DTC REVENUE ROCKET — SEASON 2 — EPISODE 17 
Sold It. Bought It Back.
John Roman on Twelve Years of Battle Box
Guest: John Roman, Founder, Battle Box   |   Host: Zak Cassady-Dorion

John Roman 00:08
...which is from a D2C lifespan — it's long. That's dinosaur. I need my D2C AARP card soon. We sold the business in 2021. We then decided to buy the business back in 2023, which is not part of the playbook. We wanted it back — it was our baby, and we weren't ready to give it up.

Zak 00:34
...your Netflix series that came out — dude, that is awesome.

John Roman 00:41
Thank goodness, because it would have been a different story if it just got shelved... Out of curiosity, we found twenty-five thousand dollars worth of product that had been sitting in our warehouse, multiple SKUs, that had never been listed on our site for sale... It's seventy percent of our revenue.

EPISODE

Zak 01:11
John, welcome to the podcast.

John Roman 01:13
Zak, thanks for having me, man. Excellent to be here.

Zak 01:16
We have John Roman from Battle Box on DTC Revenue Rocket today. John, before we jump in, give us a little background about you and about Battle Box, for anyone who doesn't know.

John Roman 01:30
Sure — Battle Box is an outdoor adventure brand, everything from camping and hiking to general preparedness. We've been around for a while now — it's kind of crazy to say, but we're a few months out from twelve years, which is a dinosaur lifespan for a DTC brand. I need my DTC AARP card soon.
A lot's changed in twelve years — from five-dollar customer acquisition costs on Meta in 2015 to now. It's been an interesting journey. We sold the business in 2021, then decided to buy it back in 2023, which is definitely not part of the playbook. That's probably why we've had this lifespan without any fundamental changes in direction.
We're a little unusual as a brand because we focus heavily on content and community — those are our two pillars. Every decision considers how it affects community and content, and that's our secret sauce and our moat, honestly — it's hard to replicate. It serves as a major top-of-funnel lever for us, which is a little unusual. Don't get me wrong, we advertise a lot on all the usual channels, and spend more than I'd like to — but it's necessary. It just serves more as a middle-funnel play for us.
So yeah, happy to be here. We got connected through our mutual friend Ben.

Zak 03:35
Yeah, I want to dig into all of that, especially the content side. Before we hit record, you told me this is the third podcast you're doing today — that's awesome, clearly you're putting the time in to create a lot of content.

John Roman 03:52
Yeah — and I'm not even one of the content guys. My content is all on the business side. We have two full-time creators on the brand side, Brandon and Joey, and they now have a large team supporting them — four full-time video editors in-house, plus everyone else you'd expect around a marketing and content team: someone focused specifically on content flow, someone on social distribution, and several other marketing folks handling other pieces. We're a content engine, which is different.

Zak 04:52
Yeah, and I know that's been true since you started — I want to dig into that more. But first I want to talk about growing the business, selling it, and then buying it back, which is something most DTC founders only dream about. What led you to sell in — was it 2021?

John Roman 05:20
Yeah, we closed in October 2021 — right at the top of the market. Great timing, though I can't take credit for it, just got lucky. It wasn't really about the business needing to sell — it was more that it was time to go. There were three of us as partners at the time. Two of us saw the vision and wanted to keep building — we loved what we did every day. The third partner was ready to retire, didn't enjoy the work anymore, and when that happens, productivity follows. There were gaps in the business, and it's tough to get a partner to carry their share when their heart isn't in it. So — two roads diverged.
We'd agreed early on that we'd never take less than 6x EBITDA on a valuation, and now here we were: it didn't make sense for the other two of us to buy the third partner out at 6x. Timing-wise, remember, we'd just come through the first half of the pandemic — if you had anything to sell online, you saw success — and then we layered our Netflix original series on top of that in July 2020. Those two things back-to-back shot every metric up significantly.
The problem was, myself and Patrick — the two of us who still saw the vision — looked at that growth and had to ask: how much more exponential growth is really left? Even if we could find a way to borrow the money to buy our partner out at 6x, unless we doubled the business, we were looking at something like a three-year payback, and we weren't confident that was even realistic. It stopped being a great investment. So we decided to take it to market instead.
In the back of our minds, there was hope we'd find the right acquirer — not just an exit, but a partner to build something with. We ended up with two term sheets to choose from, and we picked the one that was actually less money. The bigger offer was from a private equity group — good guys, honest about their approach, but they already had people in place doing a lot of what my team did, and I couldn't get comfortable walking my team, who'd bled for this business for years, into that.
The other group, Emerge Commerce — who we ultimately sold to — spoke our language. They understood the vision, they knew our third partner wasn't pulling weight, and they let him retire out day one, no hard feelings. Their model was independent business units with the founding team still running things, rolling up top-line and EBITDA for synergies. Whether that's the right model is debatable, but it meant we still got to run the show, and sixty percent of the deal was cash upfront. It was a good deal, so we took it. We knew we'd be there at least three years, and honestly thought it could be longer if the partnership worked the way we hoped.
Then, through no fault of theirs, we'd sold right at the top — late 2021 into 2022 — and 2022 was the year of SPACs getting hammered. Nothing changed in their underlying economics, but they still took a beating on market cap. That created a two-sided opportunity: on one level, it was simple arbitrage — we'd sold high and could buy the same thing back low. And on another level, something we didn't fully realize until after the dust settled — there was a real emotional connection to the business. Right or wrong, we wanted it back. It was our baby, and we weren't ready to let it go. Between those two things, we bought it back.

