00:03:24 · Pete Maldonado, Guillaume Moubeche
I didn't really understand the concept of, you know, you know, cash is kind of a commodity, and we wanna bring smart money to the table. And so I brought in some guy who was a real estate guy that was in, like, mobile home parks that lived here in Naples. He had no experience in food whatsoever and didn't know how to market or any of that stuff and didn't... We were not even aligned remotely on the vision for what I was trying to accomplish. But, yeah, learn the hard way about that part. But I think, you know, I made so many mistakes with that company as well where I think it's that, like, that that founder's conundrum, like, you want everything to be completely perfect. I wanted the website to have every bell and whistle before I brought it to market. And so I spent so much time and money and quite honestly never got to the point where I was even able to take a single order on that website that I blew a bunch of money on. So in the end, you know, the company just didn't work out. He... The... We had a falling out. He wanted his money back. The real estate market was getting obliterated down here, and he needed his cash back. So... And I'm like, I can't give you your cash back. It's in inventory right now in frozen food. So I literally just handed the company over to him and and walked away from it. And I moved from Florida to Chicago, and that's kinda the story of the frozen fitness. But... That was a... [00:04:45] S1: And and when did you start, like, to think about Chomps and and starting something new from that?
00:04:45 · Guillaume Moubeche, Pete Maldonado
[00:04:45] S1: And and when did you start, like, to think about Chomps and and starting something new from that? [00:04:52] S0: Yeah. So in between there, you know, I'm a kind of a go getter entrepreneur type guy. I can't stop thinking about and having my hands in too many things. So I got into real estate, did that for a few years, started with renting apartments, then got into selling big fractured condo projects to hedge funds and that type of thing. So... But I loved... I liked doing those things. It was a means to an end for me. I I wanted to raise some capital because I love the the food and the nutrition business. Anything to do with with fitness nutrition was, like, right up my alley, and I just needed to get back into it. And so that was the plan, but this time I was gonna do it, you know, self funded. I was not gonna rely on outside capital, and I learned from all my previous mistakes. And so that's kinda where we started Chomps on. [00:05:43] S1: And how do you start a company with just, like, $6,000? Like, how does that work out, especially like in the in the food industry?
00:05:50 · Pete Maldonado
[00:05:50] S0: Really good question. I still wonder to myself, I'm like, nowadays, I'm like, why did I even bother trying to do that? Like, I I think, you know, it was only fourteen years ago or something like that now, but times have changed, you know, drastically since. But I I would say what we did is we got some samples made, and it was a very small run. And so... By the way, finding the co packer was very difficult because you need to find somebody that's small enough to actually wanna make you a small run of product, but also has the ability to scale with you. We were very fortunate to meet this co packer that we initially started with back in the day, but I'll tell you more about that story after. But we we... I start... I I actually got a $99 Photoshop Elements subscription and taught myself how to make some packaging. So I kept going to the store and I'd buy, like, different different types of packaging and other categories, and I would take little elements. So, like, if I had my claims for my calories and protein and whatever and, like, it was surrounded by a little circle, I'd figure out how to, like, make that little circle and put that in the package. And then it was the same thing when it came to building the website. I started on WordPress initially. I was having a hard time with that, and this is when Shopify was starting to get pretty big. And so I tried... I tested out Shopify, and I was like, oh my god. This is so easy. Like, I... So I had a working website very quickly and also inexpensively. And then this is kinda where... How I know you actually is by our buddy Noah Kagan. And the way I heard about Noah was from... It was this blog post, and I wanna say this was in, like, twenty nine... Two thousand nine or something like that that he wrote this with Tim Ferriss. So it was on Tim Ferriss's blog that I was following, and then Noah was, like, the special contributor to the to the blog post. And I actually can't remember the title of what it was, but it was essentially something to the effect of, like, start a a million dollar business over the weekend, which, by the way, has has kind of morphed into his book that he wrote, The Million Dollar Weekend. Right? So in there, he was giving these tips and tricks on, like, how to test test the market and then find product market fit inexpensively. And I had a couple pictures.
00:08:07 · Pete Maldonado
I got some some professional pictures taken of the of the actual product. I used that. I put that up on... For Facebook ads, but we didn't even have any inventory to sell. It was like samples for handing out. And so I put I put a couple bucks. I I know it was maybe a couple $100 behind some of these Facebook ads. Because we needed to see that somebody, random people that have no idea who we are, would actually take their wallet out and spend the money and buy the product. And it happened... We got that product market fit and that that confirmation very quickly. So... But then I had to reach out to those people and just be like, hey. Sorry. We're gonna launch this, and we're out of inventory. And would... Would you mind waiting? And, you know, people are very just nice about it and patient and we kept in touch with those people. A lot of them are still customers of ours today. So it's like pretty awesome.
00:09:01 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:09:01] S1: And also, like, I I think the... You know, whenever you look at food in general, like people will... Are just like fighting over, you know, like different stores and how much shelf space they're gonna get, but you went like straight to direct to consumer. What... Why did you start doing this? And also, like, what would you say is different versus going into stores? Because originally with with your former company, like Frozen Fitness, you you had this mindset of, you know what, like, I'm going into each gym and I will, sell from a single gym. So it sounds like the point of sale was important in the past, and now you choose, to be fully digital. So can you explain maybe, like, the the reasoning and the... And maybe the difference?
00:09:46 · Pete Maldonado
[00:09:46] S0: Yeah. Well, first and foremost, I mean, we had no ability... We had no cash, obviously. So when you had no cash, you can't go to a retailer. They're gonna charge you slotting fees. You're gonna have to, you know, sign up for trade spend, and it's usually gonna be a much bigger, larger order than we ever could afford at the time. Right? So that's that's like... Put that aside though, one of the things I learned from from Frozen Fitness was that it was brand awareness needs to stay light years ahead of distribution. We still we still talk about this today at our business. We still run the business the exact same way. I do not wanna land on a brick and mortar retail store shelf and then have customers walk in and have no idea who we are. Right? That should be the second touch point or or, you know, they should already be aware of your brand. And so for us, that's been how do we build brand awareness now before we land on those store shelves? So that's where direct to consumer, social media, all of those were such a game changer for us. We were doing, I guess you would call it influencer marketing back before it was called influencer marketing. It was signing up with some of these paleo bloggers and CrossFit bloggers, and they had large email list. And so we found that direct... Having a dedicated email blast going out to these incredibly relevant and communities, we would just see massive amounts of trial driven from that. So we might spend $3.04, $5,000 and pay that to a blogger, have them blast it out to a 100,000 of their followers, and then it spits off $40.50 mill... 50,000 of income for us. And we were like, how do we get more of these? So it was just... So they weren't all like that. Some of them were flops, but we were just relentless about building relationships with these people. And that's how we built the built the name and built the the early days. We were very... We were profitable very quickly in the business. It was in the first thirty days, we actually were able to turn a very small profit and continued reinvesting into the company from there.