Go Viral While Spending Zero Dollars on Ads

0:00Posting on social media daily is just as important as raising money these days, especially if you're trying to target Gen Z. hey what's going on i'm your host shueng esther shan and welcome to shopify masters your companion for starting and building a business in a world where pickle jars are gathering dust on grocery shelves two entrepreneurs asked what if pickles could break the internet meet leah marquez and yasaman bhaktihar the masterminds behind good girl snacks a pickle company on a mission to redefine snacking. With the perfect blend of nostalgia-driven branding, guerrilla marketing, and flavors from their Persian, Egyptian, and Tunisian cultures, the girls are taking the consumer packaged goods market by storm.

0:52After just nine months launching, they went viral numerous times, landing on the shelves of Air One as well. And they have spent zero dollars on paid advertising. Leah and Yasman, very excited to have you here. Thanks for having us. Thank you. We're excited to chat. So excited to have you both with us because I love watching your videos and I love how you were able to create so much buzz for a category that has been a little sleepy. So talk to us about creating the world of good girl snacks. Yeah, I think, you know, Yasmin and I have been best friends forever. We were always bonded through food.

1:35And we were huge pickle connoisseurs eating pickles all the time. And as we were working in our first full time jobs in very corporate settings, we kind of noticed exactly what you just mentioned, this very sleepy, boring aisle. And we started kind of thinking and brainstorming around what we could do in the space and having a lot of fun with it. So whether that was our really fun, colorful label ideas, the name of the brand being Good Girl Snacks and Hot Girl Pickles, all of our ideas with photography and how we've kind of created this very provocative nature to the images we share. these are all things we were kind of thinking about and having fun with before we even launched the company now that we have the company we've achieved this separation between what we do and what everyone else does through all those things so again label name of the brand you know colors doodles images but also by building in public and having kind of shown the world how we started this business and posting every single day and really being the people behind the brand.

2:51I think that humanized the product a lot. And a lot of people relate to us and therefore want to try the product as well, which is something that not a lot of people in the food and beverage industry have done. So it's been super fun to create this little world through images, but also just through Yasaman and I building in public. And there's so much buzz that both of you have created. Yasaman, for you, obviously you build up this buzz around the product. How did you begin to develop the product to ensure that it tastes good and there's a differentiation point within this white space you found?

3:29Right. So when Lea and I had the idea to start a pickle company, we started kind of thinking of what flavors we wanted and we knew we wanted to do flavor innovation, like Lea mentioned and we were super inspired by our Middle Eastern upbringing so we were like okay let's kind of use the spices that we grew up eating and so we decided to incorporate turmeric into our original dill flavor which is kind of like a classic dill pickle with an added twist of turmeric which adds a lot of zestiness and tanginess to the product and then we were super inspired by the hot honey trend that was going around and so we decided to do like a Middle Eastern twist on that which was our honey harissa pickle and we started making these at home initially just testing different recipes testing different ratios and it never tasted quite right because we didn't know what we were doing and although Leia and I think are pretty good chefs home chefs I don't think we really got the science down for pickling and so we actually ended up connecting with these two amazing ladies who became our consultants and one of them is a food scientist who has a ton of experience in the food and beverage industry and we kind of handed over our recipes if you can even call them that and she basically perfected them and after about maybe like four three or four rounds of samples we decided to you know launched the product and we came down to a recipe that we really liked.

5:06And we're still tweaking the recipe. We have made a lot of tweaks since our first launch and we've, we're always taking in consumer feedback and, you know, adjusting accordingly. We launched in March with really big pickles. And then due to this large community that we've built, we were able to garner a lot of customer feedback. And we decided to switch to smaller gherkin cucumbers for pickles. So now there's a lot more pickles in a jar, they're smaller, they're crunchier, they're saltier. And we kind of launched this glowed up hot girl pickles in August, and we've been running with those. And that recipe is now the recipe that we're launching in stores with and growing with as we move into next year.

5:51Well, it's so interesting to understand that through sampling and through your community, you were able to identify that people loved Gherkins more. How did you go about collecting those feedback and actually implementing those new ideas? Because we've built a really strong community, we were able to tap into them and get them excited about being part of our journey by giving us feedback. so we sent out an email to every single person that had ordered with a survey we also did a poll on our instagram stories uh and we even messaged to some people that would post the product on their stories and be like hey love this photo would love your feedback on the product is there anything you'd like to change asking family and friends but really focusing on the non-biased and true customers first.

