How Bold Bean Co. won a Waitrose, Whole Foods and Planet Organic Listing in Their First Year and Being a Female Founder in a Man's World

0:00Hello there and welcome to Hungry. Hungry is the podcast for the next wave of challenger food and drink brand looking to pour gasoline all over their growth. Each week we'll interview successful founders, thought leaders, unpack their lessons and provide you with a toolkit to scale super fast. I am Dan Pope, I am your host and without further ado, let's get started.

0:25Hi there guys, thank you so much for listening as always, it means the absolute world to me. Before we jump into this episode, I need a really big, big, big, big favour. I have pitched us some massive guests, humongous guests, and unfortunately they've said no because my subscriber count isn't big enough. Please, please, please just hit the subscribe button on Apple or Spotify or follow. Ultimately, it helps all of us bigger guests equals better conversations equals hopefully better insights for you, which means you can scale hopefully faster with a little less stress as well. So please hit that subscribe button and yeah, enjoy this episode.

1:00Hi there guys, just a quick, quick little ickle interruption I am so, so, so gassed and thrilled to announce that Mackenzie Jones are extending their partnership with Hungry Beyond thrilled Who are Mackenzie Jones? Well, first and foremost, Billy is a great mate, known him for years Second, they are, well, FMCG recruitment specialists I know Recruiter probably gives you the ick rest assured they're not the negi norse heads who will pester you on linkedin asking you if you've had your breakfast yet i personally less recruit a more growth partner they are loved and adored and are trusted trusted by brands uh real superfood lucky saint hello fresh fever tree but why why reach out to mckenty jones very very simple if you want to launch brand into retail and you need a head of sales speak to billy if you want to in-house your marketing activities with the head of marketing rockstar speak to billy or if you want to they really specialize in d2c so if you need someone who's going to really kind of pour gasoline on your d2c channel speak to bill or if you just want a general nitter natter chew the fat have a chinwagathon speak to billy he's a top bloke message him on linkedin or ask me for an intro via email and i will get that sorted thank you there's a horror story in food and drink that absolutely no one talks about it surreptitiously scurries through the underbelly causing throbbing headaches wasted money huge amounts of pain dodgy barcodes so many brands do the hard work they create the product name the brand open the bank account and then they cut bloody corners online and they order a dodgy barcode not sort your barcodes out is like scoring your own goal before you've even laced your boots and got on the pitch it's a souffle of aggro you know you've got to relabel products waste time i've even had a pal who's um who lost a planet organic listings they had the wrong barcodes but thankfully not all heroes wear capes gs1 uk are the superhero and they are the solution barcodes from gs1 uk are globally recognized uh trusted and accepted by all retailers and marketplaces giving you the confidence to sell your products anytime anyplace anywhere but gs1 uk are so so much more than that they really are kind of a spring well of advice for buccaneering brands 95 % of their community to your smes you can get free tickets to events and invites to talks big big picture opportunities you just like to put organic boots and sainsbury's and help you know with advice like exporting it's just so so so much and look don't say don't treat you and there's an oh so special offer through the podcast get 20 of your first year's membership with gs1 uk by using the code hungry 20 at checkout thank you so much hello there people and listeners of the hungry podcast i'm absolutely thrilled to welcome my wonderful friend Amelia Christie Miller to the podcast.

3:47Amelia is the founder of Bold Bean Co who are making us brag about beans by giving us the best of beans. Bold Bean everyone listings at Planet Organic, Waitrose a whole host of indies and wholesalers and look, it's so good to be in, well not your humble abode, but in a gorgeous abode in Battersea and finally getting to do this, so thank you so much. thank you so much for having me great to be back on one of your first guests yeah i think it was during um it was during lockdown it was a uh we were doing like a restaurant how to save the local restaurant i think you hadn't even started bold bean then it was yeah no i remember i was working on it but it i was still working for my previous company so it was very much on that i can't like download but yeah we were talking about my experience uh working with chefs and selling products into chefs um which was what i was doing um prior to bobby because when we were talking just to give some context to listeners we've just had one of what i've been had one of the most delicious lunches downstairs um with nina's kitchen i think and nina parker nina parker absolutely gorgeous um spread of of bean related deliciousness um but what we what we're talking before we hit the record button was we both have maybe not an equal measure but like an obsession with brands and an obsession with food and obsession with chefs and says from restaurants and it's like when you get all these weird things together and apply these interrelated but somewhat slightly different um maybe genres or tastes together you get something unique and bold ultimately is what you get i want to start with the word word bold so um there's a book i love it does sound sort of a bit makelomaniac machiavellian as i said earlier but there's this book called um the laws of uh the 48 laws of power and it's great to read as a challenger brand because ultimately we are the small puppers in sort of seas of sharks right and one that law 27 is enter actions with boldness and it's really interesting and the quote is if you are unsure of a course of action do not attempt it your doubts hesitations will affect your execution timidity timidity is a bit of an awful timidity timidity is dangerous better to enter with boldness any mistakes you commit through audacity are easily corrected with more audacity everyone admires to be bold no one honors the timid so i think the first kind of first thing i want to ask you media is is what in one sentence would you say it means to be bold for you i think it is uh in certain ways a synonym but to be shameless and trying not to think about what other thing other people think of you in what you do because if you can do that the opportunities are endless so it's about being about being shameless and not feeling yeah it's like because i get that but i think we get quite um like we can get quite restricted by other people's opinions it's like a straight jacket of oh you shouldn't do that you shouldn't be bold you shouldn't try that you should do things this way or that way so like i don't know maybe what's been the day on your journey where you felt timid and you felt scared has it been like a specific moment and how have you been like right fuck this i need to need to stay bold as a founder as a leader yeah so i think i've had it I you know I had a huge amount of times where particularly before I brought the product to market you know in those early days where I was committing all this time to brand building getting things set up I had a lot of people who were like oh I don't actually think it's a good idea like are you sure you want to go into this industry you'll make tiny margins and it's really hard to make money like why you know do you want to do this and those moments are really tough but I kind of like I kind of think that because you're so in love with the idea of whatever you're doing when you start a business like I always describe it like a toxic relationship it's like you're so in love with this idea of something that even if they treat you like shit and everyone tells you don't do it you're still holding on to this vision of like but I'm in love with it I've gotta do it and I think I think that actually they say a lot of entrepreneurs you know it's harder to be a second time entrepreneur because you've got to have that blind faith to be to put up with all of the kind of horrible things that might come along the way and you tend to only have that when you're naive and being a first-time entrepreneur so I think it's blind faith and boldness but I think you know even if you act boldly and I've definitely done a lot of things that are shameless of course there's an undercurrent of anxiety there of like oh god is this the right thing to do but you I I think what you said from that book makes a lot of sense.

