100% Growth for 8 Years: IQBAR’s Will Nitze & Jess Greenwood

Summary

Podcast Summary: Operators – “100% Growth for 8 Years: IQBAR’s Will Nitze & Jess Greenwood”

Date: July 2, 2026
Hosts: Sean Frank, Mike Beckham, Matt Bertulli, Jason Panzer
Guests: Will Nitze (Founder & CEO, IQBAR), Jess Greenwood (Head of Ecomm/Marketing, IQBAR)

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Episode Overview

The Operators team sits down with Will Nitze and Jess Greenwood of IQBAR to unpack the extraordinary 8-year journey of a company achieving 100% year-over-year growth. They reveal gritty stories about startup fundraising, white-knuckle supply chain management, category selection, personal sacrifices, and the relentless drive to dominate a crowded CPG market. The conversation bounces between practical, tactical advice and deeply personal anecdotes—offering a blueprint for ambitious founders and plenty of laugh-out-loud moments.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Realities of Starting Out: Scrappy, Broke, and Getting Sued

• Getting Sued is Standard for Scale
  • “We're always being sued.” (Will, 00:26)
  • Operators discuss how lawsuits, particularly in D2C (Direct-to-Consumer), are an inevitable part of the business, especially in states like California (Prop 65) and New York.
• Kickstarter Beginnings
  • Will started IQBAR with no cash, using a Kickstarter campaign after raising $40k from friends to get it off the ground. He lived in a friend’s parents' basement to save on expenses. (06:34–07:29)
• Scrappiest Tactic: The Harvard Email Heist [16:36–19:25]
  • Will photographed pages from Harvard alumni directories to build a 10,000-person email list and blasted them through MailChimp for his Kickstarter, generating $40k in backings.
  • “I may get sued a seventh time by Harvard…” (Will, 16:40)

From Dating to Co-Foundership: Relationship Dynamics

• Jess initially wasn’t interested in joining Will as co-founder, but helped with marketing “for free” as they dated, until it became fun and promising.
• Skillset Complementarity:
  • “It happened to be something he doesn’t do… It just made sense.” (Jess, 15:16)
• Early stage talent often comes from friends and family willing to work for little to nothing.

Category Selection: The Most Critical Decision

• Picking a Category That’s Both Big and Right For You [08:49–13:14]
  • “The category you pick is so insanely important. It’s half the battle.” (Will, 08:49)
  • Will opted for bars after realizing what he could make at home, and only later recognized just how big the market was.
• Skill Category Fit
  • “It’s also picking a good category for you... Do your skills map to that category?” (Will, 12:34)

Fundraising: Just Enough, When Needed

• Will’s strategy: raise small amounts to prove progress, then raise more.
  • “If you ask for a little and then prove something, you can ask for a lot.” (Will, 04:48)
• Ownership Focus: Stay at or above 50% to keep control.
  • “Don’t start your business with a co-founder. Start with 100%.” (Will, 24:02)
• Fundraising was always timed to evidence of traction (Kickstarter, Amazon, retail deals).
• “We never had too much money. And also here we are with still over 50% of the business.” (Jess, 23:50)

Growth, Margins, and the Grim Reality of CPG Exits

• Industry Trends:
  • “The whole be small and still sell for a big number, like, went away completely and then really went away in 2022. You better be profitable or no one's going to give you a dollar.” (Will, 29:09–29:33)
  • “All in bars, [others] were all way faster than us, sexier, raised more money and they all went to zero. And we just quietly…” (Will, 33:31)
• Profitability is Non-Negotiable
  • “If you have a consumer focused company that is losing money... it's a zero.” (Mike, 34:28)
  • There are rare exceptions, but these require exceptional margins (e.g., Cholula’s 40% EBITDA).

Retail vs DTC (Direct-to-Consumer) Channel Evolution

• IQBAR started D2C and Amazon, but today is 65% retail, 35% ecomm.
  • “Every year it’s gotten more towards retail because retail can grow so much faster than D2C.” (Jess, 38:07)
• Amazon as Launchpad:
  • Early Amazon push with sharp pricing (“value wins in every market, premium wins in some markets” – Will, 41:08), captured mindshare and buyers’ attention in retail.

Product Strategy: Adaptation, Responsive Positioning & Bites

• Demand-First Product Development
  • “We have a demand-first kind of model of how we think about business. Where is there a lot of demand? And then we'll flow towards that.” (Mike, 61:08)
• Pivot-Friendly Positioning:
  • Never married the brand to one trend (e.g., “keto”); changed messaging as market evolved. “People take the like, ‘stay on brand’ way too far. 20% of what you should be doing should be arguably, like, not on brand.” (Will, 52:18)
• Rapid Innovation – Bites:
  • New mini-format (“bites”) was ideated, manufactured (with new supply chain), and launched in ~4 months after retailers flagged opportunity.
  • “Half the stuff we sell doesn’t exist. That was Kickstarter. That’s still true today.” (Will, 60:23)
  • “We’re more cowboys now than we’ve ever been. And it's scarier because it’s at a bigger scale.” (Will, 60:53)

Deep Dive: Supply Chain & Cost Engineering

• Hyper-focus on Input Costs
  • “We are like, certainly micro and macro economists, for sure. We track almond futures, like, very closely.” (Will, 66:17)
• Will is “cutthroat” on purchasing, not sentimental. “The partnership thing... is mostly a myth. Partnership is me sending you wires of a lot of money... I’m going to negotiate as hard as I can.” (66:29)

Team, Structure, and Extreme Accountability

• Tiny Core Team, Outsource Everything Else
  • “We’re 15 people still. Still. Yeah, Today.” (Will, 84:45)
  • “Everyone is the CEO of their department.” (Will, 86:21)
• Nepotism & Flat Structure: Early team comprised of friends, family, and high-trust relationships.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On Luck, Skill, and Category

• “We started with a Kickstarter... I had literally had like zero money. I was living in my college buddy’s parents basement...” (Will, 02:14)
• “Everything is revisionist history... It’s what can I literally make in my kitchen?” (Will, 13:31; 13:47)

On Scrappiness

• “During the... at the Harvard Library they had these things called Red Books... I would flip through page by page and take pictures of everything... I had, I think I ended up with 10,000 emails that way.” (Will, 16:40–17:36)
• “Then I got a mailchimp account and I used my Harvard undergrad alumni email address because I knew I would get so many spam marketed spams and they would crush the domain square. And I just ruthlessly blasted... and it was a great microcosm of the world and people though, because like some set or like you’re the worst person ever... some people are like, this is the coolest idea.” (Will, 18:59–19:25)

On Fundraising Mentality

• “Don’t start your business with a co founder. Start with a hundred percent, because you’re going to sell a lot of it.” (Will, 24:02)

On Always Be Selling & People Unlocking Growth

• “There’s one human who can just turn on just stupid amounts of growth. Just one human. And if that human likes you, like everything changes.” (Will, 20:01)
• “Always be selling because there is always a human that can unlock that next wave of growth.” (Mike, 20:49)

On Product/Market Evolution

• “Any product can work. OK, so a bunch of bad ideas. How did you land on this one then?” (Operator, 06:13)
• “Value wins in every market. Premium wins in some markets. Yeah, I’d rather win in every market.” (Will, 41:08)

On Team Structure

• “Everyone is the CEO of their department. They make. They don’t have to ask me for...” (Will, 86:21)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:26–01:24: Lawsuits & Prop 65 reality in CPG
• 06:34–07:29: Kickstarter, raising the first dollars, living cheap
• 16:36–19:25: Harvard email hack for scrappy fundraising
• 24:02–25:25: Founder equity dilution & fundraising philosophy
• 29:09–30:25: The death of small brand acquisitions; the profitability imperative
• 38:04–39:04: Shift from D2C/Amazon to retail channels
• 41:08: Value vs Premium pricing in CPG
• 60:53: Cowboy mentality, ‘sell things before you make them’
• 66:17–70:36: Cost engineering, commodity hedging, and negotiating with suppliers
• 84:45: IQBAR’s team size, ultra-lean operations philosophy

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Show’s Standout Advice

• Choose Your Category Wisely, but Don’t Overthink It: “I think honestly being naive was extremely awesome.” (Jess, 50:10)
• Always Be Scrappy: “If you make it, demand will fall out of the sky.” (Will, 96:16)
• Raise Only What You Need, When You Need It to avoid excessive dilution, and keep as much ownership as possible.
• Do What You Can with What You Have: “What can I literally make in my kitchen?... That was it, you know.” (Will, 13:47)
• Let Demand Lead, Don’t Marry One Trend: As seen with pivots to keto, then fiber—be willing to seize emerging positions, but don’t attach your brand to single, fleeting fads.

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Closing Rapid-Fire “Titan 10” Answers

• Numbers to Watch: Net revenue, growth rate, and EBITDA (Will, 92:26)
• Contrarian Beliefs:
  • Will: “Money isn’t a good motivator... I actually think that’s wrong.”
  • Jess: “I don’t think everything needs perfect measurement in marketing.”
• Most Overrated Growth Tactic: “TikTok Shop.” (Jess, 95:22)
• Most Underrated Growth Tactic: “Retailer websites... so under-invested.” (Jess, 95:48)
• Most Important Trait in Leadership: “Trust.” (Both, 94:36)

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Tone & Atmosphere

Light-hearted, candid, and witty—equal part brutally honest business advice and self-deprecating humor. Will and Jess are unfiltered, practical operators with just enough self-awareness to poke fun at themselves and the industry at large.

This episode is required listening for anyone building a CPG brand—or anyone who just loves a good business origin story.

Transcript

[A]

Will, you've been on the show before. Yeah. Welcome back. Can I call you Jess?

[B]

You can.

[A]

Awesome. Jess. Welcome.

[C]

What else would you call her?

[B]

My name.

[A]

Miss Lady.

[D]

Yeah, the Lady Pants.

[A]

The Lady.

[B]

The Lady.

[A]

So welcome back. And you guys have grown a ton. I mean, you got like crazy story. We're going to get in all that today. I would just like to start with how many times have you guys been sued and are you currently being sued now?

[D]

We're always being sued.

[A]

Let's go for it.

[D]

ABS always be. Oh, ABGs always be getting sued.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

If you're a lawyer, it's abs because

[D]

you are not trying. If you're not getting sued, you have a native. Oh, we. I mean, D2C and D2C land. And we're not predominantly retail, but still have a large E comm presence. Like, there's so many new things to get sued on with. Whatever. California, opt in. Whatever. Whatever. Right. Like it's always California or New York or what have you. Yeah, there's always one. There's always one or two.

[C]

Somehow there are carcinogens somewhere in like, everything.

[D]

Apparently Prop 65 is a big one for food, which is like Starbucks fails the Prop 65. You know, Starbucks gives you cancer.

[A]

They put Prop 65 stickers on, like the windows of cars. Dude, I'm pretty sure you don't eat the car window. I don't understand why it's gotta be there.

[D]

Yeah. But I think. I think the aggregate something like six. And you're always working on one or two.

[A]

I didn't realize. So did you guys start off D.C. and then went retail, or did you start off retail, go to dc?

[B]

A little bit of both, I would say.

[D]

I mean, okay, mood start. We started with a Kickstarter, which is, I guess D2C sort of a weird form of it. Um, and then, yeah, we rolled out a website and then very soon after we rolled out an Amazon presence, then Amazon started outpacing DTC like four or five to one.

[A]

Whoa.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

And in the middle of all this, we had a weird, weird blimp that popped up where we got into 3000 CBSs, like out of nowhere out the gate. So then we really weren't ever like a hundred percent D to say, man,

[C]

so you guys came from Kickstarter? That's like super atypical. I don't.

[D]

I.

[C]

You might be the only founder I know that like started with Kickstarter. How did you guys actually make that work?

