guys will continually be
asking for five years from now.
So the way that I win continually, just, I mean,
I think I'm sitting at 1600, seven,
almost 2000 videos every week.
I'm pumping out seven videos on the English channel.
We have a Spanish channel that has about three,
almost three minute, 2.6 million.
Seven videos on the Spanish channel as well.
So like, this is constantly,
and this has been going on since 2017.
We've never dropped the ball. Like it's never stopped.
And you can see that evidently through your channel.
Like I was telling you originally,
like I genuinely stumbled upon your channel
because it had immense amounts of value.
And I have watched every single video
because I walk away with something, you know?
- Yeah,
definitely when nearing a hundred thousand subscribers after
four months and it is exactly the same, you know.
We just kind of went into it and went, okay,
let's just give everything.
Like add as much value as possible.
And then let's focus on SEO
and then let's just let YouTube do the rest.
Let's just pop up everywhere.
And it's what worked quite well. And you know,
all of the other channels have gone as well.
You know, YouTube, is that just that core driver.
We're gonna do probably an episode
for our hundred thousand subscribers
and probably just kind of go into all of this
in more detail.
That's why I was, I was so excited to do this episode today.
Maybe if you could just maybe if we can just touch on those
four brands that you're running
and I'd love to hear just a little bit more about them.
And you know, what are some challenges
that you had to overcome to to build those
with your personal brand?
- Yeah. So, so the four brands are,
we've got ESNTLS that's our biggest one.
We have, he Grooming, which is like,
like just the name says products for men for grooming.
We have Santa Lucia which is a fragrance brand.
And then we have Jade Black, which is a sunglass brand.
So it goes ESTNLS, Jade Black and then the other two,
because the other two, we just started this year
when it comes to size, right?
The biggest issue when it came to scaling brands,
and this is why we reached out to you guys.
It was a getting outside, especially the influencer niche.
I felt like we were very bottle-necked in our industry
and for whatever reason, I kept being the hot.
I mean, and, and that part made sense.
We always knew that I was going to be the highest
performance influencer because it is my brand.
So it was always going into over-perform
every time I promoted my own brand.
But the biggest challenge for us to overcome that we've been
working on for three, four years was all right,
how do we disconnect this brand fully from my image?
So it could be a living, breathing organism on itself.
And thankfully we're getting really close.
I think we're like at a 65 35 split. Where a lot of this 35%
of the sales are coming that are not from me,
that we can account for it. Right.
So it's getting close,
but I'd love for that number to be much, much greater.
Right. Where it could, I could literally just go away
and it would still function fully.
And that's something that we're continually working on.
Now, one of the ways that we really are working on it is,
is going into the women's section, right?
So I know my audience is heavily male.
I think I'm like at a 95, 5 split.
Cause obviously all my content is to help men.
So the first thing we did was all right,
so let's start creating products for women
and let's start finding other influencers
that are women that could be moving that product
that I know will not be myself.
So a huge part of that was because of that effect.
And then our next step now is all right,
let's figure out paid advertisement.
That's not influencer marketing.
Let's figure out how to move
that type of that type of stream.
So that that's pretty much been the biggest hurdle
to overcome and talking to a lot of other influencers.
That's the one where they almost always get stuck
and what they ended up doing that it's just,
they just turn it into a merch brand, right?
Like it just becomes so much easier to sell your product
and leave it as if it's your own product.
- That makes sense.
Well, I guess it's like a whole new skill set to learn.
You've got your core competency, which is your content,
your product that you're putting out there.
And then you've got a whole new skillset, you know,
digital marketing is just so unorthodox
and it's so, so hard to learn.
It's not, not the same as organic social,
which makes a lot of sense.
There's a lot of hurdles to jump though.
- It, like you said, it is completely different.
We're working a lot on that now.
And it becomes harder when it's different,
and you know this cause you have a bunch of companies,
but creating content for all the companies
for digital marketing purposes,
we need to have a whole team just to be able
to continually pump out fresh content for that.
But, like you were saying, like it,
it's such a different beast
and it's so easy to get comfortable too, right?
Because you're doing so well with just influencing
and because you, as an influencer, can move enough product
where the company is successful.
That makes it hard for you not
to get comfortable with the company.
And then another thing is that it also
screws up your perceptions of profit markets.
Where, because I am the main promoter,
my profit margins are so high, right.
Versus battling CPM on Facebook that you're fighting for
pennies or whatever, or drastically less conversion rates.
- Yeah. Very hard to sell a product on the $50,
relying on Facebook and whatnot.
So obviously I reviewed your product last week.
I hope you didn't take any offense to that.
I was trying to make it as, as constructive as possible.
But I'd love to talk about ESNTLS a little bit more,
you know, maybe what was your vision behind the brand?
And, you know, did it meet your expectations
in terms of success?
- Yeah. So when we first started the brand,
the idea was creating basics for guys.
And the first thing that we worked on was a t-shirt.
We literally started, I remember it was, it was around 2018.
We ordered a thousand pieces, which at that time
I think it was an investment of whatever.
I don't even remember how much we spent,
but the total revenue from that
would've only been like 30 grand, right?
