Who is tapout

Razak: I was the founder of TapouT Films. I was with the company from the very beginning. One of my first deals with Charles was I sponsored him. So when he died, I realized I had this amazing body of work. I really wanted to show what kind of man Charles Lewis was, and how complicated he was. How did you tie him into the world outside of MMA? Razak: Charles Lewis was a black man from San Bernardino, and he created a massive business empire. But it shows aspects of MMA and what he loved.

Charles did everything himself. He raised the money for the beginning, created the clothing, he was the business brain behind the company. I think anybody who watches this film will be fascinated by this guy from San Bernardino created this company that was worth multi, multi-millions.

Razak: It makes me sick to my stomach. First of all, Charles never liked WWE. He was so against wrestling and he considered it very fake. When Charles died, without him, the company was ruined. I believe 13 months after he died, the company became bankrupt. There were a lot of tenured employees working who just got fired when ABG purchased it. Razak: No, not yet. Andrew : How do you get a name like Punkass.

When someone is stealing the car and you have the guts to go get a gun, get your family, get them armed and go after this guy? Someone stealing my car—how did you get the name Punkass? Dan : That came from in high school I was kind of a skater.

So, I was skating with some of the bigger names in skateboarding at the time. I was a horrible skateboarder. But I was around those guys. Those guys would come out. So, we were the only foot ramp. My best friend had the only foot ramp in the area, anywhere in the Inland Empire. So, a lot of these guys like Tony Magnusson and Eddie Elguera and some of these pro skateboarders would come out and skate our ramp. It was just a nickname that stuck. They started calling me Punkass. Andrew : Was that your first one?

Dan : Yeah, first tattoo. I think at this point the name should have switched. Once you get a gun, I feel like everything changes, once you go out and get one. But things did end up turning around.

Let me do a quick sponsorship message and then talk about what exactly happened because things got huge. The sponsorship message is for Bench Accounting. Every year, Patrick likes to do a blog post where he shows what his revenues and expenses are for the year so everyone can follow along. To put those numbers together, he was collaborating with a virtual assistant on bookkeeping and he says on his blog post that that just consumed an excessive amount of time. You can imagine how much time it takes to track all the revenue that the guy was making with his website and all the different expenses.

Enter Bench, he says. This is a direct quote from his blog from December, This is how I found out about Bench before they were a sponsor. When an actual honest to god human being bookkeeper manages your books for you using algorithms as a lever rather than a substitution for work and expertise. If you want some organization for your bookkeeping, go to Bench. The reason you want to do that is that our sales department, which is one guy named Sachit, has been pushing every single sponsor to give some kind of discount for our audience.

They said if you go to Bench. You get to see where your money is going. You get to see where your money is coming in. Dan, what did you think of that, by the way? This is a new promotion. You have some kind of reaction to it.

Dan : I wrote it down. Andrew : You did? Your brother is helping you at your company. I wish there was a better solution. Andrew : Where did the idea for t-shirts come from? You were looking around and you saw what? We were good friends at the time. We both wanted to be police officers. This was before we wanted to be police officers. We saw the first UFC and this guy Royce Gracie comes in and he destroys like four dudes in one night. We started training with Royce Gracie. Andrew : Wow.

And really, really nice guys too. I always thought that I had to be like I was tough. I wanted to be tough. I was kind of like puffing myself up for my own personal reasons because of those insecurities that you have as a kid.

It feels like no rules. The first time I saw it, Dan, I was scared. I thought someone was going to die on stage. Dan : They were actually never there.

They were only legal in like three states at that time. If it was early, early UFC, it would have been a Denver show.

There were only like three states that it was even legal in. It never made it to Vegas until the Ferttitas bought it in Andrew : And then it came back on as like a real sport. I thought it was huge. It just gave the appearance of size. How does that lead you to apparel? The place was like an hour and a half away. Everybody was wearing these Gracie shirts. We had them. All they had were different colors.

It was all one kind. It was all just a circle with a triangle and two stick figures in the middle looking like they were about to do a judo throw. You were supposed to wear their shirts. If you were in the Shark Tank, you had to wear a Shark Tank. It was more about like Nike. It was about the sport, about the overall sport. Andrew : How did you come up with the logo? Dan : Charles was more the logo graphics design guy. So, we just got an artist.

