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Ep 461: How to Get on the CPG Fast Track: Insights from Four Sigmatic and O2 Leaders on Community and Growth
00:34:15
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- [00:00]
Dave
We feel there's a really big need for some type of coaching community that sits in between a super busy free slack channel and on the other side of the spectrum, a $25,000 a year membership where you go every quarter and party on the beach in Costa Rica and do ayahuasca with other entrepreneurs.
- [00:19]
Marcus
When brands approach me about like, how can I scale my D to see, here's my meta account. Can you take a look? I'm like, I don't want to take a look at that count right now. I want to see your website.
- [00:28]
Dave
It's just a challenge. Growing your customer base affordably. That's a pret. Common sentiment among our community today is man, like, funding has dried up. Cash is pretty hard to come by these days. How do I grow and how do I do so affordably? And that's something I think we're able to lend a little bit of insight to.
- [00:53]
Eric Dick
Marcus and Dave. Welcome to the D2C podcast. This has been a long time coming here talking about cpg. Fast track today. But maybe, Marcus, why don't you start us off by, by talking a little bit about how this all kind of came together. Give us your hero's journey, both you and Dave in this space.
- [01:10]
Marcus
Yeah, maybe I go a little bit more back on my history. I, one of the founding members of Four Sigmatic. That company started 2012 so way, way back. And we kind of, those who don't know, we kind of pioneered the mushrooms, the functional mushrooms, not the psychedelics. And you might seen a lot of companies out there right now with different mushroom products. But yeah, I was doing that. And we were sponsoring a lot of podcasts back in the day, including, I think the most biggest ones were like Joe Rogan and Tim Ferriss. And then there's one specific individual called Sean Stevenson. He has this health model podcast and he was doing really well for us. And then there was a guy called Dave who was looking into getting the same podcast and wanted to hear how things are going. And during that time, there's a lot of, like, interaction between the brands, like sharing knowledge, how, like, how is this podcast working for you and how is this not? So this is very common to be reached out by a founder asking, how's the performance been? And that was Dave. And Dave, you want to tell your side of the story?
- [02:18]
Dave
Sure, yeah. I think that was 2016, 2015, 2016, when Marcus and I first met. 02 is a healthy hydration product. And that started literally and figuratively out of the back of my car in 2014. And so we were just getting into paid marketing and I was ready to splurge on a podcast. And I heard good things about Shawn Stevenson. I talked to him, really enjoyed our conversation. I was like, hey, can you, can you put me in touch with another founder that has done your show? And he's like, absolutely. Let me connect you with Marcus. And that was the beginning of almost a decade long friendship. And Marcus has been an incredible asset to me for several years. And as we went along through our respective entrepreneurial journeys, a lot of things unfolded, including the pandemic, which I'm sure we'll get into. And Marcus and I started to work more and more closely together. And a couple years ago, he approached me with this crazy idea of building an online coaching community for early stage CPG entrepreneurs. And I had just finished my second, I think my second semester teaching as an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at CU Boulder. That was like my fun night job, basically. And what they don't tell you when you take that position is you're only going to be teaching about 20% of the time and you'll be grading papers like the remaining 80% of the time. And I rediscovered this love for teaching and coaching, but I could only do that from five to seven every Monday night. And the rest of the week I was just grading papers. So I decided to wind that down. And so when Marcus approached me about creating this community for online coaching of early stage CPG entrepreneurs, I'm like, hell yeah, like, as long as I don't have to grade any papers, I'm in. And that was really the origin of CPG fast track.
- [04:06]
Eric Dick
And I imagine even when in the school situation, few of the people in the, in the class were actually running businesses as well.
