Who is Austin?

Meet Austin Long, CEO and Co-Founder of Youtooz!

About Youtooz

Youtooz turns the joy of internet culture into amazing products that people love.

The popular brand creates high-quality collectibles for the heroes and role models of the internet — from memes, content creators, and musicians to licensed IPs and more — bringing memorable moments and personalities that bring fans joy to life. Since 2019, the brand has released more than 400 unique figures and built a community of creators, artists, and fans that drive the company’s mission. 

Austin’s Journey

Before Austin founded Youtooz, he ran Omnia Media, a talent management company that began in 2012. The management company represented top gaming personalities on YouTube—including streamers and other content creators who make videos playing popular video games such as Minecraft, Call of Duty, and League of Legends—and worked with them to license content, gain brand endorsements and sponsorships, and strategically build their channels. In 2016, executive leadership sold the brand to a Canadian company that resold it a few years later, leading Austin to transition out of the company. 

As for Youtooz, Austin and his business partner Mark Prokoudine founded the designer vinyl collectible company three years later in 2019. At the time, people were becoming more open about their “nerdy habits,” and this new sense of pride encouraged the two to create their brand. 

The business partners targeted their products toward consumers in the internet age and collaborated with internet personalities like Mr. Beast, the Sidemen, and Jacksepticeye. A year later, the team started working with licensed IP. Now, their licensed products account for about half of the business.

The Youtooz Team

The Youtooz team is made up of 54 people who are all entirely remote. Before COVID, the company’s headquarters was in Vancouver, Canada, and could fit about 25 people. Right as COVID hit, the team hit 25 members. At first, they kept the office space with plans to use it as a co-working opportunity, but as the team continued to expand and COVID went on longer than everyone expected, the co-founders decided not to renew their lease for the office space and transitioned to a fully-remote setting.

“We just found that generally, especially with the size of our team and the type of team that we have, it actually worked better for everyone to work from home,” Austin says. “I think it helps that they can kind of have their own environment that they can work within.”

Austin oversees business development, partnerships, marketing, and strategy-related revenue. Mark looks over the company's operational demands, including hiring and warehousing. Austin says that the two split up responsibilities like the different sides of the brain—Mark has more of an analytical brain, and Austin is more business-oriented but not as good with numbers. As for the team, members are split up into pods. The company has a creative pod, an engineering pod, a support pod, and so on.

Meeting the Needs of a Larger Team

About a year into COVID, around 2021, the co-founders sent their team a survey asking them if they would prefer to work in a larger office, work hybrid, or continue to work from home. The majority of the team said that they preferred working from home, and the co-founders realized that this was also the best decision, considering the size of the team and its communication needs. 

Many members of the Youtooz team are creatives, either artists, 3D modelers, or graphic designers, and it helps them to have their own environment to work in. Austin says that even team members who don’t work in creative departments could use a personal workspace they’re comfortable in.

Everyone has their own preferences. In an office, some team members may not be able to work comfortably out of respect for others. 

“Some people like lights on, maybe lights off. Some people like loud music, without headphones, some people like dead silence. Some people like it cold. You have all those things that inside an office someone might not be able to actually work at like their comfort level in terms of how they prefer to work,” he says.

Austin and Mark found that with team members working from home, no one had to travel or worry about the costs associated with their commute or decorating their office space. Instead, they could spend their money on key retreats meant to improve team collaboration. The remote set-up has worked well for the Youtooz team regarding how the business is structured and maintaining productivity and workload. 

Hiring New Members

When hiring new employees, the co-founders look for what Austin calls “beasts.” Everyone on the Youtooz team is a beast in how they handle their workload, think about the business, and put effort and energy into making customers choose better every day.

Austin's main priority is having a great team. Because the team is entirely remote, it pushes them to have a dedicated group of people who don’t need a lot of oversight. Everyone works on their own time and is diligent in the work they complete. 

“We don’t have a culture of needing to check people’s work and stuff. Naturally, with everyone working from home you can’t, so I would say that’s been our culture — everyone owning what they do, having the responsibility, and laying an autonomy to action on it,” he says. “Everyone works hard and that’s how we’ve achieved [success]. We generally only hire like we feel, and it’s needed to continue growing the business. We try to kind of work within the bounds of what we have.”

A challenge for most E-Commerce companies is throwing new hires at internal problems that they may have, but Austin says that this isn’t a realistic solution. According to Austin, the best thing for companies to do is to fix the problem and see if they truly need a new hire to help out.

The CX Philosophy at Youtooz

All of the company’s support comes from within. Although the team has members based in Australia and Europe, they work within the same time zones. The company’s CX philosophy stems from the understanding that the customer comes first. Although most companies think this, Austin says the action makes all the difference. The Youtooz CX team has a no-questions-asked return policy for customers. If something’s broken, the team will send the customer a new product but ask the customer to pay for shipping costs. The team is very hands-on when it comes to dealing with customers. They reply across all social media platforms, although Twitter and Instagram are where the CX team connects with customers the most. The CX team hosts a lot of giveaways and events to interact with and garner interest from customers. “We keep track of the analytics [and] they have good analytics when it comes  to response time, when things are sorted, and so on,” Austin says. “We’ve really gone into making sure that if you order a Youtooz, we want you to be super happy with it.”

