CEO of Oats Overnight on the Importance of Community & Core Values

CEO of Oats Overnight on the Importance of Community & Core Values Speaker 1: Welcome back to another episode of Chew on This. Today we have Brian Tate, who's founder and CEO of Oats Overnight. And if you haven't tried this product, you're probably living under a rock. Brian, for the few people who don't know you, first of all, thank you so much for joining our episode. But give the viewers a quick two minutes of who you are and what the hell is Oats Overnight. Speaker 2: Yeah, so great to be on the show here. Thank you for having me. So Oats Overnight is a high-protein oatmeal that you prep at night. It's ready when you wake up. It comes in over 60 different flavors. We make all of our products with our customers. Pretty unique. Still largely e-comm, but we've expanded into grocery nationwide with Walmart, Target, Whole Foods, and others, as well as Club this year with Costco and Sam's. So seeing some great growth, just a new model of building products with our customers and using data to continue that. My background is pretty unique. I played poker professionally for 12 years. Before that, I played Magic the Gathering competitions on the Pro Tour. So super nerd, love data, love optimization, and it's been a fun journey the last 10 years building this company. Speaker 1: Before we get started, a quick word about today's sponsor, Instant. As a brand, you know you're spending real money to drive traffic to your site. Problem is, 90% of the traffic is anonymous. You don't know who they are, and once they leave, it's pretty much impossible to get them back. That's where Instant comes in. It identifies up to 10 times more of those lost shoppers, so you can send more abandonment emails, build stronger retargeting audiences, and actually win back that lost revenue. 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Are there still times where you're like, The days I want to just go play poker, and you probably still do, and are there times where you've been able to utilize some of the skill sets you did when having the patience of playing a game like poker? Give us a little bit of that background. Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a ton of overlap, surprisingly. I started out playing poker when the online boom happened, Chris Moneymaker on the World Series in 2003, and it just popped up overnight. At that time, nobody was really good at poker. There wasn't a lot of data to make decisions. Live poker is very hunch-based. So with the introduction of online, it created this new surface area of data to just optimize and make better decisions, apply game theory, and just be really rational with that. And so I was at the front lines of that. And over that 12 years, started out playing $50 buying games, ended up playing the largest cash games that ran in the world. So it was a fun journey. In terms of overlap, You know, with Oats Overnight, I didn't want to play poker forever. I kind of hit the top of that mountain with poker, very grateful for that experience. But I wanted to build something with equity, create something that was less solitary, had a team, but lots of overlap in terms of the way we evaluate risk and think about decision making. A lot of our core values, one of our core values is rational, which is You know, being process-oriented versus results-oriented. In business, a lot of people rate the quality of a decision based solely on the result. We think this is a big mistake. Being results-oriented is actually an insult in the poker world. It shows that you're leaning too heavily on the result and not thinking about inputs. And it's very easy to get distracted by short-term variance and outputs when you're making decisions, especially at an early stage. A lot of these things are out of your control. Of course, you can influence outcomes, but you can never control them. And so I think as a leader, especially, it's important to be mindful of this as you're managing team and really benchmarking your team. In the way that you want them to go and build. So, you know, giving our team leadership and downward the ability to Maybe not face all the wrath of a bad mistake or a bad outcome, like really judging them based on the process or the rational thought that went into those decisions is a much better way to lead. And you know, you find your team will take chances that they may have not taken otherwise. A good example of this is like magnitudes of outcomes. You know, if your team, if you have a teammate who could, you know, take a shot at a 10 to 1 return But it fails 50% of the time. They might be risk averse and not want to take that risk, report a failure up, especially if your culture is overly punitive for failures or misses. That could have your team being too risk averse. But encouraging them to take those shots and find those shots, which as a leader, you'd want to take that shot all day, can make for some pretty good results over your entire team. So lots of really enjoy core values and a lot of those core values that we have today Make their way from poker logic. Unknown Speaker: That's really cool. Speaker 1: Now, I want to go back to for just a few seconds, like coming up with the idea of like Oats Overnight and this being the product that you wanted to start with, right? Obviously, you had a routine where oatmeal played a big part into your life. Tell me a little bit more about the ethos of why this product and did you have conviction in it turning into what it is today from day one? Or was