100% Growth for 8 Years: IQBAR’s Will Nitze & Jess Greenwood

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32:09Matt Bertulli:Go to nineoperators.com slash AppLovin and you'll get the$5 ,000 in free credit and the step-by-step playbook to get set up immediately and start spending. when you don't control the market i mean we talk about this all the time on the pod but that running your business where you could run it indefinitely is really the only way to intelligently do it because you don't know what interest rates are going to do you don't know what's going to be happening with iran you don't know who's going to be president you don't know what kind of outbreak there might be you know i mean you could just go on and on with all the things you don't control and so where people do get themselves and backed into corners is when they're like, this is the path.

32:47We actually talked about this in a recent episode where it's like you get too fixated in your mind on a particular outcome. And then that kind of shrinks your optionality. And if the board changes, you're just like out of options, which was not how you guys ran it. You ran it where it's like, hey, if we need to run this profitably and growing indefinitely, we can. We'd like to sell. But which makes a lot of sense. I think that happened to a lot of bar startups, actually, when it came to like raising money, because around the time that we were turning profitable a lot of bar companies that were startups like there were so many that used to be around that they still weren't profitable and investors changed what they wanted and they changed what they were looking for and they couldn't raise money anymore like there's like a grave of companies that started around the same time as us all in all in bars we're all way faster than us sexier raise more money and they all went to zero and we just quietly

33:40Matt Bertulli:has the market uh have you watched the market then seesaw back towards like this whole like it disappeared for the smaller brand do you do you see it coming back for the smaller brand you still think it's a game i think it's still fully dead yeah and do you think the bar continues to raise that so like the acquisition bar is going up i saw something on this well well went up and then it came down a little bit but it settled north of nine figures okay so like i saw something on this recently on this that the it's funny that we need data so i'm going to say this out loud it's going to sound obvious but that the larger the business is is a you may as well just invest in large companies because their chances of being around a long time and getting even larger or higher and they've actually mapped out the probability of all this it's like just buy a 10 billion dollar company you're just going to be 100 this is one of the reasons why you've got to chase profitability like we need to be giving more real talk to founders and leaders if you have a consumer or focused company that is losing money, that is losing money, it's a zero.

34:41Just, it should be, like, you should think about it as a zero if it's losing money. And if it's making money and you're doing less than 50 million in sales, it's closer to a hobby than a viable asset in the minds of the would-be acquirers. And that's okay. So you need to be running it like it is your, you know, it is your livelihood and that your livelihood is going to come from producing profits. Are there exceptions to this rule? Like, I mean, like, we weren't profitable for the first five years. We should doubt that. But it was always like because we knew once we got to a certain scale, we would be.

35:11And because you could raise. If you couldn't have raised knowing the two of you, you would have gotten profitable. Like, I mean, the whole interview so far kind of proves that you guys were scrappy enough that if you had been forced to, you would have. Yeah, it's more like we just wanted to live in a world where we doubled every year and we wanted to get there faster. But like, yeah, we could have gone 50 percent. The exceptions, I would say there's some exceptions on this being sub nine figures. I mean, Cholula, I think, was$95 million and sold for$800 million because of the$95.40 was EBITDA or something crazy like that.

35:44If you have a 40 % EBITDA margin, everything I just said is not a point of you. So there are exceptions to the top line scale. I actually can't think of any recent exceptions to the profitability.

35:56Matt Bertulli:No, I can't either. That's why I'm asked. piece i think maybe in supplement you can see companies that are they have a growth rate and a retention number that will outweigh the the bottom line in the short term that will drive up their their value well for like maybe thorne went through a transaction and a couple years later it's going to go through a transaction for a much much bigger number there is like a track record of taking something and and leveling it up so i think that that makes sense but overall like it's not even really about numbers it's about market positioning and people want to buy market leaders yeah i was told this recently about electrolytes like i'm involved in the electrolyte category we have a brand doing really well growing really fast but more or less the perspective this person was sharing with me is like there's a lot of companies doing well in this space but that also means that probably nobody's going to get bought because interesting if anybody is going to make a move in that space one of the big like strategics they're just going to it has to be a liquid iv type it's the top an element who i believe is like number two or whatever i mean gatorade maybe whatever but uh doesn't want to sell like so they're not going to sell so yeah at least according to their i i get their like investor that's the best way to sell a company is to say that you're not for sale but everybody totally but they are doing like a bunch of distributions they're doing things that would suggest that that is true but here's the thing when you get to that scale and making the amount of money they're making you really do have more serious conversations about why would we sell?

37:21Like somebody wants to give me whatever, call it, you know, 10 times cashflow. Okay. Well, unless I think the prospects of my company are bad, why would I take that? I feel like that company though was also like started for a different reason. Like it was started by Rob Wolf, who's obviously already successful. So I think it is more like, this is something I want. Yeah, it doesn't matter. Yeah, it's true.

37:41Matt Bertulli:The number, which company you're on definitely has an impact on how you think about the, so if you guys, you're looking at like the journey of IQ bar and how calculated you were with raising the money what was driving I guess the momentum to justify the raise were you guys still very d2c had you started to go into retail I think of you guys as a retail first company for some reason that's in my head we are it's 65 35 this year okay yeah and it used to be it used to be the opposite I mean every year it's kind of like gotten more towards retail just because retail can grow so much faster than d2c there's so much more sales there totally well and also it's like your category we're looking to not you know like triple spend year over year or something on d2c so it's also like naturally and if you're going to be profitable at the price points we sell at that's mostly going to come from retail so you have to it has to have logistics related a lot what does that mean price points you sell at we just we sell a very sharp price point so we we've never not once in the history of the company raised price and we started it in 20 December 2017 sorry you've never raised the price technically I think when you started like year one it was like$29.99 and we dropped it$24.99 okay yeah and like there's a lot of brands out there today who are like still selling a 12 pound online for like$40 but we comped from like day one we comped the e-com price to the price on shelf like for better or worse bars are like semi commoditized and there's a lot of data and it's very clear what the clearing rate for a bar is on a shelf in a retailer and you can make a matrix of all the all the offerings and plus or minus 10 here but like there's a price that will move a lot of units and we're like okay we're going to map e-com to that which is the opposite of how i think a lot of bar startups they'll be and david protein's kind of like an interesting exception to this because they price so much higher and it's it's working so good for them but but we don't know what the back side of that is and this is something you never know somebody else's numbers and so you shouldn't assume so like for example well what's david priced at which this is a huge success story none of this is me capping on david but i'm just going to give an illustrative example i don't so we price it like call it 219 on shelf like on average and i think they're like 399 so call it double so for example like we have no idea what margin they're giving to target and walmart on the back side like maybe they're giving them the same margin rate you are or maybe they're giving them you know that plus 15 more and we don't know how much promotional dollars are giving and so a lot of times when you kind of get down to the final analysis you can see somebody else's price point and be like like a good example this is obviously yeti runs an amazing brand and yet our i know their net operating margins and i know ours and ours compared just fine even favorably to yetis and like, well, how is that even possible with our price points?