6:47We also worked with a friend of ours who has a surveying company that works with Gen Z specifically before we even launched the product to collect data on what kind of cucumbers and pickles people prefer. So we also had that data to fall back on. It's amazing because it sounds like you both took a lot of inspiration from your heritage, also feedback from the community. I guess for the both of you, what advice would you give to new founders so that they can know how to incorporate their own takes, their own personality, maybe their culture into the ideas that they're developing? I think whenever you start a business, it has to come from either something that you're really passionate about or something, you know, you see a gap in the market or whatever.

7:44Any company that I've seen be super successful, especially in the startup space, the founder is always in it. So 110 % and a big part of that is including who you are and whether that's through company culture or whether it's through your background and what we're doing by adding the flavors of our heritage to it. I think trying to find little parts of you that kind of show up in whatever your business is, is how you'll stay passionate about it, how it'll be personal to you, how people can learn about you through whatever you're building. But yeah, I don't think it necessarily has to be through heritage.

8:23It could be like through personality. Like if your favorite color is pink, then maybe your app is pink or, you know, that's just a random example. But I think for us, it was just because of the food and because food has always been a part of who we are. It was really easy to just take that part and inject it into the flavors of the pickle industry. I think it's also kind of a fine line between creating a brand that's very authentic to you and at the same time thinking of your consumers and who you're selling the product to. Because for us, you know, obviously we had so many ideas for products that we wanted to launch and flavors we wanted to have.

9:02But at the end of the day, you have to think, okay, like we might love it, but would other people love it as much? And so kind of teetering that line of, you know, doing something that's very authentic to you and that you're passionate about, but then also keeping in mind, you know, who you're selling to do, you know, is the community that you're selling to familiar with the flavors that you're incorporating? And sometimes it's about, you know, kind of meeting them halfway of like injecting your own flavors and your own heritage into a product that they're familiar with so that there's not as much of an education process.

9:37And I think like to that point, right, there is a part where you don't want to educate the customer too much, where you can easily distill all your ideas into one label. What's your approach there where you can actually successfully communicate all that you want to say in the branding, in the packaging? I think so. Our labels are really fun. If you guys are listening and you haven't seen them, they're very colorful. There's doodles. There's handwriting on it. There's Hot Girl Pickles, which is the name of our product, is in a really fun font, whereas Good Girl Snacks, which is the name of our brand, is in a more classic font.

10:18And so So we decided to kind of split up the labels in certain ways so that, you know, the writing is the name of the brand and the product. But then we also have doodles that kind of evoke the flavors. So for our honey harissa one, which is sweet and spicy, we have like a little pepper and like fire to show that it's spicy. In the original dill one, it looks pretty basic. basic like it's just a pickle drawing because it is kind of like your classic pickle flavor just with a little bit of a twist and obviously we communicate the flavors directly on the label as well but both labels and what we'll continue to do probably with our new products is including these kind of characters so we have two characters we have Gigi and Pic and we wanted to be very nostalgic with the way that we designed the product so that you would feel a fun experience buying it.

11:20It's really cute in your fridge, but it's also kind of putting you into the Good Girl Snacks world just by like looking at it or interacting with the label. So we're also communicating our branding more than just the flavors and the product that you're buying. It sounds like there's so much thought that has gone into the branding and packaging. Yasaman, for you, can you talk us through how the both of you work through launching? Because I understand the concept to launch took only nine months. So there's so much to do in such a short amount of time. Right. So we both quit our jobs, I think, in June of 2023.

11:59And we basically started working full time on the brand all summer and starting July. um first thing we did was you know figure out who our partners would be who would help us design the brand um and then also who would help us formulate the recipes and find a co-packer and so um the consultants that I mentioned early on were amazing in that they you know both helped us finalize the recipes and at the same time um they did like this whole search for us um where we were reaching out to different co-packers across the U.S. who would be willing to have a small run, which is really hard to do when you're starting out.

12:41Usually a lot of the facilities won't really look at you unless you're manufacturing tons of quantities. So that was definitely difficult, but we were so glad to have their help in helping us navigate that. And so, yeah, I think by the end of the summer, we had our branding done, which was really exciting and we had something that we were super happy about and that really represented us and what we wanted the brand to look like. And by October, November, we also had found a facility to manufacture the pickles in and we were pretty much ready to launch in December, which was the initial goal, except we had a bit of a mishap which we call Cucumbergate.