it like, hey, I just feel like more people need access to this? I want to start with this as an idea. Speaker 2: Not a lot of conviction, honestly. It was a product for myself. I wanted to eat healthy, stay in shape, didn't have time to do it. Mason jar and spoon overnight oatmeal prep was pretty tedious. And surprisingly, a pre-packed product didn't exist in 2014, 2015 when it was just homemade. So it started out as a bit of a side project and was excited to kind of bring that, experiment with that and see if it would work. So pretty naive coming into this, of course, didn't have any experience in e-com or CPG at all. So we hired some advisors in the manufacturing front and sort of got to work in a very small scale way. But you know, we started out the product. This is a good little lesson that we learned was, you know, the product was very fitness focused. It was for me, I was looking to stay in shape. There's a barbell on the packaging. We were advertising protein with milk, which is funny now that ultra high protein is all the rage. We got a lot of pushback for advertising 30 grams, 32 grams, people saying it's too much. It's funny how that pendulum swings too. But now we're launching a 30 gram version of the product in Costco in January, which we're excited about. We had to look at the data and really see that fitness enthusiasts who would make this homemade and really cared about every little input in their recipe were actually some of our biggest critics. And that's who we were aiming to sell to. So we learned really quickly by listening to our customers that everyone else was more... People that maybe weren't so inclined for fitness or health or wanted to learn better, wanted to do better, but maybe were stopping at a Starbucks or McDonald's drive-thru in the morning. I'm rather than being super diligent with their routines and health. It was resonating more with them. So we actually changed some of the messaging, changed some of the serving sizes, the protein counts, removed the barbell, and made it more of a broad, you know, mainstream appeal. Still, of course, we have a lot of fitness folks that love it, of course, and athletes and all that, but, you know, listening to our customers early on helped us optimize that in the early stage. Speaker 1: Great, great insight there. Now, I want to turn into what I think is probably one of the most powerful parts of your business from outside looking in, the fact that it is a heavily subscription model-based brand. Most brands and most founders and operators, they dream of figuring out how to get more than 10% of their buyers to subscribe. And then you look at like Amazon Subscribe and Save and that works out for brands and builds it up a little bit. And then we have all these platforms and tooling that's trying to help it. And it's almost like working from a point of zero and keep Growing to getting more subscribers and making the business a better channel that can drive subscription, whereas for you guys, subscription was... From the get go and something that was like the ethos of, hey, almost every consumer that comes in is going to be a subscriber. Tell us a little bit about that decision making. Were there times where you're like, I don't know if I want to do this model? Are there times where you look at the churn and you're like, damn, should we offer, push a little bit more one-time purchase? Give us a little bit more how you fundamentally built this subscription first approach. Speaker 2: Yeah, so my hot take right now is DTC doesn't work without a subscription model. You need a product that has high frequency consumption to make it make sense. I mean, it can be a good supplementary channel with a lower frequency product if you're expanding distribution in grocery and retail. But overall, if you're trying to be DTC first, you really need to have, to justify that big CAC investment and acquisition spend, you really need to have High repeat and high repeat only comes in my mind with subscription. And we've really radically changed the business from shifting to a one-time offer. But if you want to subscribe, subscribe. ...into a really pure play subscription offering with a big discount and heavy incentives around that. So looking at cohorts and payback periods, which is just your CAC investment, how quickly that pays back over time, how many months after your margin, has led us to pushing for more pure play subscription. One of the metrics we focused on was first-time subscription rates. So if you bring someone in and you give them a one-time purchase offer, and then you expect them to come back if they like it, specifically if that offer is a sample offer, that's a really challenged approach because the friction is just too high. Some people may like it and still not Remember to come back. And so you're really getting them to subscribe on first purchase, risk reduction, money back guarantees, all that stuff. Make sure it's comfortable for them to take that leap. Usually a big discount has been secret to our success. And last thing I'll say, which I think is maybe a little counterintuitive, but in a time of rising CACs, the best thing we did is remove our sample offering. I think it makes a lot of sense for customers to think, or brands to think rather, that if CACs rising, let's get it easier. By reducing cap, we'll get a lower AOV intro product. But if you look at subscription, if you're looking at the first time subscription rate or acquisition orders that are subscription as a percentage of total orders, you'll see that that