Episode Summary
In this Prime Talk Podcast Sponsored by GETIDA – Jon Tilley – Co-Founder and CEO of ZonGuru will talk about Amazon Sellers Building Software Tools For Sellers, also more information about his life’s journey. #jontilley #zonguru
About Jon Tilley of ZonGuru – ZonGuru’s core value is summed up in one word: freedom. They believe the power to escape the 9-to-5 grind and make as much money as you want – wherever you want – is out there. Our team of seasoned Amazon sellers want to help you live life on your terms with an industry-leading suite of powerful Amazon FBA seller tools designed from the ground up with one focus: get you the most money possible while working outside the confines of a traditional job. All backed by the most up-to-date, accurate data to help you make the best decisions. With ZonGuru, the power to pursue your passion is in your hands.
Find the Full Episode Below
Yoni Mazor 00:06
Hi, everybody. Welcome to another episode of prime talk today. Today I am having a special guest. I’m having John Tilly, right?
Jon Tilley 00:12
That’s right. You got it.
Yoni Mazor 00:14
All right. Very good. So John is the co-founder and CEO of ZONGURU, which is an all-in-one toolset for Amazon prime-level sellers. He’s gonna expand more about it in the episode, but John, welcome to the show.
Jon Tilley 00:26
Yeah, Yoni is super cool to be here. And you know, anybody in the space has heard about you. And, and one of the common themes that always comes out is what a nice guy you are. And you’d always kind of go out of your way to show interest and curiosity and to connect with all of us. So you know when I saw that I was gonna be coming on through our team, I was excited to meet you. So thanks for everything you do for, everyone in this space. I think it’s super cool.
Yoni Mazor 00:55
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for that. I didn’t expect that. So it’s much appreciated and I am privileged to be a part of this and to serve. But enough about me, let’s talk about you. This episode is gonna be the story of John Tilley, you’re gonna share with us. Who are you? where are you from? Where were you born? Where’d you grow up? How’d you bring in your professional career station to station until we reach where you are today with the world of e-commerce. So I guess without further ado let’s jump right into it.
Jon Tilley 01:23
Yeah. Thanks, man. Yeah, a little bit of my history. I was born in Johannesburg South Africa a few years ago now and I lived there all of my life. Was a great childhood and I was there through my first job. So, I studied in Johannesburg and lived there and worked in Johannesburg.
Yoni Mazor 01:44
And Johannesburg is more the business capital of South Africa where Cape town is more leisure. Is, is that correct?
Jon Tilley 01:49
That’s right. If you got it. Cape Town is probably one of the prettiest cities in the world. It has got like a massive mountain right in the middle of the city on the coastline and I lived there for a few years. Those are some funny stories. Maybe I don’t think I’ll dive into those, but I’ll dive you into a couple of those but you know, I grew up there and I was privileged enough to be there as we transformed into a democratic nation. And we had Nelson Mandela as president, the inspirational Nelson Mandela. I was lucky enough to meet him at one stage because I was a student and I was, I was catering. And anyway…
Yoni Mazor 02:28
You were catering like, the food you mean?
Jon Tilley 02:30
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Actually…
Yoni Mazor 02:31
Just hold on. Tell me about that a little bit. You know just to give some perspective here. This is like early to mid-nineties. Nelson Mandela was rising. He was released after many years in prison basically to kind of get rid of apartheid and make it a real democracy or equal rights for everybody. And you were trying to make a few extra dollars or some pennies and then you will go to work you know, doing catering and you meet Nelson Mandela. Tell us all about it.
Jon Tilley 02:56
Yeah, I was just catering at an event that was for helping him and he was speaking and it was a relatively small group. I forget what it was for, but, when he came up on stage, he was looking for water and I had a water bottle with me. So in those days, I guess there wasn’t secret service security. So I just walked up and gave him the water and he said, thank you.
Yoni Mazor 03:21
And this was you and he was already a president, correct?
Jon Tilley 03:22
Yes. Yeah, exactly.
Yoni Mazor 03:23
Interesting.
Jon Tilley 03:24
So yeah I’ve done many of those crazy jobs as a student. You know, I actually, even though I catered actually on Martha’s Vineyard party. This was later on when I lived in the states for a little bit in 2000, I cater for a party for Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton, a very small party and I got to meet them and their daughter as well. I remember spending some time talking to her in the kitchen. So you know, I think through all of these kinds of catering jobs and stuff, you get to meet some really interesting people. And that was a great experience you know, hearing Bill Clinton talk and Hillary at that time. So I think…
Yoni Mazor 04:03
When you were doing catering, you were in college already or this was high school?
