Breaking Down Branding: Here’s How Ronnie Built A Brand From The Scratch!

Welcome to SaaS Unlocked, the podcast where we delve into successful entrepreneurs’ minds and uncover the secrets to their success. In today’s episode, our founder Pratik is excited to speak with Ronnie, a successful online business owner who started out by testing various online ventures. Through his hard work and determination, Ronnie has built a profitable business and he’s here to share his insights with us. So sit back, relax, and let’s get started!You can watch the full episode on INSIDEA’s YouTube Channel and on Spotify. But if you are more into reading than watching, HERE YOU GO!

Pratik

Welcome to ‘SaaS Unlock’. I’m bringing you amazing guests from across the globe. This guy is very special. He is an Indian based out of Canada but now settled in Thailand. Very a unique story of Ronnie and met him like twice but I already feel that and that vibe that any entrepreneur might possess. So he’s a great people person. Welcome Ronnie to the show. Very warm regards from the other side of the world where it’s too cold and you are enjoying Thailand.

Ronnie

Yeah, thanks man. I really do appreciate. Thanks pratik. Thanks for having me a really well speaking, Speaking of the connection, I definitely think that from the first time that we spoke it’s definitely been there. You’re from my hometown of Mumbai, definitely appreciate that the warm welcome and you know the the hometown connection there with you for sure.

Pratik

So, I was checking on your brand name ‘Branzia watches’. You are into e-commerce. You are an entrepreneur, you are a marketer. You did a lot of things in your career, and you ended up like right now in one of your ventures that’s Branzia. Would love to learn more about how you started it, what inspired you to come up with this product.

Ronnie

Sure. You wanna know the honest truth, man? Immigration’s a bitch. Like, I’m gonna, be super honest with you and with the crowd. The thing is, so we had a we had a decent, decent life in India, right? Definitely quite lucky in my upbringing. One to the right boarding schools, etcetera, etcetera. But when you immigrate to a new country, you’re everything. Everything changes, right. So so imagine, you know, we, we, we moved from India, we moved to Canada. Super Lucky, appreciate everything. And I call him the golden ticket because you get to move.

Ronnie

To a different country and get to hit the reset button of your life. That’s the upside. The downside is nobody has told. What nobody tells you is that no matter what your qualifications were in India or what you might have done, they’re not recognizing this new country, right? So, for example, if you’re a doctor, lawyer, engineer, whatever you’ve done in India, good for you. When you move to Canada, certain things are not of course, recognized. So when I moved with a family of four living in somebody’s basement, like a one bedroom basement, I used to, I used to work three jobs.

Ronnie

One of them was speaking.

Pratik

That reminds of my story as well!

Ronnie

Yeah, I know. Exactly right. So it’s like, yeah, I used to work three jobs. We had to make rent. I mean not that rent was much, it was still $600.00 Canadian, but for a family of four that you know, we converting rupees to dollars and all that, it was a lot. So. So I found the one thing that kept me motivated, which was essentially money. So if I want to be like super brutally honest with you, what drove me, what drove me to start my journey was essentially. Attack of wealth accumulation to say look whatever I do, I just want to make sure that I don’t end up the way in in the same streets as I was when I had moved to Canada. So you know I experienced this sort of more dust. They do changes. And that’s how I I I learned online marketing. I’m Charlotte. I guess I’m a child of the Internet and we both are. And you know talk herself. Online marketing doing a Google ad scores, watching YouTube videos reading. They didn’t even have YouTube videos back then. There was like just reading content online on Google and everything else. And then.

Ronnie

You know, squeaking my way into working for HSBC or anything else. But the interesting part is, you know, I I suck my teeth into online marketing, let’s say retail etail at Best Buy, which is quite interesting because every morning when I got to the office at 8:00 AM, they would essentially be 5 campaigns waiting for me to be trafficked. And I had a budget of five and a half, $1,000,000, right? So every day I’ve got to make mistakes on some other, some other person’s coin, right? Which was best buys coin or Sony’s coin or something else?