8:42Like it's very, it's very interesting approach in terms of like double downing on things, like doing anything hesitantly, people can see exactly your vulnerability and they'll see that it's not authentic. So if you can kind of just do things with confidence, then people believe in you. Well, and also faked confidence, I think. And I think that this whole thing of, you know, what, what, what Robert Greene says is audacity is easy, corrected with more audacity so it's just like so there's nothing about as a challenger brand i've just got to say fuck it like even if i'm absolutely cacking myself there's there's got to be some sort of boldness in in the way you do things um and i think what you said there about it's there are so many moments where you've got to stay naive so interviewed jamie lang and ed Perry um not Ed Perry Ed Williams from Candy Kittens then interviewed Perry from Big Fish uh this like the last couple of weeks and we were talking about how naivety is a superpower you actually have to stay naive I you have to stay a bit dumb you have to have blind faith to keep you keeping on because otherwise you'd be like if you know too much you'll be like all right I can't be asked to do this whereas as you said the second time founder is they almost know how hardest thing yeah yeah so i'd love to know like how do you um kind of stay naive even as you're learning does that make sense in terms of like exploring new things whether it's like a content or a club like is there a way you do that yourself personally or within the team yeah i suppose how i'm kind of interpreting that is um in the fmcg space the marketing phone's going oh god sorry sorry oh that's fine that's fine um in the fmcg space in the kind of food space in general there's like a very formulaic way of doing things and we aren't doing that in some respect and lots of respects we are like following that same routine um and it means that i think in a way you can be restricted by what the norm is in the industry whereas because we are doing things a little bit differently and how what we prioritize like basically within the business we prioritize marketing heavily and prioritize organic marketing heavily naturally with that it means that you're you are going to be naive because there aren't many trailblazers in that approach so i think that by taking that approach you're naturally going to be more naive but at the same time you're more likely to be a disruptor if you're not treading down the formulaic path and getting loads of advice on this is the next thing you need to do this is the next thing you need to do i think it can push you into being a bit more i suppose uh notable i think i think it's so true it's like again it goes back to this don't follow logic if you follow logic or you follow the path that's already been done before then you know i talk about this all the time on the podcast um you end up doing what everyone else is doing and you don't have the bold bean you have another bean brand which is kind of quite predictable so i want to go into the into this marketing because for anyone who hasn't seen like go on to the bold beans instagram like you're basically in my eyes trade kind of a media company that has a brand built onto it the actual i've like whereas i think most people think right let's build a product and a brand ebay and then we'll do a few Instagram posts here and there what is your strategy with with this and why why are you prioritizing marketing so much um yeah I think it's it's down to like a few things um first of all I I believe that you know some of the strongest kind of brand relationships you can build you know you can have a top-notch salesperson who's getting you in places and is a great hustler but if you haven't got that relationship with the customer then the sales is harder whereas if you can double down on marketing and make sure your marketing is incredible and customers know who you are and are excited and have a really strong relationship with you if i believe that the other parts fall into place it might take a little bit longer but when it does fall into place you've got an amazing rate of sale and i think that is that was almost unintentional but i think what was really intentional is that you know a year before i launched the brand i established the mission behind bold bean and what we're going to do in making people obsessed with beans and i had some really great advice from um nicola who's the head of marketing for tonys um she randomly during lockdown decided to go on a call with a random woman who wanted to set up a bean brand who had nothing to her name and she kindly gave me an hour of her time and the thing she said was like if you're going to invest in a channel like work work on it and invest in it don't like do a little bit here and a little bit there and and give consumers something of value don't sell to them don't be like buy our products it's really good give them something because consumers are so savvy nowadays they can see when someone's selling to them we're so used to it and and i think that that was incredible advice and that coupled with the fact that i built mission well like the reason why i wanted to start being brand was because i became obsessed with beans and the role they have to play in sustainability our food future so like that almost came before the product it did come before the products i was thinking about what various products i could launch to make people obsessed with beans and ended up deciding on our on our core range but because of that that has to filter into like everything we do from you know our from our marketing to our you know new products that we launched if if we were are able to make people obsessed with beans we we can do that through our product range but also we're doing on our instagram so before i launched the product i launched the instagram in 2020 so i was sharing bean recipes before even anyone knew it was a business because that was delivering on the mission so i think it's really easy to have like a strategy where which is kind of authentic but also giving something back if you're going back to your mission and giving consumers showing them that you're more than just you know selling something because actually brands need to exist outside of sales and profit they need to exist they have that personal relationship with a customer and also they they need to do good for the world i think nowadays um you know i don't think you can launch a brand that isn't having a positive impact on the world yeah i so what nicola said is really interesting so she said focus on one channel and by channel was that like in terms of a sales channel was in terms of a social channel she was talking about marketing so she didn't say one channel she just said if you're going to invest in a channel yeah don't do it half-heartedly yeah like go all in yeah and make sure you're providing value so there's so there's um mark palmer came on this podcast who did green and blacks and he talked about going um narrow and deep with one channel versus spreading yourself super thin so green and black actually they didn't want to be in confectionery straight away because they were like this is years ago right but like people are what the fuck is an organic par it sounds hideous do i mean it's so like in you know in people's shopping habits now back then it wasn't so they wanted to start in the sort of the bogey crusted aisle you know this organic aisle start there become famous uh and do really really well but amazing like sell there and then cross over to like the bigger leagues it's almost like starting like a champions i don't know if you watch football much you look like the football type um but they they they started small and i think it's a really good lesson in terms of you know steve job has got a quote focus is saying i've got to say no to a lot of stuff so what you do do is super focused with you guys it's marketing like just get that one thing do it really really well and then the rest will fall into place and i think there's um one of the dangers i think brands do is they think right shit i need to be on amazon because i went to an event and someone said amazon's fine right into amazon right i need to go into food service and get flying there because someone's on food service and then i need to get into do a bit of grocery and then before you know it you've completely spread yourself way too thin and you're up shit creek without a paddle to put in the nicest possible wave because it's like how do you you're just treading water do you know what I mean completely and it's interesting you say that because you know bearing in mind my previous work I'd worked to six years with chefs before I launched bold bean and I didn't decide to launch immediately to chefs even though all of my contacts were in that sector and there was a big reason behind that and that was because whilst I really would have loved to have supplied all the coolest restaurants and all of that that wasn't going to help me build a brand which is what I know I needed to do I was working in food tech before and the thing is about food tech is that you're you're observing this kind of this idea of oh technology is going to completely fix our food systems like oh we're going to fix it through all of this modern technology that's going to change things and I so believe that for a really long period of time and I'm sure they technology will help in the future but during this you know four years i was working there i was seeing brands like oatly um completely transform consumer behavior and make tangible impact through a really compelling brand which and during this time technology all of the businesses that's seen arise hadn't really had the impact around like blockchain tracking for transparency or you know last mile drop to improve kind of the supply chain i hadn't seen any of that happen whereas what i had seen was a bloke i went to uni with having an oat milk flat white for lunch and then having steak for dinner with with cheese on top and that they're not dairy free they're just having something because a brand has had impact and i saw through that like brands can really have a huge impact on changing consumer 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19:52It's just the sickest platform. I use it all the time at Ireland. I think we met in 2016 at that ManiLife food show. And that was when you were doing all that stuff. Yeah, I think it was almost like a bit too early. Outside looking in, is it's but now obviously now it's with fucking ai then it can happen like so there's not a bad chat gbt whatever um no completely that i think it's not cringe brands can brands brands can and actually do change the world because brands are a mission to believe in um they're ultimately like they're a community and they have they have that um ability to almost spread like wildfire you love a brand so much you just tell people about it and there's there's something about that so what you're saying is completely right um i want to talk about the so we talked about bold bean the other thing and all your team are saying on instagram is absolutely banging is um making you obsessed with beans by the um give me the best of beans i should not be on these again but the other night i made this i was 10 years earlier is this um i mean i just got the beans bit garlic chili, bosh that in there, scissor off olive oil, loads of rose harissa, the garlic chicken fried, not fried off, in the oven, but then I was putting the chicken fat into the beans.

