Operators Titans E003: Musely (with CEO Jack Jia)

29:20And his professionally built half million dollar green had two inches of standing water and the grass died. You were built to be in consumer. that principle turned out to be extremely important to build any business and i mean now i think you know recently in the last couple years everybody is talking about the first principle of innovation that's really the a fancy way of saying the first principle yeah jack i think it's fascinating that you came to the country with 50 in your pocket and you have this track record of being very efficient with cash. Even I know in your current venture, you really emphasize that you grew it without burning a lot of capital.

30:10But it is so interesting how the putting green is like a microcosm of that idea that so often in business, I see people pay money because there's informational asymmetry and they're really just too lazy to try and teach themselves. They end up hiring a vendor to do something for them at 5x the cost. They could do it internally, but it seems daunting and they don't want to take on the challenge of trying to learn. I mean, whether you're talking about doing your own Amazon ads or anything else, I see it over and over again. And so what I love that you communicated there is just a willingness to roll up your sleeves and learn and take on tough mental problems is a lot of what it takes to successfully bootstrap a company.

30:55Yeah, absolutely. I think the DIY do-it-yourself principle is so critical for building, you know, not just small business, even large businesses. And this is definitely not a lesson just for the backyard project. And we have repeated that so many times in the current Muesli business. We're relatively large now. Right. And that principle is still guiding us and to create new innovations every day. But someone spending a huge amount of money is only going to give you more of a baseline. It will never give you that differentiation you need to really be the winner in your space. I've always felt like the downside to not teaching yourself is how are you supposed to hire the right person if you don't understand it enough to know what good looks like.

31:53it's not that I'm opposed to going and hiring people, but when I'm ignorant about what it takes to do the job well, it's difficult for me to even make a good hire, whether that's internally or somebody to partner with externally. I'm sure like you kind of mentioned it. Once you learned what a good golf green looked like, you realized that the person you would have hired wouldn't have even done the best job for you, you know, but you didn't know that until you put in the work of understanding what it takes to build a really good golf green. Yeah, absolutely. So you have to learn, right? I mean, this Muesli is a great example.

32:26I knew nothing about bioscience and dermatology, right? And literally, that's not my field. I'm a scientist, but only in computer. So, um, yeah, you can get further away. Um, and, and Matt, can I ask one question to go back? I just want to ask one question I thought was interesting because I just want to make sure I understand this, right? So Jack, you're, when Muesli was started, you had no idea what you would focus on. It was really more built around, here are some people that I want to work with. Did I understand that right? Yes. Yeah. And then we said, well, consumer is more interesting than, you know, traditional B2B technology, which we've done a few times.

33:12Also, the impact is quite different because, you know, again, with the DD and then Uber here and there's tons of other consumer company. I have a few angel investment in Airbnb and a few other consumer tech company, and they all start to become interesting at the top. I mean, even in 2012, 2013, they will start to become sort of impactful. In fact, Zoom, I don't know whether this technology we're using behind this thing has Zoom or not, but Zoom founder Eric and I were friends, and we were also trading shares of each other's. And so focus on consumer was something that we felt it was more intellectually challenging and interesting and impactful.

33:58At the time, I thought, well, the thing that impacted me the most was these tips, right? So we decided to, okay, let's put these tips online and inviting consumers to participate these home lifestyle tip creation. So we built an app and in the app, literally the icons is basically tips. That's the word that we use. And then people, we decided that my backyard golf green is not a good market to go after in terms of tips. The addressable market size is probably zero. It's a very specific group of people that want to build their own golf green. Right, right. That definitely. So we knew for sure this is a woman focused app needs to be lifestyle, woman lifestyle tips.