- [04:14]
Dave
Actually there were a couple that had, that had some viable businesses that were already started. And it was a really cool course. It was all seniors and none of them were business majors, which I particularly liked because I was a business major myself and I didn't get a ton out of that major. So they were coming from different avenues of academia. And the ideas that would pour out of these students were sometimes kind of crazy, but often pretty solid. And the way that the course worked was that you basically get paired up into teams of five people. And over the course of the semester you work on your business and it culminates in a shark tank like experience at the end where the winner gets a check, I think it was for a few thousand bucks, something like that. And so I had a tremendous time teaching. Basically a lot of the stuff that I've learned through my time with O2, and especially what not to do and sometimes what to do. And it reignited that love for coaching and teaching. But, man, I'll tell you, the administrative burden of professors and teachers is no joke. And so that was a fun night job. That just stopped being fun, basically.
- [05:27]
Eric Dick
And so you transformed it into cpg Fast track. Talk about those early days. What sort of gap in the market were you guys discussing that you felt you could address with that product?
- [05:37]
Marcus
Maybe I can start a little bit. Like, this goes back to 2015. So I came from Finland to US and I didn't really know anybody in the US so. And also the D2C information was kind of scattered around. You had to read a blog or maybe find some random podcast to learn about, but there was not abundance of information out there. So there's all forums. And I was part of E Commerce Fuel, which you might know this forum. And in 2015, they had an event in Nashville. That was the year when I came to us So I went to the event of Nashville. I started networking with people, meeting. Then we started joining different masterminds like Ezra Firestone. I think you've been interviewed, Ezra, friend of mine, times. Yeah. So Ezra had the blue ribbon, and that kind of kick started, like, hey, this is the best way for me to learn, understand what's happening in D2C. So when I started reaching out to Dave about the idea of having some sort of community, I was benchmarking a lot of these communities that I've been part of and getting value out of. So then Dave obviously, like, takes this information and starts spinning around, and then I'm like, okay, is it two of us? No, no, no. We need more people. So this guy is a connector. So he starts reaching out to other people. And Dave, you can explain how that end up going.
- [07:00]
Dave
Yeah. So when Marcus approached me about this, I was living in Boulder, Colorado at the time. And over the course of 2020, just a little backstory. Four sigmatic and O2 and a couple other brands partnered up on a campaign that was driven by O2 to help gyms that were shut down during the pandemic. And O2's origins started in the. In the gym scene. I used to be a CrossFit coach. And so, you know, when the business launched, I started hounding my gym owner to sell my product. And that, you know, led to another gym selling my product in another gym. And, you know, a few years later, we built up a presence with a few thousand gyms selling O2 and in the pandemic that largely shut down. And so O2 has always been a very mission driven company. So we said, you know what, it's not really fair that all of the gyms members are now buying O2 from our online website when in reality they'd probably just continue purchasing from the gym if the gym were still open. So we're going to donate 50% of our profits from online sales back to that gym members, local gym owner. And we did that and we saw tremendous response to that initiative. So much so that it basically took our D2C business from a low six figure business to a medium seven figure business almost overnight. And then we brought in a few other brands to honor that same promise. And this co branded partnership campaign that we drove involved four Sigmatic and a few other brands that are popular in the gym community and ended up winning best marketing campaign in the beverage category of 2020. And so that really put 02 on the map in a lot of ways. And one of the things that came out of that was that we were featured on the COVID of Entrepreneur Startups magazine. I remember I had an interview with Jason Pfeiffer, who's the editor in chief of entrepreneur in 2020 and he and I really hit it off. I shared with him that I was planning to move to Boulder and he said, oh, my parents live in Boulder, we should get together when you're out there. And so that's what we did. Every few months Jason and family would come out to Boulder and he and I would grab a hike or a drink or whatever and just chit chat and we became fast friends. And so when Marcus approached me with this idea, I was like, you know what? We need somebody who has kind of been around the block in the content and community space and I know the perfect guy. And so I just incidentally had a hike scheduled with Jason where I said, hey, this is what I'm thinking about doing. This is the other person involved. He's awesome. We feel there's a really big need for some type of coaching community that sits in between say a super busy free slack channel with 30,000 members and on the other side of the spectrum, a super expensive $25,000 a year membership where you go every quarter and you know, party on the beach in Costa Rica and do ayahuasca with other entrepreneurs. We're like, there needs to be something a little bit more accessible and a little bit more value added. And so he felt firmly that there was an opportunity there just based on some of the stuff that he had done with Entrepreneur magazine. So he was like, I'm in, like, let's, let's do this. And there's two other people you should talk to. One of them is another CPG founder, a woman by the name of Lisa Barnett, who co founded a brand called Little Spoon. That brand's done tremendously, tremendously well. She's raised over $90 million for that brand. And then another guy we brought in named Matt Gartland and Matt's been in the online coaching community building space for about 10 years. And so we pulled this group together and the intention was to make something that could be truly value added to early stage entrepreneurs. People who've got some traction, say 100,000 in revenue to a million or so in revenue, but haven't quite scaled into the multiple millions and really need some hands on coaching from people who have been there, done that, but also need some community. You know, Marcus and I just met incidentally. Right. Just happenstance through Shaun Stevenson. And he's been such an asset to me over the years. And we're trying to remove fate from that equation and put people who have similar businesses and similar stages in the same room so that they can get to know each other and really facilitate that networking experience. That's so value added to founders at that stage.
