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Limited Supply
S12 E5: Creative Chemistry and Building a Beverage Brand (with Aaron Nosbisch of BRÉZ)
00:40:29
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- [00:01]
Nick Sharma
Welcome back to season 12 of limited supply, the only commerce podcast with unfiltered and refreshingly hot takes. I'm your host Nick Sharma and when I'm not recording, I'm behind the scenes scaling your favorite celebrity and consumer brands. Let's start talking all things direct to consumer I'm going to tell you about a software that my agency, Sharma Brands uses. With our fastest scaling brands historically last click advertising channels. Think Facebook, Google or TikTok. They take too much credit for what they do. As a result, it's reduced confidence for brands to effectively scale their upper funnel structure strategies which puts them in a pickle of higher CPAs. A few years ago without Prescient, I would have said there's no real way to track what channels like YouTube TV or even newcomers like Applovin are doing. But with Prescient you can now look at daily multi channel forecasting and optimize your paid media without any bias. Prescient allows you to see the halo effect that is usually unrecognized with top funnel channels and allows you to measure those down to the campaign level. See the impact your upper funnel media really has on E commerce, Amazon and even retail stores. Plus once you go live, since it's not a pixel based platform, you'll have data and results populating within a week. Try it out and go to prescient AI.com limited to learn more. All right Aaron, you are live on Limited Supply. Welcome to welcome to the podcast. Officially it's weird because weird to say.
- [01:25]
Aaron Nospish
That dude I'm so honored to be here. This is like goals being realized right now. So pretty, pretty stoked to be here.
- [01:32]
Nick Sharma
Honor to have you too brother. All right, well first off I think a lot of people who are listening to this probably know about Breez cause I've talked about it a few times. But could you just give us a quick background on yourself as if you were bragging or your parents were bragging about you. Just give a quick highlight reel of just your career so we have some context going in because I think your context is really important to Breeze and the way that Breeze was built.
- [01:56]
Aaron Nospish
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So just maybe a couple sentences on Breeze today. So Breeze is a feel good social tonic brand. So we make a variety of feel good drinks. We're most known for our original drink which is a microdose cannabis and mushroom infused social tonic. We use low dose thc, CBD and Lion's Mane Mushroom to create this happy euphoric feeling that you feel within minutes of drinking and lasts for about an hour to an hour and a half. So very comparable to alcohol. We launched the brand a couple years ago and it blew up. Turned into one of the fastest growing beverages of the country, if not the fastest growing beverage in the country. And it's been a whirlwind. But to back that up on myself personally, I've been in E commerce since I was really young. I started at 13, actually, back on MySpace and Big Cartel. Back then I did T shirts where I would design them in Photoshop and then I would send them off to the printer and get the shirts and then I'd sponsor bands on MySpace and drive sales to my Big Cartel store. So I've been in the game for a while there, but I really cut my teeth with a brand called Monk. It was a portable aromatherapy diffuser. We essentially took the nicotine tobacco out of E cigarettes. We added essential oils, and then you could feel the way you want through these different blends of therapeutic air, which were essentially essential oil pens. We scaled that to 15 million a year, from 0 to 15 million a year in two years. And it was one of the fastest growing companies in America two years in a row. This is before DSC brands really did that type of revenue online. And so that was pretty exciting. I was a CMO there and I thought I owned a piece of the company, but I didn't really know how to dot my eyes and cross my T's. And so I got pushed out and I kind of fell on hard times. Didn't really know which way was up. And I was really kind of confused. And you know, I thought I was at this place and I ended up at this other place. And so. So I did that for a little bit. I started a few other direct to consumer brands after that, but I didn't have very much capital, so none of them really took off. And then in 2018, they passed the farm bill in the US and the farm bill essentially classified a variety of cannabis as hemp. So it's Cannabis sativa below 0.3% called hemp. And people started extracting CBD from hemp. So I started a CBD brand in 2018, and it did pretty well initially. And I tried to run Facebook ads on it, just similar to how I had all the success with Monk and these others in the past. But when I tried to do it, I kept getting shut down every which way possible. That startup kind of fell apart. But I realized that this problem of advertising CBD and hemp products was a pretty big problem and kind of Like Elon Musk says is you get paid in the proportionate, proportionately to the problems that you solve. I realized that if I solved this problem and did so with an agency, that it would be super valuable. So I spent a lot of time and energy working on that, eventually cracked the code on how to advertise CBD and hemp products on Facebook and Instagram and Google and Twitter and some of these others. And that's when I started Lucid. Lucid. My ads agency turned into the largest cannabis social advertising agency in about five years from there, in that timeframe. So. So I was running that for quite a while and it was doing really well. And I was kind of seeing