Why Derek Halpern Walked Away From Millions To Start An E-Commerce Brand

Why Derek Halpern Walked Away From Millions To Start An E-Commerce Brand Speaker 2: If there's an e-commerce Mount Rushmore, I think you're on it. Speaker 1: I had to be like 20, what, 26 years old or something, and I was making way more money than I ever thought I'd make, especially in such a short time period. Speaker 2: Why'd you walk away from it? 10 years ago, Derek Halpern had one of, if not the biggest podcast in the world, and it was making him millions of dollars. Why don't most people know who Derek Halpern is? Because he shut it down and walked away from it all. Speaker 1: He wanted to make products that people use in their daily life without weird shit. That was the core premise of the brand. Our first year in business, I could share this number. We were probably just under five million in revenue. Everyone always has this big idea of, hey, what's my next business? Like, what's my business going to be? And they're like, oh, well, I have to perfectly plan it. We didn't do none of that. And here's where we got our first punch in the face. Speaker 2: What do you think you did so much better than even the well-funded companies that raised a bunch of capital? Speaker 1: Yeah, so that's a really tough question. Speaker 2: Derek Halpern, it's good to see you, buddy. Speaker 1: Thanks for having me. I'm pumped to be here. Speaker 2: Dude, I don't mean to blow too much smoke up your rear end, but if there's an e-commerce Mount Rushmore, I think you're on it. And part of the reason why your story fascinates me so much is it's now been 10 years since you ran Social Triggers. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: And what people don't understand, most people are familiar with Truvani and they see it on store shelves all over the country. And it's pretty much the number one natural plant-based protein powder. It sells out everywhere. People know that about the brand, but they don't know that you were an influencer before it was cool. You had the biggest business podcast pretty much in the world. Speaker 1: There wasn't that many podcasts back then. Speaker 2: Sure, but you were still, you had half a million people on an email list when that was a lot of people. Speaker 1: Yeah, it was a lot. Speaker 2: So why'd you walk away from it? Speaker 1: That's a really tough question, but I could probably break it down into a couple of different compartments. The first compartment is that I built a business teaching people how to do things and I didn't like teaching. I like doing, not teaching. And as I continue to build the business, you start to realize that the way you monetize a teaching business back then, now people can build a podcast like this, sell advertising, actually make a decent amount of money in revenue from advertising on podcasts. But back then, the way you would monetize is you'd teach a bunch of stuff and then you'd sell a course as an example. And the types of people that would buy the course, 98 out of a hundred people would buy the course and not even open it. They wouldn't do anything with it. And that was always kind of disheartening because then you'd have some of the other people who were the most vocal, right? I helped a lot of people. I know this because they always told me I did, but the people who were most vocal were the people who would buy the course and say, Oh my God, you scammed me. Like, this is not what I thought it was. I'd always give him a refund right here. Just go on your way. But. That type of negative energy wasn't my favorite experience. Speaker 2: It weighs on you. Speaker 1: Yeah, and it also wasn't that great for me personally because I didn't like doing it in the first place. Some people are born teachers. They want to teach, they want to share, they want to do all that stuff. Me, I was a teacher on accident. I always call myself an accidental teacher, actually. Speaker 2: You got into it because Lewis Howes pushed you into it, didn't you? Speaker 1: Yeah. Basically, I had just started doing consulting for a friend's company and Lewis said, oh, you're good at this. You should make a course about it. And I'm like, I don't know about all that. Like, I don't know if I'm going to make a course. But then I did it. I got built a huge email list on social triggers in the first year. And I was like, oh, let's make a course. I'll monetize it. And I made a lot of money. And it was like, oh, OK, this is good. And, you know, at the time, this is 2012. So I had to be like 20, what, 26 years old or something. And I was making way more money at one time than I ever thought I'd make, especially in such a short time period. Like, oh, well, there's something here. Speaker 2: And when you say a lot of money, we're talking millions of dollars, right? Speaker 1: That first year in 2012 was just under a million dollars. I didn't spam courses. I just made one course. I think I sold it. I think I sold it for $500. I launched in the middle of the year, somewhere around the middle of the year, and it made a lot of money. Like I said, it was like enough for me, and I had one employee, so there's no overhead, and well, software and stuff, and it was all organic. I didn't do very much paid media back then, so it was all profit, and I was feeling real good about it at that time. Speaker 2: Most people would not walk away. Your first year, you do about a million, and you ended up being One of, if not the biggest business podcast in the space, people are coming to you wanting... I remember the last one you did I think was with Tim Ferriss and you made an exception because you were wrapping it up and Tim wanted to be on your show and you just came out of the woodwork and did one with Tim Ferriss. Speaker 1: I met Tim previously. We were kind of like tangentially connected. So he had talked about depression on a post somewhere and it was something that I was interested in because I felt like that was something that kind of plagues everyone at some point. You know, they call it, I think Cameron Herold wrote a book called Double Double and he talks about the highs and lows of CEOs. And it was really interesting to hear Tim's battle with this sort of feeling. And I felt like I was kind of going on the up and down at this point too, kind of doing something I didn't like to do or whatever. So that was one of the last podcasts I did. That is true. Speaker 2: So you end up establishing yourself as the player in the space. And Accidentally or against your wishes or however you describe it, still most people would not walk away from a seven-figure income stream to start a protein company. Speaker 1: Yeah, well I didn't even start a protein company. It was actually a tumor company at first. Speaker 2: Really? Speaker 1: Yes. So I always tell people, everyone always has this big idea of, hey, what's my next business going to be? And they're like, oh, well, I have to perfectly plan it. We didn't do none of that. I was at my friend, Devin, I have two co-founders, Devin and Vani. I'm at Devin's Lake House up in Connecticut, and we're having a conversation. I'm just telling him how I'm getting bummed over doing this teaching thing. He was doing teaching stuff too, and he was kind of feeling out of it as well. He's like, well, I started this new Amazon thing and I'm reselling people's products on Amazon. Tumeric sells a lot on Amazon. Speaker 2: Still does. Speaker 1: Still does. He goes, Tumeric does really well on Amazon. Do you want to start a Tumeric company with me? I'm like, huh? What do you mean? I don't know anything about Amazon. I don't know anything about Tumeric. He goes, yeah, but you're fun to work with. You know how to sell stuff. We could figure it out. And I was like, okay, let's take a step back here. First, I remember telling him, I don't know if I like the whole idea of being an Amazon brand, right? Because that is platform risk to me. But I don't hate the idea of building a real brand. Why don't we talk to my friend Vani who has a blog about food and see what she thinks because we could bring her into the story here. She has the food experience. I have the marketing sales and you could have the finance operations experience. Speaker 2: And this person that you're referencing is better known as Food Babe, correct? Speaker 1: Better known as Food Babe, yes. Why don't we bring her in? So we get on a call. This is the end of August 2017, the end of the month. We decide to start a business together. Speaker 2: This was 2017? You've done all this since 2017? Yeah. That is nuts. Sorry for interrupting. Please continue. Speaker 1: So we met August end of 2017. Here's the idea. She's like turmeric. I used to take a turmeric. My turmeric just got acquired by a big multinational corporation. They changed the ingredients on me. I need a new turmeric. Perfect timing. We said, all right, we're launching a turmeric. At this point, we're like, okay, well, how are we going to launch it? We ended up pre-selling the product because we didn't know what type of volume to have or what type of pre-order to do or how many bottles to make. So we're like, let's just do it as a pre-sale. At the time, everyone told me doing a pre-sale of a turmeric is stupid. No one's gonna buy a turmeric product. No one's gonna pre-buy it. I was like, look, we don't need it to be big. We just need to get a semblance of demand to help us figure out how many bottles to get. At the time, our first order of bottles was 5,000 bottles. And we're like, when we launched it, about an hour in, I remember calling Devin. I was like, Devin, we have a problem. We're gonna need way more product. He's like, what do you mean? How much more product? I think we need about 35,000 bottles, actually. And he's like, oh no. And at this time, we have a turmeric, it's working, but right as it's starting, we're making the product, the turmeric, we're trying to take the coating off the tablet, because we want to get rid of all the nasty ingredients out of the product. And the tablet's not holding in the bottle at the time. So we're confident we're going to figure it out. But at the time, all this stuff is going wrong, and we're overselling the product. We're like, oh man, this is big. And that was kind of how the business was born. Speaker 2: You started selling it to Food Babe's audience, right? That was your lift off. Speaker 1: Yeah. So we partnered with Food Babe as the main face of the brand. And that was a lot of where some of the initial sales came from. Like the first year, I would say probably 7 out of 10 people that heard about us came to us through a recognition of my partner, Bonnie, from FoodBay. Speaker 2: Yeah, how important do you think that relationship was to getting the business off the ground, getting it to the first 1 to 5 million? I don't know that it has the same impact now because you're a recognizable brand independent of FoodBay, but at the beginning, how important do you think that relationship was? Speaker 1: When you start a business, you have to have a way to get customers. On the one hand, a relationship like that makes it pretty easy to get the first group of customers, but it also creates restrictions on how you can get customers. And what I mean by that is when you lean on an influencer as a partner, You'll get your success, early success quicker, but you're more likely to hit a plateau and then never go anywhere because you don't know how to grow past it. You're accustomed to easy. And one of the things I will say is when we all got together, we didn't get together predominantly because she was an influence. We got together because she had food and green experience. Devin had finance and operation. I had marketing and sales experience. The fact that she had this, that was part of the gig and she was going to promote it and that helped get it started obviously. But what's important to know is that we all brought a unique expertise to the table. That we knew eventually we could go bigger than just one face, right? Cause unless you're like Oprah, you're not one face for one brand is actually a limiting behavior. Like you're only gonna be able to grow so large from one face. You actually need 10,000 faces promoting your product, which is where we're kind of at now. And like, you know, where we had the seven out of 10 in the beginning, I think now it's something like less than one out of 10 people even We are aware that we had a face of a brand promote the product, so you have to scale. Speaker 2: You came out of the gates of this turmeric. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: When did you pivot over into protein? Because that's my perception is that's really where you started to get ahold of Artemis. Speaker 1: Yeah, so we launched turmeric in February of 2018. We shipped our first product February 26. We just hit our, what is it, eight year anniversary? Yeah, so February 26, we shipped our first product. At this point, the launch went great. We're like, okay. At that point, we saw how big the pre-launch was and now the launch went good and like more than half the people subscribed. And I was looking at the subscriptions and I was like, okay, I'm done with social triggers. At that time, I was doing a daily vlog on YouTube and literally that all happened and this was going really big, really quick. I quit. A lot of my best employees from social traders came over to Truvani. So they were some of the first, like my videographer, my designer, head of customer support. Like a lot of people came over to the new brand, which is great. But that was big. I shut it down instantly because I was like, this is the future. And I was already sick of doing this. And now that I could see that this was going to work, I'm doing this. So Tumor came out. We went to Expo West. We had no idea what to do next. We had the idea to do Bone Broth next because Bone Broth was big. So we made a Bone Broth powder. Bone Broth launched really well, but had really poor subscription rates. The product wasn't that good. It was a good product. The people that loved it, loved it. Like I loved it. It was a savory bone broth with some ginger. It tasted really good. It was like, if you use this product warm, it was a good product, but it wasn't a mass appeal product. We launched the protein, chocolate protein, in July of 2018. And at this time, it did pretty good, but we weren't sure we were a protein brand yet. We launched a collagen, marine collagen, in September, which is a funny story because we have the marine collagen that's supposed to come to our warehouse in September and it's like two weeks late. And I'm like, ah, shit, what's going on here? Where's the product? And I remember jokingly saying like, well, It's on a boat. There's all this talk of pirates. It's white powder. Maybe they stole the boat. The boat's missing at sea. I was jokingly telling every one of my friends at the time, I said, I think pirates stole our boat. That didn't happen. It was just delayed or whatever, but I always tell the story that the time I thought pirates stole our product. We launched that in September and here's where we got our first punch in the face. We launched in September, did college and did really well, then our Facebook account got banned. And you know why it got banned? Because at that time— Pirates. Yeah, pirates. They reported—no, no. We were making—we had—our original formulation for protein was a pea protein, hemp seed protein, pumpkin seed protein. For some reason, having hemp seed protein was flagging illegal drug algorithms at that time. And we kept getting illegal drug references for having hemp in the product. CBD was getting big at that point. So they kept seeing hemp and we were triggering these illegal drug algorithms, which is a mess. So that happened. We launched vanilla protein come in November, but we kept having more and more problems with hemp disapproving our ads. Like hemp was getting all our ads disapproved. We're like, what the heck's going on here? So we actually reformulated the product within the first eight months and changed from hemp seed protein to chia seed protein because we didn't want to flag the algorithm, essentially. Speaker 2: And at this point, you are getting a lot of adoption all online, right? Speaker 1: Yeah, it's all Shopify. We didn't even have an Amazon. I didn't have an Instagram. We were buying Facebook ads basically. Speaker 2: At what point did you go retail? Because the thing that really stood out to me is it is so rare to dominate online and then go into retail and also dominate. The playbooks are different. I experienced this when we, before I sold my company, we were in a thousand retail stores and it was not a total disaster, but it was way different than we expected because the playbook was totally different. Speaker 1: So I can share, I know why good DTC companies fail in retail. I can actually dumb it down to once, probably one paragraph. So we can talk about that, but you want to know why it went retail. At this point, we're not even sure we're, What kind of company we are, right? We launched a product. We're doing well. Our first year in business, I could share this number. We were probably just under, like probably just under 5 million in revenue and we launched in March, essentially. So we did a really good for this year. And we were, we built a team up. We got everything going. And at this point I know subscription rates on pills were better than powders. So I think we're going to be a pill company. The whole next year we launch only pills. Vitamin C, vitamin D, immune support, magnesium. Speaker 2: I did not know that. Speaker 1: So, this is interesting. Speaker 2: The entire first and even part of the second year, you're just figuring out who you are. I mean, even I, who am fascinated by the Truvani story, look at this and don't know that you had all these iterations of products that don't even exist anymore. And so many people want to know what the exact roadmap is going to look like before they get started. One of the leaders in the space, Truvani, was still figuring out who the heck they were for the first year and a half. I'm so glad you shared that. Speaker 1: We know what we stood for. We wanted to make products that people use in their daily life without weird shit in it. That was the core premise of the brand. So we didn't know what products to deliver yet. The whole second year was pills. And at this point, we're not sure what's next. This is not my, this is 2018, second year is 2019. At the end of that year, we started to realize that, you know what? If we want to build a real omni-channel brand, a brand that lasts or potentially could be acquired, for example, we need to win online and we need to win in stores. So then we started to think, how are we going to break into stores? 2020 comes, I hire, actually 2019, I hire a VP of sales at another company that's doing 50 million plus in retail alone. And I hire them as a consultant to try to advise Devin and I on retail strategy. Like, hey, what do you need to know going into this? What type of margins to expect? How does doing business with these big retailers work? I knew nothing, right? Cause I'm an internet guy that bought advertising. So we hired this consultant. We drilled him with questions for months. Like we met every like week or two and I just asked him a million questions and he kind of got me up to speed. Like, you know, here's the 101 and 102 and 103 course on retail. I probably asked some of the dumbest questions in the world. So hopefully he doesn't have any memory of the dumb questions I asked. But at that point, we want to go retail. So we start going into some, we hire a director of sales and we start, we build a broker network to try to get our stuff in the stores and we have some headway. We get to like maybe a hundred doors. Then we get, we sign for Expo West. We're supposed to debut in March of 2020. The day before we fly out, Expo West is canceled. Expo West canceled about a week and a half before everything canceled. Outside of the window when you can get refunds on Airbnb bookings and outside the window when you could get refunds on plane bookings and outside. So we had all this stuff that got canceled. All the team was going to Expo West. The show gets canceled. We lose all of the money around the event. That was a mess. So at this point, everyone on, but we got lucky because online sales blew up. Like the year of COVID online sales for a lot of businesses, we doubled that year just off online alone. And that was a very good happenstance because it allowed us to eat some of the headaches that occurred from the retail push. But even though some brands leaned heavier online in 2020, because that's where everyone was going, Devin and I, we all just had this thought that people were gonna rebound back to retail in a big way after this is done. So we thought now would be the time to double down on retail when everyone thinks online is the only way forward. Speaker 2: You're like, let's zag. Everybody else is going to come online and they're turning away from retail. So this is an opportunity for us to strike while everybody else is on the sidelines. Speaker 1: We were like, you know what, let's do that. Speaker 2: I feel that way about e-commerce in general right now with tariffs and uncertainty and Costs of goods are up and I see competition so low. I bought back my business that I sold in 2017. I bought it back a year and a half ago and I am just stunned at how bad the competition is. I thought being out of the market for not quite 10 years, about seven years, I thought Everybody's matured. I'm going to have to relearn this whole thing. And I'm like, I can't wait to pounce. And I think that's why the business has been growing as quickly as it has. So you had the same mentality as you see people are running away like now, strike. Speaker 1: And we still had no success, which was rough. So at this point, we're still trying to figure out what type of brand we are, by the way. We don't even know we're a protein brand. We get into some stores and we, Devin sends me a picture. I don't remember what store it was, but there was a picture of our products on shelf on the bottom, the bottom shelf, two flavors, chocolate and vanilla. And there was this other brand above us in the middle, I line, six flavors. I'm like, oh, they command attention. We need more flavors. We need to productize our protein. We need more flavors so we can take up more shelf space and get a bigger brand block. This is what we told ourselves. And at this point, our manufacturer at the time, well, our co-backer, they said we can't make flavors because we're not allowed to use natural flavors. It's very hard to flavor powders, especially plant protein powders, without natural flavors, like natural vanilla flavor, natural cherry flavor, all those man-made flavors that they make in labs. We were kind of stuck. So we didn't know what to do at this point. We didn't have any flavor options. We didn't really have some options coming forward. And at this point, like, yo, we're a clean ingredient brand. So we launched a deodorant line. Which is not a, not a powder. We actually are, I think we're fully canceled out of deodorant, but we did, we launched a deodorant line. Speaker 2: I remember that. Speaker 1: We launched toothpaste. We launched lip balm. We were just making clean products that we wanted to have in the world. We launched one individual snack bar coming up in the next like year or two. And, but. For retail powders, we're making the push. So we furiously went to developing powders. That first year, 2020, my director of sales quit on me at the end of the year because he wasn't getting any doors because it's, you know, it's COVID. No one's accepting new product. We get a new person in charge of sales that starts the beginning year of 2021. He comes in and he goes, look, we have to build foundation first. After we build foundation, getting the ability to take orders and all this stuff, then we're going to go – we're off to the races is what he said. So he spent about eight months doing that, building foundation. We built – at this point, we finally figured out how to make some more flavors. And then he gets us in from 100 doors to 500 doors to 1,000 doors to 2,000 doors and we landed Sprouts. At this point, Sprouts had told us no multiple times, Whole Foods has told us no multiple times, but we're starting to build it brick by brick, store by store, 10 stores here, 12 stores here, 15 stores here, 20 stores here. And then we eventually got the unlock of one of the bigger chains that took us early was FreshTime. They're a 76-store chain in the Midwest. Great store, by the way. If you ever make it to the Midwest, you got to check out their stores. But FreshTime took us, and that kind of, now Sprouts was interested. Then when Sprouts was, now Whole Foods was interested. And that kind of got the groundswell going. Speaker 2: So you mentioned before that you have one paragraph about why D2C companies don't do well in retail. