E124: Winning Big In Consumer With Grüns' Founder Chad Janis

28:28Tell us about how you did product development. Because like you said, it really started with, hey, I think this green powder, you know, getting greens in some kind of a supplement form makes sense. And I think there's a better way to do it. And you guys have obviously found a really effective way to do it. So how did you go about actually bringing the product to market? And then you've also done a lot of interesting things in subsequent product launches. Would love to hear how you guys are approaching product dev. Yeah, it was actually harder than I thought getting this off the ground. And when I had the idea, I started calling around to Comans and packaging partners.

29:08And I would literally had probably like 50 conversations that I would ask the first one, hey, if I was talking to Gummy Coman, Comanufacturer who produces the products, who are the best packaging partners? And then I'd go talk to those people. And then I'd ask them who are the best Gummy Comans. And I slowly whittled to who I thought were actually the best. And what was crazy is like, I would talk to these Gummy Comans. And every time they were like, that's not going to work. It's going to taste disgusting. No way we're going to do that. You're just another like, sorry, I'd founder. It's not going to work.

29:38I found one finally who was willing to give it a go. But they also said like, there's no way this is going to taste good. And I said, look, just do it. Here's the formulation. Here's what I want in the product. Let's all taste it. And then we'll say whether it tastes bad or good, right? Like, well, let's actually produce it and see. And the first iteration was pretty good. Now, I spent a year from like August of 2022 to August of 2023 when we launched going through dozens of iterations on this and not just testing like formulation, the science of it. Also testing like, should it be a gummy bear or should it be a gumdrop?

30:15How many gummies should be in a pack? What's the color? What's the smell? What's the taste? All of those things were tested and there were blind sample surveys I was doing. It was actually at Stanford campus. I, you know, probably half of my class were part of the guinea pigs on this. And I thought it was a good place to do it because you don't, you know, Stanford's interesting because you have a lot of people from different backgrounds, a lot of ethnicities, a lot of nationalities. And so you get a lot of different opinions. It's sort of like a weird place where, you know, if I went to the DTC community, we might have a bunch of chats, um, trying this product and we can kind of get in our own bubble of like what a good product looks like.

30:51And I got some good feedback from that. um and so that you know spent that year formulating it became really clear what the product should look like so the product you see today is it is highly intentional um but but i think the biggest unlock for me you know a year back in august of 2022 when i had the idea was like why hasn't somebody put this in a gummy and i think the world that gummy represented back then is a 60 count bottle one to two gummy serving size and so for me the big unlock and you know we all look at it today and we're probably like, yeah, yeah, like it's a sachet. It's got eight gummies in it, whatever.

31:24But like, that's new. That's not like a, that's not like a format that really existed at the time. Yeah. I remember the first time I got your product being like, this is different. Like I've never, I've never seen these kinds of micro packets of gummies before. And here's the crazy part. The infrastructure to do that didn't exist when I launched. Well, that maybe that's why, maybe that's why I'd never seen it. Cause it literally didn't even exist. It works for pills. It works for powders, but the machines, gummies are a hard technology because it's a little sticky and so it can get stuck in the machines.

31:52And so for the first like eight months of this business, this is going to sound crazy, but this is what you do when you pave the path for a new format to exist in the world. Our first co-man, we now have three, we're probably onboarding a fourth soon. That first co-man, they had 20 bodies with gloves standing around a table, taking eight gummies, sticking them in the sachets and clamp sealing them. Super manual for the first eight months before we got machinery. And I pioneered how you do this with the gummy format. But it was a slog for the first like eight months of this business. It's like, have any of you guys read Apple in China?

32:29If you haven't, it's great. I got put onto it. I'd recommend it to anybody listening to this podcast. But one of the things that they talk about there is the way, I mean, like Foxconn and a lot of the reason why Foxconn becomes Foxconn is just their raw ambition and willingness to be like, we will try anything. And it's interesting when people go and think about their supply chain and who do I want in a co-man or who do I want in a manufacturer? Man, just ambition and willingness to try things is so valuable. Whereas just like, yeah, eight gummies in a package, never seen that before, let's figure it out.

33:05Most co-mans, like you said, would just be like, no, that's not what we do. nope, nope, not going to do that. And some of our best product ideas have been like us going to our, our, one of our manufacturers and saying, Hey, we want to do this thing that we've never seen before. You want to help us try? And they're like, they get excited about it. They're like, yeah, let's try it. I don't know if we can make it work, but like, let's try it. So I'd recommend that to everybody. It runs counter to what manufacturers are though, Mike. Exactly. Like their entire business is replication, not innovation.

33:35So to find a manufacturer in any category that's willing to try something. I mean, we saw this with Lomi. We had to build our own manufacturer. Like we went to a factory. We said, look, we know you don't want to do this. So we'll do it. Like we'll pay for it. We'll design the line. We'll figure out how to assemble the whole damn thing. We threw our engineers at their factory. And all we said was like, you just need to provide the bodies, right? And the building and the power and everything else that you have. And that the Apple in China book, like that's kind of one of the stories is that Foxconn and then more generally kind of China and Taiwan realized like this is a great way to get our people trained if we can convince these American companies we're willing to try all your crazy stuff if you'll send some of the intellectual capital.

34:19And so I also think like on the manufacturing side, it's a great customer acquisition. It's just got to be like an absolute beat down to try and compete on margins in a commoditized category with a whole bunch of other people do you know i don't know if i've told you guys this chad you might hear this for the this is the first time our initial factory for lomi was a toy factory because they're the only one psycho enough in china to make anything new like the entire toy industry is like you have an idea six months later we're going to put on a shelf in walmart every single appliance company or like device company went to was like not a chance like we do not know how to make those That's not a thing.

35:00It's a new category. Chad, similar to what you were doing with this pack for this type of thing, everybody kicked us out. They laughed us out of the room. The toy guys were like, sure. Somebody showed up one day with a drone. We did that too. But I mean, it kind of gets to that point, Matt, that like sometimes even the specific skill set is not as important as just like a willingness to try something. Like you were able to build a pretty revolutionary product with people that on paper don't have the skill set to make that product, but they had the willingness to try to do something. So, I think one of the interesting questions, when you're whatever, like hyperscaling, whatever word we'd use for the way that Grunz has grown, because like you said, you're kind of externally opaque.