where the market was going and I realized people were super excited about cbd and that kind of fell off because they weren't really getting that light cannabis buzz that a lot of people were looking for through CBD. So this is where kind of like the Delta 8 movement started happening. And I kind of just watched that and then people realized that you could pull Delta 9 THC from hemp and put it into finished products as long as it was below a certain threshold, 0.3%, and that it was legal. So I saw that happening and I had a couple of brands come to me and like, hey, you think you could advertise this? And I thought, yeah, I think we. I think we could. And it was. It was really successful. Really quickly, shortly thereafter, the guys at can came to me and said, hey, you know, we're going to put Delta 9 THC in our products and try to sell them. You think you can help us advertise? And I tried their products and I tried and I helped them advertise and I realized that this is fundamentally the future of drinking. Like, and. But it was still a little too relaxing for me. Like, I still found myself drinking wine and I was kind of like happy in the corner, but I wasn't really active. I'm like, okay, if this was only a little bit more active, if this was a little bit more exciting, because, you know, even though alcohol is a depressant, when you start drinking it, you get this kind of like dopamine excited feeling from it. So it kind of feels like an energetic buzz. So. So anyway, long story short, I was like, okay, this is how I want to re. Enter into the direct to consumer world. This is how I want to participate in cannabis. And so I started formulating a beverage. I met some really cool people at cannabis and psychedelic convention and in Miami, and they had some really unique Ingredients like this nano emulsified lion's mane that created this. All the benefits of lion's mane, but it gave it to you in this very like instantly bioavailable rush type feeling. So, so we started formulating a beverage and it was a few months later I launched that beverage on 420 of 23 and it just took off, man. Just. It just, it's been. Since then, it's been just like one wild ride month after month. And it's been really, really exciting. So that's kind of a little bit of the background. So been an E commerce and direct to consumer for a long time and then cannabis and then really saw this kind of just perfect opportunity to lean in and did that.
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Nick Sharma
And just for context, because you've shared this on Twitter, but what was your last year's revenue and what are you projecting for this year just so people understand the scale here?
- [07:03]
Aaron Nospish
Yeah, absolutely. So, so we launched it on 420 of 23 and our first eight months of business. So from 420 to January 1 of 24 we did about 1.25 million. So it was good, fast scaling for a new brand. Nothing crazy crazy, but pretty quickly. But then from 1-1-24 to 1-1-25 we did about 28.9 million. So huge scale from there. I think that's like a 19x scale year over year. Moved about, I think about 9 million cans in 2024, which is pretty wild. And then just this last quarter we did about 12 million, um, which is pretty exciting. So pacing for somewhere between like 50 and 70 for the year of 25.
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Nick Sharma
Wow. Yeah, I feel like you'll be closer to the 70 because the brand's gonna get bigger before Q4.
- [07:50]
Aaron Nospish
I think so too. I mean, bigger before Q4. You know, it's like in, you know, we started as this like microdose, cannabis and mushrooms. So we put the THC and the social tonic and created, you know, we're, we're part of this big movement of creating this new way of drinking. But, you know, I think our perspective is a little bit bigger on how this plays out. I don't think that people are so much looking for a THC cocktail. I think people are looking for drinks that help you feel good in ways that are good for you or at least not harmful for you. And so we expanded last year into a non infused product that has cacao, lion's mane, black seed, L theanine to create a similar social uplifting buzz, but without the, without the thc. And we're continuing to Lean into that. So my expectation is by the end of this year that we have a full range of products, both infused and non infused. And I think the non infused are going to scale really aggressively and effectively in traditional retail and grocery. And then the infused will be where wine and liquor and beer live for the most part. So, you know, honestly, dude, I did not know what I was getting into fully. Like, I knew personally like that this is the product that I wanted. You know, I used to drink a lot and I don't drink anymore at all. And this kind of filled that hole that was left and that space that was left by, by not drinking alcohol. And so. And that was exciting. And intuitively I felt like that was a big problem to solve for not, not necessarily myself, but whatever part of myself was the same part of everyone else that had that similar desire, affinity. And anyway, long story short, if I would have known how challenging beverage was, I don't know if I would have ever got into it. But thank God I didn't because we blew through probably the most challenging aspect of Bev and now that we're at this stage, it's rare that beverages get this big and don't get massively bigger after like this is that that first jump to kind of where we are today is really the hardest part of it, I would say. And then from there, you know, the nice thing about Bev is it's such an old industry that all the infrastructure is already built and it's been built for the last hundred years. You know, there's distributors in each state, there's trucks that are built for the retail shelves are built to distribute it.