34:54And of course, we invited a bunch of women to create, you know, just whatever they want to create before we launched it. So we had about 1 ,000 tips when we launched it. And the number one category of all the tips that these women around us created was, no surprise, beauty and skincare. And, you know, there's 1 ,000 ways to do hair, 1 ,000 ways to do makeup, 1 ,000 ways to protect your skin. So that's when we launched it. it was women beauty and skincare focused app. Yeah. And that's, I think that's actually the interesting, one of the interesting things to me, Jack, is you got together with this founding group and you did exactly what I would expect somebody in the Bay area to do in consumer, which is launching an app first.

35:47Right. So like go after app, you built a, I mean, a huge user base over several years and, and started to notice this beauty thing. When you were building, when you were like this first version of Trustpare, right? And you were scaling up the user base. Had you figured out the, I guess the financial model of the business yet? Or was it still just like, no, we just want eyeballs? No, no, it was a pure eyeball play. So we did that for three years, from zero user to about 8 million downloads of the app, and then cross our website and social. Altogether, we got 20, 30 million monthly readers of these tips, right?

36:31We got about a million tips created by women, everyday women. So that's how, you know, we got a lot of tractions, but without any business model, without any revenue. You build up this massive user base. And then this decision at some point is like, we're going to transition to what is today muesli i'd like to just start with how did you guys decide to so beauty obviously was standing out so i get that the the intent and the users are there and this is like the topic but there's a lot of ways to monetize in an app why go into what you have today? Why Muesli? Yeah, it was fairly accidental. So this is around 2017, three years after we launched the app.

37:25And we decided that, hey, we could either become another media company to put ads around the content, around the tips, or we could become something else. That something else became pretty clear when we look at the top, most popular tips that women created. that was product recommendation. Skincare, beauty, product recommendations to each other. So women would write up, hey, this thing really worked for me. That thing worked for me. So we thought the problem was about product discovery. It's really figuring out what products would work. So I know a lot of skincare products because just watching my wife doing skincare routines and you know most most of the product don't seem to work but i i did not know the industry inside to know enough really what's going on so what um we thought is what do we what if we use our corporate resource to find the best products and put a marketplace together uh so that that everyone can now find the best skincare product or beauty product they were looking for.

38:42And so that's when we decided to rebrand the company also to Muesli. Because at the time we were calling these women creating tips, tippers, and calling them tippers in a marketplace tipping products that wasn't necessarily the right sort of sentiment. So we start to call these women muses and they start to recommend these products. And also in 2017, 2018, this was sort of the heyday of natural organic movement. Yeah. There were a lot of brand new brands came up, you know, really have had a lot of promises. So we thought, you know, let's let's go do it. Right. We spent about two years building the marketplace and finding the brands.

39:32So we officially launched in late 2017 in New York City, and it was a very successful launch. 200-some media members came, and Nina Garcia was editor-in-chief for Elle magazine at the time, also personally came. And so we thought we found the business model.

39:55So six months later after we launched, so this is the middle of 2018, we realized we did not solve the problem. In fact, none of the skincare, the 900 skincare products that we had didn't do much better than the products that people used in the past. And so we had a hard time deciding what to do now, right? shoot we wasted a two million dollars two years building this marketplace and looks like it's gonna fail uh it's gonna fail miserably and so we this is where experts does help a little bit so so we need to do a level set uh reset um and um so we invited a few people become uh to be our advisors.

40:50Three ladies specifically became critical people to decide what to do, right? So one person is Dr. Marie Jin. She's now our chief medical officer. She was invited to help us to basically looking through this 900 skincare products and what to do with them, you know, which one would work out of this 900. And then Dr. Jin came, became advisor, and she didn't even bother to look at those products. And she said, none of them will work. I said, none of them? Oh, you got to study their ingredients and look at their claims. I said, well, I have done that for the last 25 years in my practice, right? Every week I've had ladies bringing toe bags of skincare products and ask me the same question.

41:43And literally spread it on my table with dozens of their products and the first few years I actually look at them and now I know it's the same story. Nothing will work. And she did bring up, if you want something to work, you need to go prescription. I mean, I certainly know prescription drugs, but I didn't know for these cosmetics reasons that there's prescription medications for cosmetics, skincare needs. The two other ladies actually came from industry because I really want to understand, you know, what, what from skincare industry, right? So, you know, what does, why does L 'Oreal, you know, you know, why don't they do something about it?