35:45So, I won't ask you to share any numbers other than they're really crazy. They're really big, really fast. You did take a round publicly that's a big round with a big valuation attached. patched there's a very small number of companies for sure in the d2c space that have ever gotten to that kind of valuation that quickly it might be the fastest i've ever seen so congratulations on that that's awesome but with that like the scaling that comes with that has all kinds of operational headaches what's been one or two of the most challenging things you've had to deal with operationally chad as you guys have scaled at this amazing rate 100 inventory um and And more specifically, if you double in the course of three months and you're an early business, it's not that bad for a co-man to pick up that demand and say, hey, I got you.

36:38We'll just run you an extra day here. But when you start doubling at larger scale in a quick period, you got to onboard a new co-man. right like you gotta and if you're a reputable brand you have to have good quality control in place so it's not like you just like onboard a new command like you got to be planning on that six to nine months ahead so i'll give you an example our third command we started the process of onboarding when we felt so good on capacity it was like oh my goodness the second command's on we've got great production here uh it feels like capacity is going to last for a long time and it was like, no, no, we know our forecast.

37:20We know where we're headed. We got to get working on this new co-man right now. Otherwise, in six months, we're going to feel some massive pain and have to turn off the marketing engine. So that's been the hardest thing. And I would add to that, we talked a little bit about that process of putting gummies in sachets. The hardest part is every time we onboard a new co-man, we have to teach them. Here's how you do it. Here's the machine you use. Here are the things to watch out for. And there's a good sharing happening across the three, potentially fourth command soon. But like we're actually taking a lot of that pack out process in-house.

37:53So we have a Dallas facility we just opened last month where we receive gummies in bulk and Grooms in-house will be doing a lot of that pack out, right? Because it's a lot easier to scale a new command to produce gummies than it is to go in there, produce gummies, buy this machine. Let me train your people who know how to produce gummies and how to now put gummies in packages. Yeah, it's totally a separate thing. Totally separate. Yeah, Jason kind of reminds me of Hexclad. You guys obviously have been hyperscaling and over a long period, but then you also have like kind of a really proprietary thing with your pans.

38:28How have you dealt with just the inventory headaches? I know you've talked about it some, but you'll post sometimes in chat, like how many containers, like, and I don't know if you're willing to share this publicly, but just like he'll post how many containers that they are shipping. And it's just this absurd number, you know, like 20 % of the containers on the ocean are somehow carrying Hexclad. I had a Vops did this awesome AI image of a container ship literally filled with HexCloud. And that's what shipped in Q4 of last year. It's like crazy. Now, we've got months of 150 plus 40-foot containers coming in on a ship because our boxes are just big.

39:16But in terms of inventory, we had kind of Foxconn. It's interesting how Foxconn, talk about Foxconn, because they scaled alongside of Apple. I think I didn't read the book, but I think that's the case, right? And so our factory, our main cookware factory, they produce 95 % of our cookware and we're 95 % of their production. They're our partner. We have been together from the beginning when they were doing like 10 a month. So like every two years, they build a new Hexnet factory and we go see it. And there's a new sign that says Hexclad. And they just keep building new factories for us down in southern China.

39:52And so there have been times when they haven't been able to scale. Like in 2021, 2022, we had difficulty scaling and we were out of stock. And I remember right before Christmas, literally being at the warehouse at South Anderson and waiting for a container of pot sets to come in. so that we can ship them out with the pan set so that people would get their 13-piece set in time for Christmas. And the whole senior management team was unloading a container and slapping a label on it and putting it in a UPS truck. I did that. Yeah, just basically cross-docking inventory. Yeah. We did all that. So that's like a high-class problem of scale.

40:39And the other problem is cash. You know, like if you have the like Sean keeps a ton of inventory is his also his inventory are very, very small, doesn't take up a lot of space. But I've heard him say like he's got a year's worth of inventory. Now, I don't think that's good. Like inventory turn management from a financial reporting perspective. But it's also easier when it's aluminum as opposed to like a gummy that's going to like, you know, you don't want a year old gummy going out to Target. it or something. It's amazing how, I mean, it's amazing how Chad has scaled and the ability to produce all this.

41:19I mean, it really is, uh, it's, it's incredible operational, um, shout out to our ops team. Um, like, you know, it's never become more clear to me as I've talked to some big gummy players in the market, um, who are just like baffled at what we've done in two years. It's never become more clear to me. And I've never had more appreciation for what the operations team is doing than hearing like experts in the space, like genuinely surprised at our ability to stand at these commands. But it's because we start scaling them up or standing them up, onboarding them, you know, well in advance of needing them.

41:57It's not like, oh, we need them. We'll get them onboarded in six months now. Man, two things this makes me think of. One is like, I just, you've said it a couple of times, Chad, but I want to like reiterate it for people listening to this. I've now been a part of businesses that are scaling for gosh, 15 years. And if you wait until you have to have something, you're dead, you know, like you really do have to get in front of things. And that's the hard part about scaling. It's kind of like the exponential growth with technology. And a lot of people have written about this, that like the human brain is just not able to really kind of comprehend it.

42:30And so it'll catch you really off guard. And you, you, you tend to think like, hey, what's happened the last three or four years? Okay. If that happened the next three or four years ahead, where are we going to be? And then it's like, wait, we're like 10 times that level of advancement. It's just because the exponential nature, scaling a company is the same way. If you try and say like, okay, what do we need a year ago? Okay. What do we, what do I think we'll need a year from now? You'll always undershoot it when you're growing at these really rapid rates because your brain just can't wrap it around.

42:59But one of the things like that I've noticed about myself, I don't know if you guys can relate with this. One of my more toxic traits is that I can tend to think like the hard part is getting to sales and getting like the kind of the model established of like, okay, we're acquiring customers. Well, we're acquiring good economics. And now it's basically just execution and kind of easy stuff of like just fill in the orders and keep in the trains running. And the reason I think it's a really toxic trait is like, it gets real hand wavy that like a lot of times that actually the keep in the trains running is the hardest part.