- [11:17]
Eric Dick
Such a cool approach. I've been, we've been at D2C working on different educational programs and platforms for, you know, kind of since we started. We recognize that as a kind of need in our space. But like 90% of people don't take online courses even if they buy them. Something like it's like 20% of people actually will take a course. So it's kind of cool that you guys brought your idea together based on the natural way that entrepreneurs kind of seem to those reach out for help.
- [11:42]
Dave
Yeah. And you know, it's definitely not a course. And that's something I've been very careful of stating because I don't want to mislead people into thinking they're taking my, you know, my CU Boulder entrepreneurship class. There's no, you know, there's no finite stop date. Right. It's a monthly membership where every month there are different themes. So for example, we've got a group this month who's focused on branding and marketing. Next month we'll focus on cash flow. The month after that we'll focus on customer insights. So there's certainly themes, but most of the interaction comes from, hey, somebody wants to book time with Marcus to talk about, you know, Black Friday and that happens in a one on one coaching call, or we're going to run an exercise where over the course of the next two days, Marcus is going to lead people through his own Black Friday planning that took place last month. And that was a tremendous experience for people. And so a lot of that interaction just is kind of timely, but it's also ad hoc in terms of what people need when. And these are conversations that can happen anytime in the community.
- [12:43]
Marcus
Yeah. And if I can build on that, this is now we have two cohorts. So we started in end of July, cohort number one. This is now the second cohort. They're pretty small, you know, 20, 15 companies per cohort, pretty intimate. And after the first cohort, two months after the first cohort, we interviewed everybody and kind of got the sense where the value is. And it's kind of clear for us that there's two big value drivers for us. One is to access the coach, which is obviously a little less scalable, but it's very much an experience that I love personally to be able to help one on one and bring value in that half an hour. Another one is these office hours and different kind of group calls that we have during the week where you can really. And we see people being very vulnerable and open of when there's hardships or when there's wins. And those are the moments that give a lot of people value and that that sense of community. The rest is more like on demand. They might ask questions from us on this platform that we created, but those are the two, like kind of value drivers for them right now. And now we have to just figure out how. What's the next steps like, can we scale those things? Obviously one on one time is harder to scale, but the community experiences are easier to scale.
- [14:00]
Eric Dick
Yeah, the one to many is right.
- [14:03]
Dave
And one thing to note too is I think we have around 35 people or so in the community today. And as Marcus mentioned, it started around 20. And we brought in partners that we all know and trust and we worked with before, including Pilothouse, to have seats in the community as well. And as the community grows, what we're seeing is it just gets better and better with every member who joins, because now we can connect people who say, somebody who joined last month is having a question about how to get their THC infused beverage into distribution. And it turns out we've got somebody from Cohort 1 who's dealt with that exact same problem. And we can just connect them because they're at such a similar stage. In their business, they're willing to help each other. And so those conversations are taking place now and I think that as we grow, the coaching and the access to myself and Marcus and Jason and Lisa and Matt, that'll always be helpful just for some one on one time. But I think people will likely come for that sort of thing and stay for the community. They'll stay for the relationships they've built. They'll stay for the access to other members of the community who are doing similar things with them. They can help each other. So that's been really, really fun to watch unfold as well.