21:14It was like, it was orgasmically good. But it is, what you're doing is you're turning the bean, the meek bean fan, if that's such a word, into a diehard fan through this obsession. so how do you get your team right to be as obsessed about beans as you are because i was speaking to perry about this the other day and he's like if you're a founder it's it's can can be foolish to think your team care about your brand as much as you completely i mean i know so well that my team do are obsessed that's what i mean yeah that's what and i think that um there's a few things that like have helped that is that you know basically the more you dig into beans the more you do become obsessed with them so it's actually really easy because like we um for example you know we did a team session um a few months ago which where basically we each took an element about beans so rosa took on health i took on um soil health i think um han spoke about kind of um something else around like meat reduction or ed took something else we all took different areas of where like beans are really great and did presentations on why they were and taught each other and you know rosa was digging into how like there's a certain kind of property in a bean that can like get rid of toxins in the body and was breaking it down on a whiteboard and we were all like super engaged with what it is and i think that you know things like that help but also you know we are in that position where we it is very easy to become obsessed being so that that is that helps hugely um but i really i really think it's like a almost a non-negotiable like we won't work with anyone who isn't obsessed with beans and our products like we won't like you know we're speaking to like third party services if they're not we're like yeah they seem pretty good they seem like good but you remember to get that into us and we're like yeah see you later it's a bit like deep zone you know you've got you want someone who is obsessed with you as well and i think the same goes for both staff and like outsourced um kind of agencies that you want to work with yeah it's it's it's um almost obsession is is what uh well not necessarily obsession may be the wrong word i'm trying to go for here but it's like is there something that links the founder's vision with because your team's early now is like four or five of you so you've got that core nucleus of a team where you've got to be obsessed because that's what gets the nucleus going say we would be talking 15 years time right there's probably more people lower down who may not care be as obsessed but that team to get going to be bold to move needs to be obsessed and i think that word kind of is what you have lots of people in the team with different values different interests but if there's that one thing that ties them together it's that i don't know it may not be obsession's word but there's something in that We actually, so I kind of distilled down my personal bean why, which sounds really weird, my bean why.

24:28So like why I started Bold Bean and like really distilled it down from my own, my kind of view on sustainability, my view on brands, like everything that came to make me obsessed with beans, my first experience, all of that. and then also every time someone joined the companies when ed when hannah when everyone joined they had to write their own bean wine even if it wasn't fleshed out yet so for example ed's was more focused around like health and how they made him feel because you know his journey happened a lot later because i got him to try beans like come on what do you think he was like oh not for sure and then he had this eureka moment where he had it instead of pasta in a in a putinesque a dish and he was like oh my god this is amazing I feel so much better um you know Han was you know she's a cook and loves cooking and she I'd sent her some and she kind of slowly built up a love of it from that Rose's dad grows beans so she's like you know how how more apt could it be I think everyone has their own being wise and why they love a bean and I think getting your team to like unpick why dare the person to be in that job at that time helps them feel like okay like this is this is why i'm here this is what i'm doing and i think that that that is really important i don't know how scalable that is oh yeah it is absolutely is it's um it's i mean it's genius and actually i've been thinking about bringing a couple of people on to hungary like still very early days and one of the questions and actually you've teamed me up so nicely here amelia is um is there's a quote by paul graham is like much of what life is about is about finding out what feels like play to you but looks like work to others which is really interesting so obviously like for me the obvious one is a podcast like a lot of people i mean i've been here setting up and all that shit there's a lot of toil involved in this but the conversation bit i love this bit there's a lot of ag involved the other one is um chefs i mean outside looking in that looks like hellish work but to them it feels like play i'd love to know what what you're in with all the roles you do whether it could be the marketing it could be whatever what is the bit that feels like play to you but looks like work to others god it's so interesting i always think like as a founder a lot of the time you end up the stuff that you even like the really fun stuff that you love doing ends up not you not doing anymore because it as as the business moves on you end up doing lots of other things um and such as for an example well just like for example uh recipe content so recipe content now for example i'm still helping with the curation but i'm i'm trying to wheedle myself out from like the prep and the the clearing up and the kind of the actual production of the content so that I can be you know growing the business in other areas but I love doing that I love having a morning with Han where we just like gas and cook and you know and eat lovely food but I know that for the business I'm gonna have to give that up because it's not sustainable me chopping onions on a Tuesday morning at nine o 'clock like I need to be doing other stuff and things like that is like a loss but I think that when you really believe what you're doing you're you're motivated by you know the the end goal that it means that everything you do that looks like work is motivating and I'd say the play element I don't like it's funny you get that from the small wins do you get that from a customer saying they love your product you get that from you know someone posting about the fact that he tried you or someone saying that you did their recipe like those sorts of things make you remind yourself and make it all worth it it's like this is you know this is connecting with people and that's that's that's kind of the main thing so yeah I don't ever feel like work is hard to do I never feel unmotivated but I think that I've also always been like that when I'm passionate about something I was like that about my old job until I lost my passion for it um I think when you're passionate about something you can do any any job that comes into it yeah I mean so many beautiful like split the things we could talk about i think the first thing is interviewed the founders of caravan who was sick that's gonna have a monday yeah really cool and what laura was saying is actually one of the hardest bits was when she had to stop playing or literally but like stop doing the bits that she really loved being in the business the service serving the flat whites you know the steaming flat whites in the morning the cold morning um you you know wine of like this during the sunset, that really fun hospital bit.

29:24Here we go. We can start.

29:33What's that, Fred?

29:39Hi, I'm here. Sorry, I'm recording a podcast. Are you okay?

29:47Okay, okay, cool. Okay, bye later. um sorry it's fine um okay so talking about so basically caravan yeah so caravan um there she's laura laura was basically saying as the business got bigger she couldn't do the things that felt fun to her she actually found that really fucking hard like that was a bit where it's like why am i doing this i'm becoming disillusioned with it am i losing my passion for it it's an interesting things i think you can either take the approach that you have which is the vision's so big that everything feels like play right well but for me personally if i wasn't doing this i'd be like fuck this i'm done like i'm not interested so it's just interesting how people are listening to this as a founder it's like do you where does where do you want your role to go and almost be a bit prudent and look into the future of like there's going to be a point where this won't be play and how do you feel about that and it's just interesting yeah i think i think what i probably battle with is the idea of like i probably want this business to outgrow me yeah and how i will take that like that i want that to happen but i also don't want that to happen you know there'll be a point where someone with way more experience will hopefully be able to come in you know if if the business goes in the direction i want it it should have me on the back seat which is which is terrifying but also you know to be a successful business it's kind of what you need to work towards completely and i want to go keep on this obsession theme because i think for me i do these almost like personal therapy right so i'm super sensitive very emotional person and i think but completely obsessed so i think obsession is like water in a pan like you know when you cook pasta and it's that thing it's that bubbling furnace inside of you and it bubbles and it allows you to fucking move through mountains get shit done move fast but it can come to a point where it's like you just it almost bubbles over and bubble over is different from burnout burnout is when you're completely fucked like you can't get out of bed like don't bother like get yourself in cowpole and chin out for a bit it's gonna be any but so i think there's a difference so i know where you're you're super passionate and emotional about it but what how do you deal with with it when when the obsession bubbles over and you're just like ah um is there is there an example to add some sort of um yeah i mean i'd say like i think the how i kind of can interpret that is essentially if something goes wrong say for example uh someone has a really terrible brand experience um with us it can be so upsetting is there like an example sorry to be um the nerdy twat but yeah we had um we had an example where um Jay Rayner got sent some beans um and we didn't kind of control the whole process properly and he got really upset about them being them being sent to him without his permission and normally we do ask permission it was just like a spook time where he ended up getting sent some beans and anyway it was really really upsetting I was like oh how how'd this happen?