42:28Right. So one lady, her name is Lori Bush. She was the founding CEO of Rodan and Fields. She helped to bring that company from zero to$2 billion in revenue and just retired in 2018. Another lady, Kimber Mazzarazzo, she was the EVP and GM for Proactive. Both of them have 40 years of skincare product development from the industry each. And so I asked them that same question, why our marketplace products don't work? Well, what's wrong with them? Why can we find something that would work? and they actually said some insights that i would never have guessed right it's basically they said you know we are not allowed to put ingredients that actually can do something for your skin conditions if you put something topical on your skin if that chemical can interact with your skin cell and do something good or bad right you know remove wrinkles or dark spots for goodness or for badness, you know, causing cancer.

43:41Either way, that's the very legal definition of a drug. FDA would shut me down. So therefore, we're not allowed to put ingredients. All right, 30 years ago, that was slightly different because back then we didn't understand the cellular structure, DNA as much. And therefore, the skincare companies can actually put ingredients as somewhat useful or efficacious. um but today if you are if you are anybody if you put something effective into your into your you know topical uh you know otc skincare products you will be shut down right so that was oh my god that is that is huge huge insight right i did not know that i did not know that either straight up system design flaw yeah like yeah and it's a great example of how like sometimes uh subject matter expertise really matters.

44:36That it's not just about being very smart. You said it, like I would have never gotten there on my own. And we've had some insights like that in our business where I just would not have guessed why a particular product feature was really desired by our customers. But then when you hear the explanation, you're like, oh, I get it now. I just wouldn't have gotten there on my own. And this is a good example of where having diversity of experience and expertise with your team can really pay off. Right. However, the experts don't necessarily well introduce in breakthrough, right? So the breakthrough happens when you, and this is again, 2018, right?

45:14The telemedicine just came out of the scene, right? I think HIMSS was just launched maybe six months earlier. So we said, well, if it requires prescriptions, so then why don't we build a whole prescription telemedicine platform? So literally by summer 2018, we decided to pivot again and shut down the marketplace and start to build telemedicine technology. And then we started to realize a bunch of other stuff needs to be built because the whole infrastructure don't exist. The whole medication making became a critical piece because there are turn out because these conditions we're treating are largely cosmetics and insurance really doesn't like to cover them.

46:06And so therefore, there's no pharmaceutical company that have any kind of financial incentive to make these drugs available. So there are very few, a handful of cosmetics, drugs that, I mean, pharmaceutical drugs that is available for the doctors to use. So we have to compound these medications ourselves. And that bring in a whole set of disciplines that I have no idea what they are. And so we have to learn a lot of that stuff. But once you learn, right, the knowledge is really relatively easy to learn. Then you start to have new insights on how to create breakthroughs. This is like the whole putting green thing over again.

46:49You're now compounding medications. Yeah, we have to learn compounding. We have to know the whole chemical supply chain, which turned out to be actually perfect industries to be disruptive because they haven't been disruptive for a long time. They're a very, very old industry, very inefficient. by making things yourself you literally can reduce costs by 10x 20x like my golf green example yeah easily jack when when did you guys figure out or when did you know that this was this was the model that was going to work so like you launched the face rx like you started doing tele telemedicine or teleprescription i forget what the technical term is um was there a moment where you're like, okay, now we got it.

47:37Yeah, actually, I got it much earlier. I don't know if you read, my wife was the first patient, patient zero, in fact, we call her, right? She had melasma since our son was born. So for 20 years, she tried everything on the planet, hundreds of creams, several years of laser, nothing worked, right? When we decided to do this, And Dr. Jean, our chief medical officer, you know, she became our doctor, in-person doctor, because we literally, before this is all, our telemedicine wasn't built yet. So I had to drag her to Dr. Jean's office to prescribe this compound that we're making in person. And she did not believe this would work.