KPIs Austin is Tracking

When it comes to KPIs, Austin says that the team has worked very hard to reduce their response time. During COVID, the support volume increased quickly out of the growing team's comfort zone. It took a day or two to reply to customer inquiries. Understanding that isn’t something the team members would want if they were reaching out to another company, the CX team began keeping track of analytics with a sharp eye and setting achievable goals.

Now, the team has great analytics and short response times. Austin says that, on average, the CX team handles customer emails for five or six hours, seven days a week. Since the beginning, the team has worked to ensure that when customers order a Youtooz product, they’ll be very satisfied with their purchase. If a customer isn’t happy with their product, the CX team will do whatever they can to fix the issue. 

Otherwise, the company does a lot of outreach to customers to garner their feedback and see how they feel about the customer journey and CX support. The team also tracks customer retention to monitor how many customers make multiple purchases and return for more products. Finally, Youtooz considers the general reception to its products, which includes reading a conversation and understanding the sentiment behind the customer responses. As for quantifiable metrics, Austin says the team looks at how quickly the customers respond. They also consider how often the CX team solves customers’ issues. 

Improving the Customer Journey

“Part of [improving the CX team] was just being more prepared for purchase volume. [Our] company is primarily drop driven and by drops, I mean, every Tuesday and Friday, we have new releases,” Austin says. “If we’re working with someone really big or it’s a really big TV show or video game, we just allocate more resources on those days to make sure that we can handle that volume.”

Often, if the company processes 10,000 orders in a few minutes, a handful of those orders will have the wrong address or use the wrong credit card. Understandably, customers will reach out and want to refund or fix the order information. Now, the CX team is prepared to handle a large amount of customers reaching out for help at the same time.

To improve its customer service, the company also segmented the CX team based on members’ expertise and what excites them. The team has members who work on the support and community side and only deal with chargebacks and address changes with those products. This way, those team members can build a rapport with those customers. If the team continuously improves and tries new things to elevate service, customers will eventually see this effort, too.

Finally, the company got better at knowing what the common issues were and anticipating them. 

One issue the team often encountered was shipping issues when the company released a larger product drop, so they sent out an email proactively to alert customers about any shipping problems that might arise. Proactive emails have helped the team navigate the volume of customer requests that they received.

Youtooz’s Growth Strategies

Strategies for Boosting Revenue

When the company first began, the team saw a significant boost in revenue during COVID because customers spent most of their time watching YouTube and new shows and movies. Youtooz launched in early 2019 and performed very well for a new company, bringing in $6 million in revenue. Just last year, the company brought in $40 million. The company has grown significantly, and Austin says that what matters most to the team is having sustainable growth.

Austin and the Youtooz team want to grow sustainably without doing too much at once. Although the company’s growth may be a bit slower, it is repeatable and allows the team to do what they do best—making really cool products for fans.

While the company began selling products on its website, Youtooz products are now sold in more than 4,000 stores around the globe, including FYE, Gamestop, and Spencers. Distributing the company’s products in more places has boosted the team's revenue, and the same goes for building new product lines. At first, the team began selling five-inch vinyl figures, and then they made plushies and device holders. 

Additionally, diversifying the mix of fandoms they work with. Initially, the team only collaborated with creators, but now they create products for creators, video games, anime, and more popular media. Finding more properties and fandoms that want unique and cool products has helped the company grow exponentially. “I think that what matters most for us is having sustainable growth. There's a lot of companies, especially in our space, that are kind of, I would say, fads. They find something that works, they kind of spam it to oblivion, and they kill the hype, and then people don't want it anymore,” he says. “[We try to] grow in a sustainable way where we’re not over leveraging ourselves, we’re not doing too much at once, and we’re not over extending risk, things like that.”

Peak Season Strategies

Generally, the Youtooz team sees boosts in sales on the retail side of the company, like on Amazon. Still, Austin says that the team doesn’t usually see a seasonal increase in orders because the company constantly drops new products. Naturally, there’s a small boost when no product drops, but customer orders are sustainable year-round.

Around the holiday season, the team has to prepare for member vacations, so there’s more team planning at that time. The company also sets reasonable expectations around holidays with customers, just as a heads up for longer response times.

Elevating to the Next Level

Next, the company wants to ship products faster. Although Youtooz is primarily a pre-order-based business, customers have wanted a faster experience. To help with this, the company began selling products in retail stores so people could get their hands on them immediately.

Austin and the team want to build the brand more. Although Youtooz is primarily an online company, it has begun attending conventions to create more touchpoints with the fan community. The Youtooz team has started setting up booths at Comic Cons and similar events. 

The third tenet of the brand's growth is improving its relationships with partners. Youtooz has collaborated with most of its partners for a while, so the team is always looking for ways to strengthen those relationships and drive value for them. 

The Youtooz team always considers this question regarding their business partners: What are they doing to benefit them more each day than they did before?

Advice for Entrepreneurs

Just jump in.

Austin says that many people overthink things when they want to start a business and spend a lot of time wondering when they could follow their dreams and go for it. When aspiring entrepreneurs begin their business, they should prioritize the grind and focus on one product first.

As you build a company, you must learn to let go of stuff. Bring on experts who are smarter than you and can do the job better than you can. Austin says that learning to delegate tasks is hard for most business leaders because they must let go of some of the responsibility, but it’s a key factor in building a successful team.