Neither of us were artists. Neither of us knew how to draw. We just found an artist and started coming up with something that was nice. We both liked Batman and Kiss, so it was these influences that we would talk out.

Andrew : Is that why he had makeup on? Andrew : This is Charles Lewis Jr. Dan : Exactly. We wanted to create these characters. Back then, FUBU was really big. They were their own people. So, if you looked at their hang tag, the owners were actually on the hang tag wearing their clothes.

So, we wanted to create that same thing, but maybe take it a step further and then combine the whole Kiss aspect. So, we each had these characters. We created these characters. Mine, if you ever saw, I had like a bandanna and of course all tattooed up and always wore black.

Charles would wear the makeup and he was more militant. Andrew : I saw the three of you. When I saw it, it just looked so cool because it felt like it was a thing, not a t-shirt company, but like a movement, just like WWE feels like something bigger than life, not like a bunch of guys in tights wrestling. It feels something bigger because of the attitude, because of the costumes. So, I get why it works. But I know at the time when you started, did it feel a little bit weird?

Did it feel goofy that you guys were getting dressed up and you were questioning yourselves? We probably would have stepped up to anybody who said anything to our face.

There were some keyboard haters that we would run up against on different message boards. We would get a little bit of hate. People would yell stuff every once in a while. I remember we got into at the MGM. But eventually, we got our own TV show and people kind of understood who we were and what we were doing. It really became a big movement. Hundreds and hundreds of tattoos people would send us.

It was really crazy and exciting for us how far that went. They had a lot of smaller events that would feed the UFC. It was still illegal in California. So, I got arrested at an event before because it was totally illegal to have a mixed martial arts event or back then a no-holes-barred event out in California until maybe or something like that, where it got legal.

So, you were going there to fight. Dan : No, we were going there to sell. Andrew : To sell t-shirts. Dan : We would setup our table.

Andrew : How did you get permission to sell? What was your deal there? It was just for him to bring in more money. I remember an event in like—there was an event in Huntington Beach where it was totally underground. You had to give a password to get in. One time, actually, they had set it up. They got smart. It was the one in Compton, I believe.

So, we were like all extras and they had this whole movie set and these big cameras. The police left and they continued the fight. Andrew : How much money could you make at one of those events selling t-shirts? Dan : It depends on the event, how big it is.

You wanted to be both online and events, no stores, no nothing. But really, I just followed the instructions to get connected to you. As a non-technical guy who was the business side of the partnership, how did you setup a website? How did you get yourselves online? How did you sell? Andrew : Around , late We were just pushing. We were kind of a dotcom company in away because we were providing this service.

When we first jumped on, we had an internet site. We just had a phone number and you would have an number. I would forward that number—it rang my house and then I forward that number to my cell phone and I had to keep ordering forms in my back pocket. So, when I was at work or wherever I was, I would take an order on the spot.

Andrew : And you would write it down? Dan : That was before we had commerce. We just wanted to create this 24 hour ordering, you could call any time of the day and then I had an answering service too. So, if I got tired and I knew—I was working two jobs at the time. I would just forward the phone number. It was forwarded from the house to my cell phone. I would forward my cell phone to the answering service. They would go online. They were really just doing what the customer would be doing, but they would just go on our website and take the order over the phone from the customer and—.

Andrew : And type it in. Dan : But we had hour ordering back in It was good for us. It worked well. Andrew : How did people find you online at the time? Dan : So, starting in , we started sponsoring fighters in the UFC. We kind of considered ourselves the first people to do these huge logos on t-shirts.

So, before, back when we were creating t-shirts, most t-shirts just had a simple small logo here on the pocket. And we knew that we were paying all this money to sponsor fighters in the UFC and they were going to be walking in. Well, nobody is going to see this little tiny logo here. So, we started printing these huge logos on the front of the shirt. Before that, no one had done that. No one was printing big logos on t-shirts. Andrew : Well, Everlast was doing it for boxing?

Dan : No, not on the front. Nobody would do it on the front. They did it on the back, but they would do a little tiny logo up here. So, you had a big back logo and a small front logo. So, over that next seven years or something, they stopped doing back logos all together and everything became on the front. We felt like we contributed to that a little bit. This was before we actually had TapouT.