48:29She absolutely hated that trip, even if it was only 10 miles away. and she said I tried I visited dermatologists before and it didn't work either and a month later her melasma started to fade away and six weeks after six weeks her skin was just completely cleared up that was amazing and I said a product like that kind of you know, with that kind of impact, there will be a huge market. So I'm intellectually convinced and the results really convinced me that this is going to be huge, even when I had zero paying customer yet at the time. What's up, everybody? Welcome to Operators Titans. This show is only sponsored by AppLovin, the S &P 500 mobile gaming ad platform.

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51:17From that moment to today, can you tell us like the ramp? Because it's been quite fast. Yeah, yeah. It's been six years since, so we launched in May 2019. So we have grown from, you know, one patient, my wife, to over 1 million. We have also expanded the treatments from only two, the dark spot treatment, the spot cream, and the anti-aging cream, which is more of a companion cream to make this spot, the dark spot disappear faster, right? And all the way to now 24 different treatments. across the body, face, hair, even inside, you know, hormonal treatment, even some longevity related medications now.

52:05And so it was the big breakthrough here, Jack, that you just made a better mousetrap, that you're actually solving a problem and that's been the competitive advantage. Yeah, I would say a different mousetrap. Instead of trap them, maybe we just drive them away. We have a different technology altogether. And so this is something that I don't think, you know, it was not available. Even, you know, theoretically, there should be medication like this available, but in reality, they are not available. And for at least for the vast majority of the population. Joe, and when you solve a problem like that, I'm guessing the lifetime user values just have to be enormous right that's where i wanted to go like yeah that's got to be i mean just like hymns has shown this that like when you do telemedicine and you do it well and you help solve a problem like it's enormously lucrative yeah yeah absolutely um it is a and because we've uh solve a lifestyle um you know we literally call this a wellness problem right it's a it's um You know, it's cosmetics.

53:16It makes you look better. And it fundamentally changes people's life. I mean, we didn't realize how severe this impacts women's self-confidence, right? So we end up, when we solve this, they become a friend of the company for life. Every year, we will launch new products. We will always recruit a patient to do the study with them, with these new medications. And we just have people raising their hands. You know, every single time when we're introducing something new, they want to participate. So they become literally a lifetime customer for us. You know, I never, for some reason, this is the first time.

54:00where I am now seeing the relationship between prescription and subscription, even though the words sound the same. You know, I always, I guess, Jack, for me, like prescription was always like you take something for a temporary period to fix something, like some kind of symptom. Yeah. And you're right, that distinction between like, whatever the other thing is called and lifestyle is a huge insight. And I get now, I actually, now I get why this business is as big as it is. how many could you just give us a sense for like how what's the team size like now like how big is this company just so people understand yeah we have about 200 people and so we have several locations our headquarters in Silicon Valley but our pharmacy operations in Salt Lake City and Atlanta so we have two giant pharmacies each with both pharmacists chemists and technicians and working there around the clock because every single medication is prescription first.

55:04Then a pharmacist would literally make your personal medications together what's coming that day with similar medications. So it's freshly made for each customer. And then we have this notion from farm to table, from pharmacy to your table. And if you, it sounds incredibly complicated, by the way. Like this is not your, I buy the widget, I sell the widget type of business. What, if you could change one thing about the company, is there something that stands out? You're like, God, this is such a pain in the ass. I would love to change this. Pretty much every day we're trying to change everything because the pharmacy world is very old.

55:49You know, when we started out, we, I didn't know this, the pharmacy software has to run on DOS PCs. PC with DOS, right? So we have to, you can't buy a new one. You have to go install something really old. And we had to use our engineering resources to rebuild these software, just to automate. And then turn out all the process to make medication happen was very, very manual. Even with the DOS software, they can only do certain things, very, very rudimentary. So we're completely rebuilt that entire technology. stack. We've been building and we're continuing to improving it. I would say, you know, even just recently, our VP technology and one of the engineer went outside, just stayed with the pharmacists.