13:28A bunch of our cucumbers were actually put in the wrong truck and they were frozen. And so because of that, we had to postpone our production to January, which actually ended up working in our favor because it gave us more time to prepare. And we were really able to beef up our strategy and have it down. And so, yeah, we were really quick with it. And I think being two of us really helped because we were able to split up roles. But then obviously having the help of our consultants, which was really crucial in us moving this fast. Mm-hmm. Well, it sounds like you found really great partners, the ones that help you develop recipes, Copac, and also the consultants.

14:12What's your advice there to actually find people that can help scale and elevate your business when you're trying to build it? So one thing we always tell people, whether you're starting a business or you just have the idea and you don't really know where to start, is to cold outreach people in the industry through LinkedIn or just get connected with people in the industry or who have worked in the industry through people that you know. So that's exactly what we did before we even decided to launch the business. And we were connected to a bunch of people in the industry who told us that we should take the leap and totally go for it, that we had a great idea, which is what gave us the confidence to do it, obviously.

14:53But those same people were able to then connect us to others in the space, including these consultants. So the best way to really do that is just to talk to as many people as you can in the industry, just whether that's for advice, connections, or anything else, really. It's really the first step we took and that we tell people to take. Yeah, and I think if you're passionate about your project, you eventually will encounter people that are as inspired by the idea as you are and who will be willing to help you make it come to fruition. And that's what happened with our consultants. And it was great also that they were women and they were young and they kind of understood the vision.

15:34We were all aligned for everything. And yeah, it's been great working with them. I also have to follow up because I think if it's anyone else hearing this, like it sounds like Cucumbergate was a scary moment. Some people might have just given up or, you know, let go of the idea then and there. How did you actually resolve that issue and motivate yourself to like keep going? So we basically had to call every farmer known to mankind in America, which was definitely hard. And we, yeah, we basically just didn't give up. We just kept going at it until we found someone that could get us the quantity that we wanted.

16:18And it so happened that we ended up finding somebody who was able to kind of resolve the issue for us and get us cucumbers in January. so that was great it's just really hard with organic cucumbers they don't grow year-round so these were coming from Mexico and you know obviously whenever you're importing a product there's also always issues with that and delays and so yeah we were very lucky and I think for us we were so close to the finish line that I think it would have been such a shame to just give up we believed in the idea so much that I don't think it was even an option in our heads we were like you know what, this maybe is going to be a good thing in the end.

17:00There's a silver lining to this. And we just tried to spin it in a positive way. We also, anytime something bad happens to us, we make it a marketing moment. So that we made a video that was like, someone stole 3000 pounds of cucumbers from us. And it did really well on TikTok. It did really well on reels. And so that's kind of what we do whenever something bad or unfortunate happens. We just kind of twist it into a marketing or like community building piece of content. And we also already had a pretty big community at that point, people that were rooting for us and excited for the product to come out.

17:39So having that kind of encouraged us and motivated us to keep going regardless. So yeah, we also always have cucumber gate issues. It's not just that one thing that happened. It's a continuous struggle finding growers and getting our productions all in line. But we're smoothing it out. We're figuring it out and learning a lot as we go, which has been, you know, a blessing that we've been working with these consultants and so many great partners that can kind of help lead the way. But yeah, cucumber gate is very much so still a thing. Well, I love the fact that not only the initial cucumber gate, you learned from that and ironed out the kinks for logistics, but you also turned it into a marketing moment.

18:27So which is kind of the perfect segue, because I think both of you have done so well with your TikTok and social media, but also getting your products into the hands of really successful content creators as well. So yeah, talk to us about your approach to making these marketing moments happen. A lot of it is really through having posted every single day since October 2023. So we haven't missed a single day. We just don't post on Fridays. And that's both on TikTok and Reels. So it's weird to think about, but we do show up pretty much daily on a lot of For You pages or Explore pages. So a lot of these creators that we reach out to through DMs or email or whatever contact information they have available online, they've probably seen us before, which is really weird to think about.