33:19Like he is so influential in our food culture and you know this never should have happened and on one hand like you can really get yourself in a like a tizz about it and be like that's terrible, he's blah, like this is awful but on the other hand you have to think at the end of the day like this isn't gonna change, this isn't gonna change our path and I think reminding yourself when those sorts of things happen like if we're ultimately doing you know the right thing 99 % of the time when there's one thing one percent time happen it won't change the ultimate path and I think that I've had to remind myself a lot is like even if there's going to be really hard periods in this business which that there are going to be in the have been we're on the right path and reminding yourself of that means that you can like kind of justify um some of those those feelings when you get overwhelmed by like the success of a business in a certain area if you feel like you're on the right path then it's then it's fine and I and I remember listening to one of your podcasts like early days when you had Lucy Wright on and she was like spoke about slow failure with regards to her first business cuckoo and I really it really stuck with me this idea of like constantly assessing like your gut where your gut is at on the business and if your gut is like we're on the right path and that's great and as soon as my gut is like we're not i'll be like it'll probably be really hard i'd love to say i wouldn't have slow failure but i'm but i would like to think that i'm gonna be like okay my gut's not in this i need to move and i think if your gut is in it then you can justify those little spillovers in the pasta pan fascinating and i in this garden not garden path path is yes i mean i have that all the time we're talking about like today well tomorrow i've got a big podcast and i planned loads of questions for the fucking ages on it get an email from the person saying there's two themes that i can't talk not allowed to talk about i'm like oh my god i've done all this prep i'm like oh can't be able to do it it's like it's basically it's similar as a jay rainer moment but i actually emailed him when you saw that i wrote like i reckon i spent about four hours on the scene now sometimes to get some of these people on you've got to spend ages and it was like a whole thing to like an ode to his favorite um chinese restaurant called four seasons in soho yeah as you went he was i've been as well so we were walking there's two though you've got to go to the right one yeah i i was a bit so basically we went there and i was walking on it was a boiling hot day in like august and i was with my mates and there's like a bit of a running joke but i always pick the shit restaurants i don't know why i didn't i worked in food it really fucked me off anyway so we're walking along and i just started laughing there's like oh my god there's a place with three stars and i basically i got the guardian article up i said look it's jay rainer's joint like not his joint but and i was like i've looked at that place three stars i looked hideous and i looked it was like oh four seasons i was like oh no i was like boys trust me because we've got like the crispy duck but anyway it was completely underwhelming but anyway i wrote a whole thing to him and he came back to me but i was just like no i'm not interested in the podcast and so i don't mind stuff like that i've got a lot of resilience when it comes to things like that it's more just this sort of the the feeling when you're when you're so close to the to the cold face that you can't see the path i think there's a difference where you're a founder you've got to have two two abilities the ability to be at i'm just make they're not making this up they're thinking out loud the ability to be at the cold face like right i've got to solve this problem but then also weirdly simultaneously have the calm pragmatic look at the path cap on yeah do you know what i mean yeah yeah definitely i think like you know look even with like customer complaints like every business has customer complaints like someone who gets seriously upset about our jars being too tight but like and that you know particularly the first few times you're like oh god stop setting like they're having a terrible experience but you become more resilient and also you problem solve we've now got a jar opener that we send customers oh really yeah amazing um completely and i think it's it's yeah that i'm gonna definitely use this It's like, just look at the path.

37:46It will kind of bring you out of that. Looking at the path will be taking the pasta water off the thing and letting it just simmer down. I will be using that greatly. So I want to talk about Humble Bean. So to do a bit of context, I think we spoke early on in the journey. You sent me the Humble Bean deck. I think it was just me but I was like you cannot call it humble bean yeah it was I was like you're bold like didn't I know if I use the word bold but I was like that's not you like humble bean I remember because it must have been uh like January February 2020 was when I had I was like humble and then I remember speaking to like you spoke to a few other people spoke to Ben from mob as well and we're just like the name no like it's not it's not great and what was so hilarious I was just trying so hard I was like trying so hard and a lot of brands try really hard and I was I'm actually so embarrassed to say this I was like oh beans the future obviously beans the future Gen Z's get it Gen Z's got it me being like a very much a millennial Gen Z's get it so I need a brand that appeals to Gen Z so I did all of this stuff on Gen Z I was like hey they don't like caps you've got to write in like lowercase because that's a cool and trendy i was like also i went to like a gig i went to like a um what's an easy life gig and everyone was like a teenager and i felt so old and they were all obsessed with kendrick lamar um humble and i was like oh my god i didn't realize like everyone was so obsessed with kendrick lamar's humble song it's a great song yeah yeah yeah yeah and then i was like oh my god it'd be really cool for like humble beans but like actually not humble like tongue-in-cheek like obviously not humble and obviously it sounds it's the most try hard thing and imagine i it was going to be a cool brand like hey like maybe you should try some beans i was like can you imagine me trying to pull off that brand it just like wouldn't have worked and i think as soon as i you know had a bit of feedback i was like right this isn't the right approach but if i can't write copy as essentially an exaggerated version of me we're never going to get this up off the ground and gen z will scream at a mile after i'll be like who is this old lug trying to be cool so i actually at this point i had the instagram i probably had like 300 400 followers and i shared all of the name i wrote 80 name ideas and shared all of them and did basically a world championships of who should win and they voted voted on like loads of different ones and then the top two were legume so legume as in like legumes because legumes are be another word for beans the french word um and then bold bean co and so bold bean co one so i such delicious lessons in there for this is because even the way you would think about that it was like yo man there's a pin in the world you guys think about that but i'm at this kenny lamar gig and it's it's i think you i can't remember exactly what you said to you like i I sat down and I realised that I couldn't pretend to be that version of me.

40:59And I think a lot of people in life in general try and do that. We all wear these masks and we're always trying to, you know, someone be something you're not. And I think what you've done so well, and I genuinely believe one of the reasons the brands have such traction in such short periods of time is this audacity we were talking about at the beginning, but also authentic audacity. Do you know what I mean? You can't fake it. And I love it. and then the other thing which is a great lesson is you but kind of created product market fit um by leaning and using your community and audience and i think a lot of founders get so wedded to their idea their ego gets wedded to the idea and it's like they listen to these podcasts like you're gonna have some doubters man and like fuck the naysayers bro like all that of stuff yeah and okay my idea is banging it's like well actually you know sometimes you may actually need to reset things and i think you're so right about this this humble bean turning into bowl bean is just genius and was there anything else because i remember looking at the instagram i think i commented a few times what else were you asking your because there'll be a founder right now it's just starting out who may think their brand is banging they may think their their product's great and it's like just get some really easy feedback before you go in and try and get it into waitrose do you mean yeah completely so i would say that idea of creating finding a community first and then finding product market fit i learned in a it was a kind of a course that i did um and this man was talking about uh it was called outdoor voices it was a brand in the states where essentially this woman had a running club and she created this it's a completely you know worth millions now brand for runners that don't see themselves as like athletes they see themselves as kind of you know casual runners they like going on a jog and they want to go and get a coffee afterwards they're not like here for performance that kind of thing and so they use that as an example and this idea of finding community then product market fit and so i knew i wanted to do that and I was also coming from the tech industry and in the tech industry you speak about the lean startup you speak about minimum viable products you launch a product and then you learn from it and you kind of adapt and you know I think I had that perception going into it I was like you know I want to launch launch a product and learn learn from it it might not be the right product maybe the right product will happen down the line and I was very aware of that and I think that exactly that not tying yourself too much to the the products and the idea and your ego it it gives you so much benefits because you can hear what people say and I also you know I remember reaching out to um an amazing I reached out to a Tesco buyer like before I'd even launched and she just gave me like literally just a few messages on LinkedIn but she gave me so much information and so much that was really valuable at that stage and I think that before you have a product to sell a buyer like before then you're not annoying them you know as soon as you got products felt it's a sales pitch but if you're asking for their advice you're letting them shape a product and giving their ego a bit of a a part of that journey and I think that that that was really useful in terms of bringing buyers on board early days so they feel like they can shape it and we know that you know if you bring buyers into mpd they're more likely to list the products they're not necessarily always right because they're often looking at as you said that like data rather than the kind of maybe the hunches that you get when you're on the ground but they do often take take the product that they feel part of that process yeah i think the the other thing is what i'd be talking about is there's i'm not talking about i haven't talked about it as far as i'm talking about it but i'm thinking about is in food and drink in tech there's this product market fit which is this sort of panacea where growth just kind of is exponential but in food and drink you need that you need product market fit but you also need buy a brand fit because also i know they're not the same thing because you could have product market fit like i could sell um i could sell hot sauce in notting in a nottingham food market for 10 pounds and sell out every week that's that is is ultimately product market fit yeah but to actually get to sell go and sell 10 pound hot sauce to asda the bar be like that's someone to work at asda so you do need the buyer to back the brand as well that kind of makes sense and so if that is maybe the best way of describing it but you managed to get a meeting with waitress pre all the branding didn't you know all the actual time you actually got the product yes yes so uh how how you've you talked to me on the past about using linkedin like what you actually what you're actually writing to people because there'll be fans out there listening thinking like yeah how do i do this because i think it's this illusion that buyers these demagogues so you're like they're actual people yeah i mean i always say virtually the same message it's like hi i'm amelia um we're on a mission to make you obsessed with beans by giving you the best of beans um can i send you some to try that is what I do now like it's so simple but I think that as soon as you tell people like the mission behind why you're doing something it's not like I'm selling you beans it's like I'm on this mission like can you help me are you interested in this and I also always follow buyers like even if they don't accept me I'm always following them so you can kind of like their posts you can comment on them I'm sure Dan you're an expert in that as well like you can engage with them without kind of actually them having to accept you there's so many ways i think linkedin is so useful for um that networking and also when they are following you you know if you're posting about your successes if you're showing your passion that hustle they will recognize and they'll be thinking okay i can if i launch this brand they're gonna hustle for it they're not gonna you know sit back and i'm gonna have to do this in six months i can see the energy and the passion behind what they're doing and therefore i'll give them a shot i want to go on to that hustle and into that hustle because um really i love doing these podcasts is i like to test things that i could be wrong about and one of my beliefs and i and probably am wrong is that i think tiktok's great for brand awareness and in your instagram reels not just used if i'm talking about every brand but i'm like does it actually drive shoppers to store because you could have say for example 100 000 instagram followers whatever and they love your content and i don't know is there a way to track this but how have you utilized um both tiktok and ig to actually drive shoppers to to get that product moving in in a waitress like have you tested that have you tracked that so one of the only one of the real challenges with tracking, you know, store sales and Instagram and that kind of connection.