56:39This is after several years improvement already, right? We did another sort of sit down with our pharmacists, our technicians for two days, and they came back with a bunch of small innovations that improved our productivity by about 20, 30x just by watching how they do things every day. So there's so much to improve. And then the entire drug making, you know, we start to use a lot of machinery. The traditional pharmacy, compounding pharmacy use very, you know, kind of like your kitchen operation feels like, you know, lots of meals, lots of pots and pans, you know, mix them up, grind them, and then you make these small batches.

57:23But for us, at our scale, we need to automate a lot of the stuff. So we have bought dozens of dozens of machines, you know, folding boxes, for example. Our machine can fold boxes really quickly now. We used to have high schoolers and, you know, people, retired people to fold boxes. Now you're folding millions of them a year. That's just not possible. So the machine really helped. And even in buying those machines, we found ways to really to scale the machine at scale for one-fifth, one-tenth of the market cost. And there are ways to do it. Jack, Mike asked you earlier if you could go back in time and give yourself advice when you were doing your first.

58:07Because you run such a complicated machine now, I would like to flip that question. If you could have a much younger version of yourself come and talk to you today, what advice would a much younger version of yourself give you running this style of company today? I would probably, I'm born to be an entrepreneur, but I'm also born to be very calculated. So I need to get lined up all the things and convince myself this is good enough now to do it. But I realize now if I advise younger me, I just say, go do it. Don't do those calculations that much because you're going to figure it out. I would never have figured out Muesli, the current rendition of the Muesli, without doing it.

59:01So by doing it, you will figure it out. You can't really pre-calculate them and do the paper analysis. You just have to go touch the ground, refine, touch, and refine all at the same time in a flywheel loop. Jack, I love you using the word calculated. It's the perfect word for a mathematician to say, I try to be too calculated. I try to look at it like an equation. And I just love that analogy because entrepreneurship is not like I start with an equation. And if I just solve this equation, it's living, it's breathing, it's moving around. And so that's why bias to action is so important because you can't sit there and solve the entire thing and then just go do it every day.

59:54you just have to address the problems and the challenges that are coming up and roll with the punches or you won't get anywhere. And so in some ways, one of the most remarkable things about you is that you do have this incredibly mathematical, precise kind of part of your personality and that you've overcome that with this willingness to learn and bias to action. And you really see how it's helped to make you successful through all these different ventures that you've done. Yeah, Jack, you know, the thing listening to Mike, the other thing that stands out to me is I don't know that I've met too many consumer founders that have done like legit pivots along the way.

1:00:33Like typically when you enter in a consumer, like that's the category that you're in. You've actually like really had to move this business model along over a decade. Right. As you and what jumps out to me and really what I want to know is you started out with this huge community, like millions and millions of people. What is what is driving the business today? Where does demand come from? What's marketing look like in Muesli right now? Yeah, our entire marketing changed, right? Although we had those millions of people reading our tips, I don't think it really helped our current business that much.

1:01:14It gave us some of the technology, like the social sort of viral techniques that we learned and still helped us. But the core of our marketing really came from the realization of it works, right? This thing work. And for my wife, it worked for my wife. It worked for so many other patients. And the typical patient experience is similar to my wife. I try everything, everything else, and the kitchen sink to solve this skink problem. and nothing had worked for 10 years, for 20 years, sometimes for 30 years, right? So that's the consumer we're dealing with, right? Someone like my wife. Turned out that, you know, her experience was universal.

1:02:08It's 90 % of our patients. They tried everything, nothing worked. So how do you convince someone like that to try for the 50 first time, right? After they fail 50 times. and that was really the biggest challenge and this is a challenge in our entire industry is people try, fail so many times. So for us, everything has to come from the efficacy. So our medication must work, number one, and which is in my wife's chair's case, it worked. Wow, my God, this is sort of the, I got that building block. Then it's really about amplification. our entire marketing strategy is amplifying that success, not just from one person.

