Former Matchmaker Turned CEO: How Katie Wilson bought Facebook Groups to Build a Gut Health Empire

0:28Do you have a lawyer? So that's how it started. And now it's nationwide Walmart. Walmart is usually the finish line.

1:00consumer, and you'll be the first to know when a new episode drops. Our guest today is Katie Wilson, who is the co-founder and CEO of Belly Welly. Belly Welly is a functional wellness brand focused on gut health. They offer gut-friendly snack bars and a daily fiber and probiotic powder supplement. It was absolutely terrific having Katie on to discuss how Belly Welly came together from her own gut struggles, the power of Facebook groups of all places as a launching pad for her business, the bizarre way that she met her first investor, and the bizarre way she got into Walmart. Both really, really cool stories.

1:38Her approaches to TikTok and content itself, which has been vital to their success. And also how she even thinks about partnerships too, retail partnerships. I absolutely love this episode. But before we dive in, I want to tell you about our presenting sponsor, Highbeam. Highbeam is the all-in-one finance platform built specifically for consumer brands. If you're running a D2C or omnichannel brand, you know managing cash, payouts, inventory, and vendors isn't just back office work. It's core to the business. Most banking platforms weren't built for that. Highbeam combines no-fee banking, automated treasury to maximize yield on idle cash, flexible credit, bill pay, and live 13-week cash flow.

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3:05Nothing here should be considered investment advice. Without further ado, here's Katie.

3:16Katie, thank you so much for joining me today. I know we've talked about this for a while. Totally. And now we're finally here. Nikki, thanks for bringing us together. Katie, how are you? We love you, Nikki. This is a long time coming. Mike, so glad to be here. You've been such an important part of the CPG community for as long as I've been a part of it, I think, or I should say I know. So very honored to be on this call. Can't wait to dig in, talk CPG juice. Oh my gosh. Well, that's really kind of you to say. Let's get into it. But I don't even want to talk about cbg to begin with how did you become a celebrity matchmaker oh my gosh um i totally wasn't expecting you to start with it but i love that you did because it's like one of my favorite life chapters um so i was a weirdo and at 10 years old i went to my parents and i was like i actually want to be a matchmaker and they were like what um okay maybe think about it like they're on the roof yeah like think about it a little bit more and i was like um and anyways I mean like if you ask anyone I went to high school junior high elementary school with and and if you told them like Katie went on to be a matchmaker they'd be like obviously like she was like trying to force me to date someone in like eighth grade I mean I would that was literally what I spent all my time doing um I actually just had this experience I ran into an old classmate and friend at Coachella and he was like by the way the fact that you were a matchmaker was just, I saw it on your LinkedIn.

4:47This is the most fitting thing I've ever heard. I was like, he's like, I think you like, like set me up twice in like sixth grade. I'm like, I'm sure I did. So anyways, um, I was adamant about doing this. So I went to LA every college summer and interned for different professional matchmakers, which was as sketchy as that sounds. And after multiple summers walked away thinking, gosh, maybe this isn't really what I pictured, right? I just pictured matching awesome people with other awesome people, right? For lack of better words. And let's just say kind of the one man show matchmaking businesses out there are maybe not in that business.

5:28Different motives. So anyways, I walked away thinking, gosh, this isn't what I pictured. I went to go work at Hulu, fell in love with startup. I mean, Hulu was was a was a mature startup at that point but I kind of got exposed to tech startups and uh especially you know the the startup world in Los Angeles I fell in love with that wanted to be a part of it but I also couldn't shake matchmaking so I obsessively networked until I found someone who was starting or had just started a matchmaking business uh with the same goal that I had had years prior, which was match great people with other great people.

6:06And in that case, the goal was do it affordably. So her name was Talia. She was starting a company called Three Day Rule. I was immediately hooked and I got to join Three Day Rule really early on. And I got all of the benefits of being at an early stage startup and none of the downsides. So I got to watch Talia raise venture capital twice while pregnant. I got to witness the highs and lows. I got to watch her hire over a hundred people. And of course I got to matchmake, which was the best part. And so anyways, I mean, I really credit Talia and three day rule with, with kind of my addiction to startups and eventually my own wanting to go start a company.