[D]

Well, I don't understand how other people start because I had no money And I was like, if I'm going to manufacture 30,000 of something and I have no money, like how do people do that? I was like, of course you would need to solve that chicken or egg situation where you need to have like pre orders. I guess they do. Pre orders is the other way to do it. But we needed to get in money and not ship stuff in return and use that money to make stuff to then six months later ship stuff. And that, that is Kickstarter. But the dirty secret of Kickstarter is you need like 30 grand to run a good Kickstarter. Like you need money to do, even start that process. So I had, and I had literally had like zero money. I was living in my college buddy's parents basement to get my burn to like zero. And.

[B]

And he went through like a few phases of some like fun jobs while this was happening too. I think you like, he nannied for a week.

[D]

Terrible name.

[B]

Yeah. Wait, was a life coach also for a week. Like did a lot of ranting.

[D]

One client, you're just blowing by these

[C]

and each one is just opening so many questions that I could ask.

[D]

I would. You can, but you can bullshit the life coach thing better, like easier than any profession on earth, basically. Like give advice at a pretty generic level.

[A]

I can't be us being a nanny, dude. There's like, there's a. I was, I

[D]

was relieved of my duties.

[C]

It is a wild hybrid. By day a life coach. At night, I'm a nanny.

[D]

Yeah, we were mixing in some dog walking. Yeah. But I.

[B]

Those didn't work out. And then we just went back to working.

[D]

But I, but I pretty quickly learned, okay, I'm going to do this Kickstarter. Actually I need five grand for the video and money to try ads which then later didn't work and blah blah, blah. So I was like, okay, I need like 30 grand. And so I pinged a couple people who were aware of me starting this thing and I was like, hey, well you. I don't need like 50 grand, I just need 5 grand or 10 grand. And so I raised, I think it was 40 grand from like three different people and used that to run the Kickstarter. Sold $75,000 in the Kickstarter and incremental 15 on Indiegogo to 90k total. And then I turned around to those people who I raised the 30 or 40k from and I was like, well, now I need half a million dollars. And they gave it to me very quickly because I didn't plan it out this way, but like, if you ask for a little and then prove something, you can ask for a lot and someone will give it to you. Don't start by asking for a lot.

[C]

Yeah, no. And so it's so rare people actually prove it out. But I want to understand, like, okay, so part of the thing that makes this great is gesture here. So basically you're the fact checker, but also you're able to give us like the real version of what went down. And I've talked to Will enough that I know some of Will's version. But, like, how. So how involved are you in the, like, genesis of this idea and what are you thinking through this process? Are you like, I'm gonna let him, like, wear himself out on this idea? That's not gonna work. Like, what's going through your head?

[B]

Well, so at this point, we're dating, we're not working together. I was not a co founder. I had no intention of being part of this. It's just kind of like my boyfriend wants to start a business. Crazy cool. Every day it's something new. You went through a lot of different ideas.

[A]

I'm not the only one.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. It's like we were just making fun of this with Matt, like every day. He's like, he's the serial.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

And eventually, like, one will stick. So like, eventually, like, I didn't know that.

[D]

Well, we should mention like some of the ideas. In retrospect.

[B]

No, they were all like, that's.

[C]

Did you ever tell him this? When would you tell him the baby's ugly?

[B]

I feel like I would typically just tell you if it's a bad idea, but I would be like, but like, do you.

[D]

It was. I was going to make a drink that was like specific to gender related nutritional needs. That's terrible.

[B]

No, it's awful.

[D]

Or choline for like females, because females need more co.

[C]

I don't think it's a terrible idea.

[B]

Like, from a, like a 20 year old man.

[A]

No, it's like, I think that's a.

[C]

This has a high chance of being caught. But in a world where they're selling vaginal probiotics, gummies, like there. Anything can work. Like, I, like, I believe that any product can work.

[A]

This is true. Any product can work. Okay, so a bunch of bad ideas. How did you land on this one then? Like, what was the. So you. I mean, prior to the Kickstarter, you decided to do it. What about this? Told you that this was worth doing.

[D]

I was really interested in the brain. I studied, among other things, Psych and Neuroscience. In college, that was the. I was interested in the physiological side of the brain.

[A]

Okay.

[D]

I then later became interested in the intersection of nutrition and cognition. So how do what we eat, how does that impact how I feel in a couple hours if I eat the same thing over and over and over again for 30, 40, 50 years? What. What does my brain look like when I'm 60? Right. And I read a book called Grain Brain, which detailed that. And more specifically was like, look, if you're eating a standard American diet, your. Your blood glucose is elevated all day long for like 50 years. Here's what that does to your brain. It. And it's not good. Like, spoiler alert, it shrinks it.

[C]

Like, I saw something where it's like, as your blood sugar goes up, you lose like 1 to 2% of brain mass per year or some kind. It's some kind of crazy.

[A]

It's really gotta be a bottom. You don't finish your life.

[C]

Well, yeah, I mean, it's, it's all relative to how high it is, but it's like basically you're. You're embalming your brain and like a sugary fluid and it's just shrinking it. Like a raisin, I guess. I don't know. But like terrified me at least. I mean, maybe it was like not accurate, but I. There is some real stuff here.

[D]

Yeah. And yeah. Point being, it's not good. And so the whole idea was like, basically eat fewer simple carbs, eat less sugar, eat higher healthy fats, eat more protein. All stuff that now is kind of like common knowledge. But at the time, not, not so much. This is like 2015ish. And then I was like, okay, this is a, like, how do I just map this to my life just as a consumer? Because I was working really long hours and I, I didn't like to cook. I still don't really like to cook. I wanted something convenient that would map to this new diet. And then pretty quickly I was like, wait, this is a business opportunity. Cause I can't find anything. There's. There just is nothing that's convenient. And then of course my brain went to like, okay, what's the biggest opportunity within that aperture? Uh, and so I started cycling through like drinks, basically just looking at categories. And this is like a, a learning after the fact. The category you pick is so like insanely important, really important. Like, it's like half the battle at least. But not even that how the category evolves over your journey. So you have to be forward, like present looking and forward looking. For that category.

[A]

Yeah.

[D]

And at the time RXBar had just sold for 600 million. And I was like, okay, that's like clear proof point that this can become a big sellable asset. And then looked at the market. Okay, big market, you know, whatever.

[A]

Cliff had been around for a long time too. Right.

[D]

Cliff was a multi billion dollar top line business that time. So now the downside is ultra, ultra competitive. The first thing anyone ever says to me is yeah, why would you enter such a competitive field? So that's like the primary downside of it. But. But yeah, I arrived at that idea and then I. We can get into all the minutia of how I started, but basically started from zero. Like had no, I never manufactured something. I didn't know someone had manufactured something

[C]

at Hexclad.

[A]

Applovman has been our highest spending new channel since the start of last year.

[C]

Mid seven figures and growing.

[A]

It almost wasn't. My team was skeptical so I stepped in to push them. First I had them pull data on the overlap between Meta and Applovin customers to find out if the platform was really just retargeting. Then we ran multiple holdout tests. The results, 90% new customers 53% higher ROAS 36% higher new customer ROAS 20 27% lower new customer CAC. The numbers were just bang on.

[C]

If you create an Applovin account and

[A]

launch on day one, you're gonna get thousand dollars in free ad credit plus

[C]

another 5,000 when you spend 5,000 audio on vertical videos. Unskippable ad units, new reach for new customers. Check it out today. Go to 9operators.com applovin. You're going to get our guide to

[A]

new channels, recordings of our live expansion events with us and 25 of our friends. 9 operators.com applovin Back to the show, the crowdfund. So we did a crowdfund for Lomi. Sean did one too. I think for Ridge. That's actually how Sean found Ridge. But it is actually it is not typical. And I love that you hit on the you need money to do a Kickstarter thing. I get asked all the time. So we did seven and a half million bucks in our. We did Indiegogo 45 days. Seven and a half million. Did a million dollars in the first hour. People are like I want to launch. I want to launch a business like this. This is great. You need any money, you can just start the crowdfund. I'm like, oh no, no. I spent $350,000 in ads in the two months leading up to the campaign. So that first hour we just like blew the doors off. So we invalidated everything. Oh, yeah, we had like. Oh, we had.

[B]

I just mean like from those ads.

[A]

Oh, yeah. 300,000 people.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

On the watch list. So like getting to the, to the, the size that we did it. People don't realize how much you have to invest in the campaign to make the thing that looks like free money work.

[C]

It's because you're selling, you're still selling. You're selling people on the idea of being involved in the campaign.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

And frankly, like, I'm a fan of. If you're going to do a crowdfund, you should have validated the idea before you can get the crowdfunding.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

Well, I want to talk about the category thing you just said, because, you know, Will and I are like, so on the same page with how we view this stuff. We've had these conversations where we're just like saying yes back and forth to each other. Like, um, but like to draw a parallel, getting married is like 50, 70% who you choose. And then it's like 20, 30% tactics. But all the books are written about being, you know, having a better marriage once you're married. And I feel like the business like podcast book system is like the exact same thing. It's all about like, hey, here's how you run your business. Better not. Here's how you identify a great opportunity beforehand. But we should, we need to preach that more often that like, the situation you get yourself into is so much of how much success you'll end up having. And I just don't feel like that gets said enough. So I totally agree with the point.

[D]

And here's the other thing. It's, it's picking a good category. It's also picking a good category for you. Meaning, like, do your skills map to that category? So it has to be big. It has to satisfy, like, all the key things that a good market satisfies you. You also have to be uniquely situated towards it. And then the other thing I would say is it's not a prison sentence. Like, take Sean at Ridge, right? He keeps adding categories. And they could be adjacent, they could be totally like non related. Right. So it's not like if you realize your category is really tough, you can't do anything about it. You can do stuff, of course, then you create a more complex business. And maybe you didn't want that.

[A]

But so, so grade yourselves then. Early days of IQ bar, right? On this, on this vector of like, you're fit to do this company? Like, did you. Is this a rep? It's like you're. Are you retroactively saying this or at the time, did you know, like, I am uniquely suited to build this business.

[D]

Everything, everything is revisionist history.

[B]

But no, but at the time, like, roughly, you knew in the sense that's like, didn't want to start a tech company, didn't know how to code. Like, it's kind of like, what can I just do?

[D]

It's.

[C]

It's.

[B]

It's actually messing around.

[D]

It's actually insanely simple.

[A]

It's.

[D]

What can I literally make in my kitchen? That. That. It sounds so silly, right? That actually is it.

[A]

No, I love it.

[D]

And it's like. And not even that. What can I make without adding heat? Like non big. What raw thing? What can I literally jam a bunch of stuff into a KitchenAid mix and that is the product and how many things are there like that? It's basically just a bar. Like, that's it and that. And then it's like, oh, after the fact. Oh, is that a giant category? Oh, it is. Oh, okay, let's do that. Like, that was it, you know.

[C]

So.

[A]

Okay, so then what point did you come into this sort of journey other than like letting him try to beat him, his himself up and.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Yeah. Other than just, you know, support. Probably like a year in, maybe.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Somewhere around there. Because Will. When Will officially started working full time on it. So this is post Kickstarter. Obviously. You, like, have no money and you can't really afford to pay anyone who's good at marketing. I worked on ad agency.

[C]

So he's dating his way into cheap labor. Is this what you were saying?

[B]

Literally, I worked on ad agency at the time.

[C]

Hey, look, using your own personal skills.

[D]

There you go.

[B]

Exactly. No, so like, I just for free, like with people I worked with, just started like running his ads. And then eventually it just became more fun than my job. And they were raising money. So I was like, oh, this actually seems like it could be a good fit. I can't do this for free forever. And then came over. There was no one else, like, doing marketing though. So it kind of was like there. It just happened to work out. We talk. Talked about that earlier because, like, I don't really know how exactly it works for couples when they're starting something together and they don't like, naturally have complimentary skill sets. Yeah, this one just like it happened to be something he doesn't do. Like, no one on the team did it. It just made sense.

[C]

So you're not butting heads. It's like, yes, it's like we're just

[B]

in different like worlds.