So, we put InYaFace. Hopefully people saw it when they were watching the UFC and they would write it down or something. And we had a little tiny ad in Blackbelt Magazine. So, those were the two ways that they could find us. Andrew : You told our producer that you would start getting calls from all over the world.

People from Japan would start dialing in to get the shirts. It was so crazy. You must have got the wrong number. But I would take the order at night. Andrew : Was it InYourFace. Andrew : InYaFace. Dan : InYaFace. If you can see flash animation—great, I can. I like how for a long time, all the navigation had chokeholds over it. Dan : Oh yeah. Andrew : This was even back when you switched over to Tapout.

Dan : Yeah, the choke was our logo at the time. So, eventually we came up with this other logo right here. But that was kind of our swoosh. So, we had this choke logo until we had this whole lawsuit with it. You just did it. Once you start making money, everybody comes out of the woodwork and starts suing you. It was ridiculous. There you go. Now what? Andrew : At what point does it start to make—actually, before we even get into that, what did it cost to sponsor a fighter?

I heard this. This was shocking to me. I interviewed the founder of HeadBlade, the razor that you use to shave your head, he did that too.

He started sponsoring UFC fighters. He told me the prices. The sponsor is Toptal. Dan, is there like a development project that you wish you would do, that if you had your ideal developer, is there one that you would do that you would jump on right now?

Dan : Yes. Andrew : What is it? Andrew : Not describing it in detail, just broad strokes. I tried to find somebody who was doing this idea. We should do this app. Andrew : Time really is the issue. A lot of people who are listening to me have full developer teams, some have none.

They work through Toptal. Toptal vets them. Every company, every cultural fit has their own quirks. Their prices are reasonable. Where they really excel is in the insane quality of their developers. I had dinner at my house with entrepreneurs, two of them before they started their businesses said they tried to work with Toptal as developers and Toptal turned them both down.

One worked for a company that I interviewed here, one of the best funded companies in Silicon Valley. He was one of their top engineers.

They want to get the highest quality people. If you want to work with Toptal, I urge you to go to Toptal. Shoot me an email. It looks like they created an email address for me, Andrew Toptal.

Think about it, 80 free hours. Go to Top—like top of the heap—Toptal—Tal as in talent—Toptal. I love new companies. Hopefully someone is fixing a problem when they start a new company. Andrew : I do feel like Toptal outside of the development world is not very well known, even though they got money by Andreessen Horowitz. What was the thing that let you really take off? What did you do? They put some rules behind it.

They brought it into Vegas. They got it legalized in California. That really started changing the landscape of the overall sport, which were attached to. The UFC really worked with us too. They knew we were this real guerilla marketing force that everybody related to and everybody knew. Andrew : Why? Dan : I think they would have if they could have at the time. But the sport still had this stigma. It was just coming out of the dark ages where it had pretty much hardly any rules.

We were one of those companies that were willing to do it. We were already in the space. We had grown with the sport at that time. So, as much as the sport was growing, we were growing too. And it allowed us to just be—in a lot of ways, we were in the right place at the right time. We just kept growing with the sport.

Andrew : So, they come out. The show comes out. You get your logos on the mat, which means that people see you throughout the fight. You get your logos on the flag banners. They did that twice during the event. This was their highest watched event in the history of the UFC.

There were some 10 million people watching it at one point, watching what is still one of the top ten fights in the UFC ever in the history of the UFC, Stephan Bonnar versus Forrest Griffin. It literally shut down our website. My web developer called me in the middle of the night. It was probably our time, so it may have been in the morning his time.

He said at one point we were getting 3, orders an hour. It was insane. We were coming from doing maybe 10 orders a day. Andrew : That was a huge turnaround. Dan : It was huge for us. Andrew : Were you working a full-time job up until then? Dan : At that time, no. I had already quit my job. Andrew : What was the deal that allowed you to get so much promotion from UFC? So, you were giving them credibility just as much as they were giving you credibility.

People now are getting to see the shirt that I bought and where it comes from. Was it like the ice cream cones where every time you sold an ice cream cone back at the rave days you had to pay?

Did you have to pay them per shirt? At the beginning, there were a couple times—the very first time we had logos on the mat, the UFC just gave it to us. Explore Wikis Community Central. Register Don't have an account? Edit this page. History Talk 0. Categories Merchandise Wrestling sponsors.