6:53So anyways, that evolved into me. This sounds crazy, but accidentally matching a celebrity one day and one thing led to another. And it turns out if you match a celebrity successfully, they'll tell other celebrities that you match them successfully. And all of a sudden I had 15 celebrity clients. And so that's what I did. I've signed my life away so many times. So no, I can't talk about who they were, but I have really good juicy stories. And I actually found that my favorite type of client to work with was a founder, right? So someone who had sold their business for many, many millions of dollars and was now looking to solve dating in the way that they had kind of solved other pain points in their life.

7:38And it turns out you can't solve dating that way. So anyways, I love that archetype and those are my favorite clients to work with. Um, and then one day the CEO of match called and said, you know, come help us build better dating apps here at match. And so I went and I did. That's amazing. Um, that's incredible. Um, I, I know that you said that founders were kind of your favorite profile of, of people for, for matchmaking. What about them? Is it, is it because they were, you know, like, is it, is it because they were trying to kind of analyze things, maybe put things into data or metrics. What was it specifically?

8:24I'm just curious. Oh my gosh, this is like such a fun conversation. So I'll even be more specific. I really liked working with male entrepreneurs. And male entrepreneurs who had, well, so they kind of go through this evolution, right? So many of the male entrepreneurs that I'm talking about were probably like super smart and nerdy, right? Like early in life. And then, uh, you know, went and built iconic businesses and sold them for millions and millions and sometimes billions of dollars. And then they get to this place where they're like, Oh my gosh, like I did the thing. Like I did it now. Like, Oh my gosh.

9:01Like my dating pool is huge. Right? Like I can kind of like, wow, I can like kind of date anyone. I mean, I got a lot of options and they don't really know what to do with it. Right. And you, you mentioned it there. They're trying to kind of solve this problem. And actually, you know what, I'm going to, I'm not going to say solve this problem. They're trying to optimize, right? So they're, they're optimizers. And so they're trying to optimize. And when they kind of first figure out that like, wow, they're just, their pool is so much bigger than maybe it was, you know, 20 years prior when they hadn't built the business, they kind of they go through this this journey right where at first it's like I want to optimize for everything I want like top one percent of people in the world and that's who I want to date and anyways you kind of go through this journey with them and then they eventually you know end up with someone incredible and smart and all the things but they're problem solvers they're really analytical it's it's fun I'd imagine it's also tough as well I mean not just for for them but But for any celebrity that is thrown into either stardom or a lot of money, it's hard to really see the authenticity of another person.

10:12Do they actually like the actual person or they like the bells and whistles that come with that person? For sure. I mean, underline bold. Yes. It's really hard. I wouldn't wish it on anyone. It's really hard. You know, I could go on and on. But yes, it's not all it's cracked up to be. And I'm not having ever been famous, but having observed what it's like, it's challenging. So you wanted to be a matchmaker your entire life. You ended up being a matchmaker. You then get Match.com then pulls you over and said, hey, Katie, come to us and help us build better apps. You're not doing matchmaking. What happened?

10:54So I still did a little bit of matchmaking. But when this opportunity presented itself, it was just it was too good to be true. Right. So dating apps, you know, hugely, hugely impactful in our lives. Right. And it's how everyone's dating now. And when you're matchmaking someone right, the other the other thing you talk and analyze all day long alongside them is dating apps. Right. And how they're performing on the dating apps or or the lack lack thereof. And so I was, I had a list of like 50 things long that I wanted to change about dating apps. So when I got this opportunity, it was like, oh my gosh, I actually went in so cocky.

11:34I was like, oh, I've been spending all this time one-on-one with people. I've met with thousands of singles. I got this like match. Just let me, let me show you how it's done. It is so humbling, right? It is so humbling. And it was such an important experience for me. Match is an incredible company. They have an incredible suite of brands. Building a dating app that works for Susan in Arkansas and also works for Chris in Newport Beach is very, very, very difficult. And I mean, I could go on forever. I think the incredible opportunity that I was afforded at Match was I almost got to be, I almost got to head up an incubator within Match.

12:16So I got to test lots of new iterations, ideas. Match is, for those who don't know, Match is Tinder, Hinge, Affinity, right? So it's like a whole suite of apps. So there's so much room to play and there's so much room to test and learn. So it again was also keeping my foot deeply rooted in like the startup world, but also getting to spend some time in in corporate America, which I think coming out of a startup was very, very important. It's easy to feel like, especially when you're at a startup or running your own business, that you're a little brand and you are at the center of the universe. And then you quickly learn when you go spend some time in a corporate environment that you're not at the center of the universe.