[D]

But this is like a whole other. We could do a whole pod on this. Of like, when you have no money, you can't pay people.

[B]

Like I only hire people.

[D]

Pay people 50k, right? Like 60k. How do you find like good enough talent to get to the next stage, to raise the next round or get to the next revenue milestone, whatever, or hire your spouse. That's like the hack of all hacks. Right? But it's like that those early days when it's. It's still a crazy idea. You have no money. It's not obvious if the idea is even going to work or you're going to be around in a year. How do you find the people then? That is the hardest thing.

[A]

I'm going to combine your life. Life coaching or spiritual coaching history. There's a book in your future. I'll give you the title now.

[D]

Okay.

[A]

It's how to make Good enough. Great.

[C]

There you go.

[D]

Good enough, I think.

[A]

Yeah, good enough to.

[C]

I have a question that's.

[B]

There's a will. There's a will.

[C]

Okay, so this is one of my favorite entrepreneur questions that I ask. What is the scrappiest thing that you did during that period?

[D]

Oh, I gotta tell the Harvard email address thing.

[B]

Right, that's good.

[D]

Which I may get sued seventh time by Harvard for this, but I. During the.

[C]

Don't worry, there's no digital, you know, like evidence of what you're about to say.

[A]

We don't.

[D]

Yeah. This is, this is set to auto delete in six months or something, right? No. So I did not do what you did on the crowdfunding front and raise a bunch of money and, and, and do ads and collect emails on a landing page and blah, blah, blah. What I did was I was like, okay, I have zero dollars. How do I generate a ton of demand for free? And I don't know how I came up with this idea, but at Harvard, I went to Harvard undergrad and at the Harvard Library they had these things called Red Books. Just everyone's name, John Smith. I live in Greenwich, Connecticut. And my. It's john.smithmail.com, it actually has their email address. So I would go at nights and on weekends I would take every Red book. Class of 73, class of 74. And I would flip through page by page and take pictures of everything.

[B]

Yeah. And then at the time it was like hard to find a software that would turn that.

[A]

Yeah. Claude in ChatGPT.

[D]

So much easier with Claude. No. And then I just found some software that could pull the email addresses out of my thousands of pictures. So anyway, I had, I think I ended up with 10,000 emails that way. And then my boss at my first job out of college went to Harvard Business School and he just gave me his login. I was like, hey, can you just. I don't know why he gave me his login, but he gave me his login and yeah, he'll get sued, but it'll be cool.

[B]

And then I gave you my log and I went to be you. So it was kind of like he just wanted like everyone that he could be like, I have some connection to you. I live in Boston, I went to Harvard. So it's like the email sounds like I kind of know you when I.

[A]

Wait, were you one on one emailing these people?

[D]

No. No. Okay, so I, I, I. You can't actually get email addresses from the HBS system, but you can get their first and last name by going to advanced search and like filter on tennis club and you get a bunch of people. Filter on tennis club and, or filter on International studies club. Get a second and you just dedupe this massive list at the end and you can triangulate to like 95ish percent of people who've ever gone to Harvard Business School. And then I got a mailchimp account and I used my Harvard undergrad alumni email address because I knew I would get so many spam marketed spams and they would crush the domain square.

[B]

Right.

[D]

And I just ruthlessly blasted like you check the box. It's like, yes, everyone's opted in and just ruthlessly blasted people. And it was a great microcosm of like the world and people though, because like some set or like you're the worst person ever. How did you get my thing? And then some people are like, this is the coolest idea. I have no idea who you are, but I just backed your Kickstarter.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

And then some people don't respond, whatever. So we made like 40 grand though that way. And again, totally illicit means and whatever. Caveat, caveat, caveat.

[A]

We had very different crowdfunding. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

Well, also befriended one of the people at Kickstarter. He had this whole plan of befriending someone who worked there so that he could be featured as like, yeah, that's important, that's smart. Yeah, no, it was very smart.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

Asking the guy for advice and like, you know, being like, what do you

[D]

think of my page that was, that was actually a lesson that dovetails with like retail buyers in many cases in this journey there's one human who can just turn on just stupid amounts of growth. Just one human. And if that human likes you, like everything changes. And at that point in time it was like the food manager of Kickstarter and I was like, you could put me in your newsletter and that would generate an incremental 15k in sales which at the time was like the biggest thing ever. Right. And now it's like the Walmart buyer or the SAM store or whatever. It's like people don't realize this is such a human on the retail side in particular such still very much a human to human business for us.

[A]

You could actually argue that even in D2C it's still like small amounts of people will unlock almost everything.

[C]

Well here's a, here's a proof of that that the right hire, oh 10 extra business. But that's convincing one person. Right? You know like the idea you joked about it earlier but like always be selling because there is always a human that can unlock that next wave of growth. It's just, do you have talent and the intelligence to identify who that is and to be able to get to a yes?

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Right.

[A]

Yeah. And oftentimes these are very long games. So like when you're playing the relationship game, it's like your relationship with that Walmart or Target buyer probably started a long time before you ever asked for that.

[C]

This is also why being a trustworthy high character person pays off in ways down the road that you can't anticipate because you don't always know who the person that you're going to need a yes from 5, 10, 15 years from now and you don't know how you're going to get to that. And so when you treat others in the way that you'd want to be treated, you conduct yourself well then it will surprise you the ways that that bears dividends when you don't expect. Or at least that's been my experience.

[A]

Yeah, no, I completely agree. Can you on this sort of like yeah, you had no money, you did the Kickstarter.

[B]

Another little shady things that he did.

[A]

But like resourceful.

[D]

I think we're past the statute of limitations on that.

[A]

Yeah, I think you're okay now. At what point did you go out to try to get more capital to start building and did you even get remotely enough money to launch the product? Like not like I got $90,000 or 75. Like is that an overshoot Undershoot for like.

[D]

No, that was, like, barely. That's the other misconception about Kickstarter. Like, you can't fund a business on Kickstarter. That's how you prove the con. Like, proof of concept.

[C]

You hope.

[D]

Yeah. If all goes well, you prove the concept, which it did. And then we're like, cool. Now we have 90k in sales in the first two months. We will use that to raise money at a good valuation such that we can actually start running this business, which is kind of like anathema to the whole, like, bootstrap, bootstrap, bootstrap stuff that we hear now, which, like, great, if you can do that, then do that. But we were like, look, our. Our gross margin's gonna be like, 5% or something. Laughably.

[B]

Like, we.

[C]

We. We should talk about that because I think part of the problem is if you tell people too strongly you have to bootstrap everything, what they end up doing is they will only choose exceptionally high margins.

[B]

Yes.

[D]

Yes.

[C]

Product categories. And so you get kind of pigeonholed into, well, I guess you have to be D2C. I guess you have to be super niche. Yeah, exactly. So it's like everybody's launching a supplement gummy, you know, and it's like, well, why are you doing it? Well, because there's 85 points of margin, and that's what I have to have for me to bootstrap this. But like you said, where the majority of the opportunity is, is in big categories that have commodified over time, and those are going to be lower margins, because that's.

[B]

How could you talk more about your fundraising story? Just because, like, in the sense that, like, you always did a good job at, like, raising exactly how much we needed at each point. So it's like. And also always once we were like.

[A]

So it's very.

[B]

A little bit more. Yeah. So it's like, we never literally had no money. We never had too much money. And also here we are with still over 50% of the business. Like, it's like, we didn't have to, like, you know, give everything away.

[D]

The first thing is, and some people will hate this, but, like, don't start your business with a co founder. Start with a hundred percent, because you're going to sell a lot of it.

[A]

Like, if you're going to raise money.

[D]

Yeah, if you're going to raise money.

[C]

Unless they are awesome. Like, the right person can be worth equity if they're the, like, you know, we're talking about who's the key person cap Tables, energy. Sometimes the key person, you know, to unlock things is that other founder.

[D]

But for me, I was like, I personally want to own more than 50% of this business. When all is said and done, we flip to profitable, et cetera. Okay. Like, other people have different goals. That was my goal. So owning 50.1% is the exact same as owning a hundred percent. There's no difference. I control everything. And if you get to the promised land, it's a killer. It's a killer outcome no matter what. So why wouldn't you raise. You're a damn fool not to raise money. If it helps you move faster, innovate faster, hire better people, you're a damn fool to not raise money unless it dips you.

[C]

You're saying if it dips you below 50%, unless it dips you.

[D]

And then, and then the very beginning.

[B]

Or like, screw people too, because it's

[A]

like you can't early rounds where you dilute too much.

[B]

Totally.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

I, I, I would argue, I don't even, I don't know that the 50% actually matters as much as by retaining a lot of ownership as you raise money, you get to maintain, like, you can implement all the other structural things that are important. Yeah. So like board control, share classes.

[D]

For sure. For sure.

[A]

Prep versus common. Like, for sure. You know, I know people that own 10% of their company, they control the whole damn thing just because of structural.

[D]

That's like the Zuckerberg model. Yeah. So sure. That was way smarter than I was thinking. I was like, simple caveman brain. Like, more than half good. Like, let me manage that. But also, I wasn't starting a tech company. I was starting a protein bar company with no track record. Right. So I couldn't just justify these super high valuations. So our first valuation was 4 million bucks, which was like, totally plucked out of nowhere.

[A]

Yeah, the first month.

[D]

But, like, generally that was market at the time. And we raised, I think it was like 625.625k on that, which was like, just enough to get to like, the next step change in revenue. And then we raised a million, which was just. We could have raised 2 million. We could have raised 3 million, raised 1 million.

[C]

Why did you only raise a million?

[B]

We had the CBS situation.

[D]

Totally.

[B]

Which was very helpful for raising money.

[A]

Well, so we learned a lot.

[C]

Yeah.

[D]

This is what's so funny about. We, we went into CVS, which helped us get a 2 mil, 2.1 million run rate. Or like, we were projecting that we would do 2.1 million in 2019. We then used that to raise it to 12 million because we were like 6x. Yeah, it was like 5x was normal. And we're like, yeah, but we're special for XYZ reason. So it's 6x, so we're 12 million. Of course, that CVS thing, like, totally blew up in our face and it didn't matter. It was believable at the time. Yeah, it was believable at the time. And so we raised a million at 12 million. And we're like, okay, that was a little less painful than this. The 625 at 4. And then from the 12, we raised 2.7. A year and a half later, 2.775 at a 20.5. And I think that was a flat 5X. It was like 4.4.1.

[C]

So you're kind of shaving off 10% of the company on each of these rounds.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[D]

And then we. And then a year after that, we raised 5.5 at 50. And that was our last raise. We flipped profitable and that literally brought me down to like just above 50%. So it all, like shook out.

[C]

What would you do now? Let's say you needed money to get to the next level, to get to an even bigger outcome.

[D]

But you could have just hypothetically, like

[C]

going back to this idea, like in terms of trade offs. If you knew you could get to a bigger outcome but you'd have to raise money to do it, would you do it? Or would you be happy with a smaller outcome?

[D]

Oh, man. The answer, like, changes each year. My original goal, I was like a dumb 26 year old kid, right? I was living in a basement life coaching, right? Like, I was like, I want to make 10 billion.

[B]

I love that.

[C]

I love that. The person living in the basement life coaching others. Let me tell you how to reach your dreams.

[B]

He tells the story as if, like, it made like a little bit more sense. He's like, oh, I reached out to, like, my friend's parents. It's like this was an acquaintance's parents. If anything, he was just like, hey, I know you happen to have parents who live nearby.

[D]

The whole thing was weird. We can get in all the ways that it was weird, but it was weird.

[A]

Oh, no, it's weird. We're good.

[D]

I actually prefer.

[C]

I prefer the kind of choose your own adventure version that I get to like, fill in the blanks in my head than you actually even telling me. That's even better.

[D]

But the original goal was I want to make $10 million because I'm going to be rich and I'm going to drive a Ferrari. All the like dumb stuff you think about when you're young. And it became pretty apparent that that's like pretty much not possible. Like it became not possible once we actually got to 10 million. It's like, oh, actually there's no buyers or the buyer is a pe, but they only buy based on EBITDA and you have negative ebitda. So like what are you even doing here?