1:02:54We literally have tens of thousands of patients giving us that before and after, that impact pictures and videos and their stories about how this transformed them. And so our marketing actually became pretty simple. We're just amplifying their successes rather than, you know, the industry loves to use model or even supermodel if you have the budget, right? We do not use any model. We use real people, real results. So that's why you go to our website and you see all our ads. They are all real people with their name, their age, even their location. You know, we will get consent for all of that, but then we get to use it.

1:03:34I mean, this is actually from even day one in 2020. I think after one year of launching the product, we realized people were telling the same story of my wife's experience. So we created this campaign called Muesli Works because we got so many feedback and comments, reviews, saying it works, it worked, finally it worked. And then we end up having a competition. This is an annual competition. Now we're in the six years. We're going to be doing that, 50 years, six years doing that. And so every year we'll get thousands or sometimes tens of thousands of patients participating in this competition of submitting their story.

1:04:15And then we get infinite amount of marketing materials for amplification. So we use every channel possible to promote these successes. And once you see 10, 100, 1 ,000 of these successes, even you're stepping, even you failed 30 years, you may still give a chance of this new thing that might work. Yeah, this is what makes entrepreneurship great, though. I mean, you created a successful business by solving a problem for tens of thousands of people. And all you have to do is then get their voices out there because you impacted their lives. And I just, I always want to keep that in front of entrepreneurs, that this is what our job is.

1:05:01It's to actually make the world better, make people's lives better. And then, yeah, there's a lot of financial rewards. There's a lot of benefits for that. But it starts with making people's lives better. And a lot of times that gets lost. People get so focused on how do I build a successful business or what is the marketing hack to grow my business? The easiest way to grow your business is to positively impact people's lives. And that word of mouth, they're going to tell other people about it. They're going to be happy to send in a video talking about how your product solved the problem they couldn't solve for decades.

1:05:32And I just love it. It's an inspirational to hear. Anytime I hear an entrepreneur has really solved the pain point for customers, I love it. And I love the success that you're having with the business because it's the right type of success. Yeah, Jack, you know, the other that the brilliance of it is in its simplicity, right? Yeah. By just amplifying all of these customer stories, other people get to see themselves and all of these variety of these faces and these people like seeing because that's what we're looking for as consumers. It's like, oh, that person looks like me and has my problem and talks like me and they're kind of my super super.

1:06:07this airway actress is an avatar for me right no there's no relatability right yeah i mean in fact we in our app we added the forum um which is patient only forum right you can count there's actually a count of how many people are participating in that forum it's close to half million so wow every other patient is participating in this forum what are some marketing channels where sharing these testimonial videos has really been effective. Yeah. Yeah. We use a large, you know, array of marketing channels because we go after women, middle-aged women, you know, sort of from 30 to 90 years old with the medium age of 45.

1:06:4890 is middle-aged, Jack? Yeah. That's right. 90 is the new 40, Matt. Yeah, that's right. The new 40. And one thing that surprised us, actually, one channel that's typically not obvious. to advertisers for a company like us is actually gaming side. Turned out a lot of women playing social games. These are not your, you know, shooting games and, you know, big screen. And these are, you know, Farmville kind of games. Candy Crush. That people play, right? So we would find actually very interesting tractions on that kind of game platform. and Apploving happened to be the, you know, the advertising platform that they can, you know, push our content and our successes, you know, these before and after into, you know, women's while they're playing their social games.