Jon Tilley: 04:06
This is after. This is the year after college. I traveled the states for a year.
Yoni Mazor 04:11
No, no, I’m saying when Nelson Mandela, when you served him in South Africa.
Jon Tilley: 04:14
Yeah, this was just when I’d finished high school and I was starting college.
Yoni Mazor 04:20
Yeah got it. Went to school also in Johannesburg yeah.
Jon Tilley 04:24
Went to school. Yeah. went to school in Johannesburg, studied college there. And then, you know, pretty quickly after that I finished college, it’s a lot of us, you know, in South Africa and other countries take a year and travel the world. So you know, I left there and traveled the states for a year. I went over and started as a waiter at a breakfast spot in Montana at big sky, which is a ski resort and I snowboarded for a season. And then actually after that, I traveled with playing rugby for a lot of the clubs around the states, at the time was a good way to travel around. I think I went to 39 states in my travels for that year.
Yoni Mazor: 05:09
Hold on, let me get this straight. Let me get this straight. You graduated out of your university or college just in a nutshell, what did you study? What did you graduate with?
Jon Tilley 05:16
I did a postgraduate in business and marketing. Yeah.
Yoni Mazor 05:20
Got it. So business and marketing. You take a year off. In the year off, you travel all around but coz you also played sports, you played rugby or you’re like a professional player or what’s your status on that?
Jon Tilley 05:28
I mean I was a wannabe professional player at the time, but no, it was just a good, easy, you know, what’s great about team sports is that if you can go to the city and you can connect with the club, you immediately have 40 friends and you can play these games and you know, get a little side job and travel around. So I, I did that for a while and lived in LA for the first time back then in 2000 and eventually ended up driving down to Mississippi and down through the south and Pensacola and then up to Martha’s Vineyard, where I lived on for the summer on Martha’s Vineyard. And then I left there in 2000 and funny enough I left on September 13th, 2001. So, no, no September 9th two days before September…
Yoni Mazor 06:17
Okay. So your year off was between 2000 to 2001 and well, two days, you know when you left, it was two days before the 9/11 disaster, right? The twin towers attack. Okay. So in that year, once again you were traveling around what playing rugby for, for pay or teams or just for your culture, for your fun or what was the framework was a league or Just a…
Jon Tilley 06:38
yeah, there was a league and there still is one in the US. And, and at the time, there was a semi-professional league with teams all around there. There’s one in New York, there was one in Belmont shore, which is the one I played for in Los Angeles. And I played for a few other ones. I lived in Cincinnati for a while, Cincinnati Wolfhounds. So it was a way ready to extend my travel beyond the ski season that I did and, and just experience the United States. So, you know, travel, traveled all around,
Yoni Mazor 07:06
Which is, which is great. Just to clarify my ignorance. Rugby is the game where it’s like baseball, but…
Jon Tilley 07:13
No, that’s cricket.
Yoni Mazor 07:14
Yeah. Cricket. Right, So Rugby’s like American football with no shoes, no helmets.
Jon Tilley 07:18
Exactly. You got it.
Yoni Mazor 07:21
Yeah. Then, all that you know, all the insurance companies reject if they can ensure you, you go, go play rugby. So it’s, you know, do it at your own risk with no defense, no helmets, no, no gear. Okay. All right. Very cool. So wow.
Jon Tilley 07:35
Amazing experiences. But I think I ended up having 12, 12 concussions over my, my rugby career. So, you know, back then there wasn’t as much seriousness put to your concussion. So if you could stand up and keep running, you, you just kept playing, you know, it was pretty funny.
Yoni Mazor 07:51
That’s funny. Got it, Okay. So you leave September 9th, 2001, two days before 9/11. And you went back to South Africa. Where’d you go? What was your next station?
Jon Tilley: 07:58
Yeah, actually after that I did a little bit of a trip living in Costa Rica and, and surfing and Mets that’s where my fondness for Tel Aviv popped up because I met a lot of Israelis who were, who were traveling and surfing and they always talked about Tel Aviv as, as an awesome city.
Yoni Mazor: 08:15
Hold on. So you met Israelis who loved to surf in Costa Rica and that’s how you discovered Tel Aviv.