Zak 11:56
That's awesome — I'm glad it worked out. Seems like it worked out great. So when you bought it back, was it you and one business partner, and the other partner went off and did his own thing?

John Roman 12:07
Yeah — the eighteen months leading up to the sale, we'd hired a CFO. We badly needed one. Found a rock star, great guy, and gave him two jobs: one, clean up the business and get it focused on what mattered, with real visibility into how we were actually doing. Two — obviously — prep us so the trailing twelve months told a good story and looked profitable enough going into the deal. He told us no on things when he needed to, babysat us a little, and made sure our EBITDA was in a great spot heading into game time.
When we joined Emerge, he stayed on with us for three years. This time around, when we negotiated the buyback, we wanted him to have an equal seat at the table — he didn't have equity the first time, just some bonuses tied to getting the original deal done, which he received. But he was paramount to the business, so this time he came along as a full partner. So it's the three of us again, just a different three.

Zak 13:52
That's a great story — really valuable for the DTC founders and operators listening, to hear candidly about an exit. One thing I like that you said: you had no idea the timing would be perfect when you sold. There was no way to know, but it turned out to be exactly right.

John Roman 14:23
Right — and we bought back at the low too. You can't time these things, but somehow we got lucky both times. Apparently it's news to me how we did it, but it worked.

Zak 14:38
That's awesome. Something else you mentioned that I want to hear more about — your Netflix series that came out around July 2020. I want to hear about it.