- [09:53]
Nick Sharma
So.
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Aaron Nospish
So I'm really excited to see where it goes. I have a feeling that we're going to be less and less known as this cannabis brand and more and more known as this feel good tonic brand.
- [10:01]
Nick Sharma
Yeah, you know, you keep saying feel good tonic and you don't really say like weed drink or cannabis drink or THC drink. And like, it reminds me a lot of Jolie in the sense that they never call themselves a shower head. You know, another thing is also breeze has such a distinct foundational, visual and also just brand identity and aura. All of this feels very like planned out and intentional. Like, can you speak a little bit about how there's building the product, which is a great product, then there's the performance marketing, which is, you know, what you're really good at. But the hardest part that I think most people overlook, and especially I would say even coming from your background of operating A brand on the marketing side, like being really good on the customer acquisition side or even somebody who's really good on the product side. A lot of people still miss that, like foundational brand piece, which I think then enables everything you do on the performance side going forward. Can you just talk a little bit about how, what your process was around that or was there things that you did differently? Were there because you, because you've been on the, on the performance side for so long, were there things that you were picking up as nuggets along the way that you said, all right, when we launch Breeze, we're going to do it this way? And yeah, just talk a little bit about that.
- [11:15]
Aaron Nospish
Yeah, so a few things. Let me start with like, what is brand? Right? Like what is. And you know, I'd be just adding to the conversation of mini greats before us. And I'm sure you have your own opinion, but I think of it really simply, like, brand is a capsule for meaning. And whatever you do as the brand defines the brand, like, that's kind of what it is in as simple way as possible. So, you know, so I think of that very holistically. I think, like, what colors are we choosing? What, what, what can. Are we looking for? What vi, what, what, what, what buzz are we creating? What, who, who's involved in the company? Who, who do we want to be? Our earlier support supporters? Who are our customers? Like, I, I, I think very intentionally of like every aspect of what we do as making a contribution to who and what the brand is. So, you know, top level, there's that. Now on the more business side, like what makes a business successful? I think it comes down to two things generally, which is innovation and distribution. Like, you have to have really strong innovation. Like you can, you have to make something that people actually want and that's typically not what's available in the market today. It's usually some permutation, some evolution or iteration of it. So you gotta have really good innovation. But if you have really great innovation, one of the best products in the world, I mean, and you're not able to distribute it, it really doesn't matter. And so I think that's the other aspect. You have to have really strong distribution. You have to have a means of getting your product to people and ideally you have a competitive advantage in that. And if you have distribution without the innovation, you can sell something once and they'll never buy it again. So you really have to kind of pair those two things together. And I think that, that again, how you do Each of those individually ties into who and what the brand is. So more on the technical side of it, like, because I have all this history in E comm and I've been building in E Comm for the last 18 years and really intentionally for the last decade, I kind of knew what it took to make a brand successful in E commerce today. And that's like high unit economics is probably the high aov. Like that's probably the number one most important. You know, the thing is like ad costs are just continuing to go up. It costs more and more to buy a customer. And to riff off of a quote by an OG in the space, Ryan Dice, he always used to say he who can pay most per customer wins. And I think there's fundamental truth to that. It's like you have to be able to participate in the auction and bid high and be able to convert to that customer as long term value. So before even really knowing the product or even knowing much about beverage, I knew that we had to build an E commerce system machine that would support a high aov, that would be subscription first right out of the gate, that would have a product that has stickiness to convert to a high LTV and it need to be really simple and lean. We had one homepage and one product page for the first year of the business and still would probably have total of five or six pages overall. I try to keep it super lean. I also knew that when you're scaling this fast because it's not my first rodeo scaling so quickly, you have to build something that you can rebuild quickly. It takes different things at every different stage of the business. So I built Breeze to be this very lean, very aerodynamic, very focused on the fundamentals. E commerce system, E commerce tech company really is what it was. It was. And then I placed the beverage in there. And being the beverage being so innovative, you know, I could command prices and build a quality product that used more expensive ingredients and then command prices that support it because it's such a unique thing. It's like, what do you pay for a can of mushrooms and cannabis? I don't know. You know, there's not really a preconceived notion of what that looks like. So. So I built that system to support that fundamentally and then be able to do things that didn't scale, then rebuild it quickly so we could get to new and higher degrees. So those were all inputs. It's like I took all this experience that I had to kind of really craft a machine that I know could stand the test. Of scaling and manifest into its better variation over time. So that was kind of like the more of the thought process I went into it. I also, I think I was, you know, you can have like the best ideas, you can have the best brand, you have a great product, but there's also like a timing component of it. Like, you know, where, where does what's actually happening in the market. And the reality is, is like whether it's due to the interconnected of technology or social media or whether it's biofeedback with our wearables, people are becoming more conscious, whether that's. Often they're more health conscious, you know. And so, so I think people, I think culturally people have been pulling back from alcohol, starting with the younger generations, but really applying to everyone. People are becoming a little bit more aware of how it impacts them, how that night out might not really be worth it the same way they thought it was in the past. And so I think we came in at a very good moment. And again, I think that was because of like just awareness of my own existence, like, and whatever part of me was part of everyone in that, in that way. So I think we timed the market really well and I think direct consumer allowed us to penetrate to a large portion of people quickly for a beverage company to meet the market where it was at in that moment and then ride that wave from there and continue to generate that wave even from now.