Jon Tilley: 08:20
Yeah. Yeah. And I had never been, but it’s just me, you know, it’s been on my list to visit just meeting those guys there. Yeah. So I did that for a while and then I moved to the UK for a little bit, and then went back to South Africa and, and started my career which was advertising. So, you know, I, I got my first job at an advertising agency, one of these blue-chip advertising agencies with big clients like Gillette
Yoni Mazor: 08:44
And Blue Chip, Blue Chip United States, or Blue Chip South Africa?
Jon Tilley: 08:48
Blue-chip, South Africa at the time. Yeah. So but you know, global brands, like Gillette was one, Cadbury Chocolate was another one that I worked on SAB breweries, which, you know they have a steak middle Miller light. So yeah, a really interesting way and a great career very entrepreneurial and less corporate. So, you know, you advertising how you see and I thrived at that.
Yoni Mazor: 09:15
So you started to advertising in 2001, you say,
Jon Tilley: 09:18
Yeah, This was,
Yoni Mazor: 09:20
On advertising for how many years?
Jon Tilley: 09:22
Man, you, this, this is gonna be a long podcast. There there are many years to go through here.
Yoni Mazor: 09:26
yeah, we gonna stay in the station to understand what builds, you know, John Tilley here. And Tim Stanley gives us, give context to your, your capabilities today with ecommerce. That’s kind of the ambition here, but okay. So 2001, until how many years did you stand that position or advertising? What were? what was yours?
Jon Tilley: 09:42
I was actually in that position at this agency called Barrows in, in Durban, in South Africa for, three years you know, working on these big clients. And it was a lot of like at the time it was more below the line advertising. So a lot of like the point of sale retail-focused advertising that I was involved in. But you know, I was never the, what I call entrepreneurial FOMO was already starting at that time, you know, like I was always wanting to start my job and start my gig and, and just kind of pursue that.
Yoni Mazor: 10:18
So, you’re saying, you’re working for a corporate job advertising you’re for more, your fear missing out. Is, is it rubbing on you? I guess the entrepreneurial bug is yeah. Switching you and then okay. Well, what happened with that?
Jon Tilley: 10:28
Yeah, so I ended up leaving that, that gig and moving back to Johannesburg with this vision, of starting my bar and nightclub with a bunch of friends. So, you know, we, my idea was to go back, you know, forget the corporate gig. I went back and started as a bartender at a bar you know, with the idea of learning the trade and just understanding how bars were run. So I went and, and kind of work at the, of a bar, which was pretty wild at the time. You know, it was dancing on the bars, body shots, you know, all, all of that kind of fun things in, in a cool spot in Johannesburg. And the idea there was to learn the trade and then open up a bar with four friends, that we had targeted. Anyway, we got, we got pretty far down that road and, and we didn’t pull the trigger. We, we decided not to, and I think I think the parents’ influence of saying, Hey, you’ve had this great education and you guys need to go on your way to, to your, your great corporate careers were a big influence to a lot of my friends.
Yoni Mazor: 11:33
Yeah, imagine your parents come and tell you, I think you got one concussion, too many with the rugby. You, you got a whole education, whole thing, opening a bar. You can do it later after, you know, you wanna retire, you want some, do something, you know, for a living or have a lifestyle, but yeah, you gotta, you gotta do some professional stuff or something more with a global scope in a way. Okay. So you guys backed off and what was your next station?
Jon Tilley: 11:55
so then I moved to so yeah, I backed off there and I said like, what do I wanna do? So I decided I wanted to move to Cape Town which is one of the most beautiful cities in the world and get involved, in films. So this idea of producing and I always thought like the creative side of, of film-making was amazing. And Cape town at the time still today is one of them, it’s one of like the great production centers for, for film-making, because you have you know, you have a whole array of climates and a very talented production crew that, that is based there.
Yoni Mazor: 12:30
But this is more for domestic production for South Africa, you know, or international?
Jon Tilley: 12:35
Yeah. International films. And so a big location for advertising commercial shooting, as well as for films, you know a whole bunch of international films. So I went there and I got a job. I wanted to understand, you know, what it was like to produce, to kind of interact with people at the highest level. So I got a job as a minute, what is it called again? It’s alike, you know you looked after the producers and the directors and the actors just made sure that you know, they, they were looked after and their daily things, so they wanted to go, you know, out and book all those restaurants,
Yoni Mazor: 13:15
you know they wanted liaison, you would liaison or some sort exactly…
Jon Tilley: 13:20
I don’t know why I’m forgetting the name right now, but anyway, it’ll come back to me. So, yeah, that was my job. And what was great about it is, you know, when I was looking at the directors or producers or actors, I was always in the think of exactly the planning and the creation of the film so was amazing to see. And probably the funniest part was at the time you know, Colin Farrell was the bad boy of Hollywood. And you know, he was coming over to South Africa to do a film. And in that group, they’re all like, cool, who the hell’s gonna look after this guy. Cause he’s just a…. and I was like, I was like, I’ll do it. So you know, I ended up, you know, looking after him on a film that he was shooting then. So
Yoni Mazor: 13:59
What was it like in a nutshell, what was he like? What was the experience like for you?
