Selling Deodorant for $100M and How to Find Your Best Competitive Advantage with Moiz Ali

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
All right, there's this amazing book called Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You've Got. I read it a few years ago and it changed my life.
And the reason I loved it was because it basically talks about how to get and make more money using things that you already have.
Coincidentally, today's podcast is brought to you by Business Made Simple. It's a podcast by Donald Miller, who I'm gonna tell you about in a second, but he has this amazing episode that's all related to this book and the things that I learned in this book. It's called How To Make Money With What You Already Have. It's an incredible episode. Talks about all the stuff that I learned in this book. The host is Donald Miller. I didn't know who Donald Miller was up until recently, but over the last 12 months, this is totally by coincidence. It was all separate people. They said, you have to check out Donald Miller. He's amazing. So I'm happy that he's part of HubSpot's Podcast Network. You can check it out, Business Made Simple Podcast. It's where he coaches you on how to build your business like an airplane, where the cockpit is your leadership, the body is your overhead, the right engine is your marketing, the left engine is your sales.
You have to check it out. This guy's amazing. It's called Business Made Simple with Donald Miller.

**Shaan Puri** (1:09)
All right, so Moiz is here. And so I guess if people don't know, so you started, you actually started a couple of businesses. People mostly know you from Native. So you created Native, which has the popular deodorant brand. You sold it to Procter & Gamble for reported $100 million, which I think is one of the better DTC exits, because you only raised like $4 million, I want to say, to less than that even.

**Moiz Ali** (1:32)
We raised $500,000 actually.

**Shaan Puri** (1:35)
Oh my God, okay, so you raised $500,000. And by the way, I don't know if you know this, I remember I was in a mastermind group with your brother and I was like, and he was like in between, he already sold his company, so he's kind of floating in between things. It's like, why do you show up to the mastermind if you don't really have a business that you're working on? So I think he was kind of like fishing and he was like, you know, my brother's got this interesting business. And I was like, I didn't even know, I didn't know him very well at the time. I was like, didn't even know you had a brother. And I was ready for this like big tech idea. And he's like, yeah, he's like selling like this natural deodorant.
And he made it sound like you're like sitting at home packing the deodorant containers by hand. And he's like, he kind of was underplaying. He's like, it's really cool. You know, it's paraben free. I didn't know what a paraben was. And he's like, it's aluminum free or whatever.
And he's like, yeah, it's doing pretty well. And then he started to say the numbers. And I was like, whoa, that's actually like really good. And I was like, so how much has he raised? He's like, I don't know if he's like, he's raised like nothing.
And so that's when you got on my radar. And I feel like you operated very quietly. You're kind of like me where when you're doing something that's working, you shut the hell up. And when you're not, when you're just thinking about ideas, you're like super loud to bounce them around off people. Is that your strategy?

**Moiz Ali** (2:46)
That's exactly right. In fact, we've done no PR for Native until after we sold the business. I remember we had all these news publications reaching out to us. And I took one interview with, I think it was like Retail Dive or somebody. And they were like, we want to talk about this deodorant company because we haven't heard of that. And you know, they're like, who are you guys? What are you doing?
And we sort of talked about the business and they wrote an article. And after that, I was like, I'm never talking about the business again.
When we went to go fund rate, like we talked to a few people, we talked to Simon Equity Partners, which is basically the family office of like, you know, the Simon Property Group, which owns a bunch of malls across the United States.
And we opened up our books to them and we're like, here's our business. And they're like, our job is to find businesses like you. And you know, you're down the street from us. You're based in San Francisco. Your headquarters is three blocks away from ours. We've never heard of this business and we should have heard of it by now. How come? And we're like, you know, we're not talking about our business. Like no one walked around with native t-shirts until after we made an exit. Then I was like, okay, now the brand can exist and we can be loud in public about it.