19:24So whenever we were DMing or emailing these influencers, they'd be like, oh my god, I love your product. I've seen X have it or I've seen it in this store and I'd love to try it. And they're really excited about it. We also have a theory that because the name of the product is Hot Girl Pickles, it serves as a hook for these content creators in their videos. Because if they're showing that product, people are going to be like, what is that? I've never seen that before. And they're kind of also one of the first people to try it, which gives them a little bit of hype. So it just works out for everybody.

19:57And it's kind of a win-win situation. But we had Alex Earle, Hallie Batchelder, Kit Keenan, and a bunch of other creators post us, which has been one of the biggest highlights of 2024 for us. And it's created a lot of buzz around us and allowed for a lot of sales while still maintaining a$0 CAC because we just gift. We don't pay anybody. Yeah. And I think we also did our research when we figured out who we're going to reach out to. We made sure that we reached out to the girls that we knew would love the pickles. We knew they were either like pickle connoisseurs already or they ate a similar snack.

20:35And so I think naturally it just felt more organic for them to talk about it and show it in a video because it's already part of their like everyday routine. Yeah, that's so smart, especially the fact that you mentioned that your cause of acquisition is essentially zero. To that point, how are you looking at your analytics to make sure you have loyal customers who are returning to you and is essentially, to your point, in the universe of Go Girl Snacks? It's a little bit difficult to have data when you are only running organic marketing. But because we sell on Shopify, we can see how many customers are reoccurring or who our most loyal customers are.

21:21we also look at views and follower growth a lot. So we know what types of videos do better than others. And if we post a certain type of video, if our sales go up, we assume it's because of that video. So we have to make a lot of inferences in terms of, you know, this video caused this many sales just because we're not paying for ads or anything. And same with influencers like, oh, if this influencer posted on this day and we have an X percent increase that day in sales, it's probably because of them. But again, there's no direct way to know. So the Shopify tools and just knowing that we have, you know, this person buying this amount of times a year is really helpful for us.

22:07It sounds like you really have to connect the dots yourself with the dashboard on your social channels and Shopify to see the impact of the content. To the both of you, because I think a lot of new founders understand that you have to be building in public so that you can build up a community and also have customers familiarize themselves with you. It is quite an intimidating task. So what's your advice for juggling, you know, creating content, but while you're actually building a full-blown business at the same time? Well, I think that's why it's so great that Leia and I have each other, because I think if one of us had to do both of that, it would be nearly impossible.

22:48And it's extremely time consuming, especially for us. We definitely prioritize social media a ton and maybe more than other companies do. And we put, you know, maybe as much hours into it as we do building out like the operations or like the sales aspect of the business. I think make sure you have dedicated times in your week to sit down and brainstorm content for the week brainstorm you know what type of videos you're going to make Leia and I have like a weekly creative brainstorm where we just sit for two hours and you know go through strategy for the week strategy for the month you know what's coming up what can we make content content of and then we also schedule film blocks through our week whenever we need to film content so that we can just make sure we get that done.

23:38And it depends. Sometimes we'll have like a more spontaneous moment where we're like, oh my gosh, we need to capture this and we'll just like pull our phones out and film it right there and then. Or it'll be more planned out and we'll sit down, film it, edit it, and then publish it. But yeah, I think it's just about really dedicating enough time to make sure you can do something that's worthy of publishing. It's also something I tell people a lot is building or posting on social media daily is just as important as raising money these days, especially if you're trying to target Gen Z. Because if you're not present on social media, you're not targeting the almost biggest consumer, which is crazy.

24:28So Yasaman and I, like she mentioned, split roles. So I take care of anything marketing and then Yasaman's on operations, sales, finances, all the stuff that my brain cannot comprehend. And we help each other, you know, in the middle with any tasks that make sense for us to both work on. But most of the time, it's pretty separated. And so if you don't have a co-founder or someone that you're working with that can help support on the social media side, it's really helpful to hire like a UGC creation agency or like an intern or somebody that's Gen Z that's kind of chronically online that understands how to build content for that audience.

25:12and you after posting for a couple months you'll find certain videos that do best and it'll kind of create a recipe almost for how to create a video so for us we started posting vlogs and it was like day one of starting a pickle company with my best friend in our early 20s and we went every single day posting a vlog of what we did that day and that was really easy because we were already doing those things anyway. And so I was just taking little clips of what we were already doing and posting it at the end of the day. So it wasn't adding any time or complicating anything in our schedule. It just kind of seamlessly fit into what we were already doing.