40:39Well, it's like we have a different overhead structure. There's just, and to run those price points, they have to do so much more marketing as a percentage of revenue. And like, that's great. I mean, they're an unbelievable brand, but what I've kind of learned is usually when you see somebody at a much, at an elevated price point to what like you're saying, like what the preponderance of data shows, they're doing something on the backside to have to support that. So if you think they're just taking all that home, they're not, you know, that's getting that's getting recycled somewhere influencers meta whatever and our take two is like value wins in every market premium wins in some markets yeah i'd rather win in every say that again yeah that's great a value wins in every market like so and think of how many market life cycles we've been through since like you know there's covid that was crazy right with the trump trump tariffs like blah blah blah like the market has shifted violently up and down but like Value is always cool.

41:31Matt Bertulli:And win, you mean capture the most share of market or most profit of market? How do you define win? So you say value wins in most markets. Our North Star really is units. Yeah, because why units? Why does that matter? Because we run an old school economies of scale business and units changes everything for the better. The more units, the more every other metric downstream gets better. And you're talking about the cost of the product. Our cogs, our cogs go down. Everything goes down with more scale. More, more, like bars and mouths. Like the more, the more, it's trial, right? Even if we break even on that bar sale that went into someone's mouth, they tried it.

42:12There's a good likelihood they liked it and they'll tell five friends and blah, blah, blah. So it's, there's just every metric improves with units.

42:19Matt Bertulli:Did you guys run the sampling playbook early on? Like were you just get in stores and get bars and mouths? Like, is that a thing? No. I'd say no, we did not. Well, we did an analog of that, which is like because we were predominantly in the e-com business at first, which is priced really sharply and have like intro products that are super cheap. Like we have a hydration business as well. And we have a$9.99 eight stick sampler. It's like super cheap to try eight different flavors. That's effectively sampling. That is an analog of sampling. Okay. Yeah, we went through a phase where we did a three bar trial where people could pick any three flavors of bars and we'd send it to them for like five dollars, like something incredibly cheap.

43:03But ultimately, that was like us in our office packing every single individual. So that went away. But I mean, at the time we like first launched, that was definitely something. But then there's the whole thing of like, do you are the customers you're acquiring good or not? and like actually most of them weren't. And so it's not as simple as just sample, you know, indiscriminately. Like that doesn't work either.

43:23Matt Bertulli:Yeah. Yeah, I asked because I remember a story about the kind, was it kind bar? They had a whole big sampling thing. That was like a big part. Well, it was about to see the founder had this whole thing where he was like, we've crunched all the numbers under the cheapest way to acquire it. The cheapest way to acquire is sample. If, big if, huge asterisk, the product is good. How long did it take for you guys to have a good product? oh man you're going to be the most critical good is um relative right so it's like good i define as someone you converted someone so like bars is a weird one where it's like it's not a cheesecake right so it's like it's a functional food i'm choosing to eat this instead of spaghetti carbonara or converted me you didn't sell them to the bar you actually converted them to buying yours like you like we converted them on the benefits that the food is a tool to achieve which is in the early days like keto which more or less means weight loss yeah right now it's come full circle in glp1 but so it's always weight loss everything comes back to weight loss um so you know that that that was uh that was how we convert people and taste is a component of that and taste always matters but function matters just as much as taste in our categories it's also very category specific you're not looking for function out of a tortilla chip you are looking for function out of a bar or a gummy or whatever.

44:43So it's a weird category because like we learned a lot when we did sampling at Costco. Like we had to, to get in, we had to do a road show. Oh yeah, I know the road show. It's a great time in person selling, but it's really interesting. You learn a lot about like people. So like you'd have people pick up your box and complain that there's any sugar and like we're one to two grams. It's like very minimal. Well, I feel like well in the part, they have like cupcakes and like all this other stuff. just because they expect something different from a bar. It's a very interesting category.

45:16Matt Bertulli:Their cart literally has cake in it, and they're complaining about the bar. It's not how someone shops. It's how they shop for your category. The same human, like, it might as well swap out their brain when they move from aisle to aisle in the grocery shop. They shop for water differently than they shop for... And those different brands contradict each other. It's the weirdest thing. Oh, yeah, that's why the idea of an ideal customer profile, I'm like, what do you mean? Like, we're schizophrenic creatures. man like there's like 200 people in my head right now just depends on what i'm doing and what i'm buying and how i'm experiencing or interacting with the world you're never just like there's no one version of anybody yeah right and you guys are proving that with how you looked at the how long did it take you to go from bars to other products then definitely a few years we didn't launch mix until 21 i always think about our wedding because that's in our welcome bags at our wedding we gave everybody the eight six sampler and we said please go to amazon they review that is found a couple that should have been on every moment is an opportunity to sell we always forget that one but uh so i always looking back to that so like late late 2021 early 2022 we launched our hydration line so and you did the kickstarter in like what 2017 so yeah but then that's the other thing like i'm saying all this because i we learned it firsthand that the category thing like height the hydration buyer is just so different than the bar buyer which is so different than the coffee buyer and those are our three categories and then even more important than all that is because we're so omni-channel where the products work is so different like we had a wildly different experience trying to sell hydration in brick and mortar than we did bars in brick and mortar wildly different well tell me more about that what do you mean what was so different i would assume hydration works really well in brick uh i can if you're liquid ivy for sure yeah if you're the market leader like without getting into too much of the specifics so bars are cool but like bars are ultra fungible they work and you can open them anywhere in your kitchen on the train they can sell anywhere if they're not coated they're temp they're not temp sensitive they're not going to clump like bars are a great form factor a hydration powder you're not going to open it and pound it right like it needs to go in water so that's kind of weird right inherently so if you go into a 7-eleven you're going to buy that and then i got need to go buy this other thing and combine them and shake it why wouldn't i just buy a gatorade like that's the problem it's crazy you're going up against ready to um yeah got it it makes no sense this is why gatorade is so much bigger than the powdered electrolyte market i mean And I think it's also just because like, think about like in your standard store, people are selling singles.

