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.
00:14:05 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:14:05] S1: And, like, when did you start, like, doing different product line? Did you, like, just focus on one for, like, many years before you actually start thinking of different days, different angle, different strategies?
00:14:21 · Pete Maldonado
[00:14:21] S0: Well, the the interesting thing interesting thing is to this day, we still only have one product line. So we make meat sticks. That's all we do. So we never dabbled in any other format of of meat snacks. So you'll see a lot of the the smaller competitors that we... We've competed with, they start in jerky, and then they move over to sticks. So they do bars and stick... Like, it's there's usually just some diversification there. But the way we felt about it and especially early on was like, we need to keep this business as simple as possible. And so it was always this thought process of delete complexity every step of the way. That started with the product. Right? And so we launched initially with just two beef skews. It was original beef and our jalapeno beef, and that was it. Then we added a third, just like a spicier... People were asking for more spicy versions, so we had like a habanero version that came out. And... But we were just so... We we were not trying to go wide. It was about going deep. We wanted high, high volume, great... Know, find a a handful of great products. And by the way, if we could have a single SKU, we would have done that. Like, especially back back then, we just wanted to keep things as simple as possible. And also we were building the business because because both Rashid, my my cofounder, and I, we both had full time jobs. I was still doing the real estate. He was a operations consultant. He's great with the ops and finance side of things. I was more of the sales and marketing guy. So we really complimented each other. But what we were doing was like, okay. How could we build this as a side hustle? So nights and weekends, we're gonna work on this thing. Let's keep it as simple as possible. And that, like... We got so lucky because you never could've, you know, have the foresight to understand that, like, the... Those decisions that we made so early are the reason why we are so successful now. Because we went so deep on just a handful of products, and we did one thing really, really well, and we became known for it. And because of that, it's like, that's why we're here. And now we're able to have some extensions. Right? So now we've got other proteins. So we've got, you know, we have beef, we have turkey. We just launched chicken about a month ago, and we also have venison that we...