43:38There's a reason why, you know, to use the Apple analogy, there's a reason why Tim Cook ended up being Steve Jobs replacement that like the operational side of things. I've talked about this with my CMO several times. What sucks about being in operations is that you don't get a lot of pats on the back when things go well. You just kind of get people's attention when it's like, hey, where's that shipment? Hey, why is the factory screwing things up? Why were there defects on this order? You basically just hear about it when things aren't going well. And then when things go well, it's just like, yeah, you did your job.

44:13So what? So I don't know. I just want to emphasize what you said that everybody listening to this, go hug your ops person. I don't know. But it's a tough job. Our ops department is incredible. I mean, they're the unsung heroes of Hexclad. When I just look at all of the operational situations that they're dealing with, and our ops were terrible for the first couple of years that I was here. And so we always had major issues and major mistakes that cost us big money. And we finally figured out that we needed to get better. It took a while. It took a lot of beatings. But we built out an incredible best-in-class ops team.

45:04And that investment has just reduced so much stress in our organization. So highly recommend that. Like I always say, invest in understanding your numbers really early and invest in your ops really early. Like don't be cheap about that. If you really think your business is going to succeed in scale, invest early there. Well, and if you're going to partner with the Targets, the Walmarts of the world, I mean, they value predictability in your supply chain and operations. I'm not going to say they value it more than productivity, but it's pretty close because Because their model is all about being able to kind of make this promise to the customer that, hey, you show up and we're going to have stuff on the shelves.

45:46And so you can be wildly productive. But if you're also wildly inconsistent in your supply chain, that's going to wear thin really quickly. And they're going to kind of sharpen the knives for when your performance drops off. So, like, it's just a really big deal that your partners are going to care a ton about as you scale. Yeah, the precision thing with retail, huge. Like, when they give you ship windows, you hit them. that's not negotiable. Walmart's big thing is OTIF, on time and full. And it's like, that's their gospel metric. You don't have a choice. When you get started as a new brand, you don't realize that they'll send in a PO and expect it to be like turned around immediately.

46:24So you need to be doing the job on your end, forecasting, producing inventory that you're ready for when they say ship, you can ship. And I'd say that's why a lot of brands probably have trouble when they launch into retail is they're not doing that. They're not building up inventory for these retailers to be a good partner. But if you looked at our OKRs, it's the number one on time in full, 100 percent. We got to deliver to be good partners. And I do think that's really critical to your point, Mike. Like you got to you've got to deliver on that. You actually have to be the forecaster. Like you're doing your own demand forecast for the retailer.

46:57Like they're they're not going to do that. Well, they'll give you a number. But that number is like, I mean, you know, my cabochon puppy could probably come up with about as good a number because, you know, you're just kind of grabbing something out of the sky initially. And so, and if you think that, you know, they giving you, they gave you a number and you, you know, prepare for that number. If you don't hit that number one way or another, like they're not, you're not going to get a pass on it. If you're doubling that sales rate, they're going to expect you to be able to support it. And if you're half that sales rate, they're going to say, you know, it's gonna be like, sorry, you're heavy on inventory.

47:30You know, like it's just the way it is. So I think we're absolutely on to something. I mean, my observation about the D2C kind of community, the e-com community, is that the worst version of it is all you think about is marketing, basically, and product. And there's no operational backbone. One of the best things we did in the history of the company, and it sucked so bad, we went from the marketplace to 1P with Amazon. And the, I kid you not, our switchover date was March 15th, 2020. And it was literally like three days before COVID went bananas. And so we had to basically grow this entire organizational operational backbone to now, we went from like just shipping containers directly into Amazon in California to like having to fill all these POs.

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50:09I want to ask the dumb question of why go so fast? Why the extreme up and to the right? You know, we've talked on this show in the past about how like in consumer, there are rarely winner take all, if any, right? Like I think the biggest brand in the world might be Coca-Cola and they have like 18 % market share on Coke. And they had to buy every other category and every other brand to get to like 48 of drink of beverage. So what's the, is this speed thing just a personal style or is it strategic? It's about competition. It's about category. I'm impatient. So that's probably like the number one thing.

50:49I'm a very impatient person. And I think a lot of the concern that people have about growing fast, you know, like I'll point out a brand that pumped really quickly and then fell off a cliff, Goalie, right? We all know the apple cider vinegar brand. The reason why that business fell off a cliff is because they were acquiring too many customers. They don't have a lot of LTV. they're churning through the universe of customers way too quickly. Contrast that to us, right? People like to compare us sometimes because gummy gummy, it's an easy comparison. We're not growing fast because we're acquiring a ton of customers.

51:30Yeah, like we're acquiring a lot of people, but that's not really the reason we're growing. We're growing fast because, Matt, if you bought from Grinz today, you're going to spend like, I don't want to say exactly how much, but like a lot more in the following 365 days than you did on day zero. So what's happening here is we're stacking all these cohorts together all under a disciplined three times minimum LTV to cap. And so the way I've thought about it from the beginning and we've raised a few rounds over the course of this business, it was always the same thing I would tell investors. I'm gonna grow as fast as the world lets me at that cap ceiling because I know that I get at least the three times LTE good to CAC.

52:11So if that means that there's 50 ,000 customers in a month that I can go get at that efficiency, I'm going to go get them because that's what the world's telling me I can do this month. If it happens to be 5 ,000 this month, no problem. I'll go get 5 ,000 because that's what the efficiency says. I don't want to acquire somebody if they're unprofitable to me and I set my profitability metric at three times. And so the output of that is our growth, right? Like it's not like I've chosen, I got to grow and hit these targets. Our investor group isn't telling me to hit these targets. They mostly let us cook.

52:45And it's because we have a lot of discipline around, here's the efficiency, the P &L is an output of that. Yeah, that's great advice, man. That's kind of why I asked. There also is this thing called first mover advantage, which in some businesses really makes a difference. And in this space where Chad is, You know, AG, I think they were really successful because they went out and they grabbed a big lead. And they kind of created the idea. They kind of created it, right? And so I think it's to some extent that's what Grunz is doing. And so I think stepping on the gap, as long as you can have the LTV to CAC discipline that you do, you definitely wouldn't want to leave anything on the table.