- [16:29]
Nick Sharma
I've always thought too in beverage kind of like what Ryan said, but I've always thought that, you know, in retail stores, you. It's a game of who has the most shelf space. There's no other game when it comes to retail. It's just about, you know, how many square feet of shelf space you have on the Internet. It's about who's the best at bringing you to your virtual shelf. And, and I think that's like I remember working at hint and thinking these other companies have zero shot against what we're doing because they don't know how to, they don't know how to construct that digital aisle or that virtual aisle to bring people to.
- [17:02]
Aaron Nospish
Totally, dude. Well, and you see it all the time. It's just like, you know, you see it in cpg, you see it in like CPG wellness, like in CPG supplements, all these, like, they understand D2C and the role it plays in ret. But you don't see that in beverage and you especially don't see it in alcoholic beverages. Alcoholic beverages. The most, most of them can't really market and Advertise online due to the legislation that exists around it. Some kind of found their way through that like the wine clubs like Wink and some of these others. But it's pretty, pretty sticky. And then you know, like a hint or some of these others, it's like the liquid's so heavy that it doesn't really make sense to ship it. And so it's really hard to justify the flywheel of ad spend and revenue whenever the product costs so much to ship. It's kind of a. So like we so knowing all of that, you know, it's like I built the system to be like supportive of it regardless. Even just like little things like we pass on the shipping cost to customers still to this day, if it's not a hundred dollars, you know, and it's like that one move negates a huge loss to the business that allows us to do something in beverage that I don't think has really ever been done before.
- [18:05]
Nick Sharma
A few years ago, without Prescient, I would have said there's no real way to track what channels like YouTube TV or even newcomers like Applovin are doing. But with Prescient, you can now look at daily omnichannel forecasting and optimize your paid media without any bias. Today, brands like Porton Leather, Saatva, Jones Road, Hexclad and so many more of our clients use Prescient to understand what these top of funnel channels actually do to impact their sales in retail. Amazon and their DTC site Last Click channels have taken too much credit for far too long and reduced confidence in upper funnel channels. Prescient allows you to see the halo effect that is usually unrecognized with top of funnel channels and allows you to measure those down to the campaign level. See the impact of upper funnel on your revenue roas and new customers today by going to prescient AI.com limited to learn more. That's prescientai.com limited yeah, I think what, what Breeze does really well is, you know, a lot of people when, when, when you think about like optimizing conversion rate or building a better funnel, it's all about okay or it's not all about. But a lot of people try to go the route of okay, how do we get them to buy faster? Like how do we just get them to checkout? You know, do we put a timer, do we put a discount, do we apply, you know, offers? And you guys took a different approach which was actually like, our product's really fucking good. Let's educate people. Why they should be paying more. And I think Breeze did a really good job of that. But also speaking to your point just now about, like, the cost of the unit economics, that was one thing we discovered at Hint when. When I got there, we used to sell this $15 variety pack that would cost us 12 in cogs and $8 to ship. And then we learned that we could sell or, sorry, not 12. I think it was $4 in cogs and 8 to ship. Then you'd sell for 15. Then you still pay Facebook on top of that, plus what percentage of customer service or returns. And then we switched the offer to be three cases. It's still the same offer today. Three cases for 36 bucks. You know, that becomes $20 in COGS. The shipping actually stayed the same up to three cases. So everything's optimized for threes. But how have you, like, taken all these learnings around beverage unit economics and created the intro offer that you guys go for today? And. And then also you can maybe lean into how you did that per channel, because I think another thing Breeze did was you guys were. You're very. You're first to new channels. Applovin, TikTok shop, even. Even as a cannabis product showing up at certain activations and events irl. Like, I'd love to know a little bit about your channel strategy and just how you think about tapping into new channels before any of your competitors can even get a foot in those doors.