number is very low for any sample offer. Again, you're giving customers a chance to sample and come back. There's too much friction in that approach. So removing the sample offering, pushing up first time AOV, offering a first time percentage off to subscribe has been our secret for success there. And, you know, it's really radically changed our payback periods, our LTVs, our retention. And of course, focusing on product quality has been, you know, further key to that success. Speaker 1: Now, you know, you guys have You guys have expanded flavors almost at a rate of where you almost know something's going to work because you guys have incorporated your customers so well into it. Can you give me an example of when maybe a flavor that you launched with pretty high conviction because it was with your customers, if there's even an example of this, but the retention data or the subscription data just didn't What did you guys read? What did you do from there? And I'm curious on how to adjust when sometimes the signs just aren't pointing to what you thought it would be. Speaker 2: Yeah, the beautiful part about observing the community, we have a Facebook group called Oats Overnight VIPs, 100,000 members. It's a private group. So we have thousands of comments a day talking about the product. It's a pretty insane community. We get to watch all the chatter and that but also look at the data. And so having a handle on the data really helps be high conviction in the face of that local minority when people are saying, you know, we launched like Group Beer Float, for example, which we had pretty high conviction. It's a weird oatmeal flavor, but really highly asked for and sought after. That didn't make the cut. It didn't perform as well as we hoped. And so we cut it. It was just pure rage in the VIP group, which of course, there's something to be said for cult favorites and all that. So we may do something to bring it back. Being able to see the retention data on that and the ratings at scale helped us confidently choose to not launch that. And I think when we do make changes to formulas in market, which we do, we take a very iterative approach to product development, which is rare. We're constantly tweaking things behind the scenes and not always announcing them and looking at how that impacts retention. We do a lot of different measures. And so we do see sometimes people, Hey, why'd you change this? This is upsetting. But you'll, you'll see that chatter, but you'll see retention kick up 2% for that flavor. It kind of reminds me of like a Facebook changing the newsfeed, you know, from, from a chronological to more algorithmic. You got all the rage, but time on site's up. What are you going to do? So, so it's fun to be able to look at both that sort of feedback and behavior and then combine those to make the decisions. Speaker 1: Yeah. The community piece is super important. I mean, we obviously rely on our Facebook community a lot as well. What are some additional things you guys have been using the community for? Any best practices on how you've been managing it? And would you today say any brand that starts should also start a community? Or do you think it's better for a certain type of Brand or is it agnostic? You know, give us a little bit of color on the community building side. Speaker 2: Yeah, getting your customers all in one area and entertaining them and giving them, you know, exclusive access to information is always a good thing. It's low cost. As an early stage founder, I dove in there. I answered all the Facebook comments for the first four or five years and was very hands on. I think beyond just the free element of that, it's nice to be able to get that product feedback in real time and just be that close to what you're selling and your customer. So I'd say that you should build community into any product or brand. It should be founder led, I believe, or We're heavily influenced by the team. One of the things we've seen as our secret sauce for community is feedback loops. We think about feedback loops that are company facing. We're always trying to get better data to make better decisions. When you think about a customer's incentive to engage, you want to build feedback loops that are customer facing where they ask for something and you actually listen, then you deliver it back, in our case, through the form of a change in the product or a new product. But you can do that in a lot of different ways that aren't as heavy as the way we do it. But I think a lot of people do community wrong where they let people talk, the customers talk. And they don't actually action any of the feedback. So that incentive to engage is very low. We maximize that incentive to engage because we're real-time delivering them responses. And that really is rocket fuel for community and engagement. So I think it looks different for every business, but I encourage everybody to take a look at how they can do that. Speaker 1: Quick break to talk more about today's sponsor, Instant. Are your abandonment flows making at least 20% of your site's revenue? If not, you're in trouble. 