Jon Tilley: 14:03
Yeah, he was an awesome guy. We became pretty good friends at the time and yeah. You know, it was around
Yoni Mazor: 14:10
Took him on a ride, took him to the club, took him shopping. I just took him for free time
Jon Tilley: 14:14
Pretty much, pretty much every, every party that we could get to, we would do so it, it was tiring, but it was a lot of fun.
Yani Mazor 14:22
Wow, you did a big job.
Jon Tilley: 14:24
Yeah. we got up to a lot of fun.
Yoni Mazor: 14:25
You got Nelson Mandela, you got Hollywood stars, I wonder what’s next? Yeah.
Jon Tilley: 14:28
And then actually I ended up staying at his house on the island at one stage, cause I was looking at it, you know, in my head, I was starting to think of moving overseas and, and experiencing some time. Then I got the opportunity to go and work at an agency on the island actually at the end of that shoot. So I went over and stayed in his space in Ireland and you know you had a lot of fun over there, so good times, you know, and yeah, so at the end of that, I moved to the UK, so I moved to London.
Yoni Mazor: 14:55
So what year was that? So you started 2004, right. You know, in cape town and then until which year did you switch To the UK?
Jon Tilley: 15:02
So it was 2003, I think. And then 2004, 2005, I moved to London.
Yoni Mazor: 15:10
Got, so 2000 to 2003 you were basically with advertising, a little bit of stint of bartending and then you know, production and then film rather than again, 2003 or four you headed into the UK. Well, for a brand new career at a brand new path.
Jon Tilley: 15:24
You know, I’ve got an older brother who’s two and a half years older than me. And he had moved to London and we’ve always been close and you know, he was talking to me about the opportunity over there and I thought, why not this go, live in one of the best cities in the world?
Yoni Mazor: 15:39
And what is he doing here? What was his?
Jon Tilley: 15:41
He was actually, and still today. He’s ahead product designer for that company that I started with my first job called Barrows. It’s a global agency with a lot of big clients and the head product designer at retail, you know, it’s a retail solution ad agency that he heads up there.
Yoni Mazor: 16:00
So do you feel comfortable going to the UK because he was there, but it is not necessarily to a job he kind of, arranged for you or anything like that back with Barrows? Yeah,
Jon Tilley: 16:06
No, no. I just went over there and lived on the couch and you know, was looking to get into the film in the UK. I think what was, what I loved about film again, was just the creation. I mean, people would come in and take something that wasn’t there. And in a week like Build a city, you know, it was so creative and it’s amazing to see how people can work together and create these amazing sets and production things. So I went over there trying to get a job in film and didn’t have the experience yet. You know, I’ve only been, you know, working for a few, a year or two there. So I ended up going back into advertising the work for another agency right in the heart of London and Holborn Covent garden one of these top agencies and burger king was my main account that I was working on and helping at that time, helping them not only on the retail you know, point of sale and the designs of the inside of these burger king restaurants but also moving, transition them onto a kind of digital marketing so that my digital advertising, that was kinda my first shift over to digital advertising.
Jon Tilley: 17:17
And so yeah, those were, those were good years, you know, living in, in London you know, working at an amazing agency, you know, getting exposed to some of these big brands, how they work, you know going to the corporate offices, knowing for well that I never wanted to be corporate in that sense. And just, you know, we had a lot of friends move over from South Africa at the time. So you had your best friends in one of the best cities in the world at a time where you know, it was young and a lot of fun. So yeah, really good times. And still that entrepreneurial FOMO was there. And we started, you know, going back to the club, nightclub kind of bad thing. We started an underground kind of nightclub that we used to run under the London bridge.