- [20:46]
Aaron Nospish
Yeah, great question. Well, so a couple things. We're more sophisticated in many ways than people think, and we're less sophisticated in many ways than people think. You know, it's like. Like, the. The more sophisticated is like, we have a really great product. We're making innovative ways to bring that product to market through. Through. Through the Internet, through direct to consumer building a business that. That supports that. But, you know, less sophisticated ways of, like, I mean, man, we have like, one funnel that runs, like, the majority of everything. Like, in just the last three months have we developed new entry intro offers and new funnels to kind of like, really support that. And, you know, just kind of like, quick side quest on that is like, why, you know, something I've learned, especially at Breeze is like, when you have a great product, like, when you really have a great product that times the market, well, marketing becomes like, just an additional layer on top. It's almost unnecessary. Which is funny coming from a guy who spent a lot of his life marketing. You know, it's like. It's funny how, like, when you really dial in those Other more fundamental first principle components. A lot of that velocity is inherent. Like you know, people love the product and when you, you know, if I give you a drink and you love it, it doesn't take much encouragement for you to go share that with your friends. So there's like this inherent viral network effect built into just it being good, you know, and people want to share, share that. So, so I think there's that, you know, so then how do we go about it though? I'm always thinking, you know, one of the things my first lessons in direct to consumer is like you don't want to be overly dependent on meta too long. You know, it's like it's a, it's and there's, there's a balance there at the beginning stages. Like you don't want to diversify too quickly where you're diluting your focus and your effort and you're not able to do anything well. So initially we were really hyper focused on meta and really succeeding there. But at some point you got to then quickly divest and look for new channels that you can drive revenue from to start having a little bit more of a, a balanced and fortified structure for long term growth and scale. And so, so you know, we had the cannabis line first and then I thought okay, we need to have a non infused line that will allow us to sell this product in places where we can't sell cannabis products. Most obviously Amazon. You know there's a ton of traffic going through Amazon and I wanted to have my products available on Amazon but I couldn't get the THC products on there. So, so we did the non infused that allowed us to get on Amazon. It also started allow us to get in traditional retail channels that you couldn't get into otherwise, you know, like bigger groceries. They weren't ready to carry THC maybe, but they were ready to carry a feel good adaptogenic tonic. So that happened also the first TikTok wave. You know, I saw, I saw a TikTok shop happen and I just realized like man, TikTok is literally going to convert all of their users into affiliates and that's like the wildest thing to happen in social media for a long time. So I was just, I was aware of that early on at the same time I was preparing it for Amazon. I thought okay, let's, let's lean into TikTok. So, so we did and we caught that first wave and it became a viral product on TikTok. We became the number one TikTok shop beverage and like a few weeks and then we rode that wave for a couple months. You know what's interesting is it was an effective channel. It wasn't like the most profitable channel for us, but the halo effect it provided to sales on our website based on post purchase surveys, as well as the performance improvement that we saw in Meta with it running made it pretty obvious. A learning though there was. We were kind of like suggesting this idea of our brand from two different angles with two different products. So we had like on the Meta side we were promoting the THC product. On the TikTok shop we were promoting the non. So there led to some confusion that I think led to some negative reviews on our Amazon or TikTok people expecting the infused one, again the non infused or people, you know, expecting the non infused and getting the infused. So there was definitely some learnings there but, but we moved quickly and that was definitely a major aspect to our growth cycle and getting through these different stages of scaling, you know, so there was that.
- [24:24]
Nick Sharma
Is there an equivalent that you could share around? Like what did like TikTok for the purpose of driving awareness and just people knowing about the product and it exists and what does. Is there an equivalent you've seen for that? Like is it the equivalent of, you know, celebrities talking about it every day.
- [24:42]
Aaron Nospish
Or like, because early influencer marketing.
- [24:45]
Nick Sharma
Yeah, I, I feel like it's one of the best, it's the first of all, I think it's the cheapest way to drive awareness if you understand the context of the platform. But a lot of people still neglect it because they find like, oh no, it's just good for it. It's just for kids basically.
