How Pistakio Grew 10x by Letting Customers Build the Brand

19:22Francine Voit:For example, after a few days of sampling, we realized that people love the idea of putting into coffee and everyone drinks coffee in the morning. So as soon as we started telling people, put it into your coffee in the morning or like add it to your espresso, their eyes were like, that didn't happen. It was like, I love coffee. Like I drink coffee every morning like I'm gonna try that so giving them something specific to use I think was super

19:44Nicola Buffo:helpful yeah we always talked about the Mike's Hot Honey example with that like Mike's Hot Honey became popular because he told everybody that like this goes so well on pizza this is the pizza condiment and then we when we were thinking about like what can pistachio be and maybe it's like the pistachio latte so the way that we were also showing people that outside of everything I could just said and like social media has played a big role in it but it's also partnering with like food service accounts collaborating with a bunch of different menus and doing like a pistachio latte in i don't know a place in idaho and then doing like a pastry somewhere in florida like finding all these different places where people will be able to try pistachio risk-free almost because they can get it on top of their ice cream for like a dollar instead of buying a 15 dollar jar and then once they try it, they are hooked.

20:33Nicola Buffo:So that is the easiest way is just getting them to try it somehow. And then definitely like showing them through these social media collabs or through these food service collabs, even if they're not able to go, they're able to see like, we did a matcha toast collab with someone or we did a latte, like this is how you make it. And I feel like they get inspired from that and they're like, oh, this is how I can use this product. So I'm gonna buy it so that I can try making this recipe at home. This is a really cool part about your business that you partner with these cafes and restaurants throughout the country that are doing these sort of bespoke pistachio inspired recipes to open you up to new consumer markets.

21:14Nicola Buffo:And something that I find very cool about it is that it's not like you're taking like one pistachio latte and saying like, okay, this is the recipe that you're going to use. Like I was looking at the map and it's like every cafe and restaurant has its own take on what they're putting out there. How are you forging these relationships? Are you going to them? Are they coming to you? And what does that collaboration look like? Yeah, last year, it was just I mean, it was just me and Nico last year working in the business. We were the only people that were full time. So I reached out to every single one of those coffee shops, we've made a list of like 200 of them, and just like DM them or sent them an email and then basically told them like, we'll give you some samples and like you can do your own R &D, you can figure out whatever it is you want to make, like we want uniqueness, we want each coffee shop to make their own spin on the pistacchio latte.

22:04Nicola Buffo:and and then this year we knew that it was doing really well so we hired someone that was already on our team to just reach out to these coffee shops again and basically do the same thing and we got a lot of the same ones that we had last year and then we also had a lot of new ones that started reaching out to us because they saw the map or they heard about it the year before and I feel like a lot of them just wanted in on it and they wanted people to be able to find them and try pistachio in these other places and then we would also pitch them to like retail the product And of course, like they get profitability on it and we get another location on our map that we can say you can buy Pistakio here.

22:38Nicola Buffo:So that always does really well, too.

22:39Francine Voit:And I think our community very super helpful in this because we're like, you guys tell us where you want us to see. So all of our community was we're tagging all these coffee shops and then the coffee shops were seeing people that they were getting tagged on this thing. And they were like, oh, I want to be part of this. And then it's kind of like this snowball effect that the more people get excited about it, the more people want to join. and also kind of feeling that foam because if you see the coffee shop next to you that is doing something special you're like oh i want to do that too you know so kind of we're always trying to create that foam and try to make it feel special and that's why we always live it like open-ended to the coffee shop we give them like the pistachio latte recipe but then we always tell them like this is a starting point you can do it as simple as possible and stick to the recipe or you can get creative and do a pistachio tiramisu matcha or you know like a pistachio this Pumoni cake topping, you know?

23:32Francine Voit:So it's always fun to see how all this like coffee shop can get creative and come up with the craziest ideas.

23:39Nicola Buffo:Yeah, it's really cool. And I love how much both of you are referencing how much you've built this business in lockstep with your community to some degree IRL, right? With like the sampling in real life and getting feedback from people in real time. But also it seems like on social media as well, you really have a connection. with your audience. Is it true that you were initially reticent to post on Instagram?

24:04Francine Voit:We were. When we started in college, Pistake was born as a social media project. But in the beginning, we were living in a dorm room. The lighting was terrible. Like the utensils for cooking were even worse. And we didn't want to start Instagram until after college. But my professor luckily told us that if we were not going to start posting, he would have failed the class and I would have to stay an extra year. So that was kind of like the kick in the butt to, okay, let's start posting on Instagram so that we can get out of college as soon as possible. But that was super helpful because we started building the community since the early days.