- [15:16]
Eric Dick
Super cool. I was, I'm curious you guys with, with O2 and with Four Sigmatic, two very successful companies, have you guys, have you guys had experience with company with CPG companies that didn't succeed? Have you, have you had any, have you had any sort of like startups that didn't make it to critical threshold here?
- [15:32]
Dave
I've had plenty of near death experiences with, with O2, that's for sure. Marcus, do you want to field that one and I can come back to it?
- [15:40]
Marcus
I mean for Sigmatic it's always a perspective here because I'm, I know ins and out of the business. So for me is like, for you it's probably a successful business. For me it's like it could be better. You know, it's always like going and chasing the bitterness. But for some of the members that are, you know, 100, 250k in revenue, we're massive for them. So it's like interesting, interesting to see that perspective. I don't have any experiences on like I haven't, I mean, damn, four sigmatic, 12 years ago we founded the company. So I don't have really an experience firsthand. I have done a little bit of like coaching and consulting on a side and one of the businesses are actually an agency, not CBG and that didn't really go well and that was for me also the first time I was able to learn and understand the agency side and have to say that I am very happy to be in a CBG or coaching, not an agency. Sorry.
- [16:40]
Eric Dick
Yeah, that's why I'm in media. That's why I'm insulated from the agency by being in this little media company here. But yeah, the reason was, I'm just curious from your perspective, what are the biggest challenges maybe facing the people in your cohorts right now, what are the biggest challenges facing CPG brands right now, would you say?
- [17:01]
Dave
I think that, you know, going back to your question around if we have any experience with businesses that have failed, I can't speak to that exact instance. However, there have been plenty of things that I've tried at O2 that haven't gone the way that I planned. And I think in that sense, you know, I'm not unique. I would imagine Marcus would share a similar sentiment. But failure can be such a great teacher. And one of the things that we've done in the past with O2 that just hasn't gone that well is 2019, maybe into 2020, spending a ton of money on paid media and Facebook ads. And that's something that we had to learn the hard way. You really have to work with the right people. Otherwise you just watch your bank account get lower and lower and lower and wondering, where'd the money go? So I think that access to the right partners is something I'm pretty proud of highlighting with our members. You know, our intention is to save them time and trouble and money and, you know, at least show them who we've worked with in the past successfully. Pilot House being one of them. There's another brand marketing agency that I've worked with with O2 that I had a ton of success with called We Are Bill. They're another partner. But I think universally it's. It's just a challenge growing your customer base affordably and doing so in a way that's. It's at least somewhat profitable. And that's a pretty common sentiment among our community today is man, like, funding has dried up and cash is pretty hard to come by these days. How do I grow and how do I do so affordably? And that's something I think we're able to lend a little bit of insight to. But also, as I mentioned earlier, there's 35 members with 35 different experiences in this community today. And they've all got things that have worked well and that haven't worked well. And so the interaction between those members is super valuable in terms of showing. Showing people what to do and what not to do in some ways.
- [18:55]
Eric Dick
And it's always easier to be a bit of an expert when it's not your product, too. You know, there's always a million things you can do for your brand that you should do all the time. But when you hear it externally, you hear people telling you their problems, you're like, oh, it's obvious. You should just do this, this, and this.
- [19:09]
Dave
Totally, totally. And that's been. That's been fun for me to experience firsthand. Sometimes I'll go to Marcus. I'M like, hey, coach, I need some coaching here on this problem that I'm having. What do you got?