- [24:58]
Aaron Nospish
Yeah, I don't think that's true anymore at all. You know, like the, the user base of TikTok is so wide and diverse and I think for the last like five, even five years plus they've been investing heavily to make it not a kids platform, to make it a, you know, so, so I, I found like user base wise, like there was a huge range of people, same as Meta, same as anywhere. So that, that's one, you know, two is I think that people don't really understand the algorithm of TikTok, especially when you come through the lens of Meta. Like Meta's algorithm is just a different beast than the TikTok algorithm. In fact, TikTok, the way I think about, you know, something I heard about TikTok early on was that like ad creatives, they, they rot so quickly. Like run a creative for so long before it. And so then, so the Question I asked myself is, like, why is that? I think what's actually happening is I think the algorithm is so good, when you have something worth sharing, it gets it to the right people immediately, like very, very quickly. And so, so you have to, you have to be able to like make something worth saying, you know, or like something worth, worth telling people that once they see it, they'll actually grab onto it. So, you know, I, I don't know. The best comparison for us, it was like, you know, I had tried doing some influencer stuff in the past and that was somewhat successful. There's a few other brands that did that approach and they were very successful with it. I tried to do some ad creatives and direct response ads in the past and never really found much success with that. But then when TikTok shop came, you got to integrate both. You had all these micro influencers that were making content at scale and then with Spark ads, you could amplify their ads similar to whitelisting on Meta. And so, and because they were driving sales, we could keep dumping money in it. And it was just a clear attribution cycle than was previously available with direct advertising from TikTok and pixeling that traffic on your, on your website. So, you know, we just, I just followed the numbers in that regard and I just like, we, you know, scaled our affiliates radically fast. I mean, at one point we were sending, I don't know, 500 to 1,000 products a week to new creators. And I don't think that this game changes so much that some of these strategies, I'm saying I wouldn't repeat exactly like I did then because they're kind of different now. But, but that's what we did. We dumped into it. What it felt like is it felt like early influencer marketing days in like 2015, 2016 is what it felt like. You know, if you could get enough product to the right people with the delta being that you didn't really need to focus so much on the creators following, you needed to focus on the creator's quality of content and just amplifying that through ads as successfully as you could. So that probably be the most comparable today. Just while we're on it, I think that game's changed today. I think how that game works today is you need to create a group of creators who are indoctrinated to your product that really understand it and are willing to pump out a lot of content frequently and with depth and, and clarity and variety of angles, and then amplify that and then just reward Those creators at scale, ongoing. I feel like that's how you succeed with TikTok shop today. I do think there's a ton of opportunity in that channel that is super, super undervalued. But it's, it's challenging, especially whenever one of the brothers giving away cars to onboard creators to, to, to make ads for them. So, so yeah, that, you know, that was so, you know, I, I, I think the other thing is like I'm, I have really good friends in this space. You know, like whether it's you or whether it's, or mixed friends or my, like, we just like a lot of the, the, the, some of the best people in E Comm are just like, you know, they're, they're friends of mine. So it's like if they see something coming or if I hear about them talking about something, it's easy for us to jump in there and test it quickly. We also have really smart people on the team that, that have been in the game a long time and, and so know how to play and test things pretty quickly. So Applovin was another example there. As we saw people were starting to make a lot of money off of Applovin. It was seemingly working and so we just leaned in quickly. I also think because, you know, THC and cannabis are kind of a restricted category. You have to be, you have to be careful on what you say and how you say it in different channels. Applovin didn't have any of those restrictions. So we were able to come in and say cannabis. We were able to say thc. So even though maybe five other brands came at the same time promoting whatever they're promoting, which might be more run of the mill, we were coming in and showing THC beverages to a whole new subset of audience directly and clearly that never had sold online ads for that kind of thing before. So I think that gave us a little bit of a competitive advantage that allowed us to see outsized returns that others weren't seeing. And then on the flip side, I built it to be an E commerce brand. I mean we have high unit economics. We were, were getting massive subscription opt in the LTV on those subscribers were strong. So I, we could win those auctions that other people couldn't win knowing that it was gonna be profitable for us. So I think that's how you know, we were, we were kind of in there and we still kind of just do that today. It's like we're very like tapped into the community and you know, even as the brand scales, I, I Never really want to be too far away from that community even if we, you know I have, I, I have a lot of confidence that Breece is going to be a multi billion dollar brand and very, very soon. But I think like that root of, of that community that we came from, I think that that's only going to get that that industry is only going to become more powerful and I want to add value to it and learn from it to apply that to breeze and I think that that's going to be a huge competitive advantage to us long term.