John Roman 14:56
Yeah, that was a big journey — and a scary one, because a lot of it overlapped with us figuring out what to do about the partnership. We launched Battle Box in February 2015. By 2016, the run rate told us I needed to make a decision — I'd had a career in tech sales, building sales teams and organizations, and I had to decide to jump into Battle Box full time.
Once I did, one of the first things on my list was to bring on a customer of ours who was already making content for fun, and get him doing it full time — start executing the vision we had of content as our pillar, because we didn't have that at all yet. That meant reaching out to a guy named Brandon and saying: I know you've had a twenty-plus-year career, and I know you shoot videos for fun at night — do you want to move you and your family down to Georgia and do that video every single day instead of once a month? He said yes, and that was really the start of our social media presence.
Around late 2017 — I'd been on for a little over a year, Brandon almost a year — High Noon Entertainment reached out. They'd made Fixer Upper, the husband-and-wife show out of Waco, Texas, and Cake Boss. What was interesting about their pitch was that both of those shows involved real businesses before, during, and after — that was in their DNA, and it lined up with what we wanted too: we had a business, they wanted to do a show with us, and we wanted to still have a business afterward.
They'd raised some money and wanted to shoot a sizzle reel — I don't know if that's still a thing, but it was in 2017. You shoot the reel, shop it to networks, and hope for a pilot, or if you're lucky, a full season order. They wanted to pitch it to the History Channel, came down, we filmed for a week and built the reel, and it went to History. Then for six or seven months — nothing. Finally: no. So I figured, okay, we're not going to be famous, no show, that's fine. But they said, we're going to pitch Discovery too. Discovery took another six or seven months and also said no. Pretty disheartening.
Now it's 2019, and we get a catch-up call. In January they had two more meetings lined up — probably the last pitches they'd make. One was Vudu, Walmart's streaming platform, which is probably defunct now since Walmart folded that into Vizio. The other was Netflix. The Vudu meeting didn't go anywhere, but Netflix said: we don't do the pilot thing, we do full seasons, and we want the rights to the first seven — we'll send over a contract.
That was such a different process — the other networks had been begging for a shot at a pilot, and meanwhile Netflix, right around the era that led into Tiger King, just said yes. They sent over a 125-page agreement. We got an entertainment lawyer, redlined it, spent a week and a half on it, sent it back — and got a fifteen-minute response apologizing for any confusion: there was no redlining, this was the Netflix agreement, sorry if that wasn't clear.
So — we signed it as-is. We filmed the back half of 2019, High Noon went home to Colorado, came back in January 2020 for some additional continuity shots, and that was it. Then it went quiet from Netflix for a while. In March or April they reached out: it's called Southern Survival, launching July 4th weekend, you can't talk about it until three weeks prior, and we'll handle the marketing push.
At that point we had no case studies to forecast against — nothing quite like this had been done before. The closest comparison was Duck Dynasty, which also sold a physical product, but that was a weekly show, not this new binge-watch-an-entire-season model, so the slow-build comparison didn't really hold. We made the investment anyway — every dollar of cash we had went into manufacturing branded product for the show.
Then they called: George Floyd's murder had just happened, the country was in the middle of that moment, and Southern Survival was — let's just say obnoxiously patriotic. Screaming-eagle, American-flag-on-the-shoulder energy. They were worried it would land as tone-deaf to release something that patriotic right then, and said they were leaning toward pulling it.
Meanwhile we had over a million dollars of product already on a boat, deposits down — you can't unwind that. At one point they even mentioned changing the name, and we had to tell them: we are way past the point of changing the name. Eventually they came back and said they'd keep it, keep the July 4th date, but they toned down some of the imagery — photoshopped the American flag out of some of the thumbnail art, that kind of thing. But they kept it.
Thank goodness, because it would have been a very different story if it had just gotten shelved.

Zak 24:45
What a wild ride. You're telling it so calmly, but there must have been a lot of ups and downs.

John Roman 24:54
Yeah — meanwhile we're having an internal civil war, with some partners wanting out and some wanting to keep going, trying to keep that under control while navigating all of this. It was a stressful time, for sure.

Zak 25:12
But the show came out, it went great, sales went great — that's a really cool story.

John Roman 25:22
Rest is history. Thank you.

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Zak 25:44
So — you talk about your content machine, and it sounds like you've been doing this since the beginning, or at least since you came on. In the last couple of years, how has your team been using AI to improve their workflows?

John Roman 26:11
Sure — we use a lot of AI as an organization, though not much of it is customer-facing yet; most of it is internal. A lot of it is on the admin and ops side. On the marketing side it exists, just not as much as elsewhere.
We use Trello to track content through stages — idea, script, film date, shoot, editing queue, chopping it up, review, scheduling — and we've built automation into that flow using AI. A lot of scripts get fully drafted by AI, and the creator takes it from there — makes it their own, puts it in their own words — but it gives them a full script at a high level they can personalize.
The other big piece: our landing pages. All of them are now built in AI, which still feels crazy to say.

Zak 27:52
I love that — walk me through the workflow. How are you actually doing that?

John Roman 27:57
It's gone through a couple of iterations. Walter, who runs marketing for us, initially built landing pages in Lovable using subdomains. We hit issues moving from the subdomain to the main domain at checkout — some data wasn't flowing correctly, attribution problems — so we moved into Claude instead. For a while he was using Claude Code to generate the code and then dropping it into Lovable, but now we've skipped Lovable entirely — it's just Claude Code writing it directly.

Zak 28:53
Are you building the landing pages directly on Shopify?

John Roman 28:57
Correct — spinning them up straight there. Some of it might be Cowork too — I think he's using the MCP over the API, honestly we use both. The interesting part is how he built it. Because of the niche we're in, we don't really have direct competitors of any size — we've got maybe 75-80% of our little market — but we look at other DTC brands doing great things for inspiration and CRO best practices. He made a list of about ten brands doing things right, went into Meta's ad library to find their ads, clicked through to grab the actual landing page URLs they were advertising to, and fed all of those into Claude, essentially saying: find the best practices across these, tell me what you think the best conversion elements are, and build us a new landing page template combining the best of all of it. It produced this incredible template, and now that's our base — for a new offer, he swaps in a couple of elements and spins up a new page from it.