12:59There's processes in place for a reason, right? You got to A, B test everything. There's data to lean into, lean on. So anyways, that was super humbling. And I learned a lot lot. I got to speak to, for a while we, we worked on a date coaching project and I got to speak to hundreds of single people per day, uh, all across the country and totally different group of people than the group of people I had worked with in my prior role as a matchmaker. And I learned so much. Um, like I said, it's like a six hour long conversation, but let me know if you need help with your dating profile. I still selfishly, not you, Mike, I just mean anyone listening.

13:41I love it. And it's my favorite thing to fix someone's dating profile even now. Well, then there you go. If you're a listener, if you're listening, you need help with your dating profile. Yeah, definitely. Definitely email Katie. I know that at some point along this line, you started struggling with your gut health. Can you talk a little bit more about about what you were experiencing and also what types of foods and how are you how are you really approaching health and health and nutrition at the time yeah so i was like that person who ate everything right like i like if like i remember my my college dorm room uh roommates still talk about the fact that like i was always walking around with a box of oreos and better cheddars Like I was not a gluten-free allergy kid.

14:30Like I was, I was like pasta every day. Went to Cabo in my early twenties, got food poisoning in Cabo. Didn't think anything of it. Came home, took some antibiotics because it wasn't really going away. Then I took some more antibiotics and all of a sudden I had gut issues. And sometimes just the term gut issues is hard to relate to because it's so broad. But like my stomach hurt day in and day out. All of a sudden it felt like if I ate dairy, my stomach was really upset. all of a sudden gluten upset my stomach. It was just like, what? Like I've never had an issue. And at first it made me mad. I was like, why do I have all these weird stomach issues now?

15:06And so at first it was, oh, I'm sure this is going to get fixed. Like I'll just find like the next, you know, the next antibiotic I take is going to fix it. And then it slowly started to set in that nothing was going away. Like it was just, I like had these gut issues now. So then I led a, I started a very, very limited diet. Like I was cutting out dairy and gluten and all sorts of weird ingredients that I had read online caused problems, which presented new problems, right? I was like eating, I would go to like the, I remember going to Erewhon in LA and like showing them a list of like 30 things that I wasn't allowed to eat and being like, does any of this have this in it?

15:43They were like, I don't know. And so I started talking about this with other people in my life and I realized I was not alone and maybe not to the same degree, but at least many of the women in my life could relate on some level. It was like, oh yeah, I'm like always bloated or yeah, I don't know. Gluten started to upset my stomach in my twenties. I don't know. I guess I don't really eat it now. I was like, wait, we're like all trying to figure this out. What's going on? And I couldn't unsee it or unhear it. Once I kind of discovered this secret about the world, it became so obvious to me that this was a massive, massive issue and it was affecting women more than men.

16:24And I challenge you to do this, Mike. Go talk to five women in your life and ask if they have gut issues and you will be astounded. You will come back and be like, wait, it was like four of them said yes. So anyways, once I realized that, I couldn't look away and I became obsessed. I was also obsessed with solving my own problem. I still had said gut issues in the background day in and day out and was leading a limited life as a result. so when you were trying to figure out what the problem was where you you know you went gluten free for example you went dairy free for example you went allergen free you did all these different steps in figuring out what the problem was and then not getting any results it seems what did you then do or or what did you stumble upon so i was trying something called the low FODMAP diet, which is niche.

17:15And it's hard to follow. And I was in tears one night. I just like got into my limit. We were living in Texas. I didn't love Texas. And I didn't love living in Texas. I want to move back to California. I just had a baby and I was just at my limit. And I was crying. And I was like, I said to my husband, I was like, you need to go to the grocery store. And I want a chocolate chip cookie and it needs to be gluten free. It needs to be dairy free. It needs to be low FODMAP. I mean, the list was ridiculous. And this poor guy like went out to the grocery store thinking he was going to find this cookie and he called me like panicked after 45 minutes he's like there's nothing like this like i don't even they don't know what you're talking about i keep showing people the list so he comes home he's like you know what i'm just gonna make this for you i'll figure out how to make this let me make this for you so he started trying to make this for me first of all what a winner what a winner right there i matched myself with the greatest guy ever i know what a winner what a winner and so he starts trying to make this.

