From $10K Losses a Day to an L Catterton Deal: Zach Stuck’s Full Story

**Sean Frank** (0:00)
I'm just gonna say it, today's episode is so damn good. Let me tee it up properly, so you know what you're about to get, and why you wanna stick around and listen to this one. So our guest is a long time friend of the pod. He's built an eight figure agency, recently sold it. He's also built two, yes, two nine figure brands in two wildly different categories. He's one of the few people I know who is willing to just kill a company and move on if it isn't hitting his goals. He's easily one of the top ad guys in the game today. You're going to have to really try and not learn something from this episode. Welcome back to another Operators Titans, brought to you by our friends at AppLovin. And yes, we are talking with Zach Stuck for Mars Men and Hollow Socks.

**Matt Bertulli** (0:43)
Professional podcaster, former agency salesman. He has sold brands for eight figures. He just raised eight figures. He's on top of the world. He's the coolest guy in e-com right now, and he's about to pull out his summer car. What's up, Zach? How's life? How's the G-Wagon treating you?

**Zach Stuck** (0:59)
Well, sadly, the G-Wagon is gone now, but the GT3 RS is here. I don't know if you said G-Wagon or not, but that's what everyone keeps asking me about. They don't even care about the Porsche anymore. They're like, where's your G-Wagon? So, well, yeah, I got rid of it.

**Sean Frank** (1:13)
Zach, we got to teach people about taste. That's what we got to teach people.

**Zach Stuck** (1:16)
I got the Hennessy truck, even though I wasn't. Everyone thought I was a winner of the Ridge giveaway. Not a winner. I did it myself.

**Matt Bertulli** (1:22)
You just bought one.

**Zach Stuck** (1:23)
I just bought one. Yeah, because, you know, Wisconsin, right? So might as well.

**Matt Bertulli** (1:28)
Yeah, you're in Wisconsin. I assume you have a boat. So how many boats do you have?

**Zach Stuck** (1:31)
I have one. I have one boat. I have one boat. Yeah. Yeah, one surf boat. But it's yeah, it's I mean, you know, we get summer for three, you know, we get nice weather for three months out of the year. So got to take advantage of that.

**Matt Bertulli** (1:43)
Well, beautiful, brother.
So what is the background? Who is Zach? Why are you in Wisconsin? Why do you have the number one email agency on earth? And what are you doing now? So early days when you're eight years old, what's Zach like? What's he doing?

**Zach Stuck** (1:57)
I mean, I was going to say we're going back there. I mean, candidly, I don't remember much of my childhood, which I'm not sure if that's a good thing or bad thing. But I mean, I did start, I did start an e-commerce business when I was 19, started a WooCommerce apparel business. And that's really where it got started was I was, my dad was a small business owner, mom was a small business owner. So entrepreneurship was in my ethos of what I could maybe do when I grew up. But small business, when I say, this is not like when we talk on DTC Twitter, oh, small business under a hundred million. No, this is like, does less than a million revenue, barely survives type of small business. So grew up in Wisconsin, went to just like very casual, normal schools, didn't go to anything prestigious as far as like growing up.
So was lower middle class in Wisconsin, which is basically poor everywhere else throughout the US.
And yeah, I mean, like, I think my dad had a business where he was manufacturing enclosures for tractors, which is like super random and niche. But at one point, he was selling them on online. And so I like learned, I learned about e-commerce when I was like 13, 14, which was like a PayPal button on an HTML page, which is gnarly. So that got me interested in the Internet. And then as most kids do, you just like tinker. And so tinkered with a bunch of stuff, started building websites. Like my most famous story from when I was in high school is I got our school districts, like Microsoft Suite disk with the full licensing, and I would sell it to people as a side hustle. So I basically sold it to 50 to 70 year olds when I was in high school, charged them a small discount. So it was like great margin, 100% margin, just install it on their computers. So anyways, that's the OG, had entrepreneurial stuff back then. But yeah, started an e-commerce site when I was 19, dropped out of college when I was 20 Got a job in a marketing agency here in Wisconsin and did that, worked at another one, worked at another one. And then that led me into the time where I was like, I think I wanna go out on my own finally and had a conversation with Andrew Foxwell and then he introduced me to David Herman. And that's where the Facebook ads world of my background really started to kick off.