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: What is the paragraph? Speaker 1: So D2C, everything's about order value, right? If you want to spend money to acquire customers. So what do people do to juice order value? Speaker 2: Add upsells. Speaker 1: Add upsells. And what's the best performing upsell usually? Speaker 2: More of the same product. Speaker 1: More for more. When you sell a product and you offer more for more, what you're doing is, is you're getting six months of product into someone's hands. You just exhausted all your demand. There's no room left to buy in retail when you exhaust all your demand. And when we were switching to retail, this happened in 2022. No, I was talking about sampling, I think, when I spoke at your event. So it was probably 2021. I'm a little hazy on the dates. When you sell more for more, you get bigger order values. So you'll do, you know, you'll get $150 order values. And if you get a thousand dollars, you have eight customers. Those eight customers are already fully satisfied and spoken for. The untapped demand are the people that saw your ad and didn't buy. Not the best people. So we, we transitioned our direct advertising away from more for more into. Speaker 2: Samples. Speaker 1: You come to our, one of our main ways that we were promoting the brand for multiple years was you come to our site and you would get a four pack of chocolate vanilla and like four flavors of protein or a six pack or an eight pack of all our flavors. And you would get those for free, just pay shipping. We have some upsells that were all for a full-size bag or whatever, but we would never sell more for more as a primary offer. So on that offer, our average order value was like $20, right? Nothing. Our CPA was like $10 or $15. With all the CODs, we're losing money. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: But we're breaking even in about 30, 60, 90 days. So it just depends on how we acquired the customer or how cold they were. And the reason why we position this is that if you do more for more as an ad buying strategy, I am confident to say, I believe you will fail in retail. I think you will fail in retail, unless you're doing it so much that you're like, you know, omnipresent with all the ads and everyone knows you or whatever. If you're doing more for more as an ad strategy, you will not do well in retail as a starting brand. So we transitioned from more for more to samples. And the whole goal I would reinforce to the team is more mouths. Get my product into more people's mouths. Speaker 2: One of my heroes, Brian Lee, he started The Honest Company with Jessica Alba. And Art of Sport with the late Kobe Bryant and built LegalZoom. He says that the win for him is when the product is in the customer's home. Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 2: Doesn't care if it comes from Amazon or a retail store. How do we get it into their home? Speaker 1: Correct. Speaker 2: That long term, that is the win. Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 2: So I want to ask the inverse of your question, which is why did Truvani do so well? In retail. Speaker 1: Yeah. So we have a really good product. The product's great. We have the rising tide of people wanting cleaner ingredients, which is what we stood for. And we have this new sampling strategy where I think at the time in the first year, we did over a million samples and like, like, you know, maybe just, just over a year and we have the sampling the product. Now we have groundswell. So what happens is, is that if we go and spend all my money on advertising and I drive samples. Those people will either maybe come back to me. I'll text them. They'll buy from us, right? They'll buy from us on the web. Or they'll know they got the samples. They'll try it. Oh, I like it. But they didn't buy yet. But then they go to the store and see us on NCAT. Oh, I know that brand. I have their sample in my house. Let me pick up a bag. And that's how that works. We did so well in retail because we did a really good job building demand for the product. It helped our Amazon grow. So even today, if you look at our Amazon, I know people have all these tools about how to figure out. I don't know anything about Amazon. All I know is my Amazon team. Is upset, not upset, but they said it's opportunity. Like 80% of our Amazon sales, when I last heard this number, we're coming from brand related search terms. Meaning I do poorly with generic search on Amazon. Meaning I don't know the Amazon game. I don't know how to make Amazon work, but people are searching for the brand, which is good. So we have the same ideas. I don't care if you buy from store, Shopify or Amazon. What I care is that you get the product the way you want to get it. And my goal is to get more people aware of the product. And the only way to do that, I think is sampling, especially if you could stand behind the flavor of your product. Speaker 2: That's interesting because I remember you don't, you, you used to create a lot of content. Now you create very little, but everyone, every once in a while, you'll update what's going on at Truvani on your Facebook page. And I remember you posting about becoming the number one protein in the space or plant protein in one store. And then I saw that it launched at, I think a Sprouts near me. And I went to that Sprouts and it was out of stock. It was like, you gotta be kidding me. And I went to another store and I noticed that the price was very different from what had been listed over here. And now I'm really fascinated by this and I'm watching it just sort of grow around me and be out of stock or there'd be one bag on the shelf. That's not normal. Speaker 1: You have to have demand. Speaker 2: But it was so different. Even if I take a company like Ghost. Ghost, they're partially owned by Dr. Pepper. They've got a lot of money to spend in order to reach mass adoption, but I don't see them running out of stock places. So what do you think you did So much better than even the well-funded companies that raised a bunch of capital. Speaker 1: Yeah. So I think building demand is the most important part of the story. We built demand and people wanting the product before we were ever in the store. So when they saw this in the store, they wanted the product already. It's kind of like when you build a new email list off just content alone and you don't sell them anything for a year. That first launch, that pent up demand is huge. Now, why would we, why are we selling out? Well, this is actually funny because we were a new brand. When people put new brands on shelf that aren't backed by big money, they don't order that many units. And it's hard to convince them to order that many units because you're a new brand on shelf. So we're going on a shelf. We're getting one shelf spot with three units and three units back. We're only selling six units. So it really looks like we're selling out way faster in the beginning than it really was true because they're not ordering as much product from us because we're a new brand. Eventually they caught up. It took several months for them to catch up to this whole idea of like, I remember when we launched in Whole Foods, we launched in Whole Foods, the first month out blew up. At first we were, we were telling them like, guys, we're going to need more stock. They wouldn't do it. Like, you know, cause we're a new brand. We don't know how you're doing Whole Foods. Now we blow it out of the water and then we're telling them to order more and it's still hard to get these stores to order more because they're like, oh, well, what if it doesn't continue? Cause you're a new brand. How, what are you going to do to keep driving this? And then it continues. And what we started to see was a lot of stores like corporate, this is not, I'm not gonna name any names here, but corporate, they don't always order all the product, but the manager of stores have some ability to order more product. And we started to notice that we were selling so well on the shelf spots. We started earning secondary placements in stores. A lot of store managers were giving us a secondary placement for free just so they could have more product in store so they wouldn't sell out because they didn't want to sell out because they want to move the units obviously. We have the pent-up demand. We're a new retail brand and the pent-up demand was good enough to sell the minimal orders that we had in the beginning. By the way, none of this was on purpose. The whole selling out thing was on accident. It was on accident simply because they just weren't ordering that many products. Speaker 2: I'm noticing a bit of a trend in how you're describing this, which is from the outside, it sounds like you scaled so fast and you just hit market penetration so quickly. But I'm hearing you say this theme of we tested small and did well, and then we started to move out. Like we prelaunched the first product, And then we ordered more product and we had one or two flavors to start with protein before we became a protein company. And we proved ourselves in this retail spot and then we started to go to more stores. And that's really interesting to me. It sounds like you obsess over proof of concept before you really go big. And that's an important point because I think a lot of people will say, will hear this conversation and say, Oh, retail is the way to go big. And so they will just go all in on retail. But even your strategy was penetrate the market a little bit. Speaker 1: Getting in stores and not selling off shelf is a death sentence. Speaker 2: Yes. And I've heard so many brands do this. Speaker 1: I know a lot of brands that go retail too big, too fast for us. Proof of concept is the number one guiding principle at our company. We will prove it before we double down on it. And we have done this. We've done it with product development. We've done it with marketing strategy, with those sampling. When we first started the samples, we did like 5,000 samples and then we waited. We've got them out there. Let's just see what happens over four months. Do they buy anything? Do they not buy anything? Waited a few months. I was like, oh, they are buying things. All right, 50,000, 100, you know, let's double down. Same thing with influencers and gifting. I think one of the things that we did differently in the last year and a half, I think we built the best influencer team on the internet right now. And all we did was is we had this idea of gifting influencers some free product, you know, just good, good gifts, like not cheap gifts, just product gifts to people. And we weren't going for big influence. We're just going over, Hey, you have 2000 fans and like Pickleball, everyone who had 2000 fans and like Pickleball, you're getting a gift. Oh, you're a ballet dancer. You're getting a gift. We just started gifting segments of people. Speaker 2: It works like bananas. Speaker 1: And we did 200. We're like, oh, this feels good. Let's do 250. This feels good. Let's do 265. This feels good still. You know what? Last year we sent out almost 50,000 gifts. Wow. In one calendar year. And the team went from zero people and just a consultant to I think it's It's like four or five full time people now on just the gifting team. Wow. And we just did it. You know, hey, this felt good. This felt good. We're all in. That's the story of basically everything we've ever done is, hey, we went from bars. We had the snack bar for almost I think almost two years, dude, a chocolate brownie snack bar we have for two years and then we're just watching the numbers, watching the margins, watching the business build. We're like, you know what? Now we have 12 flavors of snack bar. We went from last year, we started last year with 200 doors of snack bars with a couple flavors. We now have 12 flavors. We have 2,000 doors now a year later. In Sprouts, we just launched all 12 flavors plus four packs. We have 18 SKUs of bar in Sprouts right now. So the bar aisle is ours too now, which is the goal. How do we get- That is wild. How do we go from, you know, we have 14,000, 15,000, I think it's like 14,000 doors with protein right now. It's hard to keep track