48:13It's a bit like a billboard, you know, on the street. If they saw that billboard, that's why they bought it. You know, it is impossible to track. You know, there are, it's crazy how like delayed the couponing system really is. And there are some innovation happening there. We work with Green Gin, for example, who offer coupons, but you still have to download that app. So there's that consumer barrier so we could test reels give them a coupon see if they go to waitrose but the reality is we don't see that as like being hugely valuable right now like our only way of really measuring the fact that the reason why people are buying our products is because of us is the fact that in our category sales the best performers are red kidney beans and chickpeas but within our product range our butter beans are our best sellers um in waitrose and classically if people were just like open to a premium jarred bean they would be going for you know the chickpea and that that would be it and they'd be thinking the butter bean cells would stagnate like like the canned variety but they're our best seller and they're the ones that they're my favorite bean and they're the ones we've consistently pushed on our instagram and that's how i know we're having a tangible impact just from the data but how one of the ways that we also found um was really useful in terms of tiktok was we did a tiktok series that went viral about me trying to find the beans and waitress for the first time and everyone knows that like compliance is hard and it takes a few weeks and there were so many anticlimactic moments but what happened is by taking us to a waitress setting tagging waitress half tagging waitress we actually got out to so many of the waitress staff because a lot of waitrose um employees are you know students who are on tiktok or who you know are doing their their holiday job or that they just left school there's a big contingence of that and they you know over those months we were calling a lot of waitrose stores being like hi we just want to check if the beans are on shelf and a lot of them like oh the guy's on tiktok so i think by having a kind of a focus around the retailer you're able to actually evangelize their team as well i think a lot of that comes down to luck i think the fact that those went viral being somehow engaged with people people were bought into the journey like i think tiktok is luck i don't know any brands who are killing tiktok like i'd love to hear do you can you think of brands who are like killing tiktok and you without saying ones which have that like little moons i love the example but like little moons is the reason why it went viral is because of the customer using it not because they would do that user generation their own content basically yeah no no i think the word viral is is interesting because i think there's a massive difference between brand awareness and brand depth so everyone wants you know so brand awareness the best example of this right so i could give you a stadium full of a hundred thousand people who quite like beans they're like they're like 25 % of them likes beans yeah or i could give you a stadium with 10 000 people who are fucking obsessed with beans like you probably want the 10 000 people because if you can go and see them that's brand depth and they're going to tell all their friends you can you can create those diehard fans and i think we get into this tiktok thing where it's like right we're gonna get we can get we can get all over the country get this um awareness yeah but i think what you're doing is you're not going viral on tiktok but you're building depth you're creating something that you're you're um you're you're evangelists want to you know you're giving something to them and i think there's real value in that which will probably make them like rule of reciprocity go and buy it in the supermarket um what how are you uh look what is the the because i know people in very complimentary but like how does it mean to do it like bang out all these recipes what is the sort of the creative um uh process to coming up and banging out these recipes and what are you actually using to record it do it because i think there'll be a lot of value for founders who have got pretty like pretty banging products but on putting out content yeah Yeah I mean first of all prioritize it like make it a priority um and I think that our process is basically Han and I sit down and we discuss like what should we do next week and we're actually so last minute we're so last minute we need to plan way more but we're a bit like oh god should we need to do some tomorrow great let's do some tomorrow so we we typically book it in every week and normally it's a morning and before that week we think about okay what's in season like what do we want a hero do are we doing a branded partnership so we've done partnerships like mold and salt falcon and amel well where there might be a restriction around the recipe we try not to restrict too much around the recipe mainly because um people won't have access to that ingredient then it's annoying for them if they're following a recipe and they don't have a blah blah sauce or whatever so we try and go for ingredients so we we kind of build parameters around what recipes we'll do then we do in a cardo shop in the morning resentfully because the cardo haven't stocked us yet but anyway i can't listen hey himash give us a shot um then what happens is um all of the ingredients come that morning and then we print out all of the recipes that we're going to do that morning and the reason why we're able to see this is because we are doing a cookbook which is so exciting we wrote it and shot it um all kind of the end of last year so we've wrote it kind of in the summer and then shot it in november and through seeing how proper cookbook is done we basically replicated their efficiencies and how they do things and do that for content and which are which are you know getting all the ingredients there having planned the recipes you were doing having all of the recipes up on the wall so you're not looking at a screen you know you're not looking at a laptop sometimes we've run out of print paper we haven't done it but it makes such a difference from we do and also having owned tasks so you know classically i'm on kind of like prep and cooking and han is on shooting and filming because she's completely amazing at that and often we're you know interchangeable and then that that's it basically um you know but i think that where we're different is that we are dealing with an ingredient that is accessible to anyone like they might not be buying our beans but you can get yourself hands on beans and i think a lot of fmcg brands have a challenge in that they're not an ingredient and the reason why they're not an ingredient is because ingredients are commodified and you can't make many brands around ingredients there's a real challenge in what we do is that buyers are like well this is a commodity like why why are consumers going to pay more for something that they see as a commodity and that's why we're in this unique position of being able to create content that is valuable to everyone not just people who buy our products never i'd literally ever feel with it like that because obviously all the brands i've i work with are ingredients and have worked with because i like that whole recipe again what we were talking earlier about is obsession with food restaurants i'd like that but again like if you're someone like like a nice like you can't put a recipe concept yeah and develop with a nice if you're a so yeah popcorn popcorn yeah again i'll this while i'm doing these so you got there's gaps there right and how to do things but i do think for anyone who is is a um an ingredient there's massive opportunity massive opportunity massive opportunity content and then i think that's probably why you're seeing all these brands like this is not being disparaging but like you know dance around oxford street is because you know giving out product trial it's because it looked really nasty uh i don't know say x brand started trying to make you make it a spaghetti vongole yeah with fucking nice wine it might be it'd be rude to the wine it's like this is worth drinking you don't use it yeah yeah it's it's a real it's a real um opportunity in an ingredient based brand i think and absolutely i think um where I want to go now is I asked this question to all guests and is what would you say in one sentence is a brand and you can take your time on it

