🍦 DANIEL GOETZ // GOODPOP FOUNDER & CEO

0:00I'm Sam Rose, and you're tuning in to Commerce is Chaos, the podcast for consumer brand founders who know that building a business is messier than the highlight reel shows. Your supplier just missed their deadline, your top product is out of stock, and your competitors somehow launched the same thing at half the price. Sound familiar? Every week, we dive into the real problems that keep founders up at night, from inventory disasters to supply chain nightmares, because surviving the chaos is what separates brands that fail from brands that scale. Daniel, thank you so much for joining us on Commerce is Chaos.

0:32It's such a pleasure to get to know you in this way. I've been reading a bit about you and just can't overstate how excited I am to have this convo. Let's talk about the business and let's talk about ops. Thanks for nerding out with me. Let's do it. Okay, you built GoodPop with savings, right? I've been there. And like hand-making popsicles in a kitchen. Can you tell us a little bit about how that started? And then I will just signal for everybody. It's a little bit bigger now than popsicles in a borrowed kitchen, isn't it? It has. Yeah. Sam, thank you so much for having me. And yeah, it's been such an insane and incredible journey.

1:14So I was in college when I was using my savings to make these popsicles, but it goes back even further because just like as a kid, I was always doing kind of random sort of entrepreneurial things, even before I knew what entrepreneurship was. And so I started out selling, you know, like lemonade. Well, not even selling lemonade, giving it away on the street. And sometimes it would drop in like a quarter or, you know, a nickel or whatever it was. And that felt great. And then I fast forward to like middle school. I started mowing lawns with this little lawnmower that we had at our house, got my friends involved.

1:57We were just going door to door to houses that had really tall grass and just knocked on the door and said, like, you need a little help. And then, right? And then, like, yeah, we could use some help. How much do you charge? And we would say, it's like whatever you want. And so sometimes they would pay us$15 in the summer, you know, four hours worth of work. three guys but it was that money that i used for my my middle school lawn mowing money to make my first batch of good pops in college no way yeah that's amazing so that's kind of where it all started and the first batch was not a successful batch because it didn't freeze or right yeah it just it just stayed there as fruit nothing happened successful batch you kept watching it But it didn't, like, the grass was growing faster than the fruit was making itself into popsicles.

2:52We made pops. Nothing happened. They didn't freeze. That's the story. That's the origin story. The actual story is we made 18 ,000 popsicles to sell them at Austin City Limits in 2009, like outside of the festival. 18 ,000? Yeah. And I've been going to ACL and seeing how many people go up and down that Barton Springs Road to enter the festival. It's always so hot. And so as a festival goer, when I was in college, I was like, I would love a paleta or a popsicle or something that's refreshing. So yeah, life savings in, made 18 ,000 pops. And we sold four that year. 18 ,000? Of$18 ,000. Yeah, it was rainy.

3:41It was cold. The whole park turned into like a big mud pit. So we sold four pops. And so like that was the, that was my introduction to entrepreneurship as an adult. I was 22, but as an adult. Now I'm sad for a little baby Daniel. It was so sad. It was so sad. I thought we were going to use that money to kickstart the business, make these popsicles, sell them. Everyone's so excited to see them. Everyone's so excited to eat them, enjoy them. And none of that came to fruition. I was going to say no pun intended, but I don't think fruit isn't fruit-ish, is it? yeah no fru is right in there i see i went yeah so okay so pun intended um as an english major you know i don't know yeah that's fruit now it's been useful twice right yeah in the last six minutes so that was the beginning of this entrepreneurial journey that has been good pop and it's seen every type of like twist and turn and it's been a never-ending roller coaster but it has been so incredible.

4:51I'm happy to dive into any part, either the peak or the valley. I am bursting with questions. Okay, 17 ,996 popsicles. What happened to them? I loaded up my Toyota with all of them. In like Yenis or like? No, loose. Okay. totally loose i mean in like gigantic boxes like loose like no refrigeration and i i cranked my ac and there was only one place that you could like rent cold storage at that time and it was 45 minutes north of austin in this town called taylor so i went up there um and they said yeah we'll charge you a hundred dollars a month for a pallet so i got a pallet put it on there and then just stacked the popsicles on there before they melted.