of all this because you never know what's happening, but it's about 14,000. Maybe 13,000, whatever. It's over 10,000 doors of protein. We just hit 2,000 of bars and the goal is just more and more doors. But this is kind of how it is. It's like, hey, we tested a bar for almost two years before we made more flavors. We had two single flavors of protein and we didn't even like the protein business at first. We did pills for the whole next year and deodorant. And, and, and, and lip balm and, and, and toothpaste. And then we're like, you know what? Protein's kind of working. Let's lean into the protein. And now today, 80% of the business is protein. Speaker 2: Yeah, that is, that is really refreshing to hear. If you try to look up discussions or podcasts with Derek Halpern, You will find almost nothing. In fact, the two that you will find, we're both here at Capitalism.com. Why is it that we are able to bring conversations like this to you for free? It's because I've spent two decades building my network. And I know that one of the things that gets me in the door is the fact that I have an audience and I have subscribers. And the more subscribers that this channel has, the more conversations we can bring to you that are unlike anywhere else. It's because we have that network that we can bring the behind the scenes operators and winners to you. I hope you appreciate that this is very different than what most people do in the business world. And if you're enjoying this, it would mean the world to me if you'd take three seconds to subscribe to the channel, because that is how we open doors to bring the hard to reach guests and little known winners to you. So if you're appreciating this episode, please take three seconds and hit the subscribe button. Thank you. It seems like players like Truvani and the other brands that we often admire just come out of nowhere and dominate. And hearing that there's, with several of these products, just two years of, I don't even know who we are yet. Speaker 1: Yeah. We didn't even have an Amazon at first, man. Like I remember when we first launched on Shopify, remember we started to be an Amazon idea. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: And we didn't even have an Amazon at first. Eventually we were like, ah, let's just put it on Amazon. And then we forgot about it for like a year. And then eventually it started to make a little bit of money and we're like, Oh, this has what's going on over here. Speaker 2: Amazon has some volume. Speaker 1: Now I actually will tell you that today. I would almost say that I prefer a customer to buy on Amazon than Shopify. Speaker 2: Why is that? Speaker 1: Because it's just so much of a better experience. Amazon can get the product to people faster. They get it faster and they're already paying for Prime. So the shipping's free. The LTVs on customers on Amazon are similar to Shopify. It's not like the customers work less. You can't market them specifically, but the product markets itself. So the way we look at it today, and I don't know if this is interesting, but Our most loyal customers buy on Shopify because you can buy our product at a good price and you get cool free swag. And we have basically the best swag in the business. Just put that out there. No one's swag is better than ours. We make tote bags that people carry. When I go out with the wife and we're going on a boat or something, we're bringing eight Truvani bags in total. We have this tote bag. It's real nice. Some are insulated, some aren't. They're like a fashion statement almost. So you buy direct. You buy a product at a good price with swag. Usually a good price with free shipping. So it's a little bit cheaper usually because the shipping's free. And then in retail is actually where you can usually find our product at the best price. Speaker 2: I've noticed that. Speaker 1: And that's on purpose. Most people that want to go into retail, they're always asking me like, Derek, You know, I want to go in retail, but like how do you get people that buy your product in the store back to your website? I said, you're talking to the wrong person for that. If that's your goal, I don't think you should be in retail. Your goal, if you get in retail, My goal is to get more sales through retail. If you're trying to siphon customers from your retail partner, they're not going to like you. Speaker 2: Yeah. It used to be that Amazon was the discount marketplace. Now it is the convenience marketplace. Yes. Speaker 1: I agree with that. Speaker 2: So in your case, I'll go to the retail. I would go buy a retail if I want the best price. Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 2: I'll buy on Amazon if I want the automatic delivery, which is really fascinating. Speaker 1: Which is a good price. Speaker 2: Sure. Speaker 1: And sometimes it's a competitive price, especially with prime days and sales or whatever. But every day, that's how we kind of structure everything. Speaker 2: And it used to be that Amazon had a policy that you had to have the cheapest price on Amazon. That's no longer a policy. So it has changed the incentives a little bit. Speaker 1: Really? There's some headaches. It's not that Amazon's more expensive. On subscription, it's cheaper, but it's a subscription. Amazon has done really interesting things where it's a very good price. Like you're not getting the worst, but when you're in a retailer and you're on promo and you're on discount, you tend to be on promo a little bit more in retail. Cause usually when you go on promo and retail, and that's part of the retail growth story is like the goal is to get in the goal is get your product in store. After you get your product in store, you wanna move the units off the shelf to try to earn what you call secondary placement or the ability to buy, end caps. I don't like spending money on trade spend like coupons or circulars or any of that crap. I like to buy secondary placement, end caps. When you get on NCAP, your NCAP will do better if you attach a discount to it. So get in the store, earn the ability to buy NCAP, do really well on NCAP, and then try to earn permanent secondary placements. Usually you could do that through slotting by paying forward, or you could do it through, like with some stores, you have to pay for secondary placement usually, but when you're us and you're selling so well, the store managers start to give you secondary placement just to have you in store, which is kind of what the demand begets demand at that point. And the more secondary placement you get, the more you sell. So it's kind of like this, you know, chicken and egg situation, but it all started with pent-up demand, right? You need the pent-up demand first, get in store, Sell well, get secondary placement, sell better. Try to get third placements now, fourth placements. Try to get, like we have our single serves. In Whole Foods, we're put in different aisles as an example just to get single serves. And well, funny that I wish I could take credit for this because my retail team wanted to do it and I told them, this is stupid. No one's going to buy a single serve of plant protein that's not packed in like a 10 pack. And then we're looking and we're selling, you know, tens of thousands of them. Oh, man, this was the best. We got to do this everywhere. I'm so glad I thought of it. But no, it obviously gives the team credit. It was one of those things where we thought it was going to fail and then it was a huge success. Speaker 2: Derek, how did you fund all of this growth? Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Because you did not have a partnership with Dr. Speaker 1: Pepper. Speaker 2: No. You, you did not raise a bunch of seed capital. Speaker 1: No. Speaker 2: My understanding is at least for the first handful of years, you were 30 grand. Get out of, get out of here. Yeah. Speaker 1: $10,000 a partner. That's what we started with. Speaker 2: Okay, and you bootstrapped this at least for a year. Speaker 1: We have bootstrapped, we're fully bootstrapped. Well, it's interesting because we are at a position now where to continue scaling stores, capital might be needed. One of the things we've learned with retail when you're in 10,000 plus stores, and we can kind of talk about this, needless to say, we're bootstrapped. We got to our first 12,000 doors fully bootstrapped and now we're considering options. Speaker 2: That very rarely happens. That is incredible. Speaker 1: We've been talking to investors for years, even though we haven't raised any money from investors for years. Um, every time we would talk to them, they would say that you guys are unique in the fact that you got to where you are, the size you are with $0 raised. And I think that's important to know because There are brands that probably grow to higher revenues faster than us, but... They did it through burn, burning capital. And a lot of those brands didn't make it in the last few years. We had to grow through financial discipline. We had to grow with the smart decisions on how we chose to fund everything. Having DTC first is big because that's a little bit higher margin, allows you to fund that first retail. The secret to the success, and this is why I say we are bootstrapped, but we didn't do it without money. We have credit lines, and you have to find a good credit partner that allows you and understands what you're trying to do and grows with you in a way that allows you to grow. I have a lot of commentary about credit lines because there's all sorts of credit lines out there these days that I think are… What's the correct word? Pariahs. Like the fixed term credit line where you borrow money and you have to borrow it for six months and then you pay it back. But they'll always let you borrow more money off of more money and then all you know, before you know it, you're like basically stacking interest on interest on interest on interest. And I know a lot of brands that fell for this trap a couple of years ago and they went out of business because of this. That's a mess. But if you find like a good revolving credit line that lets you access, pay off, access, pay off, that becomes a very important partner to grow with. And I can't say I came up with that idea. I read a Harvard Business Review article about the Chobani founder. Speaker 2: Oh, that's a great story. Speaker 1: Yeah. And he did this. He basically grew off credit lines. I was like, oh, that's what we're going to do. So we grew without raising capital because of access to credit. Now, you could only really get access to credit when you're winning. You can't really get a credit line if you're not proving concept. But the benefit of doing TTC first, you kind of get the money in. You know, we were doing more for more. You can make a decent amount of money profit on first order, second order, especially when you're doing more for more. That allows us to create stable revenue. And the fact that we were a subscription business made it possible for us to get credit lines because the subscription gave predictability. People that are not in consumables, I don't envy anyone not in consumables. If I were e-commerce, I would never launch a business that isn't a consumable product because it just seems like you're going to sell this one thing and then you're only going to make money if you create the next new thing that they can buy. Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a different game. Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a mess. Speaker 2: You said you can only get that kind of money if you're winning. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: And that seems to be a bit of a theme. Whatever you go into, you win. You launch a podcast, you win. You launch a protein, you win. There's something in this mentality where you just seem to go for it. What drives that? Speaker 1: I actually did a video about this a long time ago, but when I was a kid, I have to credit my dad with this because even though I grew up a little bit different than most people, and I say that because my mom was on welfare for a lot of my life, for early parts of my life, and dad was in jail my whole life. But my dad taught me something very interesting when I was a kid. He would get out of jail, we'd play chess. And he never played chess for nothing. You have to play chess and you have to wager something. But I'm like, you know, I'm like nine. I don't have any money so I can't bet him. So we'd wager push-ups. And he would just demolish me. I'm owing him a hundred push-ups and he would just sit there. He goes, if you're gonna bet it, you're gonna pay it. Now give me my money. And he would just watch me do push-ups. And let me tell you, at that point, I really liked the idea of winning because losing sucked. And then, you know, he went away for a little bit, came back, and at that point, I went to the library and I read every chess book that I could find. And when he came back and I just tromped him. I just destroyed him because I was practicing. I actually found this one chess hustler. I used to go to a comic store and this guy, Angel, he was a chess hustler in Washington Square Park. And he would go to this comic store and he knew I liked chess. He goes, oh, man, you're not. You like chess. And at that time, you know, This was early 90s, Searching for Bobby Fischer was a really popular movie. So everyone liked the kid that liked chess, right? So he's like, oh, I'm gonna teach you chess. I got you. So he taught me to play chess and I was reading the books and he would always tell me not to follow the book because chess hustlers play different than book players. But I always liked the idea of the book because I feel like chess was proven. He came back, I beat him. I'm like, all right, I like winning. That's it. And it's because I didn't want to lose. That kind of created my desire to win in everything. One of the things I will say is that because I've been asked that question before because I have succeeded in a lot of different areas. I think one of the things that sets me apart personally is I feel like I can win at everything except probably basketball because I'm not tall enough to ever play a sport like that. Other than that, I feel like I can win at almost anything. The reason why is because I don't view anything that you pursue as something that can't be done, right? You can win. It's just a matter of will you win and will you do the work needed to win? And most people will go, they'll try something new, they'll fail. And they'll give up, whereas you ever see that graph where it's like, you know, most people think entrepreneurship is here and it's straight to the top. But in reality, it's like all over the place and you eventually get there. That was kind of my thought on everything is everything you're no one's going to win without failure. It's just a question of how many times you're going to fail until you finally win. And most people don't get past the first failure. The next group of people will get past that first failure and then make the same mistakes over and over again and wonder why they're not winning. With me, I knew that winning is eventual. It will happen if you put the work in. If you fail, you need to learn from failure. Most people don't learn from failure. Most people don't even want to talk about it. So I wanted to, one of the things I told you is I wanted to get into retail. I knew nothing about it. So I hired a consultant and I peppered him with all the dumbest questions in the world until I learned retail and I got into retail and I still failed, right? I still like made mistakes. We could talk about that too on some of the headaches we've had with pricing or whatever, but you learn it, you figure it out. With me, I fail. I'll go read five books on the topic or hire someone or talk to someone else to try to figure out what I did wrong. And I think that's one of the things that set me apart is knowing that winning is eventual if you're willing to believe that you're a winner. If you fail, what input are you gonna put into the failure to figure out how to do better? Most people just fail and say, oh, I'm done. Like you could actually do this. I don't know if this video is still up, but if you do Derek Halpern Affiliate Summit 2011, you'll see my first ever speaking engagement. Dude, you've seen me speak. I spoke at your event. I'm a pretty good speaker these days. That event, my neck is red. I'm monotonous. I'm boring. I'm sitting there scratching myself. I'm white knuckling the podium, just scared to talk in front of people. And then literally a year later, I built, I was like, oh, I'm a speaker now, right? But that first ever time you could see the video was on the internet. It's the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen. I wanted to delete it, but it really, it's a good story to show that you can win in everything, right? And, but after that happened, I white knuckled podium. I knew how to build an email list. I met a guy named Michael Port from Book Yourself Solid, if you ever heard of that book. He's a great speaker. He saw me. He goes, oh, you're new at speaking. He goes, you look like you've got some chops here. You want to show me how to build an email list and I'll teach you some speaking stuff? And then we kind of, he was the input to help me learn to be a better speaker in the beginning. I told him I'd build an email list. I actually spoke to another person along the way who's another famous speaker, Sally Hogshead. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: She, I remember at that point. Speaker 2: How the World Sees You. Great book. Speaker 1: What a great book. And she's a great person too. And one of the things is that I, at that point, I never wanted to give the same presentation twice. I always made a new presentation every speech. And she comes up to me, she goes, Hey, I've seen you do this before, but you always change your presentation. Why? I was like, oh, I don't wanna say the same thing. And she's like, well, you know, it's not your job to feel that you're not delivering the same message. It's your job to deliver the best presentation you can. And you can't do that if you keep making new presentations. And I looked at her, I was like, okay, you're right. And she's like, look, you should make one presentation that you develop and hone over time and you can deliver a better talk. And I remember when she told me this and I looked at her, I was like, that makes a lot of sense to me. And I then started to just take the same presentation to retool it for the audience. So it's never the same, but that kind of pushed it ahead. But again, same thing is winning is eventual at all things. When you're not doing as well as you want to do, you need an input of some kind to try to get you on the right track. You have to accept the input and then you have to keep going and then probably fail again and again and again and again, but eventually you're gonna win if you keep going. Speaker 2: Winning is eventual. Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 2: That's a quote right there. That's something worth getting tattooed. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: I'm curious though how you decide if something is worth winning because you decided not to win at deodorant, you decided not to win at turmeric, But you decided to win in protein. You decided to win in chess. You decided to win in podcasting. What do you use to determine if something's worth winning versus, you know what, it was a good effort and this gives us more data for the direction we're going to go. Speaker 1: So in the beginning, I used to think small and winning could be something as small as getting my first thousand subscribers as an example. But over time, My gauge of what makes something worth it is governed by a couple of things. One thing, one of my friends, Craig Clemens, he wrote an article about something about like 10 ways to get richer. So it was a real cheesy article, but the article's main point was, You should go after something bigger, right? You're better to have 1% of a huge market than 80% of a small market. And that idea that he presented made sense to me. That was one of the reasons why I wanted to do like products is because winning in products is so much bigger than winning on information. Speaker 2: Yes. Speaker 1: So that was, is you want to make sure the thing you're going for has big opportunity. If you start with something that has small opportunity, the likelihood of you winning is smaller because there's not as much opportunity there. So first you start with big opportunity. Second is when you're going after that big opportunity, are you delivering something that is unique, better, different than what everyone else is delivering? The truth of the deodorant was is that the deodorant was a good product. My wife is upset that we're getting out of deodorant. She loves our deodorant, uses it all the time. I hated the deodorant because as a man with hair under his arms and no weird product in it to make it smooth, when you'd use it, it'd like rip hair out as you're using the deodorant. I remember using it just thinking to myself, you know what? I'm not using deodorant anymore. I became a no deodorant guy, right? I've sold deodorant as a no deodorant guy. Guess what? It wasn't working, right? Because I wasn't using it anymore. That'll happened where it's like I had a big idea George big. But we weren't delivering a unique amazing experience and. The reviews, the experience of other people around me were telling me that we weren't doing it. It wasn't that they weren't understanding. It's that we weren't delivering on what I wanted to deliver. Same with the bone broth, which got canceled. I love the bone broth product that we had, but the problem was only one out of like 20 people loved the bone product. The other 19 would buy it and get pissed off, right? So it's like, this is not delivering a good experience. So big opportunity. That's with a product that fits that big opportunity for the masses. And then proof of concept is making the opportunity work financially. If the cogs are too high, you can't do it. If the cost of acquisition is too high, you can't do it. If people don't understand the product, you can't do it. You have to like figure out the actual math behind making this work. And that's kind of where we leaned into like with deodorant, margins are real bad, can't actually grow the business. With protein, plant protein actually margins are pretty bad in plant protein too. It still worked a little bit better because of just how big the market could be. But yeah, so big opportunity, good product, and then making sure the numbers work. That was kind of how I look at opportunity today. Speaker 2: Does that apply to something like chess? Where you've got, I mean, in this case, the big opportunity was I want to beat my dad. Speaker 1: Yeah, I want to not do 100 push-ups. And by the way, when you're like nine, doing 100, that sucks. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: I wanted to never do that again. Speaker 2: So it's impactful to you. Speaker 1: It was the biggest thing in the world to me. Speaker 2: Biggest opportunity you could see. Yes. And you had to learn a different way of playing. So you studied the books, but then the hustlers are teaching you how to combine this and this gives you the unique way to be able to play. So there's this big opportunity to you and you find your unique way of doing that. Speaker 1: We did that in retail, by the way. So, you know, retail, I'm a D2C guy. I spent my whole life as a direct response copywriter, basically. I'm a copywriter. That's how I would identify myself. Not these days, I'm not really copywriting anymore, but I would as a direct response guy. When you sell online, a free with purchase is a very good offer. Like, oh, buy this, get this free swag item. Get this shaker cup, get this tote bag. That works really well for generating sales. And I was like, why can't we do that in stores? Well, stores say, oh yeah, just put a thing on there. Go let them claim it on the website. I'm like, I don't want to do that. If they get a thing to go to the website, then I have to ship it to them. I have to lose money shipping it. Like this, this is a mess. I want you to put it on the shelf next to my product. And they're like, I don't wanna give you shelf space. I was like, well, if you're letting me buy an end cap, can I put anything on the end cap? No one wanted to listen to this, by the way. Eventually, we got another one of the forefronts here. I think it was Fresh Thyme was one of the first bigger stores that said yes to this. I think it was Fresh Thyme. And they let us put our protein on end cap with our shaker cups. Buy a protein, take a free shaker cup. Shaker cup's like a $20 value, and they were giving them out for free in line. And then we saw the numbers. We had a velocity as if the product was on sale at full price. And now we see those numbers. Remember, tested it. Now we go to the other stores. Hey, I want you to do this. I want you to do this. I want you to, and all of a sudden we have this everywhere now. We had that, one of our main promotions every year is give away a free, a free big item on shelf in store experience. And when we did that, people kept coming up to me like, you know, how'd you do this? No one ever does this in retail. I was like, yeah, retail didn't even want to do this in retail until we literally harassed them until they said yes. And that's kind of how that is. But same thing is like, you talk about combining multiple worlds. I think that's what allows people to win is when you have an experience over here or experience over there and you combine everything and make it work. They don't wanna give you the shelf space, but I'm already buying the shelf space. And if I'm trying to sell the units, what does it matter what I put on the shelf if it sells the units? Most people put like comm boxes, and we do too sometimes, like comm boxes, like signage on the end cap. I'd rather just put a shaker cup there of a free item that they could take with purchase. This is obviously way easier to say than it is to execute, but we did pull it off. Speaker 2: You found some way to be just different enough to where it stood out in a really big opportunity backed by a good product. And then you use your marketing chops to bring new things to the table. I actually, we pulled some of the quotes that you shared when you keynoted the Capitalism conference a few years ago. Speaker 1: Only two people know what I said there. You, God, because I don't remember. Speaker 2: The internet remembers everything. So two of them that stand out to me were things about how you see marketing that I want to know if you still agree with these statements today or if anything has changed. One of them is we don't do content. We just buy ads and send them straight to sales pages. Yes. Speaker 1: Still do that. We buy ads, send them to sales pages. No content. Some of our ads are content, like there's a recipe or something and some of the influencer stuff that's being done, they're making content, but still the primary way that we drive value is by offering our product to people. And if they want to buy it, they buy it. And sometimes we'll do a free with purchase offer. Sometimes we'll do a story. Sometimes there'll be a recipe or use case, but generally I went from being a content guy where I was publishing podcasts, YouTube. I think I have over a hundred thousand subs on YouTube as an example. Like I was making a lot of content and now we do zero content and we're going to keep it that way. Speaker 2: Another quote is we don't do remarketing. In fact, I hate remarketing. Speaker 1: Yeah. So we have. Speaker 2: Remarketing, meaning like retargeting ads, follow-ups. Speaker 1: So we don't do remarketing as a big part of the spend. I want my ads to hit people that are new customers. One of the internal metrics we look for is I like my, if I'm buying an ad, I want the person that I'm acquiring from those ads to be about 90% net new customers. The repeat customers kind of figure themselves out, right? Because if they like the product, they're going to find a way to buy it. I can't track if they buy it in store. I can't track if they buy it on Amazon. I don't really focus on remarketing. Speaker 2: That's really interesting. Speaker 1: You let the product do the selling for itself. Yes. The product's good enough. You will come back. Can we improve in this area? Sure. Of course we can. We do some like retargeting email lists and stuff like that. Like, hey, you're a buyer. We know you bought from us. We'll try to send you emails, obviously. I guess an email, an SMS, that is remarketing. It's just not buying advertising. But we don't put our ad spend to retarget. Speaker 2: You don't put dry powder towards people who have already converted. Speaker 1: Yeah, we let the email and SMS and all that other stuff figure it out. Speaker 2: The final quote that I wrote down is, people don't buy because they like your product. They buy because they believe what you believe. Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 2: We've talked a lot about product. So how does that match with what you're saying in this quote? Speaker 1: One thing I feel like I've missed So far up until this point, we're having this great conversation and I'm talking about product. I'm talking about business opportunity. But what I didn't tell you and what I didn't really focus on is the mission of the brand. The mission of the brand is that we want to create products that people use in their daily life without weird ingredients in them. That's it. That's the mission. When we first started that mission, this was driven a lot. A lot of that vision was driven by one of my co-founders, you know, cause she was known as the food babe. She was very big into that mission. That was the main mission and people latch on to that mission. As that mission became more and more mainstream, we are now the default option for that mission because we owned that mission, that identity, that unique selling proposition, that thing that makes us different. You could read books like Positioning by Al Ries or Culture Code or a lot of these other people that talk about Donald Miller, I think, is the guy. StoryBrand? Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: That's a great book on this too. So like you can kind of lean into this idea of mission and we didn't do it to be some like marketing gimmick. It's who we are, right? Like I believe in this stuff. I remember when I was having my kid and this is, remember, my wife was, we were trying to have a kid. We eventually had the kid in 2018. So the first year in business, I had my first kid, which was interesting. Speaker 2: It was the same thing for me, by the way. What a driving force for growth. Speaker 1: Yeah. But also like stressful. Speaker 2: Oh yeah. Speaker 1: Especially because I just killed my income stream and I have a new income stream. So like the whole thing is like wild. And I remember when we were going through all this stuff, my wife started changing all the products that she was using. She started to not buy the regular shampoo anymore and she wanted one without the chemicals in it and all this stuff because we were trying to have a kid. And then I remember when my kid eventually got sick, when we had the kids, she got sick and they told me to get like some brand of products, some like electrolyte product. And I'm looking at it, it's got like artificial colors in it. I'm like, why am I, why is it artificial? I don't think the kid can see color yet, right? Like, I think they're technically colorblind for like a few months, right? So like, why are they putting all these artificial colors in this kid's drink? And I was like, this is stupid. So like it stands with mission, right? Mission is take all this weird stuff out of product. You can sit here and argue about, is it safe? Is it not safe? Is it safe? The dose makes the poison. I don't care about any of that. The bottom line is I don't want artificial food dye in my product that I'm eating. It doesn't need to be there, right? I don't eat it for the color, right? You put the color in there for the marketing. So like we stand for this and we were neurotic about it. We actually are probably more neurotic about our ingredients than we even tell people about, right? Like we don't have gums in our protein powder or flow agents. And I remember when we first tried to convince a manufacturer to make a protein powder without a flow agent, they're like, oh, it can't be done. I'm like, what do you mean it can't be done? Just don't put it in there. Just take it out. Don't put it in the product. He said, oh yeah, but how is it going to run through the machine? I'm like, we make product for people, not machines. I don't care about how it runs in the machine. I think, well, how are we going to package it? And he's like, it's going to get caught in the spout. I was like, oh, it gets caught. Just hit it. Unknown Speaker: Just hit the spout. Speaker 1: It'll come down. So the first like year, dude, no joke, we were actually, we had people in our co-backer hand-filling bags of protein with scoops, hand-filling it. Now, mind you, they already had a process to hand fill. The reason why I know this is because they use a machine, fill it through the sprout, get in there, they weigh it. If it doesn't match the weight, they put a little more in there. I was like, just do that, right? Skip that all, skip everything else. Did that eventually put a vibrating ring on the spout and just shakes the powder down. But we want to take everything out of the product that didn't need to be there. I didn't have any sort of direct benefit or reason and I do that now where you know. My business partner, Vani, is way more strict about this than I am. I try to take a little bit more of a normalized approach where we're just not gonna have this type of stuff in the house. But if I'm going out to dinner, I'm not gonna be that friend that says, oh, I can't, I can't eat anything here. This is weird. It's not organic, right? But I try, like, in the house, we'll try to buy the best stuff we can. But I try not to let that impact a daily life, which is, some people might say, off-brand, I guess, but The same token, not everyone has caught up. Today, it's way more caught up than what it was back then. Speaker 2: Yeah, I wanted to ask you if the approach has had to shift at all now that the market has kind of caught up to you. I mean, you had your big enemy, which was big food, and you ran against that. But now with the Maha movement and organic kind of being almost mainstream, has your marketing had to shift to keep up with Where we are in the cycle or has that been a tailwind for the growth of Truvani? Speaker 1: So we started by leaning into good ingredients first. The problem is back then people didn't care. Today, even with how much press it's getting, The unfortunate reality is most people still don't care. Now we want to make them care because we believe that this is the future and we make our products. They cost more money to make like this. Like we're suffering because of this. But the unfortunate truth is not everyone cares. And we have seen this in advertising, where if you lead with some of these messages, it's like, sure, they might get some good reach, but it's not scale. And for every one person that cares about artificial colors or artificial sweeteners, there's probably 20 people that don't. Speaker 2: As I'm drinking a Diet Dr. Pepper. Speaker 1: Listen, I'm not judging you about a Diet Dr. Speaker 2: Pepper. That's good, because there's basically like an ivy of sucralose into my veins right now. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Still buy Truvani, but, you know. I drink a lot of Zero Sugar Coke and Dr. Pepper. Speaker 1: I totally get it. Speaker 2: Sorry for shitting on your marketing campaign right in the middle. Speaker 1: So the point is that like you can stand for, and by the way, I like Diet Coke too. I just try not to drink it all the time. Sinner. But the point is, is that there's a lot more people that care About something tasting good. So what we found is in our market we lead in sampling, but our messaging is always what we call a delectable treat. Protein that tastes like ice cream, that's an example, or protein that tastes like a brownie or this is a chocolate brownie. If you look at our snack bar line, the first few bars are traditional snack bar flavors. Our next line, the stuff that tastes really good is like chocolate cherry, sugar cookie, snickerdoodle. Chocolate chip banana bread and they all taste like this and we go for the delectable treat option. We market the protein with delectable treats as well because at the end of the day, what people really want these days, I think, the mass appeal. Like if I'm trying to sell to a very small, build a very small business, you would do an activism-based brand to only activists. Or you could be an activist brand that convinces regular people to use your product. And we find that it's easier to convince them to treat themselves than it is to care about every little thing that they're eating. So we rather get you in with the Trojan horse of, hey, make a healthy brownie, but you're actually gonna get a really cool thing that's pretty good for you. Speaker 2: That's interesting. And so in doing so, you're meeting the customer where they're at. Speaker 1: Yeah, Collier, right? You want to enter the conversation that's going on in people's heads. You heard the Blue Letter book or maybe you heard about the book or whatever. One of his famous quotes is you want to enter the conversation that goes on in people's heads. Speaker 2: So you're meeting them there, but as the movement or the demand grows, you're ready for it. So you have tailwinds as the market kind of comes your way. Speaker 1: Yeah. And even for our brand, man, like a protein powder, Protein powder is not a female forward product. Now you have plant proteins, very female forward. But if you look at protein powder 10, 15 years ago, it was fitness enthusiasts. Speaker 2: Yeah, bros. Speaker 1: Bros. You look a little bit later, you have women who are now fitness enthusiasts that are also trying to up their protein, the protein, the macros people and all those people trying to get more protein. We have found that our customer, we've surveyed. About 40% of the people that bought our product during this survey that they did with a couple thousand respondents, they said they'd never taken a protein before. We're bringing new people in. Wow. By the way, retailers love this because the incrementality in the aisle is demonstrable. When we come into the aisle, the aisle grows. This gives us a lot of street cred. They've never tried a protein before. This is big because our customer are what I call healthy enough people, people that aren't going to the gym seven days a week. They're going to the workout class once or twice a week or once every other two weeks or whatever. Getting their kids ready to go to school and they're looking for a healthy snack on the way to school and they want a snack bar or a smoothie. These are people that care about what they're eating, but they're not neurotic about what they're eating. That's our core customer, which really is the biggest group of people, too, because most people want to be healthy. They want to feel good, but they're not necessarily going to be fitness enthusiasts. Now, the younger generation is a little bit different. I think the younger generation is a little bit more into fitness these days than I think that's probably driven by TikTok, Instagram and the visual nature of everything today. But I think most people just want to be healthy enough. Healthy enough to not have any pain, really. And that's kind of our market. And those people, they want a brownie. They're not trying to not eat sugar for four weeks. Maybe they'll do a cleanse or something, but they're not super crazy about it. Speaker 2: But your positioning has been mass market enough that you're in most Walmarts, right? Speaker 1: Walmart's a funny story, but yeah, Walmart. We launched in 4,200 Walmarts, which wasn't the plan, to be honest with you. They came to our booth in Expo, said, hey, we see your numbers are great. We'd love to launch you. Eventually, they were going to launch us in 2,000 doors, and then like a month before we launched, like, you know what? Let's put you in 4,200 doors. Speaker 2: Wow. Speaker 1: So yeah. Speaker 2: So you had to call an audible there. Speaker 1: Oh, that was a mess. That was a mess. Speaker 2: But your mass market enough to where you're in 4,000 Walmarts. Yeah. It's such an interesting balance where you have your core superfans. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: But yet those core superfans have brought it to the rest of the market enough to where now it's a mass market idea. Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 2: Has that forced you to shift the way that you communicate about the brand or your customers? Speaker 1: Most of the shift came from leaning against ingredients, even though we do all the right things with ingredients, still, we lean into delectable treats, which helps us for mass market. I mean, one of the numbers I've shared before is, you know, people want to launch a brand and build a business. But for us, we're just at a different scale these days, right? I used to think brand marketing was stupid. It's not stupid. I understand it now. I didn't understand it then. I understand it now because you need awareness and demand for all the stores you're in. But like last July, right as we're launching into Walmart and we're doing all this other stuff, we actually launched in Walmart, Kroger, like 800 or so Kroger doors, and launched all these new products and whatever. It's a crazy summer. In one month we shipped out, I think it was about 450,000 units of product in a month. That is wild to me, right? I remember when we started this thing and we're happy with a pallet of product. Now we have warehouses of product. It's like, how many warehouses do we have of stuff? Speaker 2: You had 5,000 units is your first term, right? Speaker 1: And now we're shipping out in a month. I remember when I was doing Soul Triggers and I had a half a million people on the email list and I'm thinking, I'm the biggest thing in the world. Half a million people is a huge email list, right? We ship 450,000 units of product in a month. That's crazy. Speaker 2: That's- That is crazy. Speaker 1: That's multiple 18 wheelers just busting stuff around, right? Every week, if you think about it. And I just remember when we first did our first half truck and now we're filling multiple trucks. That's crazy to think about. Speaker 2: What is it like having a product that recognized all over retail? How does that Versus being the number one on Amazon or crushing it with ads. Does it change the business or the way people perceive the business? Speaker 1: When we were doing well on Amazon, no one reached out to us. When we started to blow up in retail, all those reports get syndicated through like Nielsen and Spins. And then we start coming up to the top of those reports, all of a sudden we have some of the world's biggest private equity companies reaching out to us to try to like get a piece, right? Like this is one of those things, success begets success. And we never wanted to raise money. So we always fielded conversations just in case, we kept up relationships or whatever, but That was kind of the story, right? We want, we got in retail, became number one and people start seeing you everywhere. And now everyone starts reaching out from private equity people to, to hiring for positions became easier because people want to work at your company. Like at any given moment, I'm getting emails from people saying, Hey, I'd love to work at your brand, right? That didn't happen when you're an Amazon company. Another thing that happens when you're a retail focused brand is You just get seen by more people all the time, right? Whereas most people, when you're an online brand, people see you if you buy ads. When you're in store brand, they see you when they walk down the aisle, when you're on end cap. So people are getting exposed to you all the time. That's really big. So recruiting is easier. Customers start to see you everywhere. And then when they see your ads, they're like, oh, I saw you in retail. Sometimes they buy you in retail because they saw you in ads, but same thing. It creates this omni-channel thing. And what's more important is that if you're trying to build a brand that has book value and actual growth, these days people aren't acquiring, I'm not saying I'm trying to sell my company. What I'm trying to say is that I might do something in the future, right? And I know that having a omni-channel brand that shows longevity and success in all channels Is worth way more than an Amazon brand. Speaker 2: I want to close by running a few words or phrases by you and I just want to get your hot take. So we're going to call this hot takes with Derek. Speaker 1: Okay. Speaker 2: So I'm going to, I'm going to pull out a word from the space and or, or related to right now. And I just want to get Derek's hot take, whatever comes to mind. You ready to play hot takes with Derek? Speaker 1: I'm worried because I have a lot of hot takes and they're not always the nicest. Speaker 2: Well, here we go. Speaker 1: All right. Speaker 2: Number one, discounts. Speaker 1: I used to be anti-discounts. Now I think they're great. The reason why is when I first got into this business, I thought that discount, oh, you're discounting your customer, you're discounting, what a mess. You're going to devalue the brand. Wrong. Now, especially with consumables, when you discount your product and you offer a easier way for people to try your product, you're giving them an opportunity to try your product. They still have to buy your product afterwards. If you're a consumable brand, discounts are your best way to drive trial and you should absolutely lean into it. I did no discounts for a long time. I don't do discounts that often. I like free with purchase offers better because that's an implied discount. You get a free item as well, but discounts are a very important way to get people to use your product once. Speaker 2: Next, Walmart. Speaker 1: Okay. I had a lot of misconceptions about Walmart when I first got into business. I read a book called Walmart Effect. This book made me believe working with Walmart is a disaster for brands because the demand, they push you on margins, blah, blah, blah. All this stuff happens. What's interesting, what I've come to learn today Is I think Walmart is a great partner. Actually. I think Walmart is just upfront about their expectations. There are some retailers that are not upfront about their expectations and they nickel and dime you after the fact. And they surprise you with these things. Walmart just lets you know what's going on upfront. It was actually, you know, they, they say big box retail. Is, is, is not a great way to do business. I think big box retail is a great way to do business because you just know what you're getting into and they're great partners. I think small box retail, like some of the mom and pops that kind of got ours, I love those people too because they're out there sharing the message. They're super users. They're not as faceless as a big box retail person, but they're out there pushing the product. And then the last thing I'll share is as an activism brand that cares about ingredients, A lot of people reached out to me and said, hey, we're actually launching in Target soon. I don't know when this is going to air or whatever, but we're in Target. And we're also in Walmart. People are like, well, do you care that your product is so clean in a store like, let's say, Walmart that doesn't always have all clean products? And I said, look, it's not up to me to decide where people want to buy a clean product. Walmart has reach, and I Take great pride in knowing that they were willing to give our clean brand a shot in their store. And if that gets more people access to cleaner products, I'm happier for it. Speaker 2: Beautifully said. Tariffs. Speaker 1: Okay. So a lot of people are talking about tariffs today, but tariffs were a problem for me last year before today, because one of my key ingredients is pea protein. Pea protein is often the runoff. Pea protein is made when people make noodles, right? They make pea noodles or whatever. And then there's pea protein is one of the byproducts. So, A lot of peas are, let's say, grown in the U.S. and Canada and often sent to, let's say, a place like China or a place like India or a place that eat noodles to process, make the noodles, and then the pea protein is something that you could acquire. So last year, there were a lot of tariffs that were implemented on pea protein. At the time, we were getting so big that you have to get pea protein from wherever you can get it and it has to be the right quality. We always say that we're not loyal to the country in which a product comes from. We're loyal to the test results of how the product tests. Is it a good quality product and does it taste good? There were tariffs implemented from China specifically that were hundreds of percent Oh, we had to get better at knowing how to manage this. So we had to kind of retool our sourcing and retool where we get our product from. And maybe we didn't change formulation, but we kind of had