Episode · 2026-04-10
Grüns Acquired
Grüns Acquired | "Puptides" Are Coming | Travis Wheeler x Ryan Garrow x Chad Hetherington
Rundown
The cowboys open by riffing on the newly announced Grüns acquisition and speculating about the next big supplement form factor before welcoming a trio of guests. Travis Wheeler and Ryan Garrow talk through buying and improving 'boring' local businesses via seller financing and the Contrarian Academy model, plus war stories from scaling a paid search/shopping agency and an underrated Bing ads workflow, while Chad Hetherington closes the show discussing his new live-shopping/social commerce platform Third and where live selling is headed.
Takes from this episode
The next big supplement form factor to scale a brand like Grüns will be lollipops or a similarly delicious new delivery format.Prediction
it could be lollipops or it could be some other delectable, delightful form
Sellers of small businesses often come out ahead taking seller financing over a lump-sum SBA/bank sale because it defers capital gains and can pay out more via profit sharing with a qualified operator.
you have to pay that capital gains tax like right away versus parsing that out... if you play the bank, you're going to make more in interest
You can outperform automated bidding-algorithm competitors in Google Shopping/feed management through manual expertise rather than automation.
We're just really, really good. Like, we don't use bidding algorithms... We beat them head-to-head.
Bing is an underrated, cheap ad channel with higher conversion rates that's trivially easy to set up because it imports your existing Google account and bids automatically.
It's cheaper. Conversion rates are higher. This is huge... It's so damn simple.
Live shopping and social commerce will keep growing rapidly in the US as Amazon and eBay push harder into the format, following China's lead.Prediction
Amazon's pushing hard at live. eBay's pushing hard at live... live's going to continue to grow
TikTok's upper-funnel value should be proven with a free trial of dynamic remarketing before committing budget, since actual buyer demographics on the platform can differ sharply from assumptions.
their demographic on TikTok 30 to 45-year-old women... we'll set it up and manage it for free for 3 months just to get some data for you