57:04i'm i'm leaning to what i'd say as a brand is a set of beliefs like beliefs about what is important and I think that that's how people connect to brands they see that brand values the same things as me and I think that's why our initial following or people who just like absolutely love food and absolutely love cooking and I I'm a firm believer of like if you want to create change in food culture bringing on those food fanatics those foodies is a great way of of changing food culture because they the foodiest friend influences the less duty friend and eventually there's like a kind of simmering and i think unless you're me and you take your mates to shit chinese restaurants no and it goes back to what we're saying about in terms of how you get the team to align it's like the the glue that aligns the team with your vision is is obsession as opposed with brand and consumer its beliefs the obsession over the same beliefs whether that's foodie or whatever or sport or fitness that's where you create that connection with the brand and to link it to other guests is the caravan guy so a brand is a friend and ultimately you know most of your most of your friends have some beliefs to you not to the book yeah some kind of values yes yeah values to that i think there's uh yeah it's a set it's a set of beliefs and i want to ask some potentially tricky questions here or like dark questions so i think that is a part of the journey but you're you're in the driving seat so don't the fuck off and i happily will make um but like i think we all have a certain shadow that gives us a lot of drive so for me it was and i've been open about this is you do to that feeling of just not to go bobs being told you're not good enough and i've got this like fuck that is it's not it's probably not healthy and that's why i can't do this with therapist because it's a bit of fuck you drive for it's like just get out of my way kind of thing but you seem super so so always upbeat and happy all the time like what would you say is like potentially in your shadow that is maybe it's slightly nefarious that gives you a lot of drive so i kind of have boiled it down to essentially part of me is around being a woman and it sounds really bonkers but um I saw my my mother didn't work and she had four kids so you know she had a lot on her plate um but I realized how like society doesn't value like a I don't think society values like motherhood and values it as a role and also we are working so until we're so old now that actually when we reach the point of you know kids leaving home there's so much like emptiness for there's an emptiness syndrome and I basically saw my mum go through menopause and emptiness syndrome and basically and saw my dad who loves what he does get up each morning goes to work feeling so fulfilled so satisfied and my mum just kind of lost and like what am I what am I doing what am I what what makes me passionate what gets me going and I think as someone who does want to have kids I realized if I wanted to like maintain a career and like maintain I needed to do something I was really passionate about um so rather than you know I never ever even considered doing anything but food I was always going to work in food and and And I think that that was based on this idea of actually having something which could replicate what my dad had.

1:00:55And also financial independence. I think it's so important for women to have financial independence. My mom didn't have financial independence. She never used to spend, she still doesn't, she can't spend money on herself. She feels too much guilt. And it's like, that's not like a way to like live a life. So I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that I started with this idea of like I want to be independent I want to have something that that defines me beyond being a mother and you know folding laundry I that I feel so bad saying that but you know if my mom were to hear this she'd be like I do more than that of course she does it's such an important role but I can see that when out the other side of motherhood there's there's not enough opportunity for women so you need to have a career throughout it and to have a career throughout it you have to love what you're going to do because the cost of child care nowadays is so high that why don't you just give up and and and actually look after your kids because you'll probably save money so the only way you won't do that is by loving what you do you're doing and making sure you you want to do it and actually i think one of the mothers are probably the most un like my mom's same as your mom right they're the most unsung heroes in society like a lot of people now like oh god she doesn't work like it's like fuck me like she probably does want to work actually as you say it's it may be good for a week or something and i don't have to go to work like for most food like we get we're very lucky everyone listening to this is that we've probably found something a vocation we're probably the the one percent but for the majority of the country it's not that so we've got to be really grateful i think i have to stay with myself every day is like you've got to be lucky to do this um what advice would you give to other female founders who are potentially struggling a bit or lacking that going back to what you're talking about beginning lacking that boldness because let's not be around the bush the woman in with the whole the fucking patriarch right the woman's always been just true whether we like it or not it's not true today thank god but it is in the weaker position i mean um your friend who was over here earlier where we had lunch with she was talking about when she went to italy literally a year ago and the women are still treated like shit over there like we're lucky to be in the uk so i'd love to know where what advice you've got um i think firstly find um female networks so for example i'm i'm part of buy women built which is spelt b y so like buy women built it's a campaign set up by um founder of naughty i think the um and it's not yes and the the non-a-the alcoholic oh okay i was thinking of there's a there was a naughty n-o-r-t-i um spread but hang on no yeah Yeah, so Vi Women Built has got all of these incredible female founders and they are a community and there's this amazing support network, which in some ways I feel sad that men don't have.

1:04:03Like I go to these all female events and they are so, I always leave just so motivated and so empowered. And what's funny is I trace back like my experience of going to these throughout my life. And I've actually, I remember at school, there was like an away day where we went to another school and it was an all-girls school and they they started talk they they had some women in work who came on board and it was so inspiring I must have been like 14 15 and then my mother kind of got me involved with another female networking community and throughout my life I've had these and they are so amazing because you're meeting women who are far like far more experienced than you um and they show you that there's opportunity out there and show you it can be done but also they help you and they give you confidence in in where you're strong and i think i've always been led by women um so having if you haven't been led by women that have liked that and that's affected your kind of confidence and things like that then find some female mentorship to give you the belief that it can be done because it can for sure and what are some of the best lessons that have come out of those um the names literally escape me the by by women by Biowomen Builds, yeah.