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And inventory management, even as a nine-figure brand, at the end of the day, it's still cash sitting in inventory, right? Were there times where you felt challenged to have to manage so many SKUs and, you know, there are times where you're like, I got to get more of this SKU out because of expiry date, this and that. How did you manage some of those challenges if you guys face some of those? Speaker 2: Yeah, it's actually a huge point of healthy tension and conflict internally here. You know, our supply chain team, our teams that manage these ingredients, you know, of course, to your point, there's huge diminishing returns on the 60th or 61st flavor. You know, that's not driving that much incremental It's almost more of a brand story at this point, but there's exponential cost in terms of managing your 500th raw material and staging and all the things that need to move those around, especially now that we're multi-site with Arizona and Ohio. And so there's tons of complexity that we're taking on. Of course, owning that helps us bake that into our DNA. We do own all of our manufacturing and fulfillment, which lets us do this uniquely to suit ourselves. We do a good job. But it's still really, really hard. I feel like I'm sometimes the Costco CEO with the price of the hot dog, like, we won't rationalize skews. They're constantly, you know, we got to cut three flavors. So we have gotten to the point now where we're using data to basically cut flavors. We used to use data to reform bottom tier flavors and relaunch them. We're still doing that. But now we do do some rationalization, cut some now that we're getting up past 60. We got some really interesting data. So I'm sure you've heard of the decision paralysis experiments. And that's something we get talked to about a lot. Why do you have 30-35 flavors on the site? Isn't that hurting conversion? We actually ran a test and we showed that the difference between 20 and 35 flavors, 35 flavors was 8% higher conversion rate than 20. And we're talking multiple scrolls Down a bundler on mobile. So adding those extra flavors did increase conversion rate meaningfully. So, you know, with statistical significance. So we've really invalidated that decision paralysis concern, or at least in our format of it. But, you know, again, I think it's something we uniquely do and we're going to continue doing, especially as we launch new product formats like iced protein coffee and others. You know, we're going to bring that like extreme flavor variety, as we call it, to each of these different categories. That's really cool. Speaker 1: Now, I think one other piece is, and this is actually we posted on. Twitter that, you know, would be interviewing. We got a bunch of questions that people had. One of the questions was interesting, which was, what is your true measure of retention? Is it based on somebody coming in and coming back and buying anything else? Or is it purely based on that they stay subscribed to the same flavor? Do you care one way or the other? How do you optimize the business for when you look at the retention piece? Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a good question. So we look at it in different ways based on different goals. Generally, we're looking just cohort based retention repurchase rate. We're not looking at active subscribers nearly as much as we're looking at active purchase in month. And so, you know, looking at how many customers are actually purchasing in that month blended between OTP and subscription. That's, you know, that's what feeds our financial models and our projections and our budget. So that's like number one, which is pretty standard, I would think. Beyond that, though, we've got different retention measures that can signal, you know, what flavors customers like more prefer over the other. We're never trying to force flavors. Flavors have slightly different cogs and different margins. But overall, we're looking at a blended number. We track all those to a similar margin profile, even if there's slight variance. But we're looking for the earliest signal we can get on flavor retention. And so we've structured the bundle such that when you swap out, customers order 12 flavors per box on average for their first order. And that usually trails down to 6 flavors over the first 6 months as they whittle down to hone in on what they prefer, what they want to reorder, and it stays pretty constant at 6. And so we're looking at Survival rate between box one and box two of flavors and stack ranking those against each other. And so when we tweak a formula, we know that let's say cookies and cream, one of our highest rated flavors shows up in 87% of second order boxes. If we tweak that formula in the next, you know, the next six months, it shows up in 88%. We know that tweak was favorable for retention. And we get that data point, you know, in the first 30 days rather than waiting, you know, waiting for like an LTB if first order contains flavor X. So we're using like flavor retention across boxes because of how much bundling there is to better inform our product development efforts in our iteration. Yeah, that's super helpful. Very, very cool. Speaker 1: And then I guess just one follow up question to that, like when you look at LTV now, right? Have you been able to also correlate how LTV has been impacted based on every five new flavors you guys are launching? Is it almost always a positive correlation to like, yeah, LTV just grows because you're offering more variety, more reasons to come back? Or have you ever seen counterpoints to that? Speaker 2: So we've seen LTV grow. This is the craziest step, but like 25% CAGR over the last five years, which is just insane. And this is with one product format, right? This is not adding on incremental products. Of course, there's a lot of, like I talked about earlier, Offer structure, bundling, you know, pack size, AOB play there. That helps. Obviously, subscription