- [30:06]
Nick Sharma
Amazing. I want to go through some rapid ish fire questions here for our last part here. So just knowing what you've known now you spoke a little bit to unit economics. You really stellar product. Something that makes somebody go wow and want to talk about it immediately. What, what are some or maybe the biggest red flag you see when founders are pitching you a new product that they want to bring to market and you know you're just like it's not going to work because of X or you, you know most of these pitches they leave out thinking about X. Yeah.
- [30:40]
Aaron Nospish
I don't think most people think big enough fundamentally. You know like there's like you have to the era of launching a product and DDC ifying it is over. Like there's, we don't need any more dog pillow companies. We don't, we don't need any more you know, razors or kitchens pans. Like we don't. There's not room for that. There's room for real innovation that makes humans lives radically better and could make a global or at least national difference. So I think most brands don't think about a, a big enough problem to solve. They don't apply enough innovation to actually solve that problem. And, and, and, and then they don't actually apply the fundamentals of, of whatever their go to market strategy is to be successful. So what I'm looking for when I'm working with other entrepreneurs or investing in a startup or something is, is those things. It's like are you playing to the, are you playing to your hand like to your skills? Do you have a channel and a matrix and a system that is uniquely your own that you can play to better than other people can? And that's kind of what we had with, with the E Comm and the bev side both on the experience of how to advertise these things, the experience of E Comm and then the personal affinity to knowledge of the product and the impact it can make long term. So that, and Then like, do you have a big enough vision for the world and how your product integrates into it long term? And you know, I think like when you go through tech cycles, technology integration into a product becomes enough of a difference or improvement for you to find success. In the early days. So whether that was the dot com bubble or the first, first social media companies or the first D2C brands, like tech is enough to kind of get you in, but when you get to the end of those cycles, it's not. It really becomes about where's the true innovation underlying it if you apply, if tech was equalized. And I think that the majority of ecom brands just don't even know what the concept of innovation is. And so it's. So I'm really like, I hope that that's what other E Comm founders in the space see with Breeze is like we saw something big and we innovated towards. It doesn't have to be like, it's a hard innovation necessarily to accomplish, but it needs to be properly proper. Innovation has to be an iteration of existence. It has to be furthering beyond what's possible and inviting people to be part of that story. So I think that that's, that's the key. And you know, we just mentioned about the breath of brand and the attract, you know, you know, I like that quote. It's like people don't remember you, they remember how you made them feel. I take that very to heart with my, my product and brand. Like obviously it makes you feel something when you drink it. So that's, that's an aspect. But I, you know, the goal was with Breeze initially is like, I wondered if you saw that product, you would forever wonder what that was until you had tried it, you know, like, it was so compelling, it almost made I, I even look at it now and I feel something when I look at it. It feels desirable, it feels interesting, it feels mysterious and it feels exciting. And I think that that plays off of our human desire for more, for our human desire for expansion. And so, you know, I'm tap, I'm trying to tap into that with the brand and I think the product actually falls through and, and delivers on that, which then that's like the holy grail of of opportunity is if you can create desire for something that is more, that is a better idea of where I could be and then you can actually land on that, you can actually deliver on that promise, then you build trust and authority. And that's where I think you can really snowball success.
- [34:00]
Nick Sharma
Yeah, I Also think one thing that you did really well with Breez is Breeze is a brand and a product that is very desirable. It doesn't feel like it's easily attainable, but it does not feel like it's. It's a hard thing to go and attain. Like it's very accessible for sure, but it also is in a higher category than, you know, just normal.
- [34:20]
Aaron Nospish
Totally. I think so too, which is a.
- [34:22]
Nick Sharma
Very hard balance to find. But it drives a. I mean it obviously drives a lot of like word of mouth and everything.