24:42Francine Voit:And we took them along the journey, developing the product, developing the labels, understanding what they wanted to see from us. And to these days, our community is an amazing resource for us. they're like they help us guide us through what's next for example we just launched a pistachio date bark it's our first limited edition skill and that came out of our community because we started seeing so many people using pistachio with dates like date barks cutting a date open and putting some inside and just like how many people are tagging us in like recipes with dates so whenever we started thinking about like what can come next what's the next product and we had this idea for like a date bark it was kind of like a no-brainer because we already knew people love pistachio end dates and this collab is doing amazing it's so beyond our expectations so it's been doing super well and and it's because it was something that was coming from our community and it wasn't something that we just came up out of the air but it was something that people were asking for you know and I feel like that's been kind of like the trend since our early days like really making products that we already know someone would buy instead of coming up with a product and then

25:57Nicola Buffo:hoping for someone to be interested in it yeah I feel like our community from the very beginning when we opened our Instagram account was literally just our friends and then our social media like the social media professor that Nico had and then like peers like I had graphic design people and we had like interior design friends and then it was just like us asking people what they wanted to see and I think we never strayed away from that too much and we started kind of like building this brand in public because we had to because part of our school assignment was like to make this account a conversation instead of us trying to sell something because we had nothing to sell so us continuing to do that kind of like helped build this strong community of people that always felt like our friends and like we always respond to them we always answered the dms we're always like trying to build this conversation because we genuinely want their help.

26:47Nicola Buffo:Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to do what we're doing. Like it's hard to say yes to this label without getting the confirmation from our community or getting the confirmation from your co-founder. But I think it's like it's already lonely as it is to be a founder. So having that community to lean back on and then having your co-founder to lean back on, those are all things that like we'll never take for granted. And it's free. Yeah. And it's mutually beneficial, right? It's like you're serving them and they're serving you. To that end, like, are there things, elements of the product perhaps that you two have felt particularly connected to that because of the feedback of your community, it steered you in a different direction?

27:26I think Grunchy came from our community.

27:30Nicola Buffo:That was the first product that genuinely came from people's comments, people's emails that we were getting. People were telling us that when we were first making our product, we had these little bits of sugar inside. And it was because we couldn't find powdered sugar that was organic and good for you. So we were just grinding it ourselves in a little Vitamix and like sometimes it wouldn't come out perfect. So there was like little bits of sugar and we were getting these comments and these DMs and these emails from people saying that they like that there's a little crunch in the product, but they don't like the fact that it's sugar as the crunch.

28:04Nicola Buffo:So we were like, okay, maybe there's something we should do about this. And then we eventually found a supplier for powdered sugar and we made our creamy as creamy as possible without any of those like bits of sugar. and we were like, well, what if we take away all the crunch that people are literally telling us that they like, then we should just do something with it. And that's when the idea of Crunchy came out. And it was kind of perfect timing because it also happened at the same time as Dubai chocolate. So everybody thinks it was a Dubai chocolate pistachio spread. And we're like, no, this is Crunchy.

28:32Nicola Buffo:She's here to stay. It's not a trend. She's here to stay. I mean, I think there's also something that I'm always curious about when it comes to feedback like this, which is that it's so valuable, right? And also you have to be careful not to listen to like absolutely everything that's coming your way. And sometimes you can be dealing with something that's kind of just like a loudest voice in the room scenario and shouldn't necessarily mean that you should pivot. Do you two have a process for assessing, okay, this is feedback that we really ought to listen to. And maybe this is stuff that we should let fall by the wayside.

29:06Francine Voit:I feel like we always try to listen to all the feedback that we get we write it down we take notes of it and then we try to see patterns with it and I think also all this feedback really helped us make some of the like biggest decisions for example when we launched we were originally selling in glass jars and we had hit a point in which glass jar was getting impossible to ship all the jars were breaking and we wanted to like pivot to plastic and we didn't want to because we felt like our customer would not have understand the switch to plastic because it would have felt like almost like a downgrade or something like that.

29:41Francine Voit:And then we put out a survey and we got like one out of like, I don't know, 200 responses of people saying, I will not buy pistachio if it was in plastic. And 199 people were going to buy it anyway. So I think our community also helped us make some decisions that for us seemed like super big and super important, but kind of pointed us in the direction of like what really mattered to them. And what really mattered to them wasn't that we were coming in plastic or that we had a little bit of sugar or that we had a little bit of salt but was it a product tasted amazing and I think that's kind of been our north star since the beginning and since we really understand what our community values and people buy us because we taste delicious they don't buy us because we have low sugar they don't buy us because we have no seed oil they don't buy us because of other things they buy us because of taste after we understood that we were like, okay, let's really hone in on being the best tasting pistachio products.