47:59Matt Bertulli:Yeah. A single stick. It's just it takes a lot to get any business there. So like we obviously want to launch like the biggest place we could, which is Costco. And Liquid IV is really a Costco brand. And they are they're hard to compete with there. They're constantly doing deals. They're always undercutting everyone. So it's not that we couldn't do it. it's hey if we put all of our energy into like bars that there's so much more green pasture to growing our share in bars in brick and mortar than banging our head against the wall on hydration in brick and mortar we know hydration can work great e-com we know we have a powdered coffee product too can work great e-com like yes we could roll the dice on brick and mortar in those or we could keep running this other form factor that's like absolutely lights out everywhere um you mentioned it, but I think physical retail is full of people that are really dialed in on scale economies.

48:53And you just cannot compete unless you are fully committed to scale economies. Like you said, Liquid IV, part of the reason they're able to be so successful in Costco is they don't take the approach that because we're the market leader in this form factor, we can charge excess. They're actually like, we're going to be more aggressive on price in physical retail even than we are online. and they're constantly paying for placement right by the front door. They're constantly paying for the member discounts and things like that. And that's actually the playbook in consumable consumer stuff in wholesale is scale economies, drive down that price, just move a ton of use.

49:36Matt Bertulli:I just feel like, can you give me your take then on what you're saying? Where I'm getting stuck, guys, is pick a large category. So go pick a huge category, right? It's likely very competitive if it's a large category. There's no large categories where it's like, well, there's nobody in it. It just doesn't work. But if it's a large category, then it's also extremely hard to compete in. So like you looked at bars, you're like, this is a massive category. We're going to do it. What told you that was worth competing in such a massive category? Like what did you have early on? I think honestly being naive was extremely awesome.

50:14Matt Bertulli:Absolutely nothing. loving it's like it's a great answer for most things in life it's like yeah it's like we didn't know and honestly like we didn't know about like that keto was going to be such a big thing for us either it's like so so that was so so big categories are not monoliths right no yeah there's lots they're not monoliths they're actually the amalgamation of 15 little categories little subcategories and actually each of those subcategories if that big market is big is also quite big yeah and so we learned early on on that we were like one of three keto compliant bars or whatever that and like three four weren't marketed like that like you know you didn't position that no not at all not at all that's how much people like were looking in this space and there were so few options that like they just were like oh my god they have low net carbs well how did you position the brand initially there it was it was brain it was brain our first tagline is brain food yeah that's it and it wasn't high protein it wasn't actually the very first bar was like eight grams it wasn't even keto compliant it was i think eight grams of sugar we then got sugar down for purposes of being good for the brain not weight loss or not keto not all that keto just happened and then all these people just started buying our stuff and in post-purchase surveys being like yeah i'm keto this was fits my macros and we're like whoa what's keto like and it just blew up and just amazon just like totally took off and we're like oh we're just a keto brand have you it's fascinating have you let like as a marketer have you let the those sort of like consumer trends pull you into different positioning different product categories one thing that's awesome about us like now that um we are like the form that we are like we're a protein bar we're low sugar we like don't have grains like these are just things that will always be true about the bar and there will always be trends just around clean labels so it's like of course we'll lean into different trends and stuff changes but like we don't have to change product to do it so like a good example is like keto came and went and when it was really big we put keto on our bar now fiber is really big we've always had a lot of fiber we just didn't call it out in the front of the pack now we're changing that so we do call it out in the front of the pack i think people take the like stay on brand way too far way too far we agree 20 of what you should be doing should be arguably like not on brand because that's how you learn and that's how you advantage of new emerging trends so like it wasn't really that on brand to be keto but we're like oh nine out of ten people are on the keto diet we're gonna put keto in huge letters on the front and of course that then paid further dividends the caveat to that is you can't marry that trend if that trend goes away you can't then dive as a result there's a lot of like brands who like put it in their name and a lot of them aren't around anymore so it's like it's also an ability to pivot that doesn't mean you totally can't get your product so i mean we could do again a whole whole pot on that right so you need enough value proposition such that that one that just popped off when that dies yeah like the other nine carry you through well that was your only value probably you're screwed yeah yeah you have to build dynamic products but uh i guess though iq bar like literally iq is in the name yeah how have you had like as a brand guy i'm like how does i do bar did you ever think about changing yeah it's like smart food yeah smart food is popcorn like i don't know smart water like it's uh the beauty of the ethereal like iq like smart choice it's pretty even the the trademark is dynamic so you never thought about changing the name at at any point of like well not just that it's iq bar like what an idiot why would you put the form factor yeah you literally called it and then you go into non-bars which doesn't make sense like right so now i would take the other side of that which is i actually love like i think it's really valuable saying literally what the thing is like iq bar again like caveman brain we all shop like that and it's like bar like i always know it's bar and uh and then we we and this is a little bit kind of like ruins right like where it's like the you they they centered on the you with the umlaut like we centered on iq so iq mix iq joe and yeah but the brand is still iq bar 95 % of sales is bar and now bites.

54:23I mean, our whole product line also, we haven't pivoted totally away from the brain. We have nutrients in all of our products that are good for the brain. Of course, things like powder allows us to have more of that than something like bars. But it's like, that will always be true whether people are looking for it or not because that's the ethos of the brand.

54:42Matt Bertulli:Do you guys think you are a net winner or loser with the whole GLP one craze? Not winner, big time. So there are three categories. So someone did a great study on this where they list all the categories that get hurt with GLP ones. And like number one is like sweet baked goods. Absolutely going to get obliterated. Like Hostess, whoever, whatever that PE that sold that, like great move because you got out at the right time. Salty snacks, not great. There's three, right? You're actually more likely to consume it if you're on GLP. It's net positive, which is protein bars, meat snacks, and yogurt.