1:05:16Is there any specific lessons or principles that could really help a female listener out? Well, I think for all listeners, the whole concept of Biowomen Builds, yeah. Let's bash her away. Fuck that, sorry. No, I did one with a job from Momo. The first one, face-to-face, and got there. I was literally like, the guy was going to the fucking hand with the old drool, like, I was like, I'm on my day, so I'm on my day. So I was like, well, they all then as well. so i felt like it was like a like a woodpecker going into our head um sorry yeah sorry you were saying about women um buy women belts yeah buy women belt has a simple message and it is essentially buy from female founders you know if you can't invest in them because female founders get like i think two percent of businesses um that female founded guess you know investment compared to 98 percent a male which is just a crazy statistic um you can't do that but what you can do is support these businesses help cash go through their their p &ls that then other people might invest in them because that is really the barrier that we're trying to get over is like people investing in female founders it's a really simple action of just supporting female founders that's that's the message of that um and then i suppose like in terms of what i one of the bits best bits of advice i got was from this woman and it was she was i remember her so vividly she was actually so grumpy and she was like you know what i mean yeah i must have been about 19 or 20 at the time she's like no i mean it's a man's world so just work your way through it and i was like okay that's like but i think in a way what i like about that approach is that like rather than constantly being upset about what's like happened let's just work within this and use the best of my abilities within that world and within that context let's you know for example the first time I had to encourage you know a guy to take um a bet on me as someone with no traction to it launch a bean business I remember I I kind of I won them with my like my passion because I knew that in terms of how he was treating me he wasn't taking me seriously in a business sense but what I could do is rather than be offended that he wasn't taking my business actman seriously is I could be like do you know what well I can show him charming with my passion and my excitement and my energy and he'll be like oh she's really sweet I'll give her a go and then the you know a few months later when he saw the business that was happening he's like oh wow maybe i should take this woman seriously and stop treating her like a little girl but being a little girl got me through the door god yeah there's a gorgeous lesson just kind of acceptance and stiff upper lip in that and in terms of it's a man's world just work your way through it yeah it's not it's not necessarily i feel like it's funny saying that it's not necessarily true i think there's so many things you can change but i think having that lesson told me early on made me less frustrated and and and also uncapable of working within it you know but i think there's a stiff upper lip lesson in that can be applied to anything so it's like it's like food and drink is hard just get on with it or i won't have anything as i think i'm not going to go into all the sort of how the world's going because it's not our place to do that but i think we are potentially losing this ability just to sort of have that just i mean you know i myself i'm like oh god it's so fucking hard it's like no it's not mate like there's people in coal mines don't mean like just you're doing a podcast son come on mate i've come here today to basi now but some gorgeous vermicelli noodles with some piece of piss what i'm doing get on with it son but it's just through do you know what i mean yeah perspective um i'd love to know uh how you manage your inner critic and i know this because i've done 70 of these in over 70 of these interviews now the big more the most creative people often have the biggest inner critic and the most driven people have the most inner critic is kind of you need it to keep getting better and keep growing what's yours like and how do you manage it because mine's a mendacious little boss at times and goes in the way of things yeah I think that um mine comes into uh my people pleasing side of myself which I find can limit my success and and that's that's something I really I'm still I still struggle with and I'm still like trying to navigate you know and as this business grows you know I can't like you know keep everyone happy and make everyone like me because i won't i won't be successful because you can't you can't run a business like that and that's something i really struggle with is just is that from like the team lens or from yeah i think from like 180 it's like asking people to do things whether it's a business partner whether it's your team and you know often it's not even a problem like that people don't mind it's just i find a lot of that like challenging challenging um because yeah i just the dvars want to be liked and don't want to be a hassle yeah no i'm just i mean completely the same completely the same and it's just it's yeah i mean yeah and also i just i think i beat myself up a lot about just it just not being to the standard i want it to be it's almost like this punishment in pursuit perfection and it's like give yourself a breather mate do you know i mean it's a tricky thing it's like a bit like with the jay rainer beans yeah i reckon well i don't know i'm not in your head but i can imagine that inner critic being like like going down hard do you know what i mean it's like how how to create a bit of space between that i think i have been had to like forgive myself a lot of times in this journey like particularly because when I was like alone running the business there was so much stuff that was going wrong because I was managing operations and I I kind of you know my my sister said this around like being a parent sometimes like sometimes good enough is good enough and I think you know I'm I'm not a perfectionist and but I see that as like a strength because you know if I was a perfectionist I wouldn't be here right now I would still be kind of probably tweaking a little label in living at my parents still so i see yeah i i kind of see like practicing self-forgiveness is is so crucial to being a founder and being like bogged that up and one thing i always think is that if you've made a mistake you've learned and you've you had to make that mistake at some point you know i have bought i've i've missed order deadlines so we haven't had any stock for months um for a month because i i missed an order deadline in the early days i printed the labels wrong because i didn't get a sample with the navel to sign off before i had it i've done so much wrong but i always see it as like this is part of the journey and this needed to happen at some point and it's just happened now and it's it's rubbish but like this is part of the journey yeah i think the the the self-forgiveness thing is is is something i try to do but the uh sam wiggin came on the podcast and he listened to him he was he's business partners with renee elliott who's the founder of planet organic super interesting guy and i did like an exercise with him and he was like dan you just need to like learn to forgive yourself for judging myself so it's like you say it's the jay rayner instance i forgive myself for judging myself that the jay rayner samples was enough because often it's the judgment we have on ourselves that's really harsh not the actual objectively what actually went wrong i mean objectively you sent some glokes and some beats really i boil it down to that um but no i i love that and i think again i'm i'm on this you know i'm six months into this now and i know i have days where i feel like alone like there's no one to talk about thank god for this podcast there'll be so many founders who are listening to this who are alone would probably list i know people listen to this whilst they're in their kitchen making the product on their own how did you navigate being alone in business world how long were you kind of a lone wolf roving through the yeah fmcg forest if that's the way of it it was probably about like you know just under like two years but i suppose from the business launching it was about nine months and it changes so much like i do encourage founders to if they're thinking about fundraising do it earlier because the valuations you get on a business um after launch post-launch even with a retailer it's actually quite minimal for the overwhelming stress of not paying yourself um working at the business alone and also not having anyone else that's risked their that their money or their time on the business i was kind of working on business alone and and that actually creates a lot of self-doubt whereas as soon as people invested in me i was like hold on this is pretty good business people have put their money into me they believe in this and i think that i always speak to them i encourage them to do it sooner so sorry so fundraise earlier because then you can hire people and bring people on so i didn't so i didn't fundraise sooner i i moved home to my parents i so i've done yeah and i basically wanted it to get to a stage with product market fit and so i got it to the stage of having a waitrose listing um on the horizon and that was agreed um and uh i was you know 70k revenue and in you know over i think 200 stockists including selfridges and planet organic and all of those but i remember meeting up with another founder who had just had an idea and and like got it to a concept level got a concept hadn't even put it out to market and he was value he was valuing his company at the same valuation as i was and i'd done so much more work and that almost like infuriating me i was like wow like how how is this possible there's only so much you can have for a first fundraise and because so many food and drink businesses are a risk so i'd say take the money earlier um and hire people to join you on your journey yeah it's like the chicken and the egg though isn't it it's but it's it's just so so when you were on that nine month period just going in a little bit deeper is um you you do like sometimes i you know i feel like it's fuck me this is a you're on your you're on your dod here son like it can be quite discombobulating what were there any like specific things you did or um can you talk about joining the the female networks and stuff like that was anything else you did to just sort of navigate that i did the unrest accelerated program which is an acceleration program for impact-led businesses and that was part of my kind of like having a community at that stage to like feel like someone else was you know in invest in my business um that was great um for that I think like it really helped that loneliness kind of go away by having people to talk to that were interested in my business and wanted to talk about it um but before then no I I didn't really you know obviously you have other founders but um it's a really it's a really hard stage and i would say that um yeah i don't envy anyone in that stage because your people are kind of also when people talk to you they're like oh yeah i saw you're doing like a bean business you're not getting any of the like no one's impressed with you at that point because you've just you've launched a business and it's doing it's selling a little bit and i think that that's the hardest part because people you haven't got proof of concept i had that actually uh i mean in quite a morbid setting but at a funeral in december and it was like some of those like school friends hadn't seen in yonks then i see your uh little podcast on belly linkedin that oh it's a well you keep on shelter in linkedin i get i get that like what are you doing man working for like rinsing your soul in canary wharf like do you know what i mean but yeah there's a lot there's a lot to i mean that's probably your own podcast in of itself um you know conscious of times a few more things i want to go into so you've worked in hospitality uh albeit through with the tech so you've worked with a lot of chefs you're an ardent foodie um obviously passion going to restaurants i really do believe that brands should start thinking more like restaurants and have to see.

1:18:43So the way you activated the Whole Foods listing, I thought was a touch of genius in terms of you're actually cooking in Whole Foods. There's a whole theatre. And I think when you're a brand, that first touch point with a brand is so important. It's like going to a Michelin star restaurant and the front of house, you want to be welcomed with a greeting. I think what brands can do is they can get to this thing. It's like, right, fuck it. We're just going to get an agency in. That is literally like a Michelin style restaurant, a premium brand. So you've put your life into, right? Gang and going on Gumtree and Knappen and finding some bloke.