25:55So finding things like that that makes sense for your business and finding types of videos that are really easy to incorporate in your routine already is the best way to do it. It's really smart. And I like the fact that you mentioned that it is as important, if not more important than raising funds, because you're essentially raising customers and finding customers. So yeah, I think it's very impressive to be able to have such great organic marketing, which frees up cash flow, especially for a business that you need to invest heavily into production. So can you ladies talk Talk us through how you initially managed your runway and be able to make sure that you had enough money to take care of your production facilities and be able to get yourselves out of Cucumber Gates and all of that.

26:47Yeah, well, thankfully, Cucumber Gate did not cause any financial damages because we hadn't paid the PO yet. So that was great. I think just, you know, making sure that you really sit down and get your numbers right. And we definitely sold our product at a slight premium the first time around just because it was so expensive to get started. And we wanted to make sure we made some of that money back to kind of keep going and continue to build our business. And so it was definitely a gamble that we took, especially because we didn't know if people were going to be ordering pickles online at all.

27:27and now that we're more settled in and that we have you know the necessary means to keep going we definitely like lowered our prices and we're trying to make our product more accessible to everyone but yeah it's definitely tough it's a gamble to take because you don't want to scare away the customer with an expensive price and expensive shipping but at the same time especially if you're spending a lot of money on a small quantity of product you want to make sure that you're making that money back and being clever about that. You have already reached so many amazing milestones. And the one that I'm so excited about is the fact that you are now in Air One, the perfect retail partner for Good Girl Snacks.

28:11Talk to us how you were able to get connected. We actually knew a couple people that had connections to Air One, but we just filled out the form online. And that's kind of how we got in. We are organic and one of the only organic pickle companies on the market. And they really prioritize organic clean ingredients. And so being the only organic pickle product on their shelf, I think makes a lot of sense. We also are fun and Gen Z and female founded, which are all things that they try to hit. It's really exciting for us. It's like our first big retailer and hopefully it helps pan out the next year for us and we can get into a lot bigger and other retail chains.

29:03Yeah, for sure. First of many, definitely. Yes. I guess like for a lot of people, when you get a big PO like that, that's also a sign for you to scale up production and figure out more of your logistics. So Yasmin, was there any behind the scenes kind of problems that you had to solve to in order to be able to take on a retail partner? Yeah, for sure. We definitely so we had the inventory to fulfill the PO, which was great. But one of the challenges that we're personally facing that I think it's important for us to be transparent about is that organic cucumbers are very hard to source year round, as we mentioned, It's their only seasonal.

29:45And working with fresh produce in general is always very tricky because you're not only dealing with, you know, the natural economic factors that you deal with with any raw material, but you're also dealing with Mother Nature. And, you know, if there is a storm that ends up happening or if the winters are too cold or if, you know, for some reasons like the soils are too dry, it can really mess up like your entire production. And so for us, the challenge was figuring out, OK, in 2025, how many doors do we think we can get into realistically? how many pickles do we think we could sell in each door um you know what would our velocity be and these are all things that obviously we had no idea about because we hadn't started selling anything in retail yet um and yeah we just basically had to model it out and then based off of that think of okay how many jars do we have to manufacture to be good for x amount of months until we then have to have another production run.

30:55And so that's kind of hard when you're just starting out because you obviously don't have any numbers yet. You're just basically kind of throwing a shot in the dark as to what your expected velocity will be and what your expected sales will be. So yeah, but having those projections are kind of how we're going about it. And we just have to hope that it works out. yeah I was also going to ask because I feel like with pickles not only are you reliant on a perishable produce but you also have that production period where it takes time to actually pickle something right yeah yeah so has there been complexities with planning and forecasting because you have so many added complexities I think because we now have had like two pretty large runs we kind of understand those complexities and were able to plan around those complexities but the first time around it was definitely kind of you know we didn't really know how to go around that so we had our production at the end of January and you know we knew we wanted to launch soon but we couldn't put a date on the calendar because we didn't know you know okay by that date are the cucumbers going to be good or are they going to be pickled enough and so it was really about like literally trying them every week and then when we thought that they were ready we were like okay let's next week is the week we launch and then we announced it and that's kind of how we went about it the first time and now obviously in hindsight we're able to work around it it's interesting with marketing because obviously you want to have like a go-to market strategy for when you're launching again or we have new flavors coming out and we still don't have a date for them, but we've started kind of teasing them.