55:24That's it. Three are net additive. Actually, electrolytes will do well, too, because you have to add back. But on the food side, it's those three. We're one of those three, right? So it's incredible, right? Protein, fiber. Basically, it's a protein and fiber story and low-cal story. yeah um yeah i would not want to be a big kids also just like kind of yeah so talk to what's what's bikes this is a new product right now yes this is a perfect example of how we are still not corporate at all we had this idea we turned it around incredibly quickly and now it's what's quickly over the place like oh it was insane so like well okay so this is another glp1 thing right portion size and this is actually absent glp1 things were getting smaller in portion size um over time but definitely with glp1 you want to sell smaller stuff yeah but uh but in terms of how we we rolled it out uh we the bar set is a set that looks kind of boring but there's a lot of interesting stuff happening within it and one of the kind of interesting trends that we saw was uh smaller format bytes right a byte is just a small bar and we noticed a couple skews of competitors that were just like ripping on bytes because there is like an a bar set like in sam's club let's say uh there's eight bars and two bites or i think it was actually like nine bars and one bite and and the bite product was just crushing and we're like whoa like that's that's really interesting and we have conversations with our buyer and they would confirm that it's crushing and they want their to that subset to be crushing even more they want to grow that subset we want to sell more stuff so we had a collaborative interaction with our buyer and basically they were like could you make something like that and that got our wheel spinning and then like yeah like of course like ding why would we not do that and it turns out there's a lot of reasons not to do it it's it's incredibly hard well we also we code our bytes so they're like they're coded and um I don't know.

57:30A saturated fat. So like... But so they're like temp sensitive. It's the first temp sensitive thing we've done. So we had to violate... We have a laundry list of things that if they're all checked, we'll consider going into that category. One of them is no temp sensitivity. Absolutely not. Under no circumstances. Because they're not shelf stable for as long. Well, they're shelf stable. It's just it'll melt. It's really the like e-com of it all. You can't ship it during the summer. But it's fine on a shelf if it's like in a normal... Or even brick and mortar. You can't put it on non-temp controlled trucks.

57:58like it's just risk risk risk risk storage when you have chocolate chips and things like that well chips are okay because it can melt and reconstitute where where it's a problem is if the full thing is coated that that's a problem because it'll turn into a goo what yeah it'll just melt and then puddle in this area and then reconstitute and some yeah like off the bite and yeah you ever see an old rx bar oh my god they they're weird looking you know like i found

58:25Matt Bertulli:one in my truck the other day i bet you ate it didn't you i still did i'm like i was so hungry um no but so so we looked at bites and you can do bites in a non-coated way but we're like whoa and again this is much better this is like kind of dovetails with the do stuff that's off brand we're like what if we violated that one principle because it helped us in 10 other ways and we're like what if we did coat it um and everything in our set is cookie dough peanut butter chocolate like what if we came in with also mass market but pb and j still mass market nostalgic kid friendly and adult friendly um and we coated it and so it's like a peanut butter center and like the fruit coating yes that would violate our you know sacred cow of don't do temp sensitive stuff but like it unlocks so much else and so we did that turns out it's very very hard to manufacture no how quickly did you i forget the like launch journey like from actually starting to make samples to like it's on shelf but it was oh we had to find a new manufacturer because it takes specific equipment it's not even the same supply chain not even the same supply chain we had to find a new supplier of the coating which is like the coating in and of itself is its own formulation that takes months and months um the viscosity you have to get into stuff like my idea to your on shelf what was the timeline i was it was insanely quick i want to say it was like four months oh wow yeah it was like wild like everyone was like internally was like we can't make packaging can't make a new product packaging alone is like 90 days depending on where you're getting it from yeah yeah it was very uncomfortable still still is yeah but it's on shelves this is in real time this is in real time by the way we're like living this what we're talking about now we're like living today yeah because also because will also just uh is working on selling in slash has kind of sold in three new flavors that do not exist we do not have i love this this is great we sell stuff make it half the stuff we sell doesn't exist that was true at kickstarter that's still true today you're right this is very not corporate it's like not planned products and then i'm going to sell things that don't even exist to see if somebody wants to buy them will was just on a call with the team and um somebody had a line that reminded me of just this of like our head of sales is always like we're cowboys if you want to join this team like it's not going to be smooth sailing there's not smooth sailing we just figure things out we can't which we thought would have a like at some point you corporatize like we're more cowboys now than we've ever been and it's scarier because it's at a bigger scale yeah yeah it's uh when you make a mistake now Now there's zeros on those numbers.

1:01:08To pull out a theme that I think is interesting, like what you guys are basically saying is we have a demand first kind of model of how we think about business. Where is there a lot of demand? And then we'll flow towards that. We'll figure out products for that. Like that's the only way you can sell things that don't exist is if there's demand, but you don't yet have a product. And so often people take the opposite approach. I'm going to come up with my pretty thing and I'm going to convince people they should want it. Whereas you're taking the totally opposite approach. And because also we'll start for stuff like this of like selling in at like the club level.

1:01:39It's kind of like, OK, well, we have such a big PO that like we're going to all figure it out. Like Bytes will do like over 15 million in year one. And we didn't it wasn't an ideal an idea in our head until like late March. Oh, my gosh. That's insane. Yeah. Yeah. Like, do you know, it took us whatever, four or five years to get to 15 million. Yeah. right yeah and it's just like like and that i mean that speaks to channel selection and product like we're already in a lot of these stores so like already know the buyers and like these conversations are like about bringing additional product not necessarily a store that like we've