1:19:20He smokes elf bars and an all face jacket to sit and be your front of house. And you walk in and he's like, well, you know, it's pretty stoned. That's not the right thing to do. And I think these little moments of magic, that first touch point of the brand is so vitally important. I'd love to know what are some of the lessons you have taken from your obsession with hospitality that you've allowed to spill into Bold Bean that's given you an edge? Yeah, okay. So I kind of see the crucial one in that, if I'm relinking hospitality to how it's like seeped into bull bean is that I see restaurants and chefs and food writers as those that drive the food industry forward and I've always looked up to them I've always been inspired by them and I always think that I remember I used to I did an internship at the collective yogurt company when I was about 20 and um I'm an MPD my MPD manager there that Fiona Cramp who's now my non-exec she asked me as a role to for looking for a new limited edition to them to look at all of the cool restaurant menus and look at what they've got under puddings like what kind of flavors have they got going and they had you know like rhubarb crumble maybe one of them brought in yuzu so you're looking at restaurants as the future of where food is going to go and I think that that's why I was ahead of like being the bean curve is because I was working with chefs on a daily basis the best chefs and they were heroing beans in a way that I saw as so aspirational so I took that learning as I was able to see beans in this way therefore if I can make other people see beans in this way then they're going to be as obsessed with them and I think that um you know we do that through even spotlighting where beans are on the menu in like because i saw that in our social media we go you know go to lyles they often have a bean dish on the menu and suddenly you're like maybe these aren't quite cool i thought they're really sad like actually they're at duck soup duck soup's quite a cool restaurant you know they're thinking about all these things and helping that have that trickle down impact of influence basically um and i think that's definitely something I took from working with chefs um and yeah I'm trying to think about anything else in that sort of like touch point market I I completely agree with this idea of you know not having a front of house that is you know not representative of your brand and I think that's in a way always why we've relied so heavily on marketing because that we can control you know i can do a video of myself or someone in my team can do a video of themselves and we've control of that that experience they have but if we needed to you know be in every single kind of supermarket doing sampling we wouldn't have control of all these people and therefore we've kind of decided to double down on what we have control of which is our kind of channels and it's actually even though it isn't online even though it is on social like you're you're not you're creating something that is is trying to well it is creating brand depth do you know what i mean so it's like a really authentic uh video that is almost speaks to yourself i think where brands can get unstuck is potentially outsourcing that to a kind of nebulous tiktok campaign that doesn't really have any kind of grammar task to it um which is interesting the other thing i would want to talk to you about is um is if bold bean were like a hotel i think i wrote something about how brands should start thinking like hotels like if a buyer comes say you're a hotel manager a buyer comes to your hotel and they get checked into their room um and you're not going to call the the person who's in that room saying that you want to come down for breakfast you've only been there for like five minutes right it's the same brand send samples to buyers and they're like right you try that mate if you try that and it's just like well give them spray so if you start thinking more like hospitality more like a hotel you actually develop a much better relationship with buyers so what if both being more hotel what would that look like yeah okay so i would say have you been to molly's diner or heard about it pray tell okay so molly's diner is by a dual carriageway it's brought in a lovely place which jewel here it's in between like oxford and i want to see cheltenham or um swindon i think um and it's it took over i think a little chef and it's a motel and it's got very nice interiors it's got a lovely place to work and then it's got a diner which is like really buff food and i kind of see that as us because firstly we're in a really dull section of the supermarket we're in that area where people just aren't expecting to have something that's something high quality and I think Molly's Motel is very similar to that and but also we don't take ourselves too seriously we're not trying to be yes we are premium but we're not trying to be exclusive we're trying to be very accessible and you go to Molly's Motel and you've got kids you've got parents you've got locals you've got you know people down from London with their kind of in their smug relationships with their barbers you know you've got such a rain diversity of people and that's kind of what we would aspire to do as well yeah i'm looking at now it's unreal yeah it was so a house it's part of so a house so um yeah i think nate jones i don't think you don't have to be a member because i'm not a member yeah yeah and go and stay and i think it costs 50 quid but you're getting like the plushest creamiest sheets you're gonna cow shed they and you're like oh my god i say plushest creamiest beans then oh they haven't got beans yet but um but i think that's kind of similar to us like we're accessible but you're getting this incredible experience and actually you know as far as a like in the same way as far as a roadside hotel like a premier angles yes they're expensive but actually if you compare it to a bougie hotel that you're paying you know 300 quid a night they're great value and i'd like to say that our beans are the same you know compared to a tin yes we're expensive but compared to some crappy chicken that's been factory farmed full of hormones we are such good value and we're still absolutely delicious what an answer i i think um yeah the the analogy of of if it being in kind of a kind of not decrepit but like i can imagine this molly's being this sort of glowing beacon and kind of searing like a kind of a rough shitty snotty february i mean you'll go yeah that's case of like oomph and warmth and that is ultimately what i think um bold bean is and then with buyers i know we've talked a lot about what you're doing sort of consumer facing the tiktoks what how have you been bold with buyers in terms of getting them to fill the brand up because i think brands have two jobs they've got to get the consumer in love with the brand but they've got to get the buyer in love the brand because buyers are ultimately consumers as well as they are buyers.

1:26:39Doreen? Yeah completely so we always try and find our buyer on Instagram and just follow them and it's quite intense because they're probably like oh wow you're crossing into my personal space but I'm like you have to see us on Instagram because then you really feel us. I think that's the starting point unfortunately like you know our waitress buyer she doesn't have Instagram which is such a pain but she still sees it because her colleagues see it and then they say oh look at this you know they've done a really funny video i think for you know what we're going to try and do is is with our retailers is really make the content also about them because what they want to see is that this you know their own channels are so restricted by the fact that they're big mega businesses with a whole team dedicated social media and they can't put one thing out without it being painstakingly kind of unpicked and is that the right thing to put out whereas we have this like ability to be nimble and to put out stuff and see how it goes and for them that you know for us to engage with the retail directly i think is a really nice way of of making them feel like part of our journey because they are they're so fundamental to our journey what sort of stuff have you been doing well well just with the waitrose we did a lot in waitrose and then it ended up with a waitrose in Henley on Thames doing a dance routine to get bold beans out and they're doing Mission and Bosch Bull LinkedIn and all of the staff did it and like things like that was so cool because we you know had them excited about us because we were so excited about them and I think like you know launching in a retailer is so exciting like that is a huge deal and I think delivering on that and showing that it's important to your journey is is a great way of making the buyer feel like oh wow i'm making a difference even if you know the the difference is is small to begin with it and in terms of their data and how much money they're making they can feel that they are making a difference in terms of a small brand who really cares about what they do as almost i think i think when small brands try and compete with like big brands in terms of like say coca-cola or peptico the small brand thinks oh god i don't have the budget they have i don't have the the access to x y or z i think that's something really shrewd in being okay what can we do that the big retailer can't do the big retailer or the big brand has to get every social thing signed off coca-cola or peptico or whatever brand can't probably be that cheeky as an off-the-cuff cheeky um neither can a waitrose so as how can you as a brand lean into your again with i don't know how we've gone full circle here but like tying in with boldness and audacity enter things with boldness like how can you as a brand be bold and be audacious and by doing that will make the buyer in bracknell or i don't know what the other ones are but like make them smile and sing do you know what i mean but like i think there's something in that yeah i definitely and i think we are like a young team and we don't take ourselves seriously and I think that the buyers you know find that probably a bit endearing they're like oh they're quite sweet I find they're really loving bees they're a bit mental but I love it and I think there's something there's something to that because at the end of the day like I think so much of a success in business is based off that personal relationship wherever it may be and I think that you know the buyer is is you know they're human at the end of the day you know they want they want to feel connected they want to feel like they're doing something good and they want to be you know whether it's a buyer or an investor or a business partner like buying them into you and your beliefs is such a fundamental part of bringing them on site and and getting the business to work well look i've absolutely loved that it's been so many so many uh yeah great naps just so many lessons in like I think it boils down to every one of these I do I get like a central couple of principles but I think it's this everyone venerates authenticity but it's actually be authentic yes but as a brand combine authenticity with audacity and be like really fucking bold obviously in the name I think that's the first thing but I also think it's like there's something about this mission that ties everything together that's whether that's like consumers is coming in employees joining buyers believing in it getting investors in having that one sentence um you know perry said if you can't sum up some of your brand in eight words you're up shit creek and making you obsessed obsessed with beans by the best giving you the best of beans is probably that i think just there's so much in that for our listeners so thank you thank you so much pleasure thank you for having me big old hungry podcast fans so great to be back so I think I know but no epic thank you so so much for listening to the podcast I really really do appreciate it if you liked that episode only if you liked it please do give it five stars subscribe tell all your friends families foes next door but one cat dog whatever please tell everyone about this podcast it means the world to me and I really want to understand what your pain points are as the new wave of of challenger food and drink brands please do hit me up on LinkedIn in search Dan Pope and hopefully we can together create a more meaningful and powerful podcast for the next wave of challenger food and drink brands thank you so much