[B]

In our mind, when it first started, we only had to get to 25 million and we could sell for 100 million. And that was always the goal.

[D]

Yeah. Well then it became yeah, so once that was not possible, it's like, OK, like maybe we keep going and we'll sell for 100 on. On 25. And then that was not possible. Like the whole be small and still sell for a big number, like went away completely and then really went away in 2022. It's like not only can you not sell, you better be profitable or no one's going to give you a dollar. Like 2022 is like the nadir of

[A]

like explain one away for people who are going to listen or watch this. Like, because I think we know what's happening from a timeline perspective in consumer. But somebody else might not. What does that mean?

[D]

There's just a lot of hype of like all these brands that were small and big CPG was like, oh, let me. This is flashy. Let me buy them and and learn from them. Even though the economics suck.

[A]

Yep.

[D]

And all of them failed. All of them? Yeah, they all went to zero and then big CPG smartened up and they're like, that's not actually going to work. So we know we're going to screw it up. So we're only going to buy things that have gotten to nine figures in revenue because they're much harder to screw up. And we can plug them into our erp. We can plug them into our salesforce or distribution network, yada, yada yada. Which is true. That's a much better model. It sucks though for the person who started the business thinking they'd sell it at 25 million and then it's like, oh, actually you better 5x your business to even start having.

[B]

Actually I think though it's like a good lesson of like, though we always thought that we always were like generally trying to keep things in a place where eventually we turn profitable and like are running a business that can still grow and be profitable because like the advice changes every year where People are like, you have to do a business like this, you have to do a business like this. But it's like if you're on a 10 year journey, it's going to change.

[C]

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[D]

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[C]

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[D]

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[B]

Happened to a lot of bar startups actually when it came to like raising money. Because around the time that we were turning profitable, a lot of bar companies that were startups, like there were so many that used to be around that they still weren't profitable. And investors changed what they wanted and they changed what they were looking for and they couldn't raise money anymore. Like there's like a grave of companies that started around the same time as us.

[A]

All in.

[D]

All in bars, we're all way faster than us, sexier, raised more money and they all went to zero. And we just quietly

[A]

has the market. Have you watched the market then seesaw back towards like this whole like it disappeared for the smaller brand? Do you, do you see it coming back for the smaller brand? You still think it's a game?

[D]

No, I think that's, that's still fully dead.

[A]

Yeah. And do you think the bar, pardon the pun, but like, do you think the bar continues to raise then? So like the acquisition bar is going up. I saw something on this.

[D]

Well, it went up and then it came down a little bit, but it settled north of nine figures.

[A]

Okay. So I saw something on this recently on this that the. It's funny that we need the data. So I'm going to say this out loud and it's going to sound obviously, but that the larger the business is, is a. You may as well just invest in large companies because their chances of being around a long time and getting even larger are higher. And they've actually mapped out the probability of all this. It's like just buy a $10 billion company, you're just gonna be a hundred billion dollars.

[C]

And this is one of the reasons why you've gotta chase profitability. Like we need to be giving more real talk to founders and leaders. If you have a consumer focused company that is losing money, that is losing money, it's a zero. Just, it should be like you should think about it as a zero if it's losing, if it's making money and you're doing less than 50 million in sales. It's closer to a hobby than a viable asset in the minds of the would be acquirers. And that's okay. So you need to be running it like it is your, you know, it is your livelihood and that your livelihood is going to come from producing profits.

[A]

Are there exceptions to this rule?

[B]

Like I mean like we weren't profitable for the first five years. We should know that. But it was always like because we knew once we got to a certain scale we would be and because you could raise.

[C]

If you couldn't have raised knowing the two of you, you would have gotten profitable. Like I mean the whole, the whole interview so far kind of proves that, that you guys were scrappy enough that if you had been forced to, you wouldn't.

[B]

Yeah, it's more like we, we just wanted to live in a world where we doubled every year and were wanted to get there faster. But like yeah, we could have grown

[D]

50% or just the exceptions. I would say there are some exceptions on this being sub 9 figure. I mean Cholula I think was 95 million and sold for 800 million because of the 9540 was EBITDA or something crazy like that.

[C]

But you don't if you have a 40% EBITDA margin. Everything I just said.

[D]

So there are exceptions to the like top line scale. I actually can't think of any recent exceptions to the profitability.

[A]

No, I can't either. That's why I'm ass piece. I think maybe in supplement you can see companies that are, they have a growth rate and a retention number that will outweigh the, the bottom line in the short term that will drive up their, their value.

[C]

Well Thorn like maybe Thor went through a transaction and a couple of years later it's going to go through a transaction for a much, much bigger number. There is like a track record of taking something and, and leveling it up. So I think that that makes sense. But overall like it's not even really about numbers. It's about market positioning and people want to buy market leaders.

[A]

Yep.

[C]

I was told this recently about electrolytes. Like I'm involved in the electrolyte category. We have a brand doing really well, growing really fast. But more or less the perspective this person was sharing with me is like there's a lot of companies doing well in this space. But that also means that probably nobody's going to get bought because if, if anybody is going to make a move in that space one of the big like strategics. They're just going to. It has to be a liquid IV type.

[D]

It's a top and element who I believe is like number two or whatever name and Gatorade maybe, whatever. But doesn't want to sell. Like so they're not going to sell. So yeah. At least according to their. I get their like investor dude.

[A]

That's the best way to sell a company is to say that you're not for sale and everybody does something.

[D]

They do totally. But they are doing like a bunch of distributions. They're doing things that would suggest that that is true.

[C]

But here's the thing. When you get to that scale and making the amount of money they're making, you really do have more serious conversations about why would we sell. Like somebody wants to give me whatever call it, you know, 10 times cash flow. Okay. Well, unless I think the prospects of my company are bad, why would I take that?

[B]

I feel like that company though was also like started for a different reason. Like it was started by Rob Wolf who's obviously already successful. So I think it was more like this is something I want.

[A]

Yeah, it does matter.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

What's probably more the number which company you're on definitely has an impact on how you think about the. So if you guys, you're looking at like the journey of IQ bar and how calculated you were with raising your money. What was driving, I guess the momentum to justify the raise. Were you guys still very D2C? Had you started to go into retail? I. I think of you guys as a retail first company for some reason. That's what in my head.

[D]

Oh, we are. It's doors 65, 35 this year.

[A]

Okay.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And it used to be, it used to be the opposite. I mean every year it's kind of like gotten more towards retail just because retail can grow so much faster than D2 cuz there's so much more sales there. Totally. Well. And also your category we're looking to not, you know, like triple spend year over year or something on D2C. So it's also like naturally.

[D]

And if you're going to be profitable at the price points we sell at, that's mostly going to come from retail. So you have to.

[C]

It has to be logistics.

[A]

What does that mean? Price points you sell at?

[C]

We just.

[D]

We sell a very sharp price point. So we've never, not once in the history of the company raised price and we started it in 20.

[A]

Have you.

[D]

December 2017. Sorry.

[B]

Have you.

[A]

You've never raised the price. Have you ever looked at it.

[B]

Technically, I think when you started like year one, it was like 29.99 and

[D]

we dropped it 24.99.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Yeah. And like there's a lot of brands out there today who are like still selling a 12 count online for like $40.

[D]

But we comp from like day one, we comped the E comm price to the price on shelf. Like for better or worse, bars are like semi commoditized and there's a lot of data and it's very clear what the clearing rate for a bar is on a shelf in a retailer. And you can make a matrix of all the, all the offerings and plus or minus 10% here. But like there's a price that will move a lot of units and we're like, okay, we're gonna map ecom to that, which is the opposite of how a lot of bar startups they'll be. And David Protein's kind of like an interesting exception to this because they price so much higher and it's working so good for them.

[C]

But, but we don't know what the backside of that is. And this is something, you never know somebody else's numbers and so you shouldn't assume. So like for example, well, what. What's David priced at? Which this is a huge success story. None of this is me capping on David, but I'm just going to give an illustrative example.

[D]

I don't. So we price it like, call it 219 on shelf, like on average. And I think they're like 3.99. So call it double.

[C]

So for example, like we have no idea what margin they're giving to Target and Walmart on the backside. Like maybe they're giving them the same margin rate you are or maybe they're giving them, you know, that plus 15% more. And we don't know how much promotional dollars are giving. And so a lot of times when you kind of get down to the final analysis, you can see somebody else's price point and be like, like a good example of this is obviously Yeti runs an amazing brand and yet are. I know their net operating margins and I know ours and ours compare just fine, even favorably to yeti's. And like, well, how is that even possible with our price points? Well, it's like we have a different overhead structure. There's just. And to run those price points, they have to do so much more marketing as a percentage of revenue. And like that's great. I mean they're an unbelievable brand. But what I've kind Of learned is usually when you see somebody at a much at an elevated price point to what like you're saying, like what the preponderance of data shows they're doing something on the backside to have to support that. So if you think they're just taking all that, all that home, they're not. You know, that's getting, that's getting recycled somewhere. Influencers, meta, whatever.

[D]

And our take too is like value wins in every market. Premium wins in some markets. Yeah, I'd rather win in every market.

[C]

Say that again. Yeah, that's great.

[D]

Value wins in every market. Like so. And think of how many market life cycles we've been through since like, you know, there's Covid. That was crazy, right? With the Trump tariffs, like blah blah, blah. Like the market has shifted violently up and down. But like value is always cool.

[A]

So when you mean capture the most shared share of market or most profit of market, like how do you define win when. So say you say like value.

[D]

Our North Star really is is units.

[C]

But what?

[A]

Yeah, like why, why units? Why, why does that matter?

[D]

Because we run an old school economies of scale business and units changes everything for the better. The more units, the more every other metric downstream gets better.

[A]

And you're talking about the cost of the product.

[D]

Yeah, cogs or cogs, everything goes down, down more, scale more, more like bars and mouths. Like the more, the more the more it's trial. Right. Even if we break even on that bar sale that went into someone's mouth, they tried it, there's a good likelihood they liked it and they'll tell five friends and blah blah, blah. So it's, there's just every metric improves with units.

[A]

Did you guys run the sampling playbook early on? Like where you just get in stores and get bars and mouths? Like is that a thing? No.

[B]

Say no. We did not.

[D]

Well, we did an analog of that which is like, because we were predominantly in the e comm business at first, which is price really sharply and have like intro products that are super cheap. Like we have a, we have a hydration business as well and we have a 9.998 stick sampler. It's like super cheap to try eight different flavors. That's effectively sampling that. That is an analog of sampling.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Yeah, we went through a phase where we did a three bar trial where people could pick any three flavors of bars and we'd send it to them for like $5, like something incredibly cheap. But ultimately that was like us in our office packing every single individual one. So that went Away. But I mean, at the time when we, like first launched, that was definitely something.

[D]

But then there's the whole thing of, like, do. Are. Are the customers you're acquiring good or not? And like, actually most of them weren't. And so it's not. It's not as simple as just sample, you know, indiscriminately. Like that. That doesn't work either. Yeah, yeah.

[C]

I asked.

[A]

Cause I remember a story about the kind. Was it kind? Barely. The whole big sampling thing. That was like a big part.

[D]

The founder had this whole thing where he was like, we've crunched all the numbers on the cheapest way to acquire. And the cheapest way to acquire is sample. If big, if huge asterisk, the product is good.

[A]

How long did it take for you guys to have a good product?

[D]

Oh, man, you're going to be the most critical. Good is relative. Right? So it's like good I define as someone. You converted someone. So like, bars is a weird one where it's like, it's not a cheesecake. Right. So it's like, it's a functional food. I'm choosing to eat this instead of spaghetti carbonara or whatever.

[A]

Converted being. You didn't sell them the bar. You actually converted them to buying yours. Like, you can't.

[D]

Like, we converted them on the benefits that the food is a tool to achieve, which is in the early days, like keto, which more or less means weight loss.