a really hard in our supply chain to make sure we can continue making product. And that wasn't the easiest. Because we ended up – remember, I said we launched in Kroger. We were supposed to be in 2,000 Walmarts. Now, we're in 4,000 Walmarts. And now, we're like, well, where's the product going to come from? We're in the process of retooling supply chain, dah, dah, dah. And we actually stocked out of product for almost a month. It may have been a little bit longer than that, to be honest with you. But like we had some problems with stock outs. And people weren't, you know, they were ordering product and we say that this was happening or whatever. So there was a headache. So they were creating headaches. That said, today we have a different conversation around tariffs. It's hard to talk about tariffs from the perspective of whether it's good or bad without making it political in any way. But one thing I will say is I'm not for tariffs and I'm not against tariffs. I just view this as just another roadblock or obstacle that a good business person needs to overcome. That is not dissimilar to any other obstacle that you might encounter. You'll notice I quote a lot of books. I'm obviously a reader, but I read probably thousands of books. I don't even know how many at this point, but Black Swan by Nazim Tlaib. They talk about the Black Swan event always happens, and it's not weather. It will happen. It's when it will happen. Every year, there's a Black Swan event that makes everything a disaster for you. It's how you respond to the Black Swan event that makes you a better person. Remember, winning is eventual. You're going to have these Black Swan events that throw wrenches in everything you're doing. It's how you respond to them. iOS 14, remember when people were complaining about iOS 14? That was a huge black swan event that put people out of business. Tariffs are gonna do the same thing. All these things happen every single year, multiple times a year. Happened last year with the peak protein stuff. It's happening now. It's up to you to take what's happening and figure out how to solve that problem. Most people see a bad thing happen and, whoa, it's me, my life is over, there's nothing I can do, and they run around in circles just being stupid. It's like, well, look, this is not any worse than iOS 14 was. iOS 14 ruined people's businesses overnight. So that's kind of my viewpoint on, yeah, look, do I want to have a new thing that punches me in the face today? No. Of course not, right? It doesn't matter where you get your product from. When you're a food company and you're sourcing, you know, when I'm sourcing lemons from Italy, as an example, and I'm sourcing monk fruit from China, because that's where it grows. And I'm sourcing peas from Canada, because that's where peas grow. Like I'm obviously getting the stuff, the best product I can from the country that it comes from. Tariffs are not great, but I understand that it's just another black swan event that I have to adjust for. Speaker 2: Influencers. Speaker 1: Yeah, I hated influencers for a really long time and I hated them because I – remember that one thing that went viral? Oh, I don't get out of bed for 10 – unless I get $10,000, right? And they kind of got this bad rap or if you look at some of the influencers that go to hotels, well, I'll give you publicity if you just give me this for free and there's some bad raps there. But like all things, there are bad eggs that spoil the bunch or bad apples that spoil the bunch. And then there are a lot of great people. A lot of these influencers are hardworking, genuinely great people. And now that we've built an influencer division where we're gifting people, making ambassador events and doing all this cool stuff, I've become a little bit more open to the idea that not all influencers are bad and some are really just cool people that just happen to share what they do on the internet. I mean, I used to be one, I guess, right? But I guess I hated myself enough to stop doing it. Speaker 2: That's why I asked. Speaker 1: You know what I mean? So it's kind of like this double-edged sword, but I think the wrong influencers are really bad and the right ones are really good. Speaker 2: Capitalism. Speaker 1: I am a bleeding heart business person and I always will be. I remember one of the first books I ever read was a book called Winning by Jack Welch. And I just remember reading that book and I was like, oh, this guy, he's saying some really cool stuff. Then I read this other book called Jack Straight from the Gut. I think that was the one written by a speech writer. And I was telling myself at the time, I gotta go be CEO of a Fortune 100 company, right? I always loved business. I love creating businesses. I love creating products, solving problems. I love everything about it. I also think that capitalism is the great change of the world. You look at people, I've done a lot of reading on like the great monopolists of the 1800s and people look on and call them robber barons as an example. And I don't view them so unilaterally, right? And I don't know what book this was, but someone said that business people, they're not immoral and they're not moral, they're amoral. They usually have a problem that they're trying to solve And they'll do everything to make that happen. And I think that's really, really cool. We wouldn't have anything that we have today if it wasn't for capitalism in the 1800s and the Industrial Revolution and all these things that occur as a direct result of capitalism. So I'm always gonna be pro-business in every sense of the word. And I think we have to prop business owners, entrepreneurs, and all these people up to create these things. And I wish they would do it to make it easier. Like you want to talk about tariffs today. Like one of the things I keep saying is like, you know, we're putting tariffs in place today because we want to incentivize US manufacturing. Great. I love, I love the concept. If that's a goal for you, offer a tax credit to people to build a manufacturing plant in the US. I mean, there's tax credits they give people who make movies. Movies are one-time productions that will produce and then be gone. At least if you give a tax credit to people building a manufacturing facility, and they do some, like there was one for I think semiconductors in 2022, but you want to manufacture food here, give a tax credit. We'll build a manufacturing plant and those will last for decades. Not a one-time like movie tax credit, right? So it's like, I'm all for incentivizing business owners to do the right thing. And I think that's where I guess capitalism comes in is I'm pro-money, pro-business, but how do you mesh that with also being – what's that word? I don't know who coined this, but like conscious capitalism I think is the right way to think about it. Speaker 2: John Mackey, founder of GoFruits. John Mackey, yeah. Speaker 1: So I like that a lot. Speaker 2: My last question for you is do you ever miss the limelight and would you do it all over again? Speaker 1: This is one of those things where I'll probably eat my words because I did the limelight. I did speaking and it was fun for a little bit and then I hated it. And now, in the last several years, I probably have done three speaking engagements and yours was one of them. But I will say, I really like seeing some of the relationships that came out of the meeting of people at your event. One guy I met at Expo West, again, I think I met him at your event. He has a company called Happy Curves. You familiar with this? Speaker 2: No, I don't know this one. Happy Curves. Speaker 1: Happy Nuts. Speaker 2: Do you know this brand? Speaker 1: I think it's Happy Nuts. Speaker 2: They have done a phenomenal job. Speaker 1: Yes. So I met him at your event and then we reconnected recently. Speaker 2: He was doing like 30k a month. You know, on Amazon and now they have a multi eight figure company. Speaker 1: They're great. Speaker 2: They've just done a phenomenal job. Speaker 1: So I met him at your event and I reconnect with him. So do I miss the limelight for the limelight sake? No, I miss meeting cool people. And when you're on stage, it's way easier to meet cool people. That's one thing that changed actually is when I, when I was internet famous for being a business marketing person, a lot more people wanted to be friends with me. Because they're like, oh, what could you do for me, right? Now it's, I don't have anyone trying to be my friend. I have to like try to make friends. Speaker 2: Oh, you mean it in a positive way where it was easier to meet people. Speaker 1: Way easier to meet people. Speaker 2: But people also want things from you. Speaker 1: They way easier to meet people and they want something, which is, by the way, a lot of those people that I made friends with back then, I'm not really friends with today because I have nothing to offer them. But these days I find myself wanting to connect with cool people And so maybe I might, I keep saying, maybe I'll do a podcast. I don't think I'm going to do a podcast, but maybe I will. Or maybe I'll do like, there's always people that say, Oh, do you want to be an advisor? I was like, I'm kind of busy. I don't really, you know, I have my kids, I have my company. I don't know if I can do it, but I was like, maybe I'll be an advisor. And I keep tossing around this idea and this is going on, by the way, for four years. And I haven't done anything with it. So clearly, I don't care enough to do it. But will I do it again? Maybe. And I do know that whatever my next act will be, I'm kind of liking the way... I'll probably be CPG for the rest of my life because I love CPG. I could see myself moving more into an advisor role or private equity role in the future that tries to incubate brands to certain levels and kind of lean into that just because I really like it. I haven't really done like, hey, I'm going to do that this year. You know what I mean? That's just kind of me kicking around ideas. Speaker 2: Well, whenever you do it, you'll have the full support of Capitalism.com. Speaker 1: That's good to hear. Speaker 2: Derek, I'm fascinated by the story. I'm a fan of Truvani. I can't wait to see what you do next. Thanks for hanging out with us. Speaker 1: Thanks for having me. This is now, I could say that you were one of my first speaking engagements as a Truvani person. And I think this might be my second ever interview as a Truvani person. You somehow managed to get me out of my hole multiple times. And in all fairness, I didn't even know you when I agreed this. I knew of you obviously, but I didn't know who you were or what you stood for. So that's a testament to you and what you're building because you're building something that's Interesting enough for making me want to leave the house. Speaker 2: Thank you. Well, I appreciate the exception. I'm a fan, my friend. Good to see you. Speaker 1: Nice to see you too. Speaker 2: People like Derek inspire me. They inspire me to play a bigger game. They also inspire me to take a dose of my own medicine. Because I made the most money by building physical product brands, not by selling things, not by selling coaching programs or by selling advertising to my audience. It's by building things. And I like hanging out with people who are building things. And he inspires me to put more emphasis into building things. And yes, I personally have a business that helps e-commerce entrepreneurs and helps founders grow and helps people make their first million. But being around Derek makes me want to put all my focus into one thing and just become number one. That's hard for most of us as entrepreneurs. And I just want to share with you, friend to friend, this is convicting for me too. This is a challenge in my life of figuring out what is the one thing that I'm going to win at. But every time I hang out with someone like Derek, I realized that the thing that gets the most focus is the thing that you'll do better than anyone else. And that is the thing that you will win at. I will contradict myself for 10 seconds and say, if you want to follow in the footsteps of Derek and build an e-commerce brand that scales, go over to Capitalism.com slash one, because we're really good at doing that. Now I'm going to go back to work and build mine. Thank you for being here. I'm Ryan Daniel Moran with Capitalism.com. I'll see you on the next episode.