- [34:27]
Aaron Nospish
Well, I think I saw in CBD too is like that whole CBD cycle. It was first to market, did really well and then it got really saturated and everyone was selling commodity and then it was a price game. You know, everyone was racing to the bottom. I knew fundamentally when I started Breeze that I like, I don't want to do that. I don't want to play a price game. I don't want to be in the game of commodities. I want to create premier desirable experiences that people are willing to pay for because they're going to hold that value inherent. And so like I knew that getting into it and you know, a way I used to say that, and I kind of still say it today, is like, you know, people don't want budget drugs. Like no one's like looking and like, I want the cheap shit. Like, no, it's like I'm putting this in my body. I'm looking for, I'm looking for a better way to feel better. Like, I don't want the cheap stuff, I want the good stuff. Now it should still be at a price that you can integrate into your life long term so you have a more viable and larger business. But I don't think it's, it's about the cheap stuff. The clearest example is this is alcohol. You know, like alcohol, everyone's really selling the drug of ethanol. Like this is the active ingredient that goes into all alcohol. No matter if you're drinking the nicest wine, the nicest whiskey or the shittiest beer, it's all ethanol at the end of the day. So and if, if alcohol was able to create such a landscape of products and prices in with large businesses at every level of it all selling the same compound. I knew if we were actually selling a mixture of really high quality compounds that were actually different, like price won't be the concern. It'll be whether or not the value contained in the product could deliver on the value we were commanding. And I think it over delivers at probably at a 10x rate to this day.
- [35:56]
Nick Sharma
Yeah, I agree. What about. Is there something an insight you learned at the agency as you were building that you know, very business, different unit economics that you brought over to breeze that you think a lot, a lot of other people should do or that you would recommend to somebody else starting a business?
- [36:12]
Aaron Nospish
I think, you know, one of the things I learned very quickly at Lucid over that 10 year first off is that agency is a really great way to make some money if you want to start an E Commerce brand. Like I would not start an E Commerce brand with no money. Like that was one of the hard lessons I learned post Monk before Lucid was like it's, it takes money no matter who you are or how you are or how efficient or how creative or how many, you know, unique deals like come up with some cash and if you need to go, like if you want to be a serial entrepreneur, you never wanted to work a day in your life. Cool. If you need to work for a six month period in order to have the capital to go do that, then do that. Like think, think, think enough as a CEO. Think enough as an owner of your own existence that you can play segmented opportunities to create resources for longer term opportunities. I think that was something I was so fearful of pre, pre agency that like oh, if I get back into the mix of doing an agency or if I get back in the mix of working that job job, I'll be stuck. You'll only be stuck if you allow yourself to be stuck. Instead think creatively of like can I acquire resources that allow me to really fulfill my long term vision. And so I learned that. I learned that at Lucid and right before Lucid other I also learned at Lucid is like, well and so then at the agency, agency was a good way to make money. But it's a sh. It's a very tough business to be involved in long term. It's a very, it's very time demanding. It's very resource demanding. You could do the best work of your life and the next day it's, you know, well what now? So it becomes a. What have you done for me lately? Business. And so, so, so I, you know, thankfully I have a really awesome partner who really specializes in agency. He's now the CEO of Lucid, runs it full time. But, but you know, so that, that was learning. Learning what you need to do at different times in order to create the resources for later and learning what you actually want to do over time. I think the last thing I learned more Strategically was like, you know, going back to what I was saying earlier about innovation and building, building for the fundamentals. Like, I've saw so many brands come through lucid and I saw some that were really well built to be successful in E comm and they thrived. I saw brands that were just, you know, not prepared and no matter what they would try, if they didn't fix the fundamentals, it wouldn't work. But then regardless if they had the fundamentals right or they didn't have the fundamentals right, do they have a product that has a long term staying power that's innovative and novel enough to. To. To make that first conversion to be compelling to. To for people who want to actually buy it and then integrate it long term? So it was a series of things I find like no matter what level of success I've achieved, it's never really one thing. It's like the combination of a bunch of variables all locking in at the right time in the right way and then your ability to execute on it whenever those variables do line up.
- [38:46]
Nick Sharma
Yeah. Amazing. Aaron, where can people find you?
- [38:50]
Aaron Nospish
Yeah, so you can find breeze@drinkbreeze.com Breeze is B R E Z. You can find me on social at Aaron. A A R O N J N O S B I S C H Aaron J Nospish.
- [39:01]
Nick Sharma
Amazing dude. Thank you for coming. We're gonna have to do a part two because we got through like four questions and I've got a whole page of stuff here. So we'll do a part two at some point soon.
- [39:10]
Aaron Nospish
I look forward to it. Thanks for having me on, dude.
- [39:12]
Nick Sharma
Amazing. Thanks Aaron. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next time to cut through the noise on cpg, retail and E commerce. If you enjoyed this episode, why not share it with a friend? And be sure to subscribe wherever you listen so you don't miss the next one.