5:49Then I went, so the pops are now frozen. That part was taken care of. And then I went back to like reassessing my entire life for the next several months after that. You've got 17 ,996 pops at Taylor. They stay frozen. You think about your life choices. I have more. Wait, I want to drill down to this for a second. We'll get back to the life choices, but how many pallets is$17 ,996? We made it all fit, stacked it all the way to the top. It was all in one pallet. I just stacked it all the way to the top. Okay, great. Yeah, so it wasn't bad. Like, it was$100 a month, but my life savings was gone.

6:30I didn't know what I was going to do. I just spent maybe five months sort of, like, dreaming about creating this better free popsicle company with a give back mission. We wanted to make like the Tom's shoes of Pops. And like, that was how I was inspired by sort of everything that was going on in this social enterprise movement back in like 2008, 2009. And so I just only saw that, I only saw one outcome. And that was that this was going to kickstart that business. And it just didn't happen. And I was still in college and I was just sitting there feeling like an idiot, trying to figure out what to do next.

7:11Okay. Give us the bright side. What happens next? Because I know you figured this out. Oh, well, the bright side is that 17 years later, we're still doing this thing. We've had a lot of impact. We've never raised any outside capital, had a ton of fun along the way, learned so much and built something that I and all of my coworkers are so proud to have built. And we're just still getting started. So that's the good news. There's no like, that's just it. That's just it. That's just it. I love that. That's just it. You know, you just got to like stay the course. You, unlike almost every CPG brand, because CPG and coaching, really expensive to run, to scale.

8:01So most businesses have to take on outside investment, but you stayed bootstrapped. How much of that, you know, like, and that's sort of a life or death thing, right? Like you're trying to protect your mission, but you don't really have, you just have to use the business to fuel the business. Has being self-funded in that way kind of shaped how you make decisions around growth? Like you're playing with your own money, your own hard-earned savings, every blade of grass you ever cut? Being bootstrapped has, both sides have their sort of positives and negatives. And I think that when you're bootstrapping, you're kind of like, not to keep using the grass analogy, but like the grass is always greener, like depending on which route you've chosen.

8:38They're both, they both can be means to the same end, which is like running a successful business, feeling a lot of pride in the business that, that, that you've launched and seeing grow. And maybe if your goal is to like exit the business, you could do that either way, but there are unique challenges that come with both routes. And so from like a bootstrapping side, the only reason it was possible other than just like a lot of really random pieces of luck along the way. Like, so the next bit of that story was I just shut this. I basically went back to school and forgot about Good Pop kind of for a while.

9:15But I had a website. I had, you know, we had given away the rest of the popsicles at South by the next year. Kind of forgotten about Good Pop a little bit. But one morning at like two in the morning, I did some SEO on our website. And because I was like the only asset that was left in the business and business at that time was just this website. And like a week later, when you search organic popsicles, we were the number one result because there were no organic popsicles. And about a week after that, a marketing firm reached out asking if we would put in a bid for 40 ,000 popsicles for a solar powered truck, solar panel company, ice pop tour.

9:55And we had no money, no way to make the product, nothing. But I put in a bid, of course, and then we get the bid. And so I asked for a 50 % upfront payment and then 50 % at the end. the 50 % upfront payment, we made their pops. And then after we delivered them, I got the profit and the profit was$40 ,000. And with that money, I bought packaging immediately and relaunched GoodPop. So little breaks like that. But then from there on, every single decision that was made, and I was 23 at this time, was taken to support the path that I chose, which is bootstrapping. So sleeping on couches and living rent free and like living up with my mom.

10:45Those are the kind of things that as a 23 year old, like you kind of, you can do maybe not as a grownup. As more of a grownup, baby Daniel. Yeah. You must be so proud of baby Daniel. Like he really, he really showed up for you, didn't he? I mean, he definitely got me into a lot of precarious situations like driving around with dry ice in my car for years not knowing that it's like bad for you unless you're supposed to roll down your window like things like that i wish i had more access to um you know like a smartphone would i could have checked is it okay right i'm in a car with dry ice does your nose like start to tingle it feels like you're swimming inside of a sprite can or something.

11:27Yeah. It's really weird, isn't it? Yes. Like you're, you're, you're drinking Sprite with your eyes or something. I'm still like, I'm still twitching out right now from that. It's residual. So yeah, I am very proud that, you know, I, I, I was coming out of, I was proud that I didn't quit because I had come out of things that I had just quit. And like in college, I was like playing football and I was all excited to go do that in college. And then after my freshman year, I quit. And I felt kind of like, I felt like I let myself down and I was kind of a quitter. And, and so I just wasn't going to let myself feel like that's who I am.