1:02:18Matt Bertulli:never been in can you expand on the the you sound like you know a lot about product like this product and the product guy yeah when did that start like was that like a day one thing or did you figure at some point you're like oh i gotta go so deep in this that i wasn't prepared to do i think the ceo has to and food has to be the product person there are exceptions you'll find exceptions but my opinion is they they have to because there's so much under the hood and the product's never done like yeah that's why i actually love the ag1 thing of like it's always a prototype like they they have a new formula of the same skew that they've that's their number one skew yeah and that sounds inherently risky but actually it's pretty brilliant like the product is never done and so yeah i feel like you've been talking about having a final formula for like 10 years now and at this point it's kind of just like it will always no i feel like at this point we've accepted it it's just like it's there's always my that's counterintuitive you think like oh snickers is snickers it's always been that snickers like no like trump tariffs mean you have to go find a new uh like uh peanut butter supplier or whatever like stuff happens and then consumer demands shift and so the ceo or the founder isn't the product person like oh you're like outsourcing the dna of this it sounds so i should note though because i feel like you always talk about this but like you don't obviously like day one come in and are like good at product i think it's like in the very beginning you were always mixing stuff in like our kitchen but in the very beginning you would hire like these random consultants to like help with certain things and they would teach you some things but also i think just the more reps you got you realized oh like i actually can do this without them and i think i know more about this product than they do but it also didn't happen overnight it's like it was like through going through those reps with different people getting different perspectives that like you got to the point where you're like i'm better than these people at this thing but i i would say like well then our product at least the part of product that's most overlooked it's it's not it's having a good product is half at most half the battle the supply chain and economics behind it is probably 70 of it it's not whether you can make a good thing it's can you make a good thing for this number of cents yeah and that is what's so so so so hard and that's and by the way those are two actually different skill sets so those have to live together in one brain for for it all to work and did you start how quickly did you realize that was going to be true you're like oh i'm gonna have to go really deep in when we were losing a million dollars a year for five straight years and i was like oh like this cogs thing kind of has to be worked out at some point i feel like you definitely started caring about it before that no but because i think you get so many false positives of whoa we have all this demand like that's cool do you do is that flowing through to ebda like yeah just selling a lot of stuff is not enough you need to sell a lot of stuff and store it properly and the supply chain has to be humming and your payment terms have to be humming like no well that is the product those are all part of the same thing it's easy to sell stuff to people when you're giving them more value than they're giving you you know what i mean it's like if i said hey i'll give you a dollar for 50 cents you'll take that as many times as i'll give it to you you know everybody would and like business is actually the ability to like give somebody something and the amount of money they give you back there is a margin and there's a profit and they're happy to make that trade and so like people people are always like it's amazing to me how quickly the market sniffs out arbitrage where it's getting more value for its money than it should get yeah and so can you talk a little bit about how you did that in the supply chain uh yeah what were some of the moves that you did to like go find the million dollars or whatever it is you want to go we could do a whole thing on negotiation but like your ability to find like what's going on in larger markets like the almond market oh where we are like certainly micro and macro economists for sure we track almond futures like very closely we track cocoa futures very close oh yeah yeah you have to be tracking that that is the difference between profitability and losing money um i mean we buy whatever 15 million pounds of almonds a year right it's very different if we buy them for three dollars versus four dollars so um it's just out of necessity it's looking at the p &l okay what are line items that contribute the most cost in use we think of everything as a bar so what is the cost in use of almond meal what's the cost in use of almond butter what's the cost in use of fiber syrup blah blah blah and then what it's kind of basic but take what are all the suppliers of that thing there's five of them okay have we called all of them have we hammered all of them have we tested all the products the thing that still has to be good and work in the product but it's relatively commoditized so cool what and have we pitted all of them against each other like one thing you learn is what is it what is the way you do that are you cut through it about it are you more partnership oriented towards it no no cut through it the partnership thing i think is mostly a myth is a myth.

1:07:33Partnership is me sending you wires of a lot of money. I'm your partner. I'm going to negotiate as hard as I can against you. That was very unabitutional, which I think is awesome. It's perfect for this kind of business because I feel like most people wouldn't be. You're not going to do the deal if it's not worth it for you to do the deal. How do you know when you're at the bottom with somebody? The best way is to have pit five people against each other. You will find the bottom. This is why rfps exist for a reason right like we never actually do a real rfp but we do a semblance of an rfp um constantly you're constantly running i forgot the latest example i'm just gonna use almonds for example but like you also like will randomly like even though you've done this recently and you know that we're at the bottom or you got a new deal like your passes you'd be like i see almonds are down 10 our price hasn't changed okay yeah that's a great point right no one had So my first job out of college, we made cost models for like piping for oil and gas companies, right?

1:08:33So what goes into a pipe? It's labor, it's freight, it's steel. And let's say I buy piping at$10 a pound or whatever. All those subcomponents have markets under them that go up, down, sideways. And the cost model is the weighted average of all of those. And so six months later, that cost model that's built properly will tell me I shouldn't be paying$10. I should now be paying$8,$7 or more. And when it tells you you should be paying less, you're silly to not act on that. Call the supplier. Hey, man, steel's way down. I see you charged me the same thing. Why are you charging me the same thing? You're making more margin.

1:09:14You should be passing that through to me. But also, it's sort of like gambling, where you will determine that you have to do a flat rate for some of these costs, because you think it's going to go up. Yeah, contracts. So we contract. This is to contract or not to contract. That is kind of like hedging, which is what you want. No, no, it's fully hedging. Totally. But we've also gotten burned on that. So like, I'll give you one random example. We bought just a stupid amount of almonds during COVID because every input went up. Every single input went up, except for one, almonds. Because there was such a glut because they couldn't get them on boats to go to China, India, Europe, et cetera, that the glut created domestically a depressed price and we're like oh the one input that went down was the one we contracted at and so we were paying above market for like a year so it's it's not that it always like you can make a good argument you should not hedge as a startup if you're hershey sure hedge right but um but you should always you should think about it and suppliers if you're like tight with them and you do a lot of business with them they'll kind of give you a little inside baseball.

1:10:26I'm like, the market doesn't really know this, but we've seen the like weather reports and like, we're pretty sure it's going this way. So we think you should contract. Okay. Now we'll contract. One of the reason why you have to have the mindset you have is that internally, Walmart, Costco, Sam's club have entire teams that their job is to do like your pipe analysis you were talking about. They do that with every single product and category. And so they look at bars and they know your ingredients and they're like, this is what we think they're paying. And so whether you're paying it or not, they think you're paying that.

1:11:00And they are going to negotiate with you as if you're paying that in the prices, the wholesales they're asking from you. So you really like all up and down the chain, it just demands that you're getting the best price. You've set an anchor. So with Bytes, our anchor is bars. And so those retailers were anchor off that. And they said, what's the premium on a smaller format, a bite, a premium on a cost per ounce basis to a bar, we're willing to accept a 13 % premium because it's harder to make smaller format things. You can't amortize the packaging across a bigger thing, dah, dah, dah. But it shouldn't be more than 13 % and yours is 15%.

1:11:36Like, why is it 15 %? They will literally have that conversation. Because somebody in their office did the analysis too. That's right.

1:11:43Matt Bertulli:They're so deep. Well, that's their business. It's their business. Their business, just like it's his business to run a really tight ship on cost. So you're going crazy deep in product and supply chain. You're on the marketing side. Yeah, E-com marketing side. E-com marketing side. At what point did the business flip from predominantly E-com to predominantly retail? Probably last year. Yeah, probably last year. I think it's really club. Just the introduction of having club. Club and Mass. Yeah, Walmart, Target. Because that makes it sound like E-com's not growing. We still double every year, but we're doing way more than double every year on retail.