- [19:19]
Marcus
Yeah, I want to highlight one thing is resources. You mentioned money, but also I mean money in this case as well. But I work a lot with D2C space and with four sigmatic because we have bigger budgets. It's easy to get a new tool and play around with AI or whatever that is. And it's not 99amonth. I don't care. I'm exploring different things and it might work for us with these brands when they have such a limited resources, I have to have a very different thinking hat. And when we discuss about different tools that they can implement on their website, for example, the increase AOV and it's like 99 bucks. They're like, I can't afford that. And I'm almost like, I wish I could just pay for you that and show you how it's going to make you more money. So I have to go and find an alternative way to do the same thing. Maybe there's a cheaper app and they can't afford to Clayville, but they can afford to something else. And that's a space that is interesting and it's actually kind of rewarding to find alternatives for them. And also gives me a little bit of gratefulness that I can have that money to play around and test things for them as well and then show them how they work. But that's one of the resources that is lacking. And then just to bring another point is what's hard is I think if I look at back in 2015, you start a Facebook ad, it brings immediately, almost immediately some money back and that might look like horrible. And your website is still very basic now. When brands approach me many times about like, how can I scale my D to see, here's my meta account. Can you take a look? I'm like, I don't want to take a look at that right now. I want to see your website. And then we start going through the website and we start seeing like, okay, there's no strategy here. Like, are we trying to get AOE up, conversion up? Is there subscription element here? Is there email systems in place that we can make sure we capture all the leads and get the retention dollars in. So it's so much more holistic machine that you have to create. And then you turn the ads on and then you try a lot of things ads. So that's much, much harder nowadays to achieve. You have, you do have more tools. There's so many cheap Tools in place. And Shopify is a very good platform to utilize a lot of that stuff, but it's not the same anymore. And that's the challenge. You have to be doing so well everywhere.
- [21:47]
Dave
Your website's got to do a ton of work for you. And that's. You know, that reminds me of an exercise that we did a couple weeks ago with Pilothouse, actually, where we had our members all on one call, and Brett, from your team, who I understand is the resident CRO expert, came in, and everybody got to showcase their website for five minutes. And Brett just went through the website live on his screen and tore it apart in a way that was incredibly constructive for people. I mean, we had one guy who Marcus later worked with a little bit closer, who increased his conversion rate From, I think, 0.5% to 3 or 4%, something like that, as a result of that exercise. And so what we're seeing is that there's a lot of ways that often go overlooked that are very quick wins that provide tangible, like, really tangible results for people in the community. If we can just get the right people talking to each other.
- [22:45]
Eric Dick
Yeah, that's been. The beauty of building this company is the amount of value that you can create by sharing that kind of education. What are the brands, the cohorts, the ones that are doing well right now? How are they thinking about Omnichannel? I think, like, there used to be 2017, 2018. You could hit the Facebook button on a nice website and you could kind of scale your. Scale your brand up. But I feel like things today are a lot more holistic. You have to be thinking about multiple channels. You have to be thinking about building your organic presence. You should probably be making some local retail footprints and figuring out your retail plan. Like, when it comes to cpg, what are you. Is there still a formula that. Where brands are just going straight D to C and then kind of figuring stuff out on the way or what? What are you guys seeing from your cohort that's working well?
- [23:31]
Marcus
Yeah, I think from my perspective, it depends on a product, because that's a really. Some products are made more for retail. Some products are made more for D2C, like supplements. If you have supplements, I'm pretty sure we can make D2C work in at least in some level, same as Amazon. If you have a canned beverage, well, Dave, you have one. It is always a little bit harder to make the math work and also get the people to. Who are not used to buying canned beverage online. To buy canned beverage online. So depends on A category but we have a great examples of people I think you could actually. You work Dave, a lot of it. Sumit, maybe you can explain like what he's doing because he's doing a really like holistic job with especially retail.
- [24:15]
Dave
Yes. Sumit's a interesting case study. He's got a brand called Lone Rider. It's a beer brand. They've branched out into spirits as well. Based in Raleigh, North Carolina and it started as a brew pub basically and over time they grew that business where they could actually can their product and sell it in retail. And now he's got several brew pubs throughout North Carolina. One of which is in the Raleigh airport. Another is in a place called Oak island, which I'm actually visiting next week. North Carolina history of Oak Island.
- [24:50]
Eric Dick
Is it that the mysterious place?