53:34because you just, that first mover advantage and being, we're the first hybrid pan. No one ever talked about a hybrid pan before Hexclad. There are lots of people talking about a hybrid pan now, but we are the real, true hybrid pan. That does matter. It matters a ton, Jason. I mean, look, if anybody creates anything that looks like Hexclad, that's like Hexclad knockoff. I mean, we've had people try to create, put gummies in sachets, these little packs. And even if it's a completely separate formulation, has nothing to do with comprehensive nutrition, they're like, why are you ripping off Gruen's?

54:14That's exactly what we want. We want any business that takes that new format, we want to own it. We want people to see that and say, that's Gruen's. Like, why are you taking their, I don't know, why are you stealing from them? Like, why are you ripping them off? Even if it literally is a different need state, a different product, just because it looks similar, we got to own that. Yeah, it's interesting. If you look at trade dress and trademarks, trademarks is basically like anything that a customer starts to associate with a brand. And really the standard in trade dress lawsuits is something confusingly similar.

54:54but what you learn when you study trademark law is that it can be anything. It can be a color, it can be a sound, it can be a slogan. It can be the packaging that if you're, if you are able to kind of associate, Hey, yeah, this little gummy packet, like that must be by gruns because they're I keep saying, you know, it's so funny. I keep saying gruns and instead of gruns and I'm doing the thing that all of us as founders hate the most. I don't know if this has been true for you guys well it bothers it bothers me because like it it's it's nails on a chalkboard when i mean people will say simply modern to me and it's i'm like i'm gonna lose my mind i've been i've been introduced for like speaking like they're asking me to come up on stage and they'll call it simply modern and so it's like i think it's the curse of when you start something i don't know if hex clad can be mispronounced clad there's no way hex clad gets mispronounced yeah but i mean there's got to be uh matt you have to deal with this right oh pila and pella like in america everybody calls it Pella because of the Spanish influence.

55:51And then we call it Pella because we're stupid. I feel like that's just like a dumb influence in the U S. Uh, if you go abroad, everybody calls it gruns because they know it's German. It means green and German. And, and, and they know that that you sound and basically every other language has a, Ooh, uh, sound to it. But for some reason in America, you get this like 70, 30 split or 70 % of people think it's gruns. Uh, and it's like, look, I don't, I don't really mind what you call it as long as you're buying. That's because Americans think that American's a language. That's why. My brother and I had quibids.

56:23I mean, we'd hear it all, quibids and quibids, and we'd hear every variation of it. So I just think that's when you create anything, you have to release the pronunciation of it. So you mentioned this, Chad. I mean, I think it's really interesting with consumables. You don't necessarily need tens of millions of people. Well, you don't need tens of millions of people using your product to have an awesome business. You don't even necessarily need millions of people using your product to have an awesome business. But you do need people to be super fans of the product. One of the things we've talked about on here is like you're in health and the downside to kind of health can be the faddishness.

57:06The kind of the bone broth effect of like, oh, everybody's excited about, you know, getting their greens. And, you know, and how do you protect yourself against that aspect of the category that you're in? Yeah, we only play in categories that are permanent. So we don't like, I'll give you an example. Everybody talks about creatine and creatine gummies right now. I would be so scared to run one of those businesses. Yeah, the science behind creatine is phenomenal. But from a fad standpoint, people don't always follow science perfectly. So like there's, there's some risk there that it's not going to be in vogue in a couple of years here in the way that it is today.

57:48So like, how does that impact your business? That's hard. Comprehensive nutrition, like that's, that's fundamental to us living, right? Like if what you're talking about is like putting salads in a powder and chopping it up and throwing it in a blender, like, yeah, that might be faddish the same way. Like juicing was, you know, like 15 years ago. But that's not what we are, right? Like we're comprehensive nutrition. It's the nutrients your body needs, the foundational support. And if science shows that there's something that we're missing from our formula for that, then we'll insert it into the product, right?

58:20So it's not, and then I'll give you like neutrops. Like these are growing categories. We're not attaching ourselves to an ingredient like, oh, L-theanine. We're going to be the first gummy that puts L-theanine in the gummy and we're just going to absolutely own that. There's businesses that do that so well, right? Like you guys are all friends with Mary Ruth Organics. I've chatted with them several times. I think what they're doing is very different than us. And that's exactly what they have to do. They have to find those trends, get there first, do clinicals behind them, own that ingredient. And it's always finding that next one that's going to be the big thing.

58:50For us, we play in big categories that are, they're not going anywhere. But we insert a new format, a new lifestyle into that category. Yeah. So one of the things you mentioned, the creatine thing, I'd be really curious to hear your take. This kind of thing about the supplements you get online might not contain what you think they contain. It has become a thing. It's become a thing with Amazon in general. But it's really becoming a thing in the creatine gummy space. Like, hey, actually, when you test these gummies, they don't have what you'd expect in them. how have you responded to that or thought about that in terms of like how do we give people confidence that you know it's not just like a placebo gummy that we're giving people that this really is you know trustworthy you know it's interesting creatine degrades really quickly in gummy form so you might see a brand that clears nsf has the required or stated nutrition labels dosage on it at production but does that mean that we're eating it all fresh off the line or are we eating it three months later or six months later off the line?

59:59Creatine degrades quickly. And so you'll see with stability testing, and I don't think any of these creatine brands do stability testing, i.e. how much creatine is in the product six months later or nine months later. I would even argue, like I haven't seen anybody talk about stability testing. I'll talk about it now. We do it. So what stability testing is - I've never even heard, I haven't heard of stability testing. So this is great. So what stability testing is, is you're testing both immediately post-production to ensure, and you'll send it into Eurofins to ensure, did your product meet all of the label claims?

1:00:31The FDA requires that you, every batch, I think you rotate through the ingredients on it. You only have to test like two at a time. And so over the course of like, you know, 10 to 20 batches, you're testing the whole label, but you're not getting a comprehensive view on the batch altogether, unless you go send it Eurofins electively. So we'll send it to Eurofins. is a third-party lab that tests your product and ensures that it actually meets label claims, is free of toxins, all the contaminants. What you'll see is with the creatine stuff that you brought up, Mike, they'll send all these brands into Eurofins.