[A]

Yeah, Right.

[D]

And then now it's come full circle in GLP1. But so it's always weight loss. Everything comes back to weight loss. So you know, that, that, that was. That was how we convert people. And taste is a component of that. And taste always matters. But function matters just as much as taste. In our categories, it's also very category specific. You're not looking for function out of a tortilla chip. You are looking for function out of a bar or a gummy or whatever.

[B]

So it's a weird category because, like, we. We learned a lot when we did sampling at Costco. Like, we had to. To get in. We had to do a road show where.

[A]

Oh yeah, we were like, I know, the roadshow.

[B]

It's a great time. Interested selling. But it's really interesting. You learn a lot about, like, people. So, like, you'd have people pick up your box and complain that there's any sugar and like, we're one to two grams. It's like very minimal. Well, but like, well, in the car they have like, cupcakes and like all this other stuff just because they expect something different from a bar. It's a very.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

Their cart literally has cake in it and they're complaining about the bar.

[D]

It's not how someone shops. It's how they shop for your category. The same human, like, it might as well swap out their brain. When they move from aisle to aisle in the grocery shop, they shop for water differently than they shop. And they. Those different brands contradict each other. It's the weirdest thing.

[A]

Oh, yeah. That's why the idea of a ideal customer profile. I'm like, what do you mean? Like, we're. We're schizophrenic creatures, man. Like, there's like 200 people in my head right now. It depends on what I'm doing and what I'm buying and how I'm experiencing, interacting with the world. You're never just like, there's no one version of anybody. Yeah, right. And you guys are proving that with how you looked at the cat. How long did it take you to go from bars to other products then?

[B]

Definitely a few years. We didn't launch mix until 21. I always think about our wedding because that's in our welcome bags. At our wedding, we gave everybody the ASIC sampler and we said, please go to Amazon the review that should have

[C]

been one of you.

[A]

Every moment is an opportunity to sell.

[D]

That's.

[B]

We always forget that one. But so I always look. Think back to that. So like, late. Late 2021, early 2022, we launched our hydration line. So. And you did the Kickstarter in like what, 2017. So.

[D]

Yeah, but then that's the other thing. Like I'm saying all this because I. We learned it firsthand that the category thing, like height, the hydration buyer is just so different than the bar buyer, which is so different than the coffee buyer. And those are our three categories. And then even more important than all that is because we're so omnichannel, where the products work is so different. Like, we had a wildly different experience trying to sell hydration in brick and mortar than we did bars in brick and mortar. Wildly different.

[C]

What?

[A]

Tell me more about that. What do you mean? What was so different? I would assume hydration works really well in brick and mortar.

[D]

It can if you're a liquidity for sure.

[C]

Okay.

[D]

Yeah. If you were the market leader, like, without getting into too much of the specifics. So bars are cool, but like, bars are ultra fungible. They work and you can open em anywhere in your kitchen, on the train, they can sell anywhere if they're not coated. They're temp. They're not temp sensitive. They're not gonna clump. Like, bars are a great form factor. A hydration powder.

[B]

You.

[D]

You're not gonna open it and pound it. Right. Like, it needs to go in water. So that's kind of weird, right? Inherently. So if you go into a 7 11, you're gonna buy that, and then I got. Need to go buy this other thing and combine them and shake it. Why wouldn't I just buy a Gatorade?

[C]

Like, that's the problem.

[A]

It's crazy.

[C]

You're going up against. Ready to.

[A]

Yeah. Got it.

[D]

It makes no sense. This is why Gatorade is so much bigger than the powdered electrolyte market.

[B]

I mean, I think it's also just because, like, think about, like, in your standard store, people are selling singles.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

A single stick. It's just. It takes a lot to get any business there. So, like, we obviously want to launch, like, the biggest place we could, which is Costco. And Liquid Ivy is really a Costco brand. And they are. They are hard to compete with there. They're constantly doing deals. They're always undercutting everyone. So.

[D]

So it's, it's. It's not that we, like, couldn't do it. It's, hey, if we put all of our energy into, like, bars, there's so much more green pasture to growing our share in bars in brick and mortar than banging our head against the wall. And hydration in brick and mortar. We know hydration. Ecom. We know. We have a powdered coffee product too. Can work great. Ecom. Like, yes, we could roll the dice on brick and mortar in those. Or we could keep running this other form factor that's like, absolutely lights out everywhere.

[C]

You mentioned it. But I think physical retail is full of people that are really dialed in on scale economies. And you. You just cannot compete unless you are fully committed to scale economies. Like, you're, like you said, liquid iv. Part of the reason they're able to be so successful in Costco is they are. They don't take the approach that because we're the market leader in this form factor, we can charge excess. They're actually like, we're going to be more aggressive on price in physical retail even than we are online. And they're constantly paying for placement right by the front door. They're constantly paying for the member discounts and things like that. And that's actually the playbook in consumable consumer stuff. And in wholesale is scale economies drive down that price Just move a ton of these.

[A]

I guess though, like, can you give me your take then? On what, like what you're saying? Where I'm getting stuck, guys, is pick a large category. So go pick a huge category. Right? It's likely very competitive. If it's a large category. There's no large categories where it's like there's nobody in it. It doesn't, it just doesn't work. But if it's a large category, then it's also extremely hard to compete in. So like you looked at bars, you're like, this is a massive category, we're gonna go do it. What told you that was worth competing in such a massive category? Like, what, what did you have? Early on I was like, I think

[B]

honestly being naive was extremely awesome.

[D]

Nothing.

[A]

It's like, it's a great answer for most things in life.

[B]

It's like, yeah, I think we didn't know. And honestly, like, we didn't know about like that keto was gonna be such a big thing for us either, so.

[D]

So that was so. So big categories are not monoliths, right?

[A]

No, yeah, there's lots.

[D]

They are not monoliths. They're actually the amalgamation of 15 little categories, little subcategories. And actually each of those subcategories, if that big market is big, is also quite big.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

And so we learned early on on that we were like one of three keto compliant bars or whatever the number and like 3, 4.

[B]

And weren't marketed like that. Like you did position that?

[D]

No, not at all. Not at all.

[B]

That's how much people like were looking in this space. And there were so few options that like they just were like, oh my God, they have low net carbs.

[A]

Well, how did you position the brain initially there?

[B]

It was, it was brain.

[D]

It was brain. It was brain. Our first tagline is brain food. Yeah. And it wasn't high protein. It wasn't actually. The very first bar was like 8 grams. It wasn't even keto compliant. It was, I think 8 grams of sugar. We then got sugar down for purposes of being good for the brain. Not weight loss or not keto, Not. All that keto just happened. And then all these people just started buying our stuff and in post purchase surveys being like, yeah, I'm keto, this was. Fits my macros. And we're like, whoa, what's keto like? And it just blew up and it's Amazon just like totally took off and we're like, oh, we're just a keto brand.

[B]

Have you fascinating.

[A]

Have you let, like, as a marketer, have you let the. Those sort of, like, consumer trends pull you into different positioning. Yeah. Different product categories.

[B]

One thing that's awesome about us, like, now that we are, like, the form that we are, like, we're a protein bar, we're low sugar, we, like, don't have grains. Like, these are just things that will always be true about the bar, and there will always be trends just around clean label. So it's like, of course we'll lean into different trends as stuff changes, but, like, we don't have to change the product to do it. So, like, a good example is, like, keto came and went, and when it was really big, we put keto on our bar. Now fiber is really big. We've always had a lot of fiber. We just didn't call it out in the front of the pack. Now we're changing that. So we do call it out in the front of the pack.

[D]

I think people take the, like, stay on brand way too far. Way too far. 20% of what you should be doing should be arguably, like, not on brand, because that's how you learn, and that's how you take advantage of new emerging trends. So, like, it wasn't really that on brand to be keto, but we're like, oh, nine out of ten people are on the keto diet. We're gonna put keto in huge letters on the front. And of course, that then paid further dividends. The caveat to that is you can't marry that trend. If that trend goes away, you can't then dive.

[B]

As a result, there's a lot of, like, brands who, like, put it in their name, and a lot of them aren't around anymore. So it's like. It's also an ability to pivot. That doesn't mean you totally changing your product.

[D]

So, I mean, we could do, again, a whole, whole pot on that. Right? So you need enough value proposition such that that one that just popped off, when that dies, like, the other nine carry you through. Well, that was your only value prop. You're screwed.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

You have to build dynamic products.

[A]

But I guess, though, iq, bar, like, literally IQ is in the name. How have you had, like, as a brand guy? I'm like, how does I do bar?

[C]

Did you ever think about changing it?

[D]

Yeah, it's like smart food. Yeah. Smart food is popcorn. Like, I don't know, smart water. Like, it's the beauty of the ethereal, like, iq. Like, smart choice. Da, da, da. It's pretty even the. The trademark is dynamic.

[A]

So you never thought about changing the name at. At any point of like.

[D]

Well, not just that. It's IQ Bar. Like what an idiot. Why would you put the form factor. Yeah, you literally call it all and then you go into non bars, which doesn't make sense. Like. Right. So now I would take the other side of that, which is I actually love. Like, I think it's really valuable saying literally what the thing is. Like IQ Bar. Again, like caveman brain. We all shop like that and it's like bar. Like I always know it's bar. And. And then we, we. And this is a little bit kind of like runes, right? Like where it's like the U.

[C]

They.

[D]

They centered on the U with the umlaut. Like we centered on IQ. So IQ mix IQ, Joe. And. But the brand is still IQ bar. 95% of sales is bar. And now bites.

[B]

I mean our whole product line. Also, like, we haven't pivoted totally away from the brain. Like we have nutrients in all of our products that are good for the brain. Of course, like things like powder allows us to have more of that than something like bars. But it's like that will always be true whether people are looking for it or not. Because that's like the ethos of the brand.

[A]

Do you guys think you are a net winner or loser with the whole GLP1 craze?

[D]

Not winner big time. So there are three categories. So, so, so, so someone did a great study on this where they list all the categories that get hurt with GLP1s and like number one is like sweet baked goods. Absolutely. Going to get obliterated. Like Hostess, Whoever, whatever. That P.E. that sold that, like great move because you got out at the right time. Salty snacks. Not great. Not, not, not, not, not, not. There's three. Right? You're actually more likely to consume it if you're on glp. Ons you can. It's net positive, which is bar protein bars, meat snacks and yogurt. That's it. Three are net additive. Actually. Electrolytes will do well too because you have to add back. But on the food side, it's those three. We're one of those three. Right. So it's, it's, it's, it's incredible. Right? Um, protein, fiber. Basically it's a protein and fiber story and locale story.

[A]

Yeah.

[D]

Um, yeah, I would not want to

[B]

be a big bites also just like kind of.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So talk.

[A]

What's bites? This is a new product.

[B]

Brand new.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

This, this is a perfect example of how we are still not corporate at all. We had this idea, we turned it around incredibly quickly and now it's quickly all over.

[D]

Like, oh, it was insane. So like, well, okay, so this is another GLP1 thing, right? Portion size. And this is actually absent GLP1. Things are getting smaller in portion size over time. But definitely with GLP1, you want to sell smaller stuff. Yeah, but, but in terms of how we. We rolled it out, we. The bar set is a set that looks kind of boring, but there's a lot of interesting stuff happening within it. And one of the kind of interesting trends that we saw was smaller format bytes. A byte is just a small bar and we noticed a couple skus of competitors that were just like ripping on bytes because there is like in a bar set, like in Sam's Club, let's say there's eight bars and two bites. Or I think it was actually like nine bars and one bite. And the bite product was just crushing. And we're like, whoa. Like that's, that's really interesting. And we'd have conversations with our buyer and they would continue firm that it's crushing and they want there to that subset to be crushing even more. They want to grow that subset. We want to sell more stuff. So we had a collaborative interaction with our buyer and basically they were like, could you make something like that? And that got our wheels spinning. And then like, yeah, like, of course, like, ding. Why would we not do that? And it turns out there's a lot of reasons not to do it. It's incredibly hard.