has been helpful for that. But we feel the underlying most first principles thing here is just like, how craveable is this product? And so we're hyper-focused on product formulas as an LTV lover. And so, yeah, that's what we do. We do feel that that really contributes to rising LTVs and, you know, just continue to reform products and improve them. The FID program, generally, the flavor and development program, we share products with customers as subscribers. We do feel that that also contributes. Speaker 1: So I want to jump into a little bit about retail. When did you guys make the decision? Was it the right time? Was it too early? So many brands right now, especially with how hard DTC, you know, subjectively speaking, is becoming, people are like, oh, well, should I explore retail? Should I explore Amazon, more marketplaces, walmart.com, et cetera? What's your thoughts on it? And what have you learned with going into retail so far? Speaker 2: Yeah, for us, you know, 85 to 90% of our oatmeal is bought in store versus online. The rest is mostly marketplace like Amazon and other. So we always knew retail would be inevitable for our product and our brand. Of course, I think thinking about, you know, potential exit or downstream valuations like retail distribution is really critical there. And so we always knew that retail was the direction. We launched first with Wegmans. I think Lessons learned here, you know, we launched in around actually 2019 was my first buyer meeting with Walmart. I was terrified. We had a successful pouch product with a shaker cup. Didn't think that format would play on shelf. And so we reformatted the product for an all-in-one bottle that you could We had a fill line, you just pour water, you mix the powdered oat milk in there. So it was kind of a one-stop shop there. You didn't need to message the component tree or all the unique prep. So we showed up, the buyer didn't want to take that new product. Of course, there was no data, they wanted a pouch. And so we were at the standstill. And it was a really tough time. COVID happened, gave us the necessary year or so to figure things out. And we came back and we launched with Wegmans and shortly after with Walmart. Walmart has been a great partner to us. Of course, Target. But yeah, I'd say that the differentiated product format has been huge as a lesson. It just removes all the pricing tension and channel conflict that you would have if you're launching the exact same product format nationwide and just competing with yourself. I'd say that not everyone can reformat the product. But if you can change bundle or pricing structure, the case pack, all that, I would definitely We try to obscure that as much from the DTC offering as you can. But overall, we found them to be very synergistic. Increasing AOVs on DTC, focusing more on subscription. Retail has sort of emerged as a sampling channel as well. If you don't want to buy $60 of oatmeal online, you can now try it in Walmart or Target for $3. And of course, customers do that and come back and subscribe. And some customers would rather put it on their grocery list, not subscribe and buy at Costco or Whole Foods. And we're okay with that too. We're pretty agnostic in terms of where customers buy. We just think it's important to let them shop We're out with our lowest friction path of purchases. Speaker 1: Thanks, that's awesome. One more question before I want to jump into rapid fire. In terms of channel strategy, what's working for you, right? You have the metas of the world, but you also have something as new as Applovin, you have, you know, Rock, you have Google, TikTok, etc. How do you guys go about channel strategy? What's working for you guys? What just never did? Give us a little bit of color there. Speaker 2: Yeah, so we're still we're still pretty classic, like heavy meta, some TikTok, some Google, some YouTube. You know, we've tried a lot of the other newer channels, you know, haven't been able to get a whole lot of scale with them. But what we're what we're now looking at as we get more distribution is more upper funnel. We've launched TV, successful TV Test Q3 this year and we're really blasting off with some big TV leading into our peak season of Q1. And so I'm really excited to see how that plays now that we're distributed in close to 15,000 doors and looking at more of just the brand. Of course, attribution is always a mess there with Upper Funnel, but we're excited to invest in brand. Speaker 1: That's incredible. Well, Brian, I want to jump into some rapid fire before we wrap up here. So if you're ready, I'm ready. Speaker 2: Yeah, let's do it. Speaker 1: Amazing. Great. So question number one, what's one poker mindset founders should apply to business decision making? Speaker 2: So this is a good one. We talk about a lot. There's a lot of variants that you deal with in decisions. And you know, one of the things that translates, a lot translate, but one of my favorite ones is that everyone It's the same amount of hands over a big enough sample size. And so, you know, when you're just dealing with the most unfortunate of events and, you know, your truck catches fire and you're late on a shipment, some crazy outlier stuff, you got to know that that's happening to your competitors as well. And it helps you kind of stay at ease. Of course, you can de-risk that and invest in different areas in postmortem. But overall, this helps you stay sane. Speaker 1: That's awesome. Great answer. Most underrated growth lever for subscription brands right now? Speaker 