18:04And then after like a day or two, he's like, I don't, I think I like need help. So we found a food scientist online, like a real food scientist. And we found a dietician and we offered to pay them both. And Nick would zoom with them every night as like his side hustle to make me this cookie. So we learned as much as he could. We still have like old photographs of this. It's pretty hilarious. He'd like post up in the kitchen with a million ingredients and be like, okay, I'm going to figure this out. So he worked on this for months alongside, alongside the, the, the two individuals that I mentioned.

18:35And eventually he cracked it and he made this great cookie that kind of started evolving into a bar. So I was taking it with me everywhere I went. In the meantime, I had started camping out in Facebook groups because there were hundreds of these Facebook groups dedicated to things like IBS, gut issues, constipation, bloating. And I was just fascinated. So I was, I was spending a lot of time in these Facebook groups, learning, learning, learning, learning, realizing how big this actually was. Um, so obviously at some point I put two and two together and I was like, Oh, we're sharing this bar with this community.

19:09Let's go. Wow. That's, that's awesome. That's awesome. Um, and so, and, and what was the response after you, uh, after you started sharing it? Yeah. So I started sharing it and then I did something really weird. I've talked about this before, but I started buying Facebook groups. So there were these admins who were sitting on like 20 of these Facebook groups, all with like 20 to 40 ,000 people in them. And I woke up one night in the middle of the night and I was like, wait a minute, I wonder if I could buy the Facebook group. So I called an attorney the next day and he's like, there's no like agreement I can write you for that, but good luck.

19:41You should try it. So I'd reach out to these admins. I'd explain that I was interested in building, building on the community that already existed. And I was up for the challenge. And that I was excited about launching a solution-oriented product. And all of them said yes. So then I bought the Facebook groups. And I would pay a couple hundred dollars for each, sometimes up to$1 ,000. And so I bought 20 Facebook groups. And that totaled about 500 ,000 people. Oh, my gosh. And that was kind of like your first wave when it came to testing. That's what powered the business, yeah, when we launched.

20:17Wow. Talk a little bit about in terms of the product formulation and as well how you also developed it and then found the right co-packer for it. Oh, my gosh. Okay. So the product was gluten-free, dairy-free, and low FODMAP. That said, I'd be totally lying if I said - I'd imagine pretty tough, I'd imagine, to actually find - Yeah. And that product, anyways, the original product, as much as I love it, I still remember the taste of it, that product couldn't exist on a shelf, right? Like it was a homemade product and it wasn't built to be, to be, to be scaled. So, um, at this point it's just Nick and I, my husband and I, and then we loop in who's our third co-founder, Mike, you know him, his name is Tyson.

20:59Um, as I was, you know, and Tyson go way back as I was starting to think about this. Um, and the three of us were like, okay, let's do this. So we, we onboarded a co-packer that did not go well, just to be honest.

21:14to make matters more complicated. So just to catch you up, I've been like, right, building this Facebook community. We have been selling these things on a website, scrappy website. We had called it IB Simple. So I launched a business called IB Simple to the Facebook community. And we had a Shopify site. I'm like, I can't believe we kind of pulled that off, but we had a Shopify site. And so people were buying these bars. Nick was making these things out of our kitchen, making thousands of them a night. And UPS was coming to the house every single morning. So we've moved back to LA at this point.

21:47We are in a little one-bedroom apartment in LA. We've converted the entire thing into a little kitchen. And Nick is making thousands of bars out of our little kitchen. And we're shipping out thousands of bars every morning. So I'd work my job during the day at Match, because I'm still at Match at this point. I'm working at Match during the day. And then at night, five o 'clock, Nick and I bake bars. I run the business. We ship orders and we average about two and a half hours of sleep a night. In this time, I find out I'm pregnant with our second baby. And so we're busy, right? We also start raising venture capital.

22:21So it became pretty obvious pretty quick that we had a winner. We were growing without doing much. Huge thanks to the Facebook community and the community that we had built. So now we're growing. We're still buying like Bob's Red Mill at Albertsons to make these bars. So there's nothing scalable about anything that's going on. And it becomes obvious to me that we need to raise some capital. So we start to raise some venture capital. Great stories there. Happy to share them. But we are very fortunate that we raised from some pretty big folks right out the gate. CEO of GNC, CEO of Sprouts, CEO of Thrive Market.