Ronnie

I’ve got to learn everything about Facebook ads, Google ads, Instagram ads, everything else on somebody else’s point, right? But I work from 888 AM to 8:00 PM, right? So in a in a couple of years, I had accumulated something to the tune of about 5-6 thousand hours of experience. And at that point in time we say, look, you know, maybe I want to try something else. Maybe I want to try a different venture. Maybe I want to try and go freelance. Tried all that stuff. Fail at it miserably. Try to start an ad agency.

Ronnie

Related miserably tried to start like a couple of other things didn’t really work out and then I read somewhere that the the the margins on watches are about 80%. So that’s how I started. In the watch Business Today we own portfolio 15 different sites. Some of them what is some of them are in software and some of them are in different niches, some of them are content sites, some of them are ecommerce sites, some of them are you know a mix of both and so here we are you know 60 plus employees completely remote company for over a decade this is MPs, so long time.

Pratik

So all of this watches that you have on your site is customly designed by your team?

Ronnie

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Like these are all custom made custom design custom. We started designing them every I think every not and I think I know that every year we have a new, we have a new range that comes out, there’s a new drop and everything is just that. That’s how we work. We work on a cycle, we make Quartz watches, sports watches. The reason why it just sports because sports has the lowest barrier of. Entry for watches. So if you, if you, if you don’t know much about watches and if you want to get into the watch, you’re like, hey, look, this piece looks good. It looks flashy enough. I’m going to buy it. There’s a, there’s a certain price point of a customer that we go up there, which is the $100 customer, right. They see it on the gram. They don’t have to think twice about it. And they’re like, OK, I’m just gonna buy it. It looks good. It goes with my wrist and I’m happy to do so. It makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s, that’s who we basically cultivated to. That’s who we go after, you know, that’s how it is.

Pratik

When when did you? Start this product and ecommerce site

Ronnie

10 years ago.

Pratik

Wow.

Ronnie

Yeah, it’s been awhile, man. No, not 10 until like 20. Well, no, no, eight, sorry, eight years ago. So 2015, January of 2015

Pratik

15 through your success journey like what were the initial days look like?

Ronnie

There is no success. I wish there was a success, man. It’s like, it’s still like there’s a lot more stuff to be done. But you know, you gave me too much credit. I can tell you my mistakes because I think when I do chat with people, I think it’s pretty interesting to talk about mistakes before we talk about successes. First mistake that I ever made was I tried to do everything myself and never got to delegate. I didn’t hire fast enough because six months into my business, I was the person who was doing my own accounting. I was the person doing customer service. I was the person doing all the media buyers. I was the person doing sourcing, designing, end to end everything. There was just one person that was me, right? And that month #3 had basically burnt out.

Ronnie

And so I kept trying to push myself. I said yeah, I can do it, I can do it, but it’s not really ideal, right? So mistake number one was not having fast enough because I believe if I had hired faster I would have definitely been able to scale a lot quicker. The second thing was, which I’m, I’m happy to share with you is I didn’t hire right, right. I definitely took people for took people at their word which I’m sure every everybody does. But the second part which is completely my mistake is I didn’t set the goal. They didn’t have right systems of monitoring.

Ronnie

I didn’t have the right goal sort of systems in place to say, look, these are the goals, these are, this is what we need to achieve and this is where we need to go with it, right. I just said, hey, here’s the here’s what we need to do and I’ll just let you go and execute it. At the end of the day, there was no follow up. There was a system for of management or performance reviews or anything else and that definitely was on me, right. And you know, six months down the line, of course you see all the customer reviews and you’re like, what the hell going on, blah, blah, blah. And then all of a sudden you like, holy shit, are screwed up pretty bad. And because the people.

Ronnie

When my employees came, came to me, they said you never told us, right this.

Pratik

Important aspect, right? Because thank God I learned this early in my journey while I was working in a job. So I was growing my team, right. So like making sure setting the expectation right for your employees and setting the KPIs and you measure that like you know with them every week to make sure that you’re helping them enough to succeed. It’s very crucial for any business. Thank you for sharing that.

Ronnie

Yeah, for sure. And that’s where they went wrong, 100%.

Pratik