Zak 30:45
John, that's awesome — the fact that—

John Roman 30:48
I wish I could take credit, but that's all Walter, not me.

Zak 30:51
Well, you hired him — but still, that's so cool. Not only did he come up with the idea, he built the workflow to actually execute it. I talk to a lot of brands, on the podcast and through the agency, and every brand wants to be doing more with AI. Most of them are doing little things here and there, mostly on operations. But going the step further that Walter's going — very few DTC e-commerce brands are doing that. And I love where he started: about ten brands he probably already liked, found them on Meta, but instead of feeding Claude their regular website, he fed it the specific landing page they were advertising against on Facebook — which is a meaningful difference, since that's usually a different page entirely.

John Roman 32:13
Right, and he's iterating on it constantly. Another impressive thing — when he pulls up the ads brands are running, you can see the date they started, so you can tell if an ad's been live a while, which might mean it's a top performer, versus one getting a lot of engagement in a short window, which might be the next one about to take over. He's watching that too, to decide which landing pages are worth pulling from.

Zak 32:53
Right — and probably the ads that have been live a long time but still current mean the landing pages behind them are probably newer versions worth studying.

John Roman 33:07
Exactly — that's the thing, you can swap the landing page without breaking the ad. So it was a smart approach for him to figure out which landing pages were likely the strongest for these brands.

Zak 33:27
For anyone listening who doesn't already know — you can look up any company on Meta and see every ad they're running. Pretty easy to do.

Zak 33:44
What else is Walter doing? This is pretty cool.

John Roman 33:48
Let me think — that's definitely one of the cooler things. We've also built a PDP creator with AI. Maybe this is just what happens once an organization hits a certain size, but a traditional PDP for us — we've got around 1,500 SKUs and are constantly adding new ones — used to require five different departments touching a single listing: procurement handling the specs, the warehouse team grabbing studio shots when product comes in and dropping them in a shared drive, marketing pulling those for SEO, and operations confirming inventory is connected to the right SKU. When that many people are touching something and everyone's technically accountable, nobody actually is. It became a real bottleneck, because it wasn't clearly anyone's primary job. We're making twenty to thirty PDPs some weeks, sometimes just two or three, but it was enough volume to be a real problem.
So we built a Claude Cowork scheduled task that runs on my computer once a day. It checks our inventory management software via API to see what's come in and been received that day. If something's been received, it checks orders, pulls a spreadsheet with everything ordered and its specs, grabs a location for the item, and for the imagery — whether it already exists online or we shot it — edits the photos: transparent background, then white background, then shadow, all sized to spec, handles the SEO piece, publishes it into the right sales channels, and drops us a note in Slack when it's ready. It was a major unlock — we don't have to think about it anymore.

Zak 36:18
That's amazing, because that kind of low-value manual work is exactly where huge errors creep in — someone enters one wrong character, or misses a step, and suddenly a page doesn't load or the wrong product gets linked to the wrong inventory.

John Roman 36:39
Yeah — and it did surface issues. Our old process ran off a spreadsheet: someone would check a box to mark that a product had come in, meaning it needed to be built, then someone else would build it, then someone else would make it live. If one person checked the wrong box, the next person assumed it was already handled, and it just stalled. It's embarrassing to admit, but the first week we ran this new system, we did an audit out of curiosity and found twenty-five thousand dollars of product sitting in our warehouse — several SKUs — that had never once been listed for sale on the site.

John Roman 37:28
No listing, ever. It was in our inventory system, everyone had technically been notified — but we had this broken five-department manual process, and things got missed.

Zak 37:40
Somebody didn't start it, so it just fell off the waterfall.

John Roman 37:44
Exactly — someone didn't start it, so it never got built, so it never went live, so there was never a marketing push announcing it. When one step failed, they all failed like dominoes.

Zak 37:55
Twenty-five thousand dollars of product?

John Roman 37:58
Twenty-five thousand dollars worth — I think it was five or six products.

Zak 38:06
So that more than paid for the cost of building the new system.
You're clearly doing a lot of amazing stuff with AI, and it probably feels routine to you at this point, but trust me — you're light-years ahead of most DTC companies out there. What advice would you give founders listening who want to lead this kind of AI transformation in their own org?