22:56Okay. Okay. Okay. How? How? Remember, I was a matchmaker. Yeah, I know. I know. Take us through the story, though. I know you're saying, happy to dive in if we can but let's check is a great story let's dive in yeah so okay again setting the stage we're still making these in our kitchen it's called i be simple we've done nothing official beyond just making these things and selling them on a shopify site and the only promotion by the way the only promotion by the way is through these facebook groups correct wow um so i'm kind of like i know we need more money because like we can't just like keep doing this out of our savings but i don't really know what to do so for anyone listening I had no idea what venture capital even really meant, right?

23:34It was like a term I'd seen on TV and I'd been exposed to a little bit at startups, but I didn't know how to go raise money at all. So I was sending out hundreds of LinkedIn messages per day and getting nowhere. And I mean, hundreds. I'm not exaggerating here. Hundreds. So this is where matchmaking and belly welly intersect in the best way possible. I obviously was not matchmaking at this point. I was still at match and a former matchmaker reached out to me and said, I'm trying to match a really wonderful woman in Miami and I don't have anyone for her. Like, can you help? I did not have any amazing men in Miami, but I was like, I can't help but try to help when I hear that like there's a match and there's someone amazing.

24:21So I go to LinkedIn, which by the way, guys, if you're single and you're listening. It's a great place to meet people. And I was like, okay, I'm going to try to find a guy for this woman on LinkedIn. So I found this guy. His name was Michael. He looked to be about in the age range that I had heard this woman needed and wanted. He was an executive at Clorox at the time, but that didn't mean anything to me. So I reached out to Michael on LinkedIn and I sent Michael a message and I'm like, hey, Michael, I don't know if you're single. I'm a matchmaker. I want to match you. I say nothing about I be simple.

24:55Right. And Matt, Michael responds and he's like, I'm not interested in your match. I'm not single, but I see on your LinkedIn that you're working on something called I be simple. And I'd like to learn more about it. I was like, Oh my gosh. Okay. So we get on a call. I word vomit at Michael for like an hour about I be simple. And like, I mean, it was looking back, it's like cringing. It's like, oh yeah, we're like ordering these wrappers and like, you know, we buy some chocolate chips at Albertsons and it's great. It's going to be amazing. He lets me talk. And at the end of our conversation, he says, Hey Katie, do you know what a pitch deck means?

25:29And I was like, nope, not really. I was like, I've seen it, but I don't know. And he's like, do you, are you up for making one? I said, yeah. So he's like, I want you to make me a pitch deck. Here's the eight slides that need to be in your pitch deck. And I want you to call me in exactly one week. So I had no idea where this was going, but I did exactly what he said. So I went and made a pitch deck. One week later to the minute, I messaged him and I said, I'm ready to show you my pitch deck. And we got on a Zoom call. I went through this pitch deck, word vomited at him again. He asked me some questions.

26:03And at the end, he's like, do you have a lawyer? I said, no. And he's like, do you have a business bank account? I said, no. He's like, well, you're going to need both because I'm about to wire you$200 ,000. And he was our first check and he's now the CEO of GNC. And that was the start of everything. And Michael, I should say, has gone on to become one of my greatest friends and mentors and investors. So he has invested many times in Belly Welly since then. and uh we talk every week that's incredible that's that's unbelievable for what do you think impressed michael about i be simple at the time i asked him this the other day actually i was like why did you do that like now that i have some perspective like what were you what were you thinking and he's like you were so relentless even without knowing you were relentless um so like there's that like I didn't feel like I could ever say no like once you were my orbit you were relentless and shameless um but he's like look I mean it's the classic people you know really good investors invest in people uh he's like there was plenty wrong with the idea trust me like but but but it was just clear that you had so much excitement I mean you were so excited and so obsessive, there was no question in his mind, according to him.

27:32What did you learn? So you had this initial customer segment when it came to the Facebook groups. What were some of the learnings of those Facebook groups? And how did that translate into actually iterating on the product if you needed to iterate on the product? Yeah, I'll say something controversial here. I think false product market fit signals. and i think i say that because um there's so much beauty right in launching in a niche community uh like great products are built usually there's definitely exceptions great products great brands are built uh initially through a niche community right like there's plenty of great examples of protein bars who are built in the crossfit community right there's there's many examples right right so like we actually unintentionally were totally following that playbook like that was great right we had immediate product market fit in a relatively niche community when it came time to going to market in a bigger broader way we had to really step back and