Jon Tilley: 18:06
You know just to get some DJs together and a whole bunch of people and throw these pretty big parties. And we did a few of those and they were getting pretty successful at the time. So, you know, I always kept that in my mind. And, you know, as much as I enjoyed advertising, I still had that, you know, I, I wanted to make this leap into entrepreneurship. So yeah, that was it. And I was loving London and kind of going back to you know, my days of living in the US you know, I had a summer romance in us at the time and then ended up meeting up with that same girl, later on, you know, five, six years later. And then we started dating between LA and London, and that’s what eventually got me to be to Los Angeles is to go there.
Yoni Mazor: 18:52
So you kept your, you know, from 2004 until when you made the switch?
Jon Tilley: 18:57
2000 and 2007.
Yoni Mazor: 19:01
Los to three years, you’re in London, you were advertising, you were, you’re doing a production of this time instead of movies and film, it’s parties and nightlife production. That’s interesting. Are you able to tie that to together your entrepreneurial bug, your, you know, field production?
Jon Tilley 19:11
sure, sure.
Yoni Mazor 19:12
Ability, but also your bar attending or, you know, opening a bar element. You tied up altogether to make parties under the London bridge. That’s pretty wild. And then nevertheless, a trip that you had in us and you met somebody, a lady that brought you back in 2007, and I brought you back to us, but basically, your life and move to Los Angeles. Yeah,
Jon Tilley: 19:33
Yeah. That was it, man. And so I kept going waste and ended up in Los Angeles and you know, I came over and that was, you know, just restarting, you know, completely from scratch.
Yoni Mazor: 19:43
You quit your job in advertising or there, whatever you’re doing there, all the productions of the party, you say, Hey, love, you know, conquer all distance is not an issue. You come all the way there and you strike roots IN the city of angels.
Jon Tilley: 19:54
Absolutely. Yeah. And, and that was a, you know, that was a pretty big and tough challenge to overcome. You know, I think you don’t realize the shock until you put yourself into that. There’s a straw of obviously you know, new relationships and new cities and all these amazing things of immigrating to a new city, but you live behind your network and your connections and your family and your friends, you know? So that was a big challenge to overcome is like I was coming to LA with zero connections, history, or anything real reset. Starting from scratch, you know, so you know, I, I started all, and I started working for a travel company you know, kind of doing the digital marketing at the time.
Jon Tilley: 20:40
And, and, you know, they were based in a different city. It was almost like working virtually like we do a lot today. And I was doing that, but you know, I wasn’t getting roots and, and my kind of network within the city of Los Angeles. So I eventually went back into advertising and, and started with another agency, in LA. And I was with them from 2007 or two…. Yeah 2000, no, sorry, 2008. Through 2013 which is you know, a pretty extensive career with this agency.
Yoni Mazor: 21:13
Are any special accounts worth mentioning?
Jon Tilley: 21:16
Yeah, I mean, you know, it was blue-chip again, I think the big one that I worked on, which is kind of what got me into software was public storage, which is, you know, a pretty it’s on the S and P 500. They’re a storage company, a personal storage company you know, well, over 2 billion in sales a year the biggest storage company in the world. And, you know, we were doing all of the digital advertising. I was a digital strategist you know and kind of can’t lead for them. And through that, we saw an opportunity to get it. We were owning their websites and their reservation system from a customer experience, but they wanted to redo their internal enterprise-level reservation system and booking system. And so you know, we put together a software team and pitch for that, and then won that piece of business. And so slowly we kind of moved from a customer-facing website, into their internal enterprise-level booking system and, and developing that. So
Yoni Mazor: 22:13
That’s interesting. Cause I never thought about these public storage companies, you know, these big at least here in the United States people get a lot of stuff, right. So yeah, big houses and big cars are not enough. You’re gonna get a storage unit and these big companies, they buy these facilities and you know, it’s pretty much just selling air. They’re selling space for you to you know, pay monthly usually, or you prepay for a year and then you store you belong is there. So you’re saying internally it works basically like a hotel. You need a whole booking system. It’s also regional because each location has it, you know, different mathematics and different capacity and different frameworks and pricing. So you’re involved in building all that and packaging it towards marketing facing out. So it’s a whole funnel. It’s a pretty complicated funnel coz it’s all regionalized.
Jon Tilley: 22:55
Absolutely. Yeah. So they, and that’s what drove their business, right? It’s the booking and the money, the money collection system. Right?
Yoni Mazor 22:59
So the efficiency,
Jon Tilley 23:00
This was a huge project. It took us three years I think. And we didn’t know what we were getting ourselves into. But you know, they trusted us and you know, when you have the connection on the strategy and the vision and you can build a team around you, you can deliver. So we did that for many years, not in the marketing, but that internal software application. And yeah, that was, you know, it was a very successful career in advertising at a very high-performance level, very demanding. And again, you know, there was always that like, dad, you know, how do I start my own thing?