John Roman 38:44
A lot of it comes down to messaging — I hate saying that, but I mean it genuinely. There's a lot of noise out there from people saying AI is going to take everyone's jobs, you're screwed, and eventually it's coming for us Terminator-style. Whether that last part happens, who knows — but I don't buy the 'it's taking your job' framing, within reason. I think the right lens is enablement: how do I use AI as a tool to increase my own output? How do I go from good to great, or great to a rock star? How do I 10x my current output? You don't have direct reports, but you can build ten — little agents doing tasks that either take things off your plate entirely, or help you move faster on the high-impact work.
I do think there will be real challenges around jobs more broadly. I have a kid, and when I think about what the world looks like for him after high school or college — entry-level business roles are going to be tough, because that administrative work nobody wants to do is exactly what's getting automated first, and a lot of that historically lands on entry-level people. I think that creates real problems, but also real opportunity — both in traditional trades, and on the other end: my brother has two kids, one just out of school, one finishing a PhD, one in quantum computing and one in AI engineering. If you can do that kind of work, the world is more your oyster than ever.
For current professionals on our team, I just tell them: use it as a tool, increase your output — we have this incredible capability that didn't exist a few years ago, so treat it as opportunity.
As for founders wanting to get into this themselves — I think there are three paths. One, which I took and I'm honestly not sure was the right call: eat your own dog food. I built a lot of our tooling myself — not because I love building, though it is genuinely fun and different from the first twenty years of my career — but because I wanted to understand it myself, not get left behind, not be in a room where people are talking about something I don't understand. And also so I could teach it to the team and build tools that make them faster. One example: after we built our internal PDP tool, which we call Leo, we packaged up its understanding of the business and technical connections — no fixed job, really, other than 'build PDPs' — into a zip file with some markdown files that team members can drop in. It runs like an interview: it asks what you're trying to accomplish, then starts building the pieces. Kind of a mini agent template.
So that's one path, and I'm glad of the output, but it was a lot of work, and outside of the knowledge gained, I don't know that it fundamentally changed much. I think the other two paths are probably better. One: I wouldn't have said this three years ago, but I don't think a ten, twenty, thirty, or forty-million-dollar brand should be without a CTO or head of technology now — someone who owns AI, owns building that infrastructure, whether that's streamlining your ops team or your technology stack. I think that's needed. The third option is just using an agency — the same way we use an agency for things like Meta, because we trust a partner who essentially functions like part of the team. We don't try to become Meta ad specialists ourselves; we trust an agency for that. Same logic applies on the AI front — hire someone, build it yourself and expect it to be painful, or bring in the right agency partner. I think those are the three paths.

Zak 45:25
I like those three options. Honestly, I think you should combine two of them — no matter how painful, you should start by doing it yourself first, just to understand what's possible and how much less complicated it actually is than it seems. It's mind-blowing. I remember the first time I used Lovable — I built an internal sales dashboard for our organization, pulling in HubSpot and our call notes and a bunch of other sources. A year earlier, that would have cost me thirty or forty grand, taken a hundred times as long to QA, and been a fraction as good. I built the whole thing sitting at my son's 11U baseball game while they were getting blown out. So — do that first, whatever it is, just start building, then hire a CTO or an agency, because if you don't understand the basics, you can't actually manage that relationship.

John Roman 46:46
Yeah — that's a really fair point. If you don't have a basic understanding, how do you manage the relationship? You can't.

Zak 46:55
I think people will find that really useful. I know we're coming up on time — I feel like we could keep talking forever.

John Roman 47:08
This has been fun, Zak, I feel like we could just keep going back and forth.

Zak 47:12
Absolutely — I'd love to set up time to talk more and geek out further. I'm a big believer that marketing agencies, as they look today, are going to look drastically different two years from now — and if they don't adapt, they won't exist. I tell my team: the roles that should be leaning hardest into AI right now are developers, copywriters, and designers — those are the three where AI acts like steroids for the job itself.

John Roman 47:39
Marketing agencies and development agencies both.

Zak 47:41
Right — it creates the biggest moat ever. No one can do what you do if you know how to actually leverage it.

John Roman 48:02
People used to talk about 10x developers, or even 100x developers — now it's actually real.

Zak 48:18
Let's talk subscriptions — we haven't touched on that yet. How have you seen subscription products change over the years? And I'd also love to hear about your e-commerce tech stack.