30:39Francine Voit:And how can we continue being the best tasting pistachio product?

30:42Nicola Buffo:Yep. I think that's exactly what I was going to say. Like finding your sort of like writing down your core values, like from the beginning as a business, and then like not steering away from it based on the feedback that you get. Like this feedback that people were telling us that there was like bits of sugar didn't have anything to do with our like mission or our core values. So of course, we were going to implement it if it was a problem for a lot of people. But sometimes we get the comments that like, we should make a product with no sugar. And we're like, yeah, sure, we can do that. But it wouldn't taste good.

31:11Nicola Buffo:And our whole thing is that pistachios are supposed to taste good. So we can make like a different product, but we have to make it taste good. And if it has to have like a little bit of sugar, a little bit of fat, then so be it like this is an indulgence. It's not supposed to be like a keto healthy diet food. But if you want that, you can get it somewhere else. It sounds like the core value to end all core values for you is it has to be delicious. Are there other core values that you're living by? It's like taste, flavor, innovation. What else, Nico?

31:42Francine Voit:I would also say surprise and delight our community. We always try, going back to the community aspect, we're always trying to like surprise and delight them, whether it's like a new product, whether it's like a little extra mini jar that we throw in on an order, whether it's, you know, answering to DMs or if someone sends us an email, like, you know, I'm responding within 24 hours. I'm responding with exclamation marks. You know, I'm not responding like I'm a bot. So I feel like that trying to be human, trying to be a friend more than a brand to people. If someone DMs us on Instagram, like we don't have a automatic response that is like, oh, our team got this.

32:19Francine Voit:We'll get back to you within 24 hours. No, we just respond to them, you know so I feel like that like human touch is something I always try to like bring forward and we try to be people's friends almost like you know a brand that they rely on and it's almost I feel like we're trying to be what Nutella was for us when we were kids you know that special treat that moment of joy the little kinder surprise that you have we're trying to bring to be that for adults so be that like you know that spoonful that you have before going to sleep that little treat that you have whenever you're feeling a little down or whenever you're wanting to treat yourself, you know, so trying to be a companion, a delightful companions in people's lives.

33:01Nicola Buffo:The two of you got very early offers from both Target and Shark Tank. Can you tell me what they were and how you navigated that?

33:13Francine Voit:Yeah, Shark Tank reached out to us before we launched and they we had a few posts that went viral before launching and they reached out to bring us on the show and it was like an amazing opportunity for us obviously we're watching shark tank since college and that's where we were learning everything about business being to art school kids but i think another common theme of our journey has been learning when to say no or what to say no to and what to say yes because we knew that we were not ready for it and by the time the show aired we would not have been ready so yes it would be an amazing opportunity an amazing experience but it would have probably put us in a very bad position if not had put us out of business so I think something that was super important for us was learning what to say yes to and what to say no I think when you're like starting out there's so many shiny things and so many like things that you can pursue.

34:13Francine Voit:You're so new, so young into the business. There's so many opportunities to grow. And I think something that like one of my biggest advice that I always give other founders is really learning, understanding where you are in the journey and understanding what you can say yes to and actually go through. And we're a big fan of like, yes, and figure it out. But I think there's like, you can figure it out to a point. So try to always say yes, if it pushes you to get better. and get better faster, but be mindful of where you are in your journey and not put yourself in a situation in which you say yes to something that you're not able to follow through with.

34:51Nicola Buffo:Yeah, I think it was just a part of our scrappy beginning. Like we couldn't launch on Amazon, on TikTok, on Instagram. Like we couldn't launch everywhere at once because we knew that we didn't have the foundation built yet. It was just us two and two people can only do so much. So we decided to start on Shopify because it was the least expensive option and we could do it ourselves. We could fulfill it from our apartment like we did. And we could kind of like manage the amount of orders, track all the inventory and make sure that like we were not going to sell out or have any out of stocks because we knew that in retail that can really hurt a business.

35:28Nicola Buffo:So for us, that was our capacity. That was like the bandwidth that we had. And then we were like, let's figure it out, maybe like expand gradually as we get more funding or as we improve our cash flow. And the thing with Shark Tank was that we knew that we would be out of stock if we got on Shark Tank. So it didn't make sense for us to say yes. And the same with Target. We wouldn't be able to say yes to that because we didn't have the capacity. We still don't have the capacity to launch in any national retailer like that. So I feel like you as a founder have to know when to say no, because there's so many flashy things that are going to come at you in the beginning.