1:07:44That is very... It makes a ton of sense. I mean, and like you said, it's a great example of like, once you know your demographic, then you can kind of work backwards into where's our demographic spending time? How do we get in front of them? And you have to do the hard work of understanding your demographic. but obviously like casual gaming um mobile gaming this is a really like when you look at the statistics there's a lot of females in the demographic you're talking about the age band you're talking about that are spending a lot of time playing these games so it makes a lot of sense why that would work for you yeah and also um we we you know these these games are interruptible right what we found is that anything interruptible like playing these casual games there's never an end right just like keep going and and so the ads would be very effective and similarly on tv for example news is interruptible uh talk shows are interruptible uh where like deep drama murder it's harder to you know they're so sucked into that content so they don't want to be so oh yeah yeah musely okay what let's wait until the show comes back right i think about that all the time when i'm watching a show and it's like somebody just got killed and it's like and then it just like randomly cuts to a commercial that's like a happy upbeat commercial and i'm like there's no way that advertiser would ever choose you know it's programmatic the algorithm's doing it or whatever but it's like a very awkward you wouldn't want that association with your product but you'll totally control it i would like to transition to this segment of the show that we call the Titan 10.

1:09:15And there's going to be rapid fire questions, Jack, that I am so curious to hear you answer because of these like characteristics of the business that you have that are so different from what we typically see. So I'm going to, I'm just going to fire off the questions, uh, try to answer from like the first thing that comes to mind. Okay. Okay. All right. Let's give it a shot. Here we go. All right. First question. You're stranded on a desert island and you need to know how your business is doing. What are the two, three, four metrics that you would care most about? Yeah. This is actually, we do this without having to be on an island.

1:10:00But so our annual must do innovation would be probably my first. We have this top 20 initiatives. Every six months, we'll reshuffle the deck. So must have innovations on an annual basis. We also track monthly in terms of actual growth. So we absolutely set goals for the monthly growth, not annual, not quarterly, not weekly. Month is really a good cadence in terms of time. And so we set that goal and we try to beat it. And then on a weekly basis, we track the unit economics, right? Because that's where the bottom line also. So we track profitability. You know, okay, we may be growing well this week, but did we spend too much money or too little money, right?

1:11:00And that's how we were able to achieve this 190x growth in the last six years, while we burned very little. I think we even talk about it publicly. We only burned a total of$5 million in cash in the last six years. And we've been profitable in the last three, four years. And so to build a relatively large business. Yeah. You're also allowed to take a book, but it can't be a business book. to this island? What are you taking? What's that book? I love Freakonomics. I don't know if that's a business book. That's perfect. No, that's great. It's such a fun read. Yeah, it really gives me new insights.

1:11:44And sometimes you forget about the principles and then you go back to visit the book and then give you new inspiration. Do you have on that, do you have a sort of like one, two, whatever, a contrarian belief about business that like most people would disagree with you on? Yeah. I think, you know, a lot of time people believe just hiring experts, you know, get sort of the current state of art is really what makes business great. To me, that only gives you a baseline. The contrarian approach is that don't do what other people are doing. Don't follow best practice. Best practice, you need to know, right?

1:12:36But does not differentiate you at all. So. Very cool. No more best practice. Love it. I know there's a few people that will love you in that answer. When you think of, like you're the CEO of your company, when you think of leadership, What do you think is the most important word in leadership?

1:12:59We believe this founder mode leader, right? So get your hands dirty, you know, refine through touch and feel. Again, do not just sit, you know, lead from the front. Even at a manager level, at CEO level, everybody needs to lead from the front line, not in the rear. So that was leadership. What about if you zoom out and you look at business, just business in general, what's the word that stands out that you think is this is the most important word?

1:13:32Innovate for us. That for us, innovation is the word. Yeah, I thought that was actually interesting. That was your first answer on the like, you're on a desert island. You were actually like, okay, how is my innovation coming? It wasn't a growth metric. It wasn't a growth metric. It was like, how's our innovation pipeline? line. Yeah, I totally agree. I have not heard that one yet. Our market is very dynamic. If you don't innovate, you lose. And you have to stay ahead. I got a fun one for you then. What's the best meal of the day and why? I know this might be controversial. For me, it's dinner.