1:01:08It's possible that some of those gummies are four months old, six months old, one month old. So there is some issue in there, and creatine especially degrades quickly. And so stability testing would be what we've done at Gruen's, which is we'll test it immediately post-production. We've also tested the product eight months post-production. Does the label claim, are we still meeting label claim eight months post-production? And you can see it on our site. We've showed those COAs that we've gotten from Eurofins. But again, I don't think, especially in the gummy category, but also more broadly, like you, I know Mike, you buy supplements.

1:01:43I don't know if you do, Matt. Oh yeah. Well, my wife does and I take them progressionally. Yeah, but like, have you ever heard the stability testing thing before? Probably not because you're probably taking pills and powders. And I actually don't know the stability of like a powder, but in pills it's encapsulated. I'm sure it really doesn't degrade, but gummy, that's a real thing. You have to make sure that the gummy meets label claims months later. I actually, I've got a friend who's in supplements. We actually have a lot of friends in supplements on the show, but the stability thing in powders and pills I think is not talked about because it's just a given.

1:02:15I think there's like an assumption that it's pretty stable, but I think that's a great call it on gummies. Like that's awesome. The bummer to me about this space is like it's a new consumer thing and you've got a lot of bad actors in supplements, right? Like there are very few that I look at in the space and obviously I'm not going to call out names, but it's just like it's so tight, the people who are like good people trying to do the right thing. Supplements are shady. I mean, I graduated college in 1993 And I knew guys back in Arizona who were like starting these supplement businesses and they were shady.

1:02:51And it's like, you know, that's another, that's a great selling point for Grunz, right? Like having people understand your commitment to quality and the integrity of your business. I very rarely use supplements but I just recently started looking at a couple and I'm scared to buy anything seriously I don't do a lot of research for a lot of purchases but this one is like I even tweeted about creatine supplements because I'm like if I'm going to do it I might as well make sure that I'm happy to pay for the one that I know is going to be good I will pay more for quality for safety

1:03:34And, you know, creatine is an interesting one because I would say the powder, like I, you know, I was working out at the gym back in 2010 when it was like the acidic, like it tasted like battery acid. And I don't know what changed since then, but like that's how you know, it's working. yeah exactly it tasted so bad uh but like today you can get a powder that like doesn't really have a taste you can throw in a smoothie you know your pre-workout whatever it is and so it's um that that need state is it's it's hard you know like people have asked like are we going to put creatine in a gummy i think we'll have an interesting innovation that you'll see at some point and it'll obviously have stability around it um but that's not why people buy gruins like that's an important aspect to give you reassurance.

1:04:15People buy Grooms and our products because they're part of the lifestyle. It's fun for them. They get to share it with friends. Oh, by the way, it works. We did a clinical study. We do all this testing that makes it really official. But I just think the space is so... It's a lot of weaponization of like, oh, I did this study. We're better than you. I don't know. I don't think it's the right place to be in versus kind of like what Dr. Squatch did. We're going to make it fun. We're going to relate to the consumer. And it's a good product, by the way, it's natural. But like, this is the first time you're going to enjoy the shower.

1:04:47Yeah, it's interesting when you're in a category that is experiencing real adoption and growth, the way that gummies, I'd say more generally are. And obviously, you guys have been a pioneer of that. One of the things that it brings is it brings the grifters, you know, the kind of like, I'm going to just throw something up on TikTok, I'm going to drop ship, I'm going to try and, you know, hit something easy and quick. And, uh, that unfortunately you've, you've got to deal with that. You know, there's a, when we were doing the quibits thing, we had a competitor, he ran a, he ran a website called swipe bids and he was literally just stealing people's money.

1:05:29And I, for years we were like, this dude is like, literally like, he's just, he's not shipping product. He's just stealing people's money. And it took a couple of years and it was literally a situation where he got arrested on the tarmac out of a private jet with$15 million in cash in a briefcase. It was like literally one of those stories. But you just, when you're in a really high growth category, it's just going to be like bait, like a homing beacon for that type of personality. And unfortunately, you've got to educate people and you've got to stand out. You got to deal with all that crap. You might remember that Ridge switched to RichPanel about a year ago.

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1:07:59If that's interesting to you, go to richpanel.com slash demo to book a demo. That's R-I-C-H panel.com slash demo. Get started today. Thank you so much, Rich Panel, for supporting the world's number one e-commerce podcast and being on the greatest show on earth. Let's get back to it. Hey, Chad, I'm, I'm curious, like the financing journey that you've had. And I, and I know you guys are very private. I don't want you to mention numbers, not asking to mention the actual numbers, but like, you've done a couple of raises, like you got this thing started. Like what, what did that look like? Like, cause I, we know a lot of people that want to be like you, right and uh i want to be like you but like the um i want to be like you jason i'm i'm my best to get to your scale yeah i want i want chad's valuation two years in or three years in whatever it is how do i do that can you just tell me how to do that clearly you had a clearly you had a great idea and you executed on it well you have got a you have a great product you know the there's a lot of trendiness around this space.

1:09:07And I think the jury is out on any business, how sustainable it is long-term, right? We've had dozens of people tell us about us that, about Hexclap. Like, can you really keep this up? Can you really keep this up? I don't think any of us know, but I think you have a good chance of keeping it up. But like, how did you get it to here from a financing perspective? Can you give us like a high level overview? Yeah, of course. And I would say, I see people trying to figure out the operations that produce our product. And I think what folks miss is it's not just a product. That's one of the 20 things that's going right for us that make the LTV to CAC and the growth work.

1:09:52There's just so much more to it. And I genuinely do feel a little bit bummed for these folks because they're going to dedicate years of their life. And there's already like three who have done it before. credible entrepreneurs who've tried to rip it and it didn't work for them. And so I like, I, I don't know, like this is actually a really hard category. I don't think people who know when they look from the outside, they're like, oh man, they're, they're doing so well. Like it must be easy. Let me just go like figure out their operations and I'll do it myself. And it's not, it's, it, there's a lot going on in this category to make it work.