John Roman 48:48
Sure — on the subscription side, looking back over twelve years: in 2015, when we started, it was the peak of the subscription box craze. You'll notice I've never called us a subscription box — I don't think that's what we are — but if you'd asked me in 2015, I'd have proudly said we were one. Back then it felt like every consumer had two or three boxes showing up at their door, and on the business side you had darlings like Birchbox raising at billion-dollar valuations, opening retail on the most expensive real estate in Manhattan because they were Birchbox.
You saw that fade — and not to keep picking on them, but they eventually went out of business, and they weren't alone. A lot of the laggards didn't adapt; they thought being a subscription box was enough on its own. To be clear, we still send a physical box monthly, and it's significant — seventy percent of our revenue. But what we learned early, and maybe why we're still here and thriving, is that it had to be more than the box and the physical items inside it.
Our early bet on content and community made members stickier. That community has had a few different homes over the years — right now it's a paywalled, members-only Facebook group, and it's genuinely active, tons of daily posts, a really great group of people. Beyond community, in the last five years or so we've focused more on value outside the physical product. Some of it's worked, some hasn't — we built a mobile app to make managing accounts easier and to push exclusive content, and we run Battle Games, which we've had for three years: a few hundred golden tickets go out in the box each month, giving members a chance to submit a video; we pick ten, fly them out to Georgia for a multi-day survival competition, film the whole thing, and the winner gets $25,000. It touches the whole ecosystem — our members, our team, and our vendors on both the product and technology side, so everyone gets to see a different angle of it. Really cool experience.
We also have Battle Vault, which is a couple years old now — a special part of the site, active-member-only, roughly six or seven hundred SKUs at any time, every one guaranteed to be the best price you'll find anywhere, in person or online. We don't need it to be a big profit center; it's about providing extra value, more like the Costco model — we're betting the extended LTV of the membership is worth more than the margin on any single transaction, and it keeps people around a lot longer. Those are the kinds of things that keep us up at night: how do we keep adding value for them?

Zak 53:53
Right — beyond just the subscription itself, it makes the brand and the products stickier, because it's not just a transaction, it's a whole community. That's basically what you built. Early in the episode you said something like: we're a content company that happens to sell subscription product. That's a great way to put it.

John Roman 54:19
Yeah — we've definitely taken a unique approach. Part of the classic mid-2010s subscription box model, and I hate saying this, was basically: put your product in front of a monthly audience that's your ICP, that's the pitch — but you need a good price on it, free, discounted, or cost-plus. And the people participating didn't get much beyond the physical box showing up. That's where we try to bridge the gap — we're also a marketing engine. Yes, we're putting your knife or your tool in front of twelve thousand of your ideal customers, but we're also handing you an arsenal of content support — we're covering every platform, everything about your product as it launches. That's genuinely valuable to brands.

Zak 55:30
I'd bet that generates more revenue for a brand than the actual product sales through Battle Box.

John Roman 55:35
That's typically the hope, and the ask — we also want to pass savings on to the end customer. The average Pro Plus box, after tax and shipping, runs around two hundred dollars a month, and members are typically getting around three hundred sixty dollars in value, because we're absorbing a lot of that cost ourselves. We want to pass that on as another value prop for the brand — so the ask to our partners is a bit aggressive, because we want them to make it up on the back end through visibility.

Zak 56:12
I love it. John, this has been great — one last question, and it might be a tough one. Over, let's say, the last year — what are your two favorite products you've gotten your hands on?

John Roman 56:23
I like it, okay — tough question.

John Roman 56:41
There's one — I won't be able to do this justice without showing it — a backpack we sent out a few months back, made by NestPax. It's really a set of separate accessories that all connect to the base bag, so it can be a super thin daypack on its own, or you thread accessories through and button them on, and suddenly it's your full carry-on. If I'm traveling and just need my laptop, I strip it down to the thin bag. NestPax — their bag-and-accessory kit has been a favorite.
The other one — I don't have it down here — is by a brand called Haven, specifically the Haven Lantern. It folds up, charges over USB-C, has a battery inside, puts out 10,000 lumens so it's genuinely heavy-duty, and it also has a solar panel on top so it keeps charging. It works as a lantern, or you close it up and use just the bottom as a straight flashlight, and you can hang it too. Super cool product — our power actually went out a few weeks ago, I grabbed two of them, and they were perfect.

Zak 58:52
And I love a good flashlight too — I was talking about it with a buddy of mine on vacation last week, about how you can never have enough really good flashlights.

John Roman 59:03
Yeah, very true.

Zak 59:06
John, it's been awesome having you on — thanks for joining.

John Roman 59:12
This has been great, Zak. No, thank you for having me.

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