12:05And so that kind of helped power through some of those early years. Wow. Um, okay. Taking, taking like what lessons you can from that. I mean, it sounds like being your own bridge is a piece of it. What I heard was you gave yourself time, right, to figure it out. And you just sort of trusted in that moment like that things would sort it out. One of the biggest lessons is just with the constraints of not having excess money, like every decision is like so narrow, so targeted, has to be super intentional. It has to make sense for the business, has to be profitable. And so I guess the original question is like, you know, that's the answer.

12:44It's being a bootstrap founder forces you to make really responsible decisions that are profitable. And it doesn't allow you to go chase things that are interesting and might have a potential return at some point or more like longer term sort of plays or longer term investments. Shopping is, it's much more narrow. And that's why that, the path is, it can take you, you know, it's been 17 years. It can take you a long time. It can take you longer to get to where you're trying to go. How much of that discipline and fortitude do you bring to the table every day when you're making decisions now as a, I assume, a very profitable?

13:28all i mean all of those decisions like that's that that just becomes experience that you have with you that that you create filters by which you navigate all the every decision that comes up throughout any course of the day like there's all these decisions that come up as a small business owner as an operator and um and you bring that with you as as sort of a filter to to run them through. Is this a good decision? Is it, are we chasing? Does, is this take us away from like with, with bootstrapping, like you have to wear blinders and go, you know, you have to know where you're trying to go and then only take those steps that ladder up to that versus something might deviate off of that path.

14:13And so the constraints of capital like are helpful in that way. Yeah. Yeah. It really does create just sort of like a hybrid focus that is a difficult, I think, to replicate when you're not so under stress, but ultimately desirable to replicate. I find myself a lot coming back to like, if this was the last dollar I was spending on this business, like how would I be spending it? Multiply that by five, by 10, by another hundred, and like make that decision that you would have made with the last single dollar. But it's hard, to do when you get comfortable sorry yeah the the discipline gets a little softer when like it gets a little softer when you get comfortable yeah i just i'm perpetually uncomfortable you too i like it that way isn't it good that way it is good it is i also i thrive in create i thrive inside chaos because i so deeply enjoy creating order out of it and then moving on to the next chaos.

15:15So I'm not like, I'm not the type of operator who's like, okay, now everything is like prim and proper. And now we're done. I'm like, Oh, where's the next, what's the next insane thing that I can do? Like feed the beast. And that, that creates seasons of perpetual discomfort, but also like extraordinary growth. And it's really fun. Yeah. Yeah. I'm, I'm like, I'm at this, I'm exactly where you are. Like, that's how I'm wired. But I don't know, like the last couple years I've been trying to think about is that is that me or is that just like what we're is that what we're really good at or is that like just what we need to thrive and is it not more challenging to try to operate in times that are not chaos like you know what I mean like it's I almost want to be able to operate in times that are not chaos because it's more of a challenge because we're used to the other side right it's like yeah it's like you're you know you're in I know exactly what I don't have words to put on it, but you are right.

16:11And maybe this is just the thing that we're doing to ourselves. If we are authentic about saying we seek challenge, then maybe this is like the Zen moment of it all. Seek the challenge of peace. Yes. That's it. Okay, I'm going to write that down and just take a break. And I'm just going to start taking notes. Yeah, let's do it. This has been cool. Bye. Cards on the table. Your tech stack is held together with duct tape and prayers. If you're a brand founder or COO juggling Shopify, your 3PL portal, three different inventory trackers, and yes, that one crucial Google sheet, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

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17:31I want to talk about, like cold chain logistics a little bit and how you scaled distribution. Cold chain, for those that aren't familiar with the phrase, is basically the sequence of custody that allows frozen things or refrigerated things to stay refrigerated the whole way. And it's logistically complicated because like that's not what the planet wants to do in the frozen popsicles. They want them to warm up and you went from distributing for yourself and like, tell me how you laddered up distribution. So you're distributing for yourself kind of locally and then regionally and then across the state of Texas.