1:10:23Yeah. To, to your question, Jason, people ask me, I got the question, how much of the growth of Gruen's would you say is due to your experience as an investor and being on the board of all these awesome brands versus Stanford? And the reality is, from a knowledge standpoint, Stanford's 0.1%. I did not learn. There's basically nothing in how I operate this business that I got from that MBA experience. However, I didn't grow up around wealth. And that early round that we raised to get off the ground came from friends and family. And my friends at Stanford, it's families. And so like, would we have a business today absent that experience and those friends putting their confidence in me?

1:11:13No. Grinz would not be here today if I didn't have that ability. So like, I'm happy to share. We raised a little over$300 ,000 of cash to get the business started. Half of that went towards the initial PO. I'll tell you, my first command was like, we'll never see this guy again. It's a big PO, so we'll take it. And that's probably why they ended up doing the hand pack out, right? Because they were like, it's just a one-time thing. We're not buying machinery for this guy. Don't worry about it. He'll be gone. We're just going to do this really quick on a table. um and so uh but basically every six months after that raised around so like none of the vcs the hardest part about consumer is none of these institutional investors venture capitalists none of them want to put money into a business that hasn't launched unless you're a celebrity you've got some like interesting take which i didn't have any of that right like in fact i would say investors look at other investors and they're like look i know my experiences as an investor, there's no way you could do this.

1:12:09And I do think my experience as an investor was different than theirs, but that doesn't matter. They have their perception. And so it was hard pre-launch to get any traction with VCs, but a week into launch, we were doing like$5 ,000 revenue days. And I literally emailed all these investors and said, hey, you've got a week to close on this. I'll let you into the round that I raised on friends and family, but we're closing. So if do you want to end? Then you need to put in. And we got 1.25 million in like the second week of the business, third week of the business, which ran for another six months.

1:12:39Then we raised in February of 2024, I believe it's 6 million. And then in August, that was last year, August of 2024, we raised. And at that point we were a break even. So this is more for like cash buffer and other needs. It wasn't like from a burn standpoint. We raised another, I believe it was 11 or 12. And then the most recent round that you all have seen in April, May of this year, the$35 million round. But you're, you know, look, you had a lot of experience in this, right? And so you kind of knew how to get that quick raise done. You're like, this is the deal, guys. We're crushing it. Come in.

1:13:23that that's um that's well executed that's not like not just everyone the average entrepreneur um probably couldn't do that couldn't execute that like execution is 50 of the battle when it comes to raising capital right i mean it's let's just be honest about that it's so hard it is so hard in this market to raise money and you know i feel fortunate that we've gone four for four on it. But it's not easy. And I'll tell you this last round was particularly hard. I would say that our valuation is a really good valuation. The 500 million is a really good valuation for the recent investors. Now that's hard to believe, but looking at multiples, it's a really good valuation.

1:14:06And I think there's an important reason for that, right? We need to leave upside for whatever the future looks like, whether it's a strategic, whether it's an IPO, oh, those people need to make their return. And so we intentionally took a valuation lower than what I think we're worth to leave that upside. Man, I just wanna stop there and say, this is one of the things that is somewhat counterintuitive about how really successful people think. They intentionally think about how to help other people win. And that's part of the reason that they win. Less moderately successful people, I think, tend to only think about how do I maximize my outcomes?

1:14:46And I'm going to constantly just focus on maximizing my outcome. And so they never hit the real home runs because the way you hit the grand slams, I'm convinced is primarily by not just winning yourself, but by helping a halo of people around you win. And that's a great illustration of it. You're actually thinking about not how do I get the maximum valuation here or, you know, the most money for the least amount of equity, but how do I actually make sure that the investors who are involved in this round crush it. And that's going to lead to opportunities in the future that you don't know about.

1:15:21I mean, we can't even, we're sitting here, we don't know what those would be ways that that's going to come back to you, but it, but it will. It sounds like your plan, Chad, is that this is probably the last round that you do that, that in the future, like there's, there's probably. We're nicely profitable. We don't, we don't need additional cash for anything. I'll tell you one thing that I probably should have mentioned that matters a lot to me is I think the debate around whether to raise or not usually focuses on like, oh, you're like, the VCs now have control and they're going to like tell you what to do and you need to hit these targets.

1:15:55And, you know, we're growing really fast. So like, that's not really a concern from like, oh, we need to like put out numbers and we're nicely profitable. But what I would say is I I tell anybody who comes to me and asks whether they should raise is you should, if somebody wants to give you money, take it. Unless you're giving up voting control, unless you're giving up control of the destiny of the business, then don't take it. So like, again, you know, you see one headline in this, this recent round of 500 million deal terms on that super clean. People, people don't necessarily see that part.

1:16:29Whereas I can tell you a competitor of ours back in 2022 raised at a$1.1 billion valuation. Ridiculous. Yeah. Nobody understands that that top line number means almost nothing. We talked about that on the last pod. We talked about different kind of, you know, I don't know if that launched today, like structure deal. So your deal, that deal didn't have a lot of structure, Chad? No, I mean, I was super clear from the start. I was like, we don't need to do this round. And so if we're doing a round, we want a good partner who's going to help us strategically scale. And two, it's going to be clean.

1:17:01It's going to be like a one-time look breath. Well, and when you don't try and get super aggressive on the valuation side, it's easier to do that as well. That's another reason why you don't try and get every penny on the valuation side, because there's always going to come with strings attached on liquidation preferences or, you know, board seats or a whole bunch of other things. So, but it still is interesting to me. I mean, you guys are profitable. Do you actually have like a line of sight to how you're going to use that money? Or is it more just like somebody wants to give me a whole bunch of money, I might as well put it on the balance sheet?

1:17:30No, I mean, there was always intent with every single round we raised. Historically, you know, in the first couple of rounds, it was back to what I was sharing with Matt here is the, you know, if the world lets me capture a certain amount of new customers in a month, we're going to be unprofitable. And so we're funding some of that unprofitability from a P &L standpoint, but not unprofitable LTVCAC economics. Now that the business has scaled, I would say there's two reasons to raise. Number one is, you know, if you've got$1 million of cash in the bank and a$10 million revenue business, that feels comfortable.