- [24:51]
Dave
I think it might be. It's only one way to find out and I'm going. But submit's unique in that he's got a retail footprint that's his own, so to speak, and he's built that into something pretty meaningful. So much so that he's one of the best and most widely known breweries in the Carolinas. I can't speak to his online sales but I can speak to his online presence. And I think to answer your question, the brands that are doing best are brands that have a consistent message across channels. And so with Sumit, if you look at his branding, whether it's on a bottle of their whiskey or the brew pub or the website or a can of beer, it's all very consistent. It's got a consistent outlaw feel. And that's something that I think has led to his success in that people know what they're getting when they touch Lone Rider. And this is often something we find overlooked, which is why we feel we can add so much value to founders at this stage. It's just what's your brand all about. And there's an exercise that Marcus and I sort of co lead called Brand on a Page. And this is a three day exercise that everybody starts their CPG fast track journey with where we challenge them to fill out a stupid simple PowerPoint template. I mean I'm looking at it right now. It's got at the top it's got your brand purpose and then there are category table stakes and you've got a couple bullets within that box and then a few areas where you're uniquely special and a few bullet points in that box and then your reasons to believe and your voice actions ultimately leading to a position statement and you know what we see is that we often can transform somebody's brand just by guiding them through this simple exercise. And so much so that there's one brand that's gone through our experience, also based in Canada, and she changed the brand name after going through this exercise. And there's just a ton of value in taking a step back and having other people look at the consistency or lack thereof in your brand messaging, what's special about it, what's coming through, what's not coming through that probably should be, and taking that and running with it. And almost every founder who's gone through this experience with us has made some very tangible changes to their website and to their messaging. Some are talking about changes to their packaging as we speak. And having that unified experience throughout the channels is really, really important and something that a lot of people just don't have unless they have a ton of experience in this space or they've done it.
- [27:29]
Eric Dick
Maybe they've done a cursory version of it, but haven't really created the lens or the prism that they can then shine everything through. Right. Whether it's your ads or your landing page or your welcome email, all of these things, if they're aligned with the right narrative, the right founder story, that's going to help.
- [27:44]
Dave
That's right. Because so often as founders, I think we get caught up in our own narrative and just assume that everybody understands how great our product is and why it's great and why they should buy it, when in reality, people aren't thinking about your product nearly as much as you are. And so being able to convey that quickly and concisely and consistently is super, super important, especially at this formative stage where you haven't yet scaled into the multiple millions. But that's the thing that really allows you, in my opinion, to reach that next step and start to scale into the multiple millions.
- [28:20]
Marcus
Yeah, we see in this exercise, we see a lot of brands who worked a long time on making, like, a cool tagline, but then when you look at their website, they have the tagline on the top, but then they don't explain where, anywhere, what is the product. So you, like, you lose a lot of people because they don't understand, but you have, like, go to the beach cool tagline. I'm like, yeah, but you are selling a product as a can of something, so let's explain what it is. So, like, missing kind of basics, and especially on the D2C experience, like, yeah, we can work on the unique selling points. That's easy. But you start from what they're, they're, they're unknown brands and they have to tell what they're selling.
- [28:58]
Eric Dick
I know we have a lot of people in this audience who are CPG brands who would want to be on a fast track. When does your next cohort start? Like how, what are your plans for growth? I guess with cpg Fast track?
- [29:08]
Dave
Yeah, it's a great question. So we haven't really done any marketing yet, which is kind of fun and we kind of intend to keep it that way, at least in terms of paid marketing. People can apply. On CBGFastrack.com we review every application ourselves and if it's a fit we'll ask for a 30 minute phone call and just assess whether or not they'd be good for us and we'd be good for them. And sometimes the brand is at a stage where we just can't offer a lot of value and I'll be the first to tell them that. But often if the brand is in the better for you space, that's pretty important for us. We want to help people whose products we would feel good about giving to our family members and friends and is founder led and at that stage where they've got some proof of concept, they've got some traction, but they haven't quite scaled into the multiple millions. Generally there's a lot of ways that we can add value and help and it's a very low risk investment. We don't take any equity because we don't believe that's good for the founders. It's very simple. It's a 499amonth subscription. You can stop anytime you're not getting value. And we actually de risk the investment by offering a 90 day money back guarantee. So if you're not totally happy how things have gone at the end of those three months, then we'll give you your money back, no questions asked. And so far nobody's taken us up on that and we intend to keep it that way because we're providing a lot of value. But it's simple. Cbgfastrack.com I think we're looking at either mid November or December for our next group. And as long as we keep it to those principles that I outlined earlier, I think it's going to continue to be a really strong community where people just love helping each other.