2: Yeah, I'd say we talked a little bit about this. I think they're really the most underrated one is community and engagement. And again, just really getting in there and getting your customers to talk together. This builds a lot more on the retention side, sharing tips, sharing hacks on how they use the product. We've seen a lot of value from this in terms of an ROI, probably the highest ROI of any of our efforts. Speaker 1: That's amazing. What's a product metric you track that most founders overlook? Speaker 2: Yeah, so I'd say we track product notes. So we built a notes tool that's timestamped in our portal. This is different than reviews. And so reviews, people leave for other people, customers leave for other people. So it's fluffy and it's obscured by, you know, like this product, but didn't like this flavor, three stars. Notes are just inside the customer's mind, like hated this, tastes like clay, you know, very punchy. And now that we're getting into AI, interpreting this and sharing insights, This notes tool that we've built is a great driver of insights, especially as we're tracking changes over time and periods of notes before and after changes. Speaker 1: How are you documenting literally just is it formatted and like filtered by different categories of notes? Speaker 2: So the structure is it ties to the shopping experience. So customers originally told us, hey, 60 flavors, I'm forgetting which ones I liked and I didn't like. So they were showing Google Sheets and spreadsheets and all this stuff, tracking their flavor notes. So we just built this notes tool for them with star rating as well. So now that notes will follow that, you know, can follow them on their shopping experience in the portal. It's customized so that it's unique for them. Of course, we get to scrape that data and really kind of make good decisions based on it. So it's helpful. Exactly. That's very, very useful for them. Speaker 1: Biggest mistake DTC brands make when expanding into retail? Speaker 2: I think the biggest one would be using that same pack size, pack structure. But you know, I think It's also, you need a different team. I think this one's kind of obvious, but to not be repeating myself, I think we had to hire, we hired some real experts. A lot of DTC brands, you know, it's just different. The relationships are just different. You know, I think there's some overlap in how we use data, but, you know, bringing in real experts that can fit our culture has been a big unlock. Speaker 1: What keeps you motivated to keep innovating after nearly a decade in the same category? Speaker 2: I just love this, I think is the short answer. But I think what we're building really hasn't been done before in the way that we've done it, right? And so I feel like being on this cutting edge, like seeing this white space and kind of like leaning into areas that are harder to be followed is really cool. I think about Peter Thiel's talk around complex coordination where what we're doing in like any little piece isn't totally unique, but it's a combination of the pieces that's creating something really net new to the space and the consumers. So that's really exciting to be building that with the team. Speaker 1: Before we wrap up, just a quick reminder about Instant. A good abandonment email can make all the difference, but 88% of shoppers never get one. With Instant, you can send up to 10 times more retention emails and use AI to personalize every single message. Fast growing brands like Higher Dose, Garrett Popcorn and Karen Kane have tripled their abandonment flow revenue since going live. You could be next. Don't miss out. Book a demo today at instant.one slash Chew and receive 50% off your first 60 days. That's instant.one slash Chew. Now, let's get back to the episode. Well, Brian, I think one thing I'll say is even just being able to be a founder who's hit you up on LinkedIn and you responded right away and I feel like you're always willing to share your knowledge but you're also equally putting so much time into being so focused and building something that's been exceptional. It's a brand that a lot of us founders and a lot of us brand builders always look up to and I just wanted to say for you to grace your presence here, it means a lot taking time out of your day. You know, one thing we like to wrap up all our episodes with is one final thing to leave viewers to chew on, one thing that you want them to take away. What's that one final thing that you'd want to leave all our viewers with? Speaker 2: I'd say core values are really important. I'm thinking a lot now that the team's gotten so big, you know, we're well over 500 employees. Think about what culture you're building. And if you're not actively doing this, the culture will develop. It'll just develop in a way that you have no control over and that'll be Fragmented. So it's been a big point of focus for me in this stage of the journey to really focus on it's get a lot of leverage from from setting that and repeating it and really building that intentionally into the org. And so I'd say that for all the founders out there that are building right now, and you know, I thought core values were pretty cheesy the first four or five years, but you start to realize like you need to you need to be proactive here and intentional if you're going to create something special. Speaker 1: It's awesome. Chew on that. Unknown Speaker: If you want more from us, follow us on Twitter, follow us on Instagram, follow us on TikTok, and check out the website ChewOnThis.io.