1:18:08But if you're running a break-even and now you're doing$50 million of revenue with$1 million of cash in the bank, that's not good. You should cushion that up. And the way to cushion that is either slow down growth or put some more money on the balance sheet to create that buffer. I would say that's more of like what we were doing, you know, last year. Now we're funding massive growth in retail, net cash flow terms of 60 days. You got to finance that somehow. We're building out this facility in Dallas. So there's like real cash needs that don't sit on the P &L. They sit on cash flow statement or other areas where we need to create some cash cushion.

1:18:48You know, something you said, Chad, that I think is important for founders on the investor side is, and I got this advice from a guy in the Bay Area years ago when we were raising money. Because I was always scared of control, right? It's like, well, what if they get control? How much equity do I own? And this guy who had sold his company for three and a half billion dollars, he was like, oh, no, no, no, you don't understand. You as the entrepreneur always have control. He's like, there's no venture investor that's showing up to run your company. No. He's like, at very late stages, like in the many, many billions, like the Instacart situation, You hear these war stories of like hostile investors that kick founders out.

1:19:26I mean, reality is anybody listening to this show, like most people aren't going to be in that seat. You know, so even the voting control thing is actually a great call. But like this idea that you own less than, say, like half of the company at some point and that you lost control. No, you didn't. There's the profits interest and how much of the profits interest you have and how is the board structured. And totally very different. It is counterintuitive to people. Like I know a founder who owns 75 % of his business. He doesn't really control the board. It's five people and he's one. And I would say it's a friendly board.

1:20:05So it doesn't matter. And the business is doing well. But I've kind of privately told him like the moment that you feel like you can, you should, you should change the structure because you, if things did go really badly, you are actually vulnerable. here in a way. And it's one of those things that like the way your board is structured, it's not a big deal until it's a huge deal. And then - Chip Wilson's talked about this, his Lululemon story. Like he's been pretty public that that board control ultimately bit him in the - I don't think I would want to run a company where I did not know that I controlled the board.

1:20:39And there's other people that can do it. I think it's a different mindset to be able to do that. But when you're in that situation, you just need to know that now a significant portion of your mindshare needs to go towards optics and towards politics because there are now people that can vote you out of your seat and you have to manage perceptions. Whereas, you know, when you're in a position where you know you have the board control, you don't have to worry as much about perception and you can run the business the way you think is best. Yeah, it's a great call out. It's interesting. I had less than 50 % of Simple Modern, but I actually put in a provision.

1:21:26I don't think I've heard of anybody doing this because I had two co-founders, but the provision I put in was that I had 50 % exactly of the voting interest. And it was kind of symbolic in that I'm like, I don't need to know that I have control. I need to know that I can block anything that I think is antithetical. So it's even like there's a spectrum of like, it's not like you need to be authoritarian or you need to be able to control everything. But if you can't stop things that you think are kind of against what the company's intended to be or, you know, your removal or something else. And my thought was always like the thing I liked about 50%, which I, like I said, I don't think I've ever heard of anybody intentionally voluntarily doing this was that it put me in a position where I knew I had to convince at least one other person to see things my way.

1:22:16And if I couldn't convince at least one other person, then probably I should, you know, look inward about like, well, why is that? But I just couldn't have anything crammed down my throat. It's so critical, but it's hard. You got to leverage like a lawyer or legal counsel to help you with that because there's so many terms that if you're not in the investing world, you're not going to pick up on. Well, it's totally asymmetric. And you know this, Chad, but like if you go and raise a round, you're doing it for the first, second, third time, maybe. Right. This is their 50th. This is their 50th, their 100th or whatever.

1:22:50And so like you're going to get waxed in that transaction. in terms of like just the information asymmetry is really big. So you have to walk in knowing that. And there's some great books about like kind of bringing yourself up to speed on some of the basics. But then kind of to your point, Chad, you really want advisors. If you're going to take money from anybody, you really want advisors that have done it before that are helping you like look over the terms because you can very easily make a bed that you don't really want to sleep in. Jason, what do you like about Saris? You were gone for the past week in Italy.

1:23:30Were you checking Saris dashboards? I wasn't checking anything in Italy, but I will say this, like whenever anyone on my team's like growth team or anywhere else like sends me data anymore, it's likely coming out of Saris. And every once in a while I'll get something from them and it looks really slick. And I'm like, where'd you get that? Is that Saris? Like, yeah. And I always feel really good about our investment. I do get a daily email of some metrics out of Saris that comes through. But one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot lately is AI. I mean, duh, right? Everyone is. Duh.

1:24:01But I finally woke up a few weeks ago. I finally woke up a few weeks ago. I was like, I got to get serious about this. And I was actually talking to the Saris guys and they launched a next generation AI powered stuff in their platform, which I'm excited about. It's Saris IQ. It's invite only right now. If you mentioned operators podcast, you can probably get access, hopefully. But the next level of all of this is, first, with AI, you need to have all of your data somewhere. I mean, it's going to be really messy to just drop stuff into different AI platforms. If you have your data in one place, then you can leverage, you can really leverage AI.

1:24:42So the way I've thought about our best minutes analytics was getting all of our data in one place, understanding our customers better, understanding our marketing metrics better. But then being able to lay your AI on top of that is I think the really exciting next level here. You brought up bringing in Costco, Amazon and Shopify. The ability to have all sales channels with the same data is so important. If you're listening to this and you sell on Amazon, you know how painful that platform is. You have to wait like a couple extra days to pull your reports. Like the SKUs aren't the same as the rest of your SKUs.

1:25:16Like the titles are different. So to get actually clean data to compare, it's very manual. Using Zeros Analytics, they matched all that up for us. So they cleaned all that data. So I could actually look at what is the true margin profile of an Amazon sale? What's Amazon return rate? What's Amazon customer frequency? All the type of data, compare it to our.com and have a comprehensive overview. And now with their new AI tool, I don't have to look at it. I could just ask it. I could just tell me cool questions. So doing that across our five Shopify stores as well. We have an EU Shopify store. So now I can compare EU ring customer cohorts versus Canadian ring customer cohorts versus Amazon ring customer cohorts.