18:07Right. And then you kind of work with a distributor at some point to take over that process. I just love to hear kind of like how, how those step ladders work for you. And maybe from the lens of sort of like, you know, trusting someone else with, you know, with your baby and rebuilding the system as you go. It's so another sort of side effect and benefit of bootstrapping is you kind of have to kind of have to just become an expert in everything that touches your business. So like whether it's like where your fruit comes from and what the farmers have to deal with or how things get from point A to point B on logistics.

18:43And when you start on the ground floor and you're in it and like I'm in my Toyota trying to keep things frozen. And I'm at the back door of a grocery store and seeing how things come in. And then I get to talk to the drivers and see like, okay, so how does this work? How do these pallets that have 50 different products on them get built? Who does that? How does it, how does it come together? So I kind of learned just by spending four or five years driving all over Texas, keeping pops frozen myself on dry ice and coolers, talking to people at the back door, either like an independent grocery store, tea store, or like a Whole Foods, and you start to figure out and piece together how this actually works from there.

19:28That all changed when we got into Whole Foods Southwest region, and I had to learn about distributors and how that all comes together. But because I had been in, I spent a lot of time in my cold storage facility and understanding how these pallets come together and where the costs all go and like how to make this work efficiently. From there, you can figure out how to scale. And a lot of the, I mean, I think the main difference between a profitable business in frozen and one that can't find a way to be profitable is in that supply chain and understanding every single touch point. And I don't know.

20:05So that's how I learned along the way. Having shipping in frozen ingredients, you've got to do it efficiently because LTL is going to suck up all the margin, like less than truckload freight is going to suck up all the margin in this business. And so you have to find ways. So it's working with some of your suppliers and maybe they'll hold additional inventory for you locally. They can ship in full truckloads of products or even full pallets of product and warehouse it for you. So things like that help separate businesses that rely on cold chain that are profitable versus unprofitable. Yeah, I've had a similar experience, like just understanding how each cog in the machine works, even if it's just a passing understanding creates, it creates so much, it gives you so much horsepower as an operator.

20:51It gives you empathy, which is like the relationship horsepower that the whole system needs to come together because it ultimately all comes down to people doing things in the real world. And like having an appreciation of how it happens in the real world allows you to make like much, much higher grade decisions about what's going to happen instead of just like trusting that the person who is maybe not quite is invested in an outcome, but maybe isn't quite as invested in your business. you understand how they're making decisions and then you can course correct too which i've found to be so valuable and having said that did you ever find yourself in a position where you're like you know someone that you're working with on the other side is kind of like about to make a choice and you're like no no no wait like why are we doing it that way all the time i mean it's like this whole thing is about and i think what you're just describing is just finding like these win-win wins for everybody like finding a win-win relationship between you and your growers or you and your distributors or you and your retailers or you and your logistics third-party logistics providers allows for that third win which is for the consumer to get the product at a price that makes sense for them and so but yeah there's constantly and if if you're not in the room and having these in the weeds conversations which a lot of people don't want to do like i wanted to build a pop company with better ingredients that I could go out and make an impact on the world.

22:15And that was all. That was the goal. It was not to spend time in cold storage facilities or spend time, you know, doing like delivering popsicles. But if you want it, if you want a business like that to exist, you have to understand every single step to where you can have these conversations and find win-wins with all of these different suppliers. So understanding, well, if you can send me, if you can send a pallet that's fully optimized that we don't have to break down and we don't have to do case picking. And if you can work with your distributors where they're not ordering in case pick, but they can maybe order in a pallet quantity, then we can be much more efficient because then we don't have to have the labor to break down pallets.

22:56And that's where a lot of your margin is disappearing. Like little things like that, that you have to be in the building to really understand. Yeah. I mean, and knowing where the margin is at, at the end of the day, if I keep boiling entire business down to just like one make or break, it's like, how intimate are you with your margins? Do you know what happens when you put, you know, stuff on two pallets instead of one? Like how much self-destructive is that? Right. You're working, you know, in a crowded category with huge incumbents. How, tell us about the, the kind of like edging in and scaling, because you're, you're super scaled now, which is incredible.

23:34Were there moments where you felt yourself kind of come up against the competition and had to have the quantity versus quality conversation with a buyer or the price versus quality conversation with a buyer? And like, what helped you win over in a situation like that? It's happened throughout this entire 17 years and it still happens today where you're like, so this became, as you get into business and you think you're solving one problem or trying to do one thing, start peeling back the layers of the onion and you find other problems and other things. And the problem that we kind of stumbled on or I stumbled on is that this is, so I wanted to make better for you paleta like I had in Mexico, just with locally grown fruit ingredients with an impact component to it.