[B]

We also co. We code our buyers so they're like, they're coated in

[D]

a saturated fat. So like.

[B]

But so they're like temp sensitive. It's the first temp sensitive thing we know.

[D]

So. So we had to violate. We have a laundry list of things that if they're all checked, we'll consider going into that category. One of them is no temp sensitivity. Absolutely not. Under no circumstances.

[C]

Because they're not shelf stable for as long.

[D]

Well, they're shelf stable. It's just. It'll melt.

[B]

It's really the like e comm of it all. You can't ship it during the summer or it's fine on a shelf. If it's like in a normal or

[D]

even brick and mortar, you can't put it on non temp controlled trucks. Like it's just risk area storage.

[C]

When you have chocolate chips and things like that.

[D]

Well, chips are okay because it can melt and reconstitute. Where. Where it's a problem is if the Full thing is coated that. That's a problem because it'll turn into a goo.

[C]

What?

[D]

Yeah, it'll just melt and then puddle in this area and then reconstitute and some.

[B]

Yeah. Like off the bite and. Yeah.

[A]

You ever saw old RX bar? Oh God, they. They're weird looking. You know, like I found one in

[C]

my truck the other day.

[D]

I bet you ate it, didn't you?

[A]

I still did. I'm like, I was so hungry.

[D]

No, but so, so we looked at bites and you can do bites in a non coded way. But we're like, whoa. And again they're just much better. This is like kind of dumbtails with them. Do stuff that's off brand. We're like, what if we violated that one principle because it helped us in 10 other ways. And we're like, what if we did coat it and everything in our set is cookie dough, peanut butter, chocolate. Da da. Like what if we came in with also mass market but PB&J still mass market. Nostalgic, kid friendly and adult friendly. And we coded it and so it's like a peanut butter center. And like the fruit coating. Yes. That would violate our, you know, sacred cow of don't do temp sensitive stuff. But like it unlocks so much else. And so we did that. Turns out it's very, very hard to manufacture.

[B]

No. How quickly did you. I forget the like launch journey like from actually starting to make samples to like it's on shelf. But it was.

[A]

Oh.

[D]

We had to find a new manufacturer because it takes specific equipment.

[A]

It's not even the same supply chain.

[D]

Not even the same supply chain. We had to find a new supplier of the coating which is like the coding in and of itself is its own formulation. That takes months and months. The viscosity you have to get into

[A]

stuff like that to your on shelf. What was the timeline?

[D]

I was. It was insanely quick. I want to say it was like four months.

[B]

Oh, wow. Yeah. It was like wild. Like everyone was like internally was like, we can't make packaging. Can't make a new product.

[A]

Packaging leak alone is like 90 days depending on where you're getting it.

[D]

Yeah, yeah. No, it was very uncomfortable still. It still is.

[B]

Yeah. But it's on shelves.

[D]

This is in real time. This is in real time. By the way. We're like living this what we're talking about now. We're like living today also because Will

[B]

also just is working on selling in slash has kind of sold in three new flavors that do not exist. We do not have them I love this.

[A]

This is great. We sell stuff.

[D]

Half the stuff we sell doesn't exist. That was Kickstarter. That's still true today. You're right.

[A]

This is very. Not corporate. It's like, not planned products. And then I'm going to sell things that don't even exist to see if somebody wants to buy them.

[B]

Will was just on a call with the team and somebody had a line that reminded me of just this. Of, like, our head of sales is always like, we're cowboys. If you want to join this team, like, it's not going to be smooth sailing. There's not smooth sailing. We just figure things out.

[D]

We can't. Which we thought would have a. Like, at some point, you corporatize. Like, we're more cowboys now than we've ever been. And it's scarier because it's at a bigger scale.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah.

[A]

It's when you make a mistake now those. There's zeros on those numbers.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

To pull out a theme that I think interesting. Like what you guys are basically saying is we have a demand first kind of model of how we think about business. Where is there a lot of demand? And then we'll flow towards that. We'll figure out products for that. Like, that's. That's the only way you can sell things that don't exist is if there's demand but you don't yet have a product. And so often people take the opposite approach. I'm going to come up with my pretty thing and I'm going to convince people they should want it. Whereas you're taking the totally opposite approach.

[B]

Because also we'll start for stuff like this of, like, excelling in. At, like, the club level. It's kind of like, okay, well, we have such a big PO that, like, we're gonna all figure it out. Yeah.

[D]

Like, bites will do, like, over 15 million in year one. And we didn't. It wasn't an ideal, an idea in our head until, like, late March.

[A]

Oh, my gosh.

[D]

Like, it's crazy. That is insane. Yeah.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

Like, do you know it took us whatever four or five years to get to 15 million.

[A]

Yeah.

[D]

Right. And that's just like, like. And that, I mean, that speaks to channel selection and product.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Product.

[C]

Product.

[B]

We're already in a lot of these stores, so, like, already know the buyers. And, like, these conversations are, like, about bringing additional product. Not necessarily a store that, like, we've never been in.

[A]

Can you expand on the. The. You sound like you know a lot about product.

[B]

Like this product and the product guy.

[A]

Yeah. When did that start? Like, was that like a day one thing, or did you figure out at some point you're like, oh, I gotta go so deep in this that I wasn't prepared to do.

[D]

I think the CEO has to, in food, has to be the product person. There are exceptions. You'll find exceptions. But my opinion is they. They have to because there's so much under the hood and the product's never done. Like, yeah. That's why I actually love the ag. One thing of, like, it's always a prototype. Like, they. They have a new formula of the same SKU that they've. That's their number one sku.

[A]

Yeah.

[D]

And that sounds inherently risky, but actually it's pretty brilliant. Like, the product is never done.

[B]

And so, yeah, I feel like you've been talk having a final formula for like 10 years now. And at this point, it's kind of just like, no. I feel like at this point we've accepted it. It's just like it's. There's always money, but that's counterintuitive.

[D]

You think like, oh, Snickers is Snickers. It's always been not Snickers. Like, no, like, Trump tariffs mean you have to go find a new, like, peanut butter supplier or whatever. Like, stuff happens and then consumer demands shift. And so if the CEO or the founder isn't the product person, like, oof. You're like, outsourcing the DNA of this.

[B]

I should note, though, because I feel like you always talk about this, but, like, you don't obviously, like, day one, come in and are like, good at product. I think it's like, in the very beginning, you were always mixing stuff in, like, our kitchen. But in the very beginning, you would hire, like, these random consultants to, like, help with certain things and they would teach you some things. But also, I think just the more reps you got, you realized, oh, like, I actually can do this without them. And I think I know more about this product than they do. But it also didn't happen overnight. It's like it was like through going through those reps with different people getting different perspectives that, like, you got to the point where you're like, I'm better than these people at this thing.

[D]

But I. I would say, like, well, then.

[A]

Or product, at least the part of

[D]

product that's most over, like, it's. It's not. It's. Having a good product is half. At most, half the battle. The supply chain and economics behind it is probably 70% of it. It's not whether you can make a good thing. It's, can you make a good thing for this number of cents?

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

And that is what's so, so, so, so hard. And that's. And by the way, those are two actually different skill sets. So those have to live together in one brain for. For it all to work.

[A]

And did you start. How quickly did you realize that was going to be true? You're like, oh, I'm gonna have to go really deep in this.

[D]

When we were losing a million dollars a year for five straight years, and I was like, oh, like, this cogs thing kind of has to be worked out at some point.

[B]

I feel like you definitely started caring about it before that.

[D]

I'm like, okay, no, but because I think you get so many false positives of, whoa. We have all this demand. Like, that's cool.

[A]

Do. Do you.

[D]

Is that flowing through to ebitda? Like, yeah, just selling a lot of stuff is not enough. You need to sell a lot of stuff and store it properly. And the supply chain has to be humming, and your payment terms have to be humming like, no will. And that is the product. Those are all part of the same thing.

[C]

It's easy to sell stuff to people when you're giving them more value than they're giving you. You know what I mean? It's like, if I said, hey, I'll give you a dollar for 50 cents, you'll take that as many times as I'll give it to you. You know, everybody would. And like, businesses actually the ability to, like, give somebody something and the amount of money they give you back, there is a margin and there's a profit, and they're happy to. And so, like, people. People are always like, it's amazing to me how quickly the market sniffs out arbitrage, where it's getting more value for its money than it should get. And so can you talk a little bit about how you did that in the supply chain?

[A]

Yeah. What were some of the moves that you did to, like, go find the million dollars or whatever it is that you want to negotiate?

[D]

We could do a whole thing on negotiation.

[B]

But I like your ability to find, like, what's going on in larger markets, like the almond market.

[C]

Oh, we're.

[D]

We are like, certainly micro and macro economists, for sure. We track almond futures, like, very closely. We track cocoa futures very close. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You have to be tracking that. That is the difference between profitability and losing money. I mean, we buy whatever £15 million of almonds a year. Right. It's very different if we buy them for $3 versus $4. So it's just out of necessity. It's looking at the P and L. Okay, what are our line items that contribute the most cost in use? We think of everything as a bar. So what is the cost in use of almond meal? What's the cost in use of almond butter? What's the cost in use of fiber syrup? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then what? It's kind of basic, but take. What are all the suppliers of that thing? There are five of them. Okay. Have we called all of them? Have we hammered all of them? We tested all the products. The thing still has to be good and work in the product, but it's relatively commoditized. So cool. What? And have we pitted all of them against each other? Like one thing you learn is

[B]

almond flour doesn't seem.

[C]

What is. What is the way you do that? Are you cutthroat about it? Are you more partnership oriented towards it?

[D]

No, no, cutthroat. The partnership thing, I think, is mostly a myth. Is a myth. Partnership is me sending you wires of a lot of money that I'm your partner. Like, I'm going to negotiate as hard as I can against this is very

[B]

unemotional, which I think is awesome. It's like perfect for this kind of business because, like, I feel like most people wouldn't be.

[D]

You're not going to do the deal if it's not worth it for you to do the deal. So that's.

[C]

How do you know when you're at the bottom with somebody?

[D]

The best way is have pit five people against each other. You will find the bottom. That's what. This is why RFPs exist for a reason, right? Like. Like, we never actually do a real rfp, but we do a semblance of an RFP constantly. You're constantly running.

[B]

I forgot the latest example. I'm just gonna use almonds, for example. But like, you also, like, will randomly, like, even though you've done this recently and you know that we're at the bottom or you got a new deal. Like, your passes, you would be like, I see almonds are down 10%. Our price hasn't changed.

[D]

Okay, yeah, that's a great point. Right? No one had. So my first job out of college, we made cost models for like piping for oil and gas companies. Right? So what goes into a pipe? It's labor, it's freight, it's steel. And let's say I buy buy piping at $10 a pound or whatever. All those sub Components have markets under them that go up, down, sideways. And the cost model is the weighted average of all of those. And so six months later, that cost model, if it's built properly, will tell me I shouldn't be paying $10, I should now be paying $8, $7 or more. And when it tells you you should be paying less, you, you're silly to not act on that. Call the supplier. Hey, man, steel's way down. Like, I see you charged me the same thing. Like, why are you charging me the same thing? You're making more margin. You should be passing that through to me.

[B]

But also like, it's sort of like gambling where, like, you will make like, determine that you have to do a flat rate for some of these costs because you think it's going to go up.

[D]

Contract. So we contract. This is to contract or not to contract.

[C]

It is kind of like hedging, which

[D]

is what you want to ask. Yeah, no, no, it's fully hedging, totally. But we've also gotten burned on that. So, like, I'll give you one random example. We bought just a stupid amount of almonds during COVID because every input went up. Every single input went up, except for one almonds because there was such a glut because they couldn't get them on boats to go to China, India, Europe, et cetera, that the glut created domestically a depressed price. And we're like, oh, the one input that went down was the one we contracted at. And so we were paying above market for like a year. So it's, it's not that it always, like, you can make a good argument. You should not hedge as a startup. If you're Hershey, sure, hedge, right. But, but you should always, you should think about it. And suppliers, if you're like tight with them and you do a lot of business with them, they'll kind of give you a little inside baseball. And like, like the market doesn't really know this, but we've seen the like, weather reports and like, we're pretty sure it's going this way. So we think you should contract. Okay, now we'll contract.