1:25:55So now we're getting to different functions of my business across different channels, different categories, and actually looking at the margin, the repeat rate, and is it worth investing in these different things? So if your business starts to feel like a spider web and just keeps going and going and going, it's just like this nonstop proliferation of different channels, maybe it's time to check something out like Sarah's Analytics. I remember Sean at the very beginning. This is a very typical Sean thing. Sean was like, what is this? Why do I need this? Right. And I'm actually really happy that you've, you come to understand like how important having a data warehouse is and what it does for managing your business.

1:26:36Because you were not like a true believer from the beginning. No, I was, I was angry when you told me I needed to pay for something new. But Jason was right. He convinced me. He got me on board. I'm using it. So a rare Jason W. So thank you, Jason. Very rare. I'm on Saris Analytics. He's on Saris Analytics. Proud sponsor of the Operators Podcast. So if you want a data warehouse and you want an AI-powered data warehouse, tell Saris about the Saris IQ feature and then you crave it. You're demanding you get access to it. So all right, guys. Talk to you later. Chad, let me ask this question. We're kind of getting to the end.

1:27:16What's one thing that you learned through the experience of scaling so far that surprised you? Or what's one of the ways that you've grown that you wouldn't have anticipated? Team, it's not lip service. You'll see me saying it everywhere. I think some people read that and they're like, oh, he's just saying it. No, no good brand. Long-term, long-standing brand is built off of five to 10 people. No. Period. And there's so much hype in the D2C community around, well, how efficient are you? I can almost guarantee you that our payroll and external agency fees lump together as a percent of revenue is lower than anybody else.

1:27:57We've almost got 100 people on our team. We're basically all in-house. That should be a measure of efficiency. And I think everybody gets so hellbit around, like you see it everywhere. It's like, oh my goodness, this brand's doing blank and they got two full-time people. I'm like, that sounds like to me, somebody who doesn't know how to lead, who doesn't know how to manage, doesn't know how to build a team, can't find the right people. And they'd rather lean in on this moment of time where we're all hyping up, how great they are that they just use like 20 agencies. And so what I've learned, it's funny, I would probably put myself in that category.

1:28:31I was pitching back in February of 2024 that I could get this thing to a hundred million of revenue with four employees. And my chief of staff at the time, Katie, she's now president of Grinz, promoted her about six months in. She's phenomenal. She made a comment to me like a month under her role. It was like May. She was like, hey, I think we need to like hire people. I don't know. And she's like, laid it out for me. And I was like, you know what? You're right. And then that's spurred what we've done here where we've brought so much in house and we have a really good hiring function and good culture.

1:29:04But like that need, I need somebody to wake me up to that. And I think there's levels where people start to realize that at like 20 million of revenue, they're like, we're just not going to build this. I'd be curious if anybody could point me to one single brand that's doing over a hundred million of revenue sustainably planning to grow for the long-term that has like five people. No, you're moving physical things around the world. No, I think there's smaller teams. You can do it with a smaller footprint than you used to. We had Will from IQ bar. He's doing it with a, with a pretty tight group.

1:29:35Um, but yeah, but, but to your point, like there's some uniqueness that makes that possible. I think, I think consumer where you're in really big channels and, and, and maybe if you're not doing like tons and tons of R and D, There's ways to make it work. But generally, we just get way too hand wavy about how important team is. And I think at the end of the day, business is primarily about organizing human capital. I'm convinced. I think people focus a lot more on the other aspects, the financial capital and the other stuff. To me, financial capital is mostly a commodity. You've got a lot of people offering it.

1:30:13There's not a lot of differentiation, but human capital is a massive piece of success. And if you're superior at being able to gather and organize human capital, you're inevitably going to be successful. Organized is the really important part there. I think, you know, you might ask now that we have all these wonderful humans here at Grinz, like, what do I do? I see my job is set the vision, make sure that everybody's very clear on what's going to drive growth. And two, I set the connected web. I'm the one that needs to ensure that communication patterns and uh street streets avenues and the company are very clear so that we function correctly all together and um that's not that's not easy to do right like it's actually kind of hard to do that stuff and it's a completely different skill set than when uh jordan are um she does influencer here at gru and she was employee number one back in october of 2023 when she and i were the only two running it for six months but like i did a lot of different stuff back then that I don't do anything with it.

1:31:13I was telling the team, like I used to look at Shopify 20 times a day, like the Shopify admin. I look at it like three times a month now, maybe. Yeah. It's completely different world. Yeah. It's funny. Like I've, I've actually kind of realized that there's a negative correlation between how often I'm checking our numbers and how well I'm doing and leading people typically. Like the more I'm in spreadsheets and the more I'm, I'm looking at dashboards because they're just very different parts of my brain. Well, Well, hey, Chad, this is awesome, man. Thank you for joining us. Congratulations on all the success.

1:31:45It's really fun when you see such a successful product that's great for people, but then also you see like just excellence in operating. And so we admire what you've done there and know that you're going to be continuing to scale and do great things, but really appreciate you, especially with a culture where, like you said, you are externally opaque. really appreciate you being willing to share some of your insights from running the company this is invaluable so thanks for being on the pod man appreciate you guys having me it's uh looking forward to giving back more we're in that period of externally opaque but i think you'll you'll see me try to share out more i have no desire to be an influencer if you look me up on youtube my wife and i did that for a year and actually built a pretty good youtube following i this is for no other purpose than to help people and help them improve their business.

1:32:37So I appreciate you guys having me on and letting me have the chance to do that. That's awesome. All right, guys, that's the pod. All right. Thanks for making it all the way to the end of this episode. Wherever you are in the world, it is awesome to have you here. If you do not already subscribe to this show, that is my one ask is please go to whatever platform you are watching or listening to this on. It could be YouTube. It could be Spotify, Apple. I don't care. Just go hit the subscribe button, please pump our egos up. It helps. And before we go, one more thank you to the sponsors, Fulfill, PostScript, Northbeam, Ceres, and Rich Panel.

1:33:11Awesome guys running these companies. We all use them. These are our vendors. That's the only reason they're sponsors of the show. So thanks again to those people.