24:17Like that was it. And then you get into this and you start to realize that status quo and like all of these big food companies in this particular category are actually incentivized on keeping everything the same. And what the same is, is just sugar water. This is a sugar water for kids category. That's popsicles. And when you start realizing that this is a sugar water for kids, like this is some of the worst stuff of the worst, right? In this category, marketing products like this to kids. And so then you start to see that like some of this equipment that was commercialized to make these popsicles for kids aren't designed to handle any type of real food or fruit.

24:54And so like you find the bigger problems along the way. And so this journey has been about giving families and giving consumers a better option than just sugar water. And that's what it's been. And with that has come education, like an education component of like, okay, well, why is this? Why is high fructose corn syrup not great for me or my family? Why are artificial dyes not great for me and my family? And so if you're talking about 2012 or 2015 or 2017, a lot of those conversations were there. And now the conversations and the dialogue has shifted a little bit. Like the mainstream American consumer knows that maybe those things aren't great for them and their families.

25:42But have we arrived at the destination or is there still better? And like that's where we're at today. Even still trying to like improve the product and make it healthier. we're still trying to communicate with consumers that things could be better, that things could be better in this category. Now, along the way, we went from having no better for you in this category to all of a sudden there's a little proof point. And what that has done and what the role of businesses like Good Pop and other challenger brands and companies, it's not just to sell more of our stuff. To create better options coming from these big food companies for all consumers.

26:25And like that's been the best part is seeing big food improve their products because of what we've done in market. That's been awesome. You're kind of forcing their hand. Yeah, I mean, when they see that they're losing share, when they see that they're losing share, they have to improve their products. That's what it is. And that's the best part about doing anything like this and solving big problems. It makes the incumbents and it changes the status quo. I mean, and you've done that so successfully for so long now that, the big guys are like licensing with you. Like, can I share like, well, it's on the shelf.

26:58So I think I can Disney and Lucasfilm. And there's like these awesome, my kids are so stoked about the green apple saber pops. I'll start. I've like, well, I have three kids, but two of them are little boys and there's nothing that makes them happier than fighting with their food. They're allowed. So it sounds like you've been able to kind of capture some momentum around just like the popularity and the trend that you've really kind of, you know, led the charge on that has turned into almost like you being one of the bigger guys, or at least being able to play in that sandbox. Yeah. And I still think there's a long way to go.

27:34But the impact that we can make by making the big players make their products better, like if they just lower their sugar by a little bit, that could be millions of pounds of added sugar that's out of kids' diets in this country. And that's what we've seen. It's been amazing. how have those licensing opportunities like how do how do you frame that up in context of your overall brand identity and brand equity do you see those they're obviously not dilutive to the brand but you still have to protect the core of the brand any like key decisions or like interesting choice points within within that kind of like licensing moment that seymour's sharing so our our innovation pipeline has always been this framed around this like cleaned up classic so like looking at classic things that we grew up with, like things from the ice cream truck and making them with real ingredients, lower or no added sugar, creating these options that are for like the next generation.

28:25And so when we looked at licensing, like it was never really interesting. Like I always wanted to focus on just real food with the Good Pop brand. But there is this classic item that we felt like really could be cleaned up with this Mickey item. And like just the amount of The types of ingredients really needed a challenge. It really needed an update. And so that had been on my radar forever. Just growing up, seeing these Mickey Pops at the parks and still on shelves, and no one had challenged that. And I thought it was kind of off the table, but we were able to bring a better-for-you version with half the calories, added sugar, and that one has been amazing.

29:04It tastes great, and it's dairy-free, organic ingredients, lower sugar, and it still fits within that cleaned up classics sort of overarching platform. So it didn't really deviate from the overall strategy. Can you get them into the parks? I don't think we can get them in the parks. Okay, why? I think that is... Is it like, well, there might be a secret reason why, but is it a scaling thing? Is it like a... It's a big secret reason. No, no. I think it's the incumbent has a larger contract with Disney on parks. And so this one is specific to the grocery channel in the U.S. Good answer. I accept that answer.