Jon Tilley: 23:40
And, and that FOMO where you’re never like really happy with what you have because you feel like something is drawing you in a different direction. But you know, I think at the same time moving to a brand new city and a brand new culture with, with zero connections you know, taking that, that kind of five to seven years to, to re-establish myself you know, into a community and a career was important. So I was very grateful for that advertising job. And you know, I was part of a lot of these you know, again, that the whole idea of, of keeping some of these events or these ways of connecting with your community alive. I always for probably the last four years in the, at the time I was running a breakfast meet up. So once a week, I’d get all the guys together, we’d meet up for breakfast. And that just expanded. We started with two people and, you know, by the end of that, we had like 50 people coming for breakfast once a weekend. This is, what’s a discussion
Yoni Mazor: 24:40
Like politics, business, sports, everything that goes, or what was the agenda?
Jon Tilley: 24:45
Yeah. Everything, I mean, you know, in the beginning, it was more just a basic conversation. It was called the fella’s breakfast. It was a guy’s kind of group. We used to connect and it was called the fella’s breakfast. And you know, it was just a time to connect and in the mornings before the day starts and just,
Yoni Mazor 25:03
was it always the same diner by the way?
Jon Tilley 25:04
No, I started running outer places to take guys, but we used to change it up just to expand. So we did a lot of hotels. It was funny enough something before eight o’clock and Los Angeles is never open, you know, so, it’s different,
Yoni Mazor 25:30
I’ve heard it very little back. I’ve never been.
Jon Tilley: 25:24
I’m like, dude, seven 30 in the morning. You can’t find many open places. So we did that and you know, that grew to, beyond 50 people that would meet up. And by that stage, we had to kind of move out of the kind of like you know, conversational way of interacting and have someone get up and speak. And there was kind of a speaker who got up, there’d be someone in the group just talking about their business or you know, something that’s inspiring to them or their projects or whatever and have that chance to speak. So I started to get quite sophisticated and took a lot of work to do, but it was a great way of keeping everyone connected. So I always did a lot of those. And through that, I met my co-founding business partner, a guy called Adam Hudson.
Jon Tilley: 26:05
He runs an Amazon education business all over Australia. So he had moved over to LA you know, one of the super entrepreneurs, just one who got, since he was 18 years old, he’s just been, executing and opening businesses and doing incredibly well, just has an amazing ability to kind of understand trends where they’re going and what to create around that to create a business. And you know, we had connected as friends and through that, he was like, Hey, you know, like I’m thinking of launching this product in retail. And you know, just obviously came across all of these, you know, obstacles of trying to get a product into retail. And then through that, you know, got exposed to this idea of Amazon. And he was like, Hey, I’m gonna go to this conference. I think it was one of the first amazing conferences back in the day in Las Vegas,
Yoni Mazor: 26:56
The Amazon side, I believe it was called back in the day today. It’s already branded amazing. Yeah,
Jon Tilley: 27:01
Yeah, yeah. So it was back in those days, this is 20, 2011, or 2012. And
Yoni Mazor: 27:07
That’s on Adams’s side, are you already involved and connected with Adam? And he was kind of getting at it coz he is tried as far as I understand, he was trying to break into brick and mortar with doing, you know, with retail, but then ASM, the Amazon selling machine was popping in 2011, maybe 2012. You already had a relationship with Adam and you of kind of use.
Jon Tilley: 27:25
Yeah, Adam had done the same thing he had moved on from an amazingly successful career and business that he had in Australia and wanted to restart and just kind of try something new so he had come in fresh, we met and I was like, I’ll show you the round, the ropes and you know, exposed to all our friends and the parties of LA. And you know, in reverse, he kind of helped inspire me around this idea of becoming an entrepreneur because he was just so good at it. And you know, so that was a great friendship that started brewing, but it was, you know, just a friendship and he was looking outside of, he had an animation business at the time and you know, he was looking at products in retail and, you know, got this access to ASM and he said, why don’t you come along? So I came along with him.
Yoni Mazor: 28:12
And remember the year been in chance?
Jon Tilley: 28:13
I think it was 2011 or 2012.
Yoni Mazor: 28:17
Got it. And this is, so it sounds like it’s alongside your regular job in a