1:12:21So now they're just growing way past me. And I honestly prefer that, though, because it's like if I was doing the same thing, we'd be in a way less healthy spot online. So it's a little less stressful.

1:12:33Matt Bertulli:Would you mind giving us a sense of how you drive the e-com business and how that's changed over time? So how do you market? How do you acquire customers? I would just assume that bars are hard to sell on the internet. Yeah. I don't know why. I just have this, like, that's a mental model for me. I'm like, and I'm an ad guy. I love ads. You should make some ads out of this. But how the hell do you pull this off? I feel like that's why we leaned into Amazon so much in the beginning. Just because, like, it was just way more efficient. People are willing to buy bars there. People are used to buying bars there.

1:13:03So I think that was a huge, like, stepping stone of, like, getting in front of people who are willing to buy this category online to begin with and convince them to buy. So really, we went all in on Amazon pretty early on. we started, I feel like maybe when I came on, we were spending the same amount on Amazon and our website. And just really quickly, our customer acquisition cost was like half on Amazon.

1:13:27Matt Bertulli:Oh, wow. Yeah. So we just like went all in on Amazon. And at the time, it was when people were telling us like, don't go on Amazon, you don't have your customer data, like, that won't matter as much. But like, honestly, luckily, we never really listened to them, because now we're bestseller in our category and we absolutely could not have gotten there if we just pivoted into Amazon a year or two ago. Yeah, and Amazon's also a great channel where value totally wins. Totally. And also, people look for ideas on Amazon. That's a really interesting thing because it helped with retail. Oh, like the buyers are looking for retail.

1:13:57We got into Walmart because of our Amazon. Yeah. They look at market share. Totally. Which is really cool. Absolutely. Target is really big on this right now. They're looking for people with digital heat to bring in as challenging things. Yeah, And Amazon's like one of the best ways to like tell who has that. Cause like. It's a ledger. Amazon is a public ledger. Every category. Totally. Yeah. And I also like, we always on Amazon, I think pretty early on, we realized like, if we want this to be a business that doubles every year, if we're constantly growing, like this is not, we're not finding profitability on Amazon, or at least not in the beginning.

1:14:32So we were kind of like, we just want to grow as much share as we can here, focus on breaking even. And now that we're at enough, share, now we're profitable on Amazon. Partially because you probably have a lot of branded search on Amazon where you're not having to pay for the acquisition. Totally. And because we have a lot of subscribers and people who just, you know, come back too.

1:14:52Matt Bertulli:Where does the branded search come from? Like, well, are you generating demand? Is that from retail? Is that from like, are you running television nationally? How do you do the demand part? It's a mix of all of it, honestly. We spend a lot on search ads. We spend a lot on audio. We're like big into audio for brand awareness. radio podcast um we do a lot of streaming tv as well we don't do linear we probably will do linear at some point but we do don't do linear tv right now so those are like our big acquisition uh like brand awareness channels but otherwise we're always doing the basics everyone else is doing meta google tiktok how you how do you here's how both of you answer this but how do you think about the customers like the initial sort of days of building the brand and the product it was very focused on like brain and brain health yeah brain performance uh how has that changed uh like today if i'm like 2026 we're in 2026 yeah we're in part six uh yeah i never you need a nike bar friend we should have brought more yeah uh so 2026 uh who is the customer of the product today is that different from um i would say it's like there's more customers is a better way to put it of like there's always going to be a small segment that is really into like longevity and the brain um is that a large portion of our customers no but like they'll always be there they'll always exist and we always want to like have some sort of ads that speak to them um but now a lot of it is people who just need healthy fuel on the go so like we found that some of our bigger audiences are uh like nurses for instance like oh yeah like need something really quick from their locker or like school teachers or even like, you know, you have your personal trainer or just somebody who like actually really cares and nerds out on the nutrition and they're buying it for that reason.

1:16:44Or like another thing is that 25 % of people are lactose intolerant. Yeah, like no one really talks about that. And like they'll just put whey in everything. So I think there's also like a pretty big market for plant-based people. So there's so many people who just buy us also for the dietary reasons whether that be no dairy no gluten no soy like there's always we have like eight different cohorts of people that like fall into all of this and we just try to speak to each of them where they are and based on what they're looking for as you get bigger and more on each and all there's the thing of like don't try to be everything to everyone like actually we are trying to be everything to everyone at a minimum most things to most people i actually like disagree with that that line uh you can start that way i think i think it's a earlier you start that way yeah like literally mass retail is like we're massive groups of that we need to win kids we need to win moms we need to win dad yeah and we that comes down even to like the amount of protein like women don't want a 30 gram protein bar right like also like we care more about having like real food and real ingredients in our product and so do the people who eat us versus people like Like if somebody wants a bar that's just 30 grams of protein and they like do not care what the label says, they're probably not going to buy us.

1:18:02And like, that's OK.

1:18:04Matt Bertulli:Has there been a stage of growth that's been harder than others? Like a size of business or a size of supply chain? I feel like the COVID times were tough, mainly because of supply chain. Yeah. I would say, yeah, put that aside because that was just like a freak thing. um for me it was like the first couple years and now now why now i think it's because we've been doubling every we have like once you get so big you're just like yeah if you're like well into the nine figures our rubric is double every year double every we realize we don't need to do that anymore but it's like hard to change your mindset where you're like no but like we've been doing that because we double our keger was over 100 from 2018 through last year 2025 so of course why wouldn't you that all sounds painful if it was like eight years like there's like so why not the ninth year at what point are you like oh no let's grow 20 like no we've done it every year so do it again well that turns out it's like quite hard to do that yeah it's kind of mathematically impossible at some point yeah yeah so i feel like we're like getting close to that But we still want to do it.

1:19:17And we're going to try to. I mean, look at Bites. We'll turn things around as quickly as we can. And it's also like all that makes it sound like Bars is still growing. And it is like we're very lucky that some things are just working. And the more money we put into them, they're able to scale. Like on Amazon, too. We've never had a downturn in Bars. Bars always up and up. Every month is our best month. So it's like that's awesome. but yeah if we want to we've realized if we want to double why do you okay so but why did you want

1:19:51Matt Bertulli:to start on this like we want to double every year is that a success metric is that like a strategic get the hell out and like take a long nap i think part of this comes back to like when the business started and our goal to like get to 25 million and sell like i think it's just a mindset thing we're like okay like we need to show that we're really high growth and at the time it's so profitability was unclear if that mattered. So it's always just been in our mind that we have to double every year, even though we probably don't. Do you want to be in this game for 10 years or five years or 20 years?