[C]

One of the reason why you have to have the mindset you have is that internally Walmart, Costco, Sam's club, have entire teams that their job is to do like your pipe analysis you were talking about. They do that with every single product and category. And so they look at bars and they know your ingredients and they're like, this is what we think they're paying. And so whether you're Paying it or not. They think you're paying that and they are going to negotiate with you as if you're paying that in the prices, the wholesales they're asking from, from you. So you really like all up and down the chain, it just demands it that you're getting the best price.

[D]

You've set an anchor. So with Bytes, our anchor is bars. And so, so those retailers were anchor off that and they said what's the premium on a smaller format? A bite. A premium on a cost per ounce basis to a bar. We're willing to accept a 13% premium because it's harder to make smaller format things. You can't amortize the packaging across a bigger thing. Da da da. But it shouldn't be more than 13%. And yours is 15%. Like why is it 15%? They will literally have that conversation because

[C]

somebody in their office.

[A]

That's right. They're so deep.

[C]

Well, that's their business.

[A]

It's their business.

[C]

Their business. Just like it's his business to like run a really tight ship on costs.

[A]

So you're, you're going crazy deep in product and supply chain. You're on the marketing side.

[B]

Yeah, Ecom marketing side.

[A]

Ecom marketing side. At what point did the business flip from like predominantly E Com to predominantly retail?

[B]

Probably last year. Yeah, probably last year. I think it's really club. Like just the introduction of like having club and mass, like, yeah, Walmart, Target club. Because it's like that makes it sound like ecom's not growing. Like we still double every year but like, like we're doing way more than double every year on retail. So now they're just growing way past me. And I, I honestly prefer that though because it's like if I was doing the same thing, we'd be in a way less healthy spot online. So it's a little less stressful.

[A]

Would you mind giving us like a sense of how you drive the E comm business and, and how that's changed over time. So like, yeah, how do you, how do you market? How do you acquire customers? I would just assume that bars are hard to sell on gain the Internet.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I mean, mental model for me. I'm like, and I'm an ad guy. I love ads. Like, you should make some ads out of this. But how the hell do you pull this off?

[B]

I feel like that's why we leaned into Amazon so much in the beginning. Just because like it was just way more efficient. People are willing to buy bars there. People are used to buying bars there. So I think that was a huge, like, stepping stone of, like, getting in front of people who are willing to buy this category online to begin with and convince them to buy. So really, we went all in on Amazon pretty early on. We started. I feel like maybe when I came on, we were spending the same amount on Amazon and our website. And just really quickly, our customer acquisition cost was, like, half on Amazon.

[A]

Oh, wow.

[B]

Yeah. So we just, like, went all in on Amazon. And at the time, it was when people were telling us, like, don't go all in on Amazon. You don't have your customer data. Like, that won't matter as much. But, like, honestly, luckily, we never really listened to them because now we're bestseller in our category, and we absolutely could not have gotten there if we just pivoted into Amazon a year or two ago.

[A]

Yeah. And Amazon's also a great channel where value totally wins.

[B]

Totally. And also people look for ideas on Amazon. That's a really interesting thing because it helped with retail, so.

[A]

Oh, like, the buyers are looking.

[D]

We got into Walmart because of our Amazon.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

They look at market share, which is really cool. Absolutely. Target is really big on this right now. They're looking for people with digital heat to bring in. It's challenging.

[B]

Yeah. And Amazon's, like, one of the best ways to, like, tell who has that, because, like, it's a ledger.

[D]

Amazon is a public ledger for every category.

[B]

Totally.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And I also, like, we always on Amazon, I think pretty early on we realized, like, if we want this to be a business that doubles every year, if we're constantly growing, like, this is not. We're not finding profitability on Amazon, or at least not in the beginning. So we were kind of like, we just want to grow as much share as we can here, focus on breaking even. And now that we're at enough share, now we're profitable on Amazon.

[C]

Partially because you probably have a lot of branded search on Amazon where you're not having to pay for the acquisition.

[B]

Totally. And because we have a lot of subscribers and people who just, you know, come back too.

[A]

Where does the branded search come from? Like, are you generating demand? Is that from retail? Is that from, like, are you running television nationally? Like, how do you do the demand part?

[B]

It's a mix of all of it, honestly. We spend a lot on search ads. We spend a lot on audio. We're, like, big into audio for brand awareness. Radio, podcasts. We do a lot of streaming TV as well. We don't do linear. We probably will do linear at some point, but we do don't do linear TV right now. So those are like our big acquisition like brand awareness channels. But otherwise we're always doing the basics. Everyone else is doing Meta, Google, TikTok.

[A]

How you, how do you. Here's how both of you answered this. But how do you think about the customer? So like the initial sort of days of building the brand and the product, it was very focused on like brain and brain health, brain performance. How has that changed? Like today if I'm like 2026, we're in 2026. Yeah, we're in 2026.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

I never.

[C]

You need an IQ bar friend.

[A]

I need to eat like 10.

[B]

We should brought more.

[A]

Yeah. So 2026, who is the customer of the product today? Is that different from.

[B]

I would say it's like there's more customers is a better way to put it of like there's always going to be a small segment that is really into like longevity and the brain. Is that a large portion of our customers? No, but like they'll always be there, they'll always exist and we always want to like have some sort of ads that speak to them. But now a lot of it is people who just need healthy fuel on the go. So like we found that some of our bigger audiences are like nurses for instance, like people who like need something really quick from their locker or like school teachers or even like, you know, you have your personal trainer or just somebody who like actually really cares and nerds out on the nutrition and they're buying it for that reason. Or like another thing is that 25% of people are lactose intolerant. Yeah, like no one really talks about that and like they'll just put whey in everything. So I think there's also like a pretty big market for plant based people. So there's so many people who just buy us also for the dietary reasons, whether that be no dairy, no gluten, no soy. Like there's always. We have like eight different cohorts of people that like fall into all of this and we just try to speak to each of them where they are and based on what they're looking for.

[D]

As you get bigger and more omnichannel, there's the thing of like don't try to be everything to everyone. Like actually we are trying to be everything to everyone at a minimum most things to most people. I actually like disagree with that. That line.

[A]

You can start the line. I think, I think it's a. Earlier you start that way.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Like we put in retailers, like we're massive people.

[D]

We need to win kids, we need to win moms, we need to win dad.

[A]

Yeah.

[D]

And we. That comes down even to like, the amount of protein. Like, women don't want a 30 gram protein bar.

[C]

Right.

[B]

Like, also, like, we care more about having like, like real food and real ingredients in our product. And so do the people who eat us versus people. Like, if somebody wants a bar that's just 30 grams of protein and they like, do not care what the label says, they're probably not gonna buy us. And like, that's okay.

[A]

Has there been a stage of growth that's been harder than others? Like a size of business or a size of supply chain?

[B]

Like, I feel like the COVID times were tough mainly because of supply chain.

[D]

Yeah, I would say, yeah, put that aside because that was just like a freak thing for me. It was like the first couple years and now.

[A]

Now. Why now?

[B]

I think it's because we've been doubling every.

[D]

We have.

[B]

Like, once you get so big, you're just like.

[D]

If you're like, well into the nine figures, our rubric is double every year. Double everything.

[B]

We realize we don't need to do that anymore. But it's like hard to change your mindset where you're like, no, but like, we've been doing that because we double.

[D]

Our CAGR was over a percent from 2018 through last year through 2025. So of course, why wouldn't you.

[A]

That all sounds painful.

[D]

If it was like eight years, like, there's like, so why not the ninth year? At what point are you like, oh, no, let's grow 20%? Like, no, we've done it every year. So do it again while that turns out. It's like, quite hard to do that when you're.

[C]

It's kind of mathematically impossible at some point.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

Yeah. So I feel like we're like, getting close. Close to that.

[D]

But we still want to do it and we're going to try to.

[B]

I mean, look at this. We just, we'll turn things around as quickly as we can. And like, it's also like all that makes it sound like Bar isn't still growing. And it is like, we're very lucky that, like, some things are just working and the, like, more money we put into them, they're able to scale. Like on Amazon too. Like, we've never had a downturn in Bar. Like, Bar is always up and up. Like, every month is our best month. So it's like, that's awesome. But yeah, if we want to, we've Realized if we want to double, why do you.

[A]

Okay, so, but why did you want to start on this? Like, we want to double every year. Is that a success metric? Is that like a strategic thing?

[D]

Get the hell out and like take, take a long nap, man.

[B]

Like, I think part of this comes back to like when the business started and our goal to like get to 25 million and sell. Like, I think it's just a mindset thing. We're like, okay, like we need to show that we're really high growth. And at the time it's also like profitability was unclear if that mattered. So it's like it's always just been in our mind that we have to double every year. Even though we just.

[D]

Do you want to be in this game for 10 years or 5 years or 20 years? At some point it's like, okay, we're gonna have to get to X and top line. Like the faster we grow, the faster you get to X. I think it's also multiple.

[B]

We always thought the multiples would matter more and be bigger.

[A]

Like multiples.

[D]

Yeah, because, because we always every. We've been for sale in terms of

[B]

like what people would. Yeah. Give us.

[D]

We've been for sale every year. We haven't been selling the business, but we are always forced.

[B]

No one was aware of it, but we were for sale.

[D]

So like you want to at any moment be like, oh, we're an ultra high growth company with these great products and da da, da. Like I want someone to approach me at any point and me be able to tell that story. So every year we were like, okay, let's keep doing it in case that happens. And then, and then it just becomes like muscle memory and.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

But it's, it's, it's comes down to like the whole bottoms up versus top down. Like most people do bottoms up, which is like we're in this many retail accounts and this is my velocities and we generally grow at this rate online and blah blah, blah. And that spits out a number. And we're going to grow 30% and our. We do everything top down.

[A]

I want to grow double. How do I actually make that true?

[D]

Exactly.

[A]

You're a psycho.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Totally legit.

[C]

Yeah.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

How will you do if it slows down at some point?

[A]

Yeah.

[D]

Oh, I mean, we're not gonna grow a hundred percent. This will be the first year we don't grow a hundred percent.

[A]

In eight years it'll be 93%.

[B]

No, it'll be something more reasonable.

[D]

No, no. But no, now I think it'll shift to growing. Like our new like north star will be 50% growth. But that's still hard, right? Like that's still ultra high growth numbers.

[B]

Right?

[D]

Like all the big CPGs grow like 8% or barely.

[C]

Well, think about it. Let's say you're at 200 million. You guys haven't said revenue. You don't need to. But let's say you're at 200 million. 50% growth means you're adding a hundred million in nominal revenue. How long did it take you to build the company? Company to 100 million in revenue. You know, you're talking about adding an IQ bar at year eight or whatever every year.

[B]

Totally.

[D]

And we sell roughly a dollar a bar. So that means you have to sell that many more bars.

[C]

Million more bars.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Which you just start to get into. Like, how many people are in the United States? Like, what does that mean? I've got to get another bar.

[A]

Every category again, how many people are consuming bars? How many more bars can we get people to consume? Are we just taking share?

[D]

Well, hence, hence bites and things where, okay, now we pull in kids and now we pull in glp.

[B]

One consumer, like different points of the day. Like, I think part of the goal is to every single one of our categories can be consumed by one person in one day. Which was like the goal whether people do or not. Because they can have a coffee, they can have an electrolyte mix later in the day, they can have a bar as a snack or maybe a bite later on as a snack.

[D]

Like drinkware, phone cases, like wallets. Right. You will like, there's only so many people.

[C]

The TAM is real.

