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.
00:11:53 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:11:53] S1: And how did you, like, find these influencers? Were they, like, blog posts you were reading or... And and also, like, maybe walk us through the process of finding a relevant audience, you know, and and people who will actually buy?
00:12:08 · Pete Maldonado
[00:12:08] S0: Yeah. That's a really good question. So I think for us, we were so niche at the time. So grass fed beef was becoming incredibly pop... Popular within the CrossFit audience. And then if you drill down deeper into there, most CrossFitters were paleo dieting. And then drill down even into the paleo dieters, and there was, like, a really small community called Whole30, which has gotten huge as well. So I think all of these small niche, I guess you call it diet tribes or fitness tribes, over time just continued building and this blew up. And that that gave us enough of a platform to continue building. But for us, it was niche enough where we could do it for very little cost. Right? So we were able to go in and really make a name for us... Ourselves, own that community, and we were the meat stick for that community. And and then as they grew, we were able to grow with them. And by the way, we couldn't have timed it better with all these trends. Right? So, we were very early with CrossFit, early with Paleo, early with Whole30, and then the the big one after that was keto. Everybody was keto dieting. And so the... We were very fortunate that our product, because we made it as clean as we possibly could with the best ingredients we could... And by the way, we focused on taste, taste, taste. Doesn't matter how healthy the product is going to be, if it doesn't taste good, it will not sell. We understood that from day one. And so that's why we've been winning. But the the great thing is that all of these diet tribes or these trending diets, we check the boxes for all of them. Right? And we'll check the box for the next one. And we happen to be... We were like heavy protein before the protein wave kicked off. And then now it's like GLP one. So like we've we've been very fortunate to have wave after wave to fought... To to really surf, and we've been we've been taking advantage of all of them.