1:14:10And a lot of people, you know, Brian Johnson would say, skip dinner. and for longevity purpose but i found number one i'm at i don't eat heavy breakfast so that's not a meal for me just coffee and then something very light and then lunch is always on the runs busy so you you eat pretty simple for me dinner is where i can get the full range of nutrition um i eat a little earlier than what you know five six hours before i go to bed i would definitely walk afterwards. That's really a religion for me. But more importantly, by knowing a lot of the bioscience in recent years, we need energy doing sleep.

1:14:53A lot of people think we're sleeping, therefore we don't need much nutrition, therefore you can go empty stomach. The entire repair and rebuild happens overnight for us, right? And so the body needs nutrition and having dinner, for good meal dinner is critical for that rebuild. Very cool. I like that answer. Also, super calculated, dude. You're on brand right now. What's the go-to food for dinner? Oh, I love steak and sushi, sashimi. So those are two. If I have to choose one, I don't know which one to choose, to be honest. We'd be good friends, Jack. That's it. You don't need to choose. We just do them both.

1:15:35Okay, so right now when you look at the like you're in this consumer world, right? The last two questions are kind of in the inverse of each other. You look at everything in consumer. Is there an overrated growth tactic or topic that you just think, like everybody's talking about this, everybody spends their time here, but it's just super overrated? Yeah. I mean, every year seems to be a new topic. I think in the last year it's been MMM, you know, marketing mix. Mollie. Mollie. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, my God. How can you contact me for doing that? The problem I see that was just, you know, it is certainly the marketing mix is happening, right?

1:16:19People, but however, those models oftentimes mislead you to what really made the difference. Because people come in with whatever their habit, right? Most of our customers come in organically. But however, whether they saw friends talking to them or they saw our success on Facebook, on social, or even watching TV ads. But if you reuse this model, almost vast majority of them come from Google. Because it doesn't matter, right? Even you tell your sister, say, hey, Muesli, yeah, you got to try it. And then the sister say, oh, Muesli, type Muesli. And then the first thing pops up on Google will be an ad probably.

1:17:02And then click on that Google search result. So that's why it's often misleading if you look at the number by itself. You have to understand exactly the consumer journey to truly understand. And it's multidimensional to start with. And the weight has to be based on their journey rather than the typical MMM. Yeah. Yeah, the computer scientist in me says if you think MMM is great, you should go study what they are and look at how many versions of these damn things there is. it's really complicated. Okay, so then what's the most underrated growth tactic? Underrated is really just go deep dive in, get your hands dirty, and do it yourself.

1:17:49People just love to hire experts and agencies and to do marketing for them rather than build. Our marketing are all done in-house. We pretty much do not use other than maybe TV buying itself, right? All the strategy, all the implementation and the changes constantly. Yeah. I love that because we've actually looked at anytime we can put the resources towards hiring a good person and giving them time to really train internally, we have never felt like we've been outperformed by an external partner. Yeah. Like when you really are dedicated, it's almost impossible for somebody who's fractionally doing the thing to be able to outperform you over the long run.

1:18:36And I understand that sometimes you can't afford somebody full time. And that's a good reason when you just don't have the resources and the bandwidth to do it at that level. But as soon as you can bring something into your team, we found the exact same thing, Jack. Yeah, absolutely. And it's not little difference. It's huge difference. Big difference. Yeah, that's massive. there's a lot of value in thinking deeply about anything is kind of what i've learned yeah and when somebody's fractional they by definition can't think deeply about a problem and about your contextualized answer to it and so that's why you you over time want to build a team of people that have really spent a lot of time thinking about your particular problem and how that you can uniquely address it yeah i mean the this is uh true in general a business win lose on the last mile right that extra advantage right someone who has 10 accounts to manage on a weekly basis can give you only four hours you cannot really have that unique last mile that that they can you know that can help your company to break through so that's just that's why it's fundamentally you have to do it in-house and there's nowhere more true than that in consumer when you actually deliver the product.