[D]

Yeah. And then. But that doesn't mean your job's done. Like, you just move over here a little bit.

[C]

Yeah.

[D]

And oh, new tam.

[A]

Like, yeah, okay. We've talked product and how psycho you are. We've talked a little bit marketing and how that's changed over time. How. And I mean, this double thing is just insane. Guys, how do you manage team? And how are you thinking about growing the team? And how have they responded to this? We gotta double next year, guys. Go find me $100 million.

[D]

I think part of it is both models can work having a small team and a lot of outsourced functionalities. And the inverse of that part of it is like, what is your core competency? Is hiring and team building a core competency? It isn't for us. I'm not good at hiring. And this we can get into. Me and Mike have a whole contrarian we both love nepotism. Right. Case in point. Right.

[B]

But, like, yeah, but even before me, our creative director, who's been with us pretty much since the beginning at this point is like, one of my best friends from childhood. But again, it's like, who will agree to work with you when you're like, we're no one. We can't pay a lot. Please believe in me.

[D]

And. But at some point, that runs out, right? You run out of people you trust or are married to or was a childhood friend. You know what I'm saying? Unless you're polygamous or whatever.

[C]

I don't know. Maybe not scalable.

[A]

Unless you're. It's not scalable lot.

[D]

So hiring was not a core competency of ours. And so we're like, all right, can we just. Can we do the thought exercise of Create a really small team? Like, we're 15 people still. Still. Yeah, Today. Whoa. And create, that's the hub. And then have spokes go out to a bunch of outsourced stuff, third parties, paid ads, third party. Amazon agency, Costco broker, a Walmart broker.

[B]

And I feel like it's also like. Like, it's tough for the people who are on the team because obviously they need to kind of do the work of multiple people, and they need to be the type of people who, like, are really all in on work and, like, really high producers and care a lot. So that's helped us. And it doesn't work for everyone we hire, so it doesn't always work out.

[D]

And like, you know where you can't hide when there's 15 of you.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

You cannot hide. You are the CEO of your department. If the department's failing, it's not like, oh, where does the buck stop? It's like, John, like, what the hell? You know, like. And that's so much better. And there are people who like that. There are people who, like, extreme accountability. Right. They wanted to be. Be rewarded and yada, yada. But, like, there are people that like that. And then most people hate that. Most people, like, hiding a little bit or the ability to hide.

[A]

Are you guys a fairly, like, flat organization? Like, structurally, then, like, there's 15 people completely flat.

[B]

Yeah, pretty much. Yeah.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

Like, we all talk to everyone in our, like, little silos. Like, we're not totally flat, but, like, we don't have, like, middle managers. Like, everyone does stuff and the.

[D]

Everyone is the CEO of their department. Like, that's the best way I can put it. They make. They don't have to ask me for Jessa doesn't have to ask me, like, can I do this? She just does it because.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, like, I'll give you, like, a heads up. I'll be like, by the way, I'm getting a new agency. This is the cost difference. But, like, I've already done the negotiation to make sure we get as low as possible and that, like. Like, we're in a good spot. So it's like, by the time I'll, like, mention it, he'll be like, cool.

[D]

And. And. And what are, like, the downstream impacts? Less meetings. Like, you know, what kills an organization? Meetings? You know, fewer people mean less meetings because single brains hold multiple functions at once. So a meeting is just two things. Meeting. If they're already in the same brain, there's no meeting. So less people means less meanings, more doing.

[A]

Oh, man. Okay, you want to ask the relationship. Oh, yeah, transition to that, because that is the perfect. Like, that's the perfect moment.

[C]

Okay, so we've got a smaller team. The two of you are working in very close quarters. You are romantically involved. Like, when have you guys really gone at it on an issue? What's your biggest disagreement you've ever had?

[D]

I wouldn't say we actually have not disagreed on that much. I would say, for me, it would be, like, upgrading of lifestyle, generally speaking.

[B]

You know, that's fair.

[D]

That is fair because, like, all my friends went into, like, banking or consulting or whatever, and they all, like, did the thing, or they get the slightly nicer apartment every other year, and then, whatever, they get tickets to the Celtics. And meanwhile, I'm, like, living in a basement, then living in, like, a really, really, like, apartment main floor. And then, well, we made it to the main floor, which is a big, big step. But we were. Jess and I, first apartment that we lived together in was just. I can't even tell you how bad it was, but. And we were. I was like, formulating the product of a multimillion dollar business in the kitchen of the apartment.

[B]

Didn't exist to me because, like, there's just, like, bats of peanut butter everywhere. Like, I cannot come in and cook.

[D]

It's just like, oh, my God. And then I, like a skunk was in. In town when I was formulating for a big, like, new product. And, like, there's a lot of scar tissue there.

[B]

There's a convention there anyway, but.

[D]

But so at some point, like, I'm actually. I am a psycho. Like, I could actually live like that for a while. And Jess is like, this is like, crazy. Like, we gotta Start upgrading our lifestyle. And so then we got actually like an, a nicer apartment and then we moved to Miami and got an even nicer apartment. And but the like, crazy thing of all of that, and I think I might have talked about this on our. When I did the operators the first time was like, I actually couldn' Afford that without a secondary transaction. And so I'm very, very pro, Pro secondary.

[B]

This is also like, you couldn't afford that without the secondary transaction because Will will still choose to pay himself as little as humanly possible to still survive and pay bills.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

So like, that's part of it. It's like if you were making like a normal salary that you maybe should be. Wouldn't be a problem.

[D]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I, I had like more or less set my own salary, so it's all self imposed, but for I have this weird complex where I'm lowest paid person.

[A]

Yeah, that.

[C]

Yeah, that's weird.

[A]

That's a therapy thing.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

Gonna do that today.

[D]

Well, it's all. This is all therapy, isn't it?

[B]

The point is there was a minor secondary transaction and I just keep pushing forward.

[C]

What was the purchase? What is the purchase that you was the most like, hey, I feel like this is a we made it moment.

[B]

I would say, honestly, like, we don't. You're like, complaining with me, but, like, we don't spend a lot of money. Like, I, I made Will go on a trip to Switzerland, which I feel like he's complained about a bit because at the end it's much fun.

[D]

Don't go to St. Moritz. If you value your finances, you're frugal.

[B]

That's.

[D]

Yeah. No, it's not.

[B]

No. But it was one of those where like, we planned it a little ahead. So I think it's like Will didn't put together all the expenses until the end. And he was like, you spent how much on that trip? And I'm like, don't worry about it. We paid it. It's all fine. So little things like that, like, I'll bully Will into taking trips and to flying first class and like actually making it like, nice. Because I'm also like, we never leave our apartment. We're always working. If we're going to leave, let's at least make it like a nice experience.

[A]

I think it's a superpower, though. I mean, it's a little crazy, but, like, I think it's a, it's a superpower to be willing to go to zero. Like, I'm fine with zero. We'll Build up from zero again. You know, I think that's a theme in a lot of people that we've about talked talk to is like their willingness to just go eat the lowest run is total.

[D]

But cpg doesn't matter what level that is. Cpg. Like, we're just like in the. We're on. I'm on a factory floor often. Like, that's cpg. What we do is not sexy. Like the first class going to Switzerland. That's not what I do.

[B]

We do that because, like, we work every single weekend. That was the first trip I think we've taken in like 10 years. Like, even for our honeymoon, we like only did like a weekend trip because we didn't have time to stop working and that. And also we got married New Year's Eve because we would have time off work.

[D]

None of this is advisable. I wouldn't like, write a how to book on any of this.

[A]

I actually, I'm a fan of the seven day week.

[B]

I mean, he, he probably feels the same way.

[A]

Okay, so we like to finish these with this segment called the Titan 10. We're going to throw questions at you. I love it when we have, like, partners, and in your case, also a couple. The answers are great. Sometimes you get some weird looks. Let's see if we could pull some out. I'm gonna throw questions. You guys give us, like the gut feel responses. You can choose who wants to answer or you can both answer them because you don't want to. Okay, so first question, you're. I'm gonna strand you on a desert island, and every week I'm giving you a piece of paper. There's three numbers on the piece of paper. These three numbers tell you how the business is doing. You get nothing else. What are the three numbers?

[D]

For me, I think of the business, about the business holistically. So I'm a. I'm a simple man, right? Like net revenue growth rate and ebitda. Like, that's all I need.

[B]

No, for like the overall business, I. I would probably agree. Of course, if you're talking like just E commerce, I would say revenue, customer acquisition cost, and lifetime value.

[A]

Cool. You get a book, you get to bring a book or any. Some kind of resource, something thing. But it can't be about business. What is it?

[B]

I feel like I read more than. Well, I recently read a book called the Compound. It's like Love island meets Lord of the Flies. It's really fascinating.

[C]

What was that?

[B]

Love island meets Lord of the Flies. Wow.

[C]

Okay.

[B]

It's. It's like, in a dystopian future. It's, like, really fascinating. It's a lot about, like, people's obsession

[D]

with, like, items or the flies on a deserted island. Right. Like, that's a nice. Nice tie in there, too. I bring a chessboard, I think.

[A]

Oh, yeah, you're right. You're the chess guy.

[C]

Also, what's your elo?

[D]

My elo?

[C]

Yeah. Do you know what's an elo? Okay, never mind. It's like a rating in chess.

[D]

Oh, rate. Rating. I was at my peak. It was, like, 1700.

[C]

Okay, very good.

[B]

He was New Jersey state chess champion.

[C]

Really?

[B]

In third grade.

[A]

This is not surprising now, listening to this whole, like, playing back the whole conversation. All of this makes so much more sense. Sense. We should start chess.

[B]

Jeez.

[A]

Okay, so what's your one contrarian belief about business? That you. That a lot of people will think you're crazy for.

[D]

I mean, I have many. One of them would be that you're not. That that money. Like, money isn't a good motivator. You have to be intrinsically motivated. I think. I actually think that's wrong. I think the. What motivates you is a moving target. Certainly has been for me, but at certain points, it's absolutely been money.

[A]

Do you have a different answer?

[B]

It's a good question. I. I think marketing people won't love this, but, like, I don't think everything needs, like, perfect measurement.

[A]

Love that single most important word in leadership.

[D]

Trust.

[B]

I was gonna say trust. Yeah.

[A]

It's the single most important word in business.

[D]

Grow.

[B]

Sure. I'll co sign that.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

Let's have fun. Best meal of the day in Washington.

[B]

Why, breakfast for sure. I'm all in on NASA. So thrilled that you guys have some.

[A]

Will, I don't.

[D]

It's so funny because I run a food company, but I don't like romanticized food.

[B]

Forgets about eating constantly. We have no food in our fridge. We order three times a day. I'm not kidding. It's really embarrassing. It's just when we, like, realize, oh, like, I haven't eaten all day. Like, where. What can we get now?

[D]

Oh, I'm gonna go with a boring one. Dessert. Just dessert.

[A]

Dessert. Oh, yes. Okay. Most overrated growth tactic.

[B]

TikTok Shop.

[A]

Whoa. You're gonna have fun tomorrow.

[D]

I know.

[A]

Will.

[D]

I was overrated. Like, growth is growth, right? Like, I actually think there are brands that grew, you know, have used TikTok Shop to. To great fanfare.

[B]

No, totally. Like, just not for me.

[A]

Cool.

[D]

Oh, that's a good one I don't I don't pass pass on that for

[A]

me most underrated growth tactic.

[B]

Oh retailer websites. Oh yeah like things like Sam's club.com people don't put good people on these things so it's you just need people who like generally are good at like Amazon search and stuff and like try a little bit and does really well oh my God but just like there's so little competition so under invested that

[D]

is so good I love that Price,

[A]

price price hell yes.

[D]

Yeah yeah and as my second answer would be product development like there just are products that if you create them there's such a pull I mean we've seen it with bytes I didn't I say that because we just lived through this if you make it demand will fall out of the sky that's so

[A]

good good guys we're done that's the pod.

[D]

Thanks for having so good.