1:20:26At some point, it's like, okay, we're going to have to get to X in top line. The faster we grow, the faster you get to X. I think it's also multiples. We always thought that multiples would matter more and be bigger. Like multiples. Yeah, because we've been for sale. In terms of what people would give us for investment. We've been for sale every year. We haven't been selling the business, but we're always for sale. No one was aware of it, but we were for sale. So you want to at any moment be like, oh, we're an ultra high growth company with these great products and da-da-da. I want someone to approach me at any point and me be able to tell that story.

1:21:06so every year we were like okay let's keep doing it in case that happens and then but but but and then it just becomes like muscle memory and yeah but it's it's it's comes down to like the whole bottoms up versus top down like most people do bottoms up which is like we're in this many retail accounts and this is my velocities and we generally grow at this rate online and blah blah blah and that spits out a number and we're gonna grow 30 and our we do everything top down i want to grow of that yeah true exactly you're a psycho yeah totally yeah yeah how will you do if it slows down at some point yeah oh i mean we're not gonna grow 100 this will be the first year we don't grow 100 in eight years it'll be 93 percent um no it'll be something more reasonable no no but um no now i think it'll shift to growing 50 like our new like north star will be 50 percent growth but that's still hard right like that's still ultra high growth large numbers like all the big cpgs grow like eight percent or whatever well think about it let's say you're at 200 million you guys haven't said revenue you don't need to but let's say you're at 200 million 50 percent growth means you're adding 100 million in nominal revenue how long did it take you to build the company to 100 million in revenue you know you're talking about adding an iq bar at year eight or whatever every year totally and we sell roughly a dollar a bar so that means you have to sell that many more a hundred million more bars yeah which you just start to get into like how many people are in the united states like what does that mean i've got to get another bar in every

1:22:46Matt Bertulli:category again how many people are consuming bars how many more bars can we get people to consume are we just taking share well hence hence bites and and things where okay now we pull in kids and Now we pull in the GLP one consumer. Like different points of the day. Like I think part of the goal is to every single one of our categories can be consumed by one person in one day. Which was like the goal. Whether people do or not. Because they can have a coffee. They can have an electrolyte mix later in the day. They can have a bar as a snack. Or maybe a bite later on as a snack. Like drinkware, phone cases, like wallets, right?

1:23:23You will like, there's only so many people ordering a wallet. The team is real. Yeah, but that doesn't mean your job's done. Like, just move over here a little bit. Oh, new team.

1:23:33Matt Bertulli:Yeah. Okay, we've talked product and how psycho you are. We've talked a little bit of marketing and how that's changed over time. How, and I mean, this double thing is just insane, guys. How do you manage team and how are you thinking about growing the team and how have they responded to this? We got a double next year, guys. Go find me$100 million. I think part of it is both models can work having a small team and a lot of outsourced functionalities and the inverse of that. Part of it is like, what is your core competency? Is hiring and team building a core competency? It isn't for us. I'm not good at hiring.

1:24:10And this we can get into, me and Mike have a whole contrarian. We both love nepotism, right? Like, case in point, right? But even before me, our creative director who's been with us pretty much since the beginning at this point is like one of my best friends from childhood. But again, it's like who will agree to work with you when you're like, we're no one. We can't pay a lot. Please believe in me. And but at some point that runs out, right? You run out of people you trust or are married to or was a childhood friend. You know what I'm saying? Unless you're polygamous or whatever. I don't know.

1:24:42It's not scalable. Unless you're in a mood shop. It's not scalable. so hiring was not a core competency of ours and so we're like all right can we just can we do the thought exercise of create a really small team like we're 15 people still so yeah today whoa uh and create that's the hub and then have spokes go out to a bunch of outsourced stuff third parties paid ads third party amazon agency a costco broker a walmart broker and i feel like it's also like it's tough for the people who are on the team because obviously they need to kind of do the work of multiple people and they need to be the type of people who like are really all in on work and like really high producers and care a lot so that's helped us and it doesn't work for everyone we hire so it doesn't always work out and like you know where you can't hide when there's 15 of you yeah you cannot hide are amazing you are the ceo of your department if the department's failing it's not like oh where does the buck stop it's like john like what the hell you know like uh and that's so much better and there are people who like that there are people who like extreme accountability right they wanted to be be rewarded and yada yada but like there are people that like that and then most people hate that most people like hiding a little bit or the ability to hide

1:26:03Matt Bertulli:are you guys a fairly like flat organization like structurally then like there's 15 completely flat yeah yeah like we all talk to everyone in our like little silos like not totally flat but like we don't have like middle managers like everyone does stuff and that everyone is the ceo of their department like that's the best way i can put it they make they don't have to ask me for jessa doesn't have to ask me like can i do this she just does it because yeah i mean like i'll give you like a heads up i'll be like by the way i'm getting a new agency this is the cost difference but like i've already done the negotiation to make sure we get as low as possible and that like we're in a good spot so it's like by the time i'll like mention it he'll be like cool and and and what are like the downstream impacts less meetings like you know what kills an organization meetings you know fewer people mean less meetings because single brains hold multiple functions at once so a meeting is just two things meeting if they're already in the same brain and there's no meeting.

1:27:02So less people means less meetings, more doing.

1:27:06Matt Bertulli:Oh, man. Okay. You want to ask the relationship? Oh, yeah. Okay. Transition to that because that is the perfect, like, that's the perfect moment. Okay. So we've got a smaller team. The two of you are working in very close quarters. You are romantically involved. Like, when have you guys really gone at it on an issue? What's your biggest disagreement you've ever had? i wouldn't say we actually have not disagreed on that much um i would say for me it would be like upgrading of lifestyle generally you know that's fair that that is fair we because like all my friends went into like banking or consulting or whatever and they all like did the thing or they get the slightly nicer apartment every other year and then whatever they get tickets to the celtics and meanwhile I'm like living in a basement then living in like a really really like apartment main floor well we made it to the main floor which is a big step but we were, Jess and I's like first apartment that we lived together in was just I can't even tell you how bad it was but and we were like I was like formulating the product of a multi-million dollar business in the kitchen of the apartment because like there's just like bats of peanut butter everywhere like i cannot come in and cook it's just like oh my god and then i like a skunk was in in town when i was formulating for a big like new product and like there's a lot of scar tissue there's a convention there was a convention but but so at some point like i'm actually i am a psycho like i could actually live like that for a while and jess is like this is like crazy like we got to start upgrading our lifestyle and so then we got actually like a nicer apartment and then we moved to miami and got an even nicer apartment and but the like crazy thing of all of that i think i might have talked about this on our when i did the operators the first time uh was like i actually couldn't afford that without a secondary transaction and so i'm very very pro pro secondary this is also like you couldn't afford that without the secondary transaction because will will still choose to pay himself as little as humanly possible to still survive and pay bills.