Because it was $30 a t-shirt. And at that time I was,
I was sweating. I'm like, man, are we ever gonna move this?
Right.
Thankfully, you know, and it was, this was just solely me.
We kept pumping, pumping, pumping,
and we sold everything out in about two weeks.
And I was like, it was like a euphoria.
I'm like, yo, this is insane.
Like in my head, this was like impossible to do.
So immediately we reordered for 4,000 units.
Sold that even faster. Two days this time. Right?
So there goes 120,000 in revenue.
We scaled, again, this time it was about,
it was going to total like 650,000 in revenue.
So this is our third order, just t-shirts at this point.
Same thing. This one even went faster.
It was like a little bit less than a day.
And then ever since then, we've been able
to gradually increase our inventory.
And we'll do about one to 2 million in sales, on launch day.
And then it started obviously dwindling down.
So ESNTLS is our biggest mover.
And I'm definitely satisfied with its success.
Because not many brands can move that much product
in one single launch.
However, I, I want it to get to a point where, Matt
can we do half a million every day?
Or a million everyday?
Like that should be possible. Right?
So what do we have to do to get to that point?
That's our current mindset at this point.
And how do we get there?
That is our current hurdle so far, ESNTLS though,
like we were definitely happy with, with its growth and,
and, and how it's currently functioning.
We just want to scale bigger.
And that's when all the problems start coming.
- Yeah. Amazing, man.
I'd love to just jump back to the YouTube.
I always love asking, you know, one of the main reasons
why a lot of YouTubers don't get into it is
they don't think they can deal with the haters
and all the negativity.
Which I'm sure you get a lot
with the teaching men's fashion channel.
Maybe do you have a process of dealing with that
or a mindset?
- Honestly like early on you learn how to deal with it.
Just because, I don't know if you've,
if you've had any of it, but people will start,
will make fun of anything that they dislike.
If you set something
or they'll start attacking your personality
or how you look early on, you deal with it.
And, and at this point, like it doesn't even,
it doesn't even phase you.
And when you get to a certain size, like even as your self,
right, at a hundred thousand,
you probably have so many comments that even like
you're not going to notice every single one.
It becomes impossible. Same thing with me.
Like I have, like I said, seven videos go out every week,
every video we will get let's say 500 comments.
No way out of the 4,000 comments,
I'm going to notice a lot of them.
Especially if the minority of them are negative.
What I do think is that
if you do notice that there's an uptick in negativity,
a lot of times it's not just haters
and there's some truth to what they're saying.
Because at the end of the day, think of it.
Because I think about my viewers as my customers.
Right? So think about your customers with Oodie right?
If you start noticing an uptick
in customers giving you negative feedback,
would you call that hate or would you call that, like,
there's probably truth to that.
Like we need to fix something.
That's really how I've, I've always seen it.
Like I remember back in the day,
a lot of the hate that I would get would be like,
man, you're so monotone.
Man this was boring.
Man, this seemed long. Right?
They were right.
Like if you look at my early videos,
I was very shy and quiet and you know, very monotone
and well, maybe the delivery is wrong.
A lot of times there's, there's some truth to the hate.
So I've never been really bothered by it.
And I always try to take it
from a constructive point of view.
- Yeah. I think if there's absolutely no truth to it,
you know, you're fat and you're lazy.
It's just like, and you just know that it's just,
it's just that then it just never, it hurts.
But when there is some truth to it, you know,
it forces that self-reflection.
I guess my, my whole thing was, you know, I looked at that
and I was like, okay, this probably would get under my skin,
but I need to become the person where it doesn't affect me.
To be happy in my life. So I was just like,
the only way I'm going to figure that out is if I just do it
and see if I can deal with it and figure it out.
- And honestly, if you're a dude, cause like I told you,
I used to be very shy.
It's crazy that
it was an adverse effect that I did not expect.
But if you're a dude that is very shy
or have problems with social anxiety or whatever,
putting out YouTube videos is probably
the quickest way to battle that.
And like, you quickly get over that.
Cause like it was almost instant
or over the course of a year
that I started changing and morphing.
Like you said, you had to become the person
that it just doesn't phase you. Like it, it really does it.
And you continue to do what you think is right.
- Look, man, this has been incredible.
I have a lot of respect for people that have grown
e-commerce brands in a different way.
To me, you know, I relied heavily on digital platforms.
You've just built this amazing community over,
you know, consistent videos.
So thank you so much for, for joining us.
What, where, where can people find you and reach you?
I'm sure that they're all probably following already,
but where can they find you?
- Of course, obviously a teaching men's fashion
is the best way on YouTube.
Like I said, I'm active there every week.
So you're, you always keep up to date with me there
or on Instagram.
You know, but again, pleasure for, you know,
thank you for having me it's an honor, honestly.
And like I'm always learning from this dude, man.
This dude's a genius.
So again, thank you for having me.
- So there you have it.
I definitely was fan girling a little bit.
He's an absolute legend.
Let us know what you thought of this content style and we
can do a ton more, make sure you like and subscribe.
Thanks for joining.