- [30:50]
Marcus
Very cool.
- [30:50]
Eric Dick
Is it mostly in the U.S. right now?
- [30:51]
Dave
It's mostly in the U.S. but I pause because we've got pretty good international representation.
- [30:58]
Marcus
Yeah, we have a brand, mostly US based. We have Brand in Portugal. We have brand in uk, brand in Australia. So, yeah, a little bit of New Zealand.
- [31:07]
Eric Dick
That's cool.
- [31:07]
Dave
Canada.
- [31:08]
Eric Dick
I can definitely testify to the power of community in this space. I've been doing this since 2016, kind of building these kind of communities. And the events, whenever we put on these events, we get people in person. It's just. It's magical, kind of what happened. So I can imagine that's in your roadmap down the line as well, to have meetups and things like that once you build out your cohorts.
- [31:29]
Dave
It absolutely is. We've already gotten plenty of requests from members, like, hey, when are we getting together in person? Because I actually want to meet these people and hang out. And so I think we'll do ayahuasca. That's right. Not going to do ayahuasca beach, per se, but you never know what happens when you get a group of people.
- [31:46]
Eric Dick
What was the event that you were referencing? Was that baby bathwater? I've heard baby bathwater can be pretty. Pretty wild. Neither confirm nor deny. I want to.
- [31:56]
Dave
We're.
- [31:57]
Eric Dick
We're right at 30 minutes here, which is perfect for us. But I just wanted to go back to the. One of the very first things you guys said and just. You were talking about the podcast. I know this was a long time ago when you were talking about podcast advertising, but you guys both coalesced on this one podcast versus some other ones. I'm just. I'm always curious what made that podcast, the really good one to advertise on, versus some other ones. I think you said it was the health model podcast.
- [32:17]
Marcus
Yeah, yeah, I'll take that. I. First of all, it was. It was 2016, so there was not that many podcasts to be sponsoring for, especially in health and wellness. Uh, I think Sean was a perfect. Because it was in the right size, so it was not over. There was not too much hype, but he had a very, very, like, engaged audience for the size. So you can get it for an affordable price. And you know that there's engagement. So that's why it worked. I don't know how it's working right now, by the way. So you have to go and try or find someone. Even better, find someone who tried it. But, yeah, back in the day, that was the case.
- [32:59]
Dave
And I think a genuine affinity for the products. I mean, you know, I don't know if Sean still drinks O2 and uses four sigmatic, but I know for a fact that he did at the time and loved both of our products and that came through, you know, that came through in his, in his podcast sponsorships. And so, you know, regardless of which podcast you choose to sponsor, which, which influencers you choose to work with, I think there has to be a really genuine affinity for the product. Otherwise you're just not going to see your money back.
- [33:27]
Eric Dick
Very cool. Well, if you're listening to this and you. This sounds like you, then you want to go to. It's CPG fast track dot com.
- [33:33]
Dave
CBG fast track dot com. You got it.
- [33:35]
Eric Dick
CBG fast track dot com dot check it out. You're going to get to work with vets like Dave and Marcus here, as well as Pilot House, who's part of the. And a lot of other great thought leaders. I look forward to being involved with it as well. But super fun to have you guys on today. Thanks for coming on.
- [33:51]
Dave
Yeah, thanks for having us. It was great.
- [33:59]
Eric Dick
Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you're not a subscriber to our newsletter, you can do that right now at direct to consumer all one word co. I'm Eric Dick and this has been the D2C podcast. We'll see you next time.