1:29:22Matt Bertulli:Yeah. So like that's part of it. It's like if you were making like a normal salary that you maybe should be, wouldn't be a problem. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I had like more or less set my own salary, so it's all self-imposed. But I have this weird complex where I'm like, I should be the lowest paid person. Yeah, that's weird. That's a therapy thing. Who's going to do that today? This is all therapy, isn't it? The point is there was a minor secondary transaction and I just keep pushing forward what was the purchase what is the purchase that you was the most like hey i feel like this is a we made it moment um i would say honestly like we don't you're like complaining with me but like we don't spend a lot of money like i i made will um go on a trip to switzerland which i feel like he's complained about a bit because at the end it's don't go to st moritz if you value your finances yeah you're frugal that's yeah no it's not no but it was one And those were like, we planned it a little ahead.

1:30:20So I think it's like Will didn't put together all the expenses until the end. And he was like, we spent how much on that trip? And I'm like, don't worry about it. We paid it. It's all fine. So little things like that. Like I'll bully Will into taking trips and to flying first class and like actually making it like nice. Because I'm also like, we never leave our apartment. We're always working. If we're going to leave, let's at least make it like a nice experience.

1:30:46Matt Bertulli:i think it's a superpower though i mean it's a little crazy but like i think it's a uh it's a superpower to be willing to go to zero like i'm fine with zero we'll build up from zero again you know i think that's a theme and a lot of people that we've talked to is like their willingness to just go eat shit the lowest run is total but cp doesn't matter what level that is cpg like we're just like in the we're on i'm on a factory floor often like that cpg that what we do is not sexy like first class going to switzerland that's not what i do like we do that because like we work every single weekend that was the first trip i think we've taken in like 10 years like even for our honeymoon we like only did like a weekend trip because we didn't have time to stop working and that and also we got married new year's eve because we would have time off work like none of this is advisable i wouldn't like write a how-to book on any of this i'm a fan of I mean, he probably feels the same way.

1:31:48Matt Bertulli:Okay, so we like to finish these with this segment called the Titan 10. We're going to throw questions at you. I love it when we have partners, and in your case, also a couple. The answers are great. Sometimes you get some weird looks. Let's see if we can pull some out. I'm going to throw questions. You guys give us the gut feel responses. You can choose who wants to answer, or you can both answer them. Cool. Okay, so first question. I'm going to strand you on a desert island. And every week I'm giving you a piece of paper. There's three numbers in the piece of paper. These three numbers tell you how the business is doing.

1:32:21Matt Bertulli:You get nothing else. What are the three numbers? For me, I think of the business, about the business holistically. So I'm a simple man, right? Like net revenue, growth rate, and EBITDA. Like that's all I need. No, for like the overall business, I would probably agree. Of course, if you're talking like just e-commerce, I would say revenue, customer acquisition cost, and lifetime value. Cool. You get a book. You get to bring a book or any some kind of resource, something, but it can't be about business. What is it? I feel like I read more than well. I recently read a book called The Compound. It's like Love Island meets Lord of the Flies.

1:33:02It's really fascinating. What was that? Love Island meets Lord of the Flies. Wow. Okay. it's like in a dystopian future it's like really passing it's a lot about like people's obsession with like items Lord of the Flies on a deserted island that's a nice tie in there too I bring a chessboard I think

1:33:23Matt Bertulli:you're a chess guy what's your elo? my elo? what's an elo? it's like a rating in chess at my peak it was like 1700 okay very good he was a New Jersey State chess champion in third grade. This is not surprising now, listening to this whole, like playing back the whole conversation. All of this makes so much more sense. We should start with chess. Jeez. Okay, so what's your one contrarian belief about business that a lot of people will think you're crazy for?

1:33:58I mean, I have many. One of them would be that you're not, that money isn't a good motivator. You have to be intrinsically motivated. I actually think that's wrong. Um, I think the, what motivates you is a moving target certainly has been for me. But at certain points, it's absolutely been money. Do you have a different answer? Um, it's a good question. I think, uh, marketing people won't love this, but like, I don't think everything needs like perfect measurement.

1:34:31Matt Bertulli:Love that. Single most important word of leadership. Trust. I was gonna say trust. Yeah. is the single most important word of business grow sure i'll co-sign that okay uh let's have fun best meal of the day and why breakfast for sure i'm all in on the assayi bowls so thrilled that you guys have some will i don't it's so funny because i run a food company but i don't like romanticized food that's about eating we have no food in our fridge we order three times a day i'm not kidding it's really embarrassing and it's just when we like realize oh like i haven't eaten all day like where what can we get now i'm gonna go with a boring one dessert just dessert dessert oh yes uh okay most overrated growth tactic tiktok shop whoa we're gonna have fun tomorrow i was overrated like growth is growth right like i actually think there are brands that I've used TikTok shop to great fanfare.

1:35:39No, totally. Just not for me. Cool. Oh, that's a good one. I don't pass. Pass on that one for me. Most underrated growth tactic. Oh, retailer websites.

1:35:51Matt Bertulli:Oh. Yeah. Things like samsclub.com. People don't put good people on these things. So you just need people who generally are good at Amazon search and stuff and try a little. And does really well. Oh, my God. But just like there's so little competition. So underinvested. That is so good. I love that. Price. Price. Hell yes. Yeah. Yeah. And my second answer would be product development. Like there just are products that if you create them, there's such a pull. I mean, we've seen it with Bites. I say that because we just lived through this. If you make it, demand will fall out of the sky. That's so good.

1:36:34Matt Bertulli:guys we're done that's the pod thanks for having us yeah thank you yeah this is so good