36:07Nicola Buffo:and if you say yes, like it can put you out of business unless you have millions of dollars invested in your company or you come from money, then you can probably say yes to everything. Right, you were working with really minimal runway at the time, very much bootstrapped. I think this is also a place where having a co-founder can be really helpful, right? It's like one of you might be like, oh, we should say yes to the like the shiny thing and the other person can kind of hold up the mirror and say, we're not quite ready yet. Were the two of you in sync in those moments? Yeah, I feel like we had to talk to other people about all of this too.

36:44Nicola Buffo:Like it was hard to know what the right step was to take since we were still so new at this. So I feel like we started reaching out to people that had gone on Shark Tank because we were afraid of saying no and then like them never reaching out again and being like, okay, you're done. I'm going to find another pistachio brand. So we talked to like a couple other founders that went on there and they told us that they also like they went on the second time that they had reached out or they went on the third time they would reach out. And like, this is how the sales went for them. And then we kind of like laid out all the pros and cons.

37:13Nicola Buffo:And we both kind of came to the decision that it didn't make sense. But if that they really wanted to have us on the show, that we could reach out in the next year, in the next two years, because one year still wasn't enough since we were pre-launch. And yeah, we'll see how it goes. Are there things that you have either said yes to that turned out to be mistakes or things that you look back on that you said no to that in hindsight you wish you hadn't? I think the agency was just like wrong for us at the time. I don't think it was a wrong decision. Do you want to just expand on that a little bit?

37:48Nicola Buffo:I think that's fine. An element of it didn't feel quite right. Yeah. You kind of have to think about what channel is going to be right for you. So we did say yes to a TikTok shop agency last year, kind of like right before the holiday season. And what happened was it was the wrong agency for us and they were making videos that were completely different than the stuff that we post and the stuff that works for us organically. So it wasn't working well and we pretty much lost$20 ,000 because of this agency. But when we realized that this was wrong and that we knew that we could find someone that could help us do this better, we switched agencies and it's been doing really great so far in the past month that we have switched.

38:34So I feel like there is some trial

38:37Nicola Buffo:and error around saying yes and no, because it could have been right for us if we had gotten that agency, the one that we work with now in November of last year, maybe we would have sold out of like all of our inventory that we had over the holidays. Or maybe we would be at a different place at the end of the year revenue wise. But I feel like you live and you learn as a founder too. So we had to have some mistakes to get the right one. And now we do have the right one. The two of you are life partners in addition to being business partners. My husband and I work together. I get it. When it works, it works.

39:15Nicola Buffo:In what ways do you feel like it serves Pistachio? And in what ways can it be challenging? I think there's a level of trust that you have with your partner

39:26Francine Voit:that sometimes you wouldn't have with a co-founder if it was just another co-founder that you find like online on LinkedIn. So I think that like we both have like such a level of trust in each other that, and we also have like our kind of area of expertise. So if Fran makes a decision, I might not be 100 % agreeing on it. And I'll tell her that my point of view is a little bit different, but ultimately I trust her that she's making a decision for the good of the business. and she believes that that's the right decision to move forward with. So I think the level of trust is something that you don't really find elsewhere.

40:04Francine Voit:And I also think that like being in this together and living and breathing pistachio together really makes it easier to not having to explain yourself too much. If I was in a different relationship with someone else and I would be working on pistachio on the side, I think someone would not really understand what it is to be a founder, what it is like to be a founder, and why sometimes it's 11 p.m. and you're sending an email, and why sometimes it's like a Sunday and you need to stop somewhere to do something, you know? I feel like the fact that we are so deep into it makes it easier and we have to do less of explaining to each other because we're growing a business together.

40:47Nicola Buffo:He did it. there's um there's something that the duplass brothers the filmmaking duo the duplass brothers mark and j duplass um said that i always thought was so interesting which was like you know sometimes one of them will be the director and someone the other one will be the writer sometimes they're both producing right they wear different hats depending on the project but they decide who the ultimate decision maker is for each project do you guys have spaces like that where you're like okay if we're disagreeing one of this person is the one who has the veto power here no but i feel

41:18Francine Voit:like we kind of have it in a way like i feel like yeah i know what you're in charge of and you what i'm in charge of so i feel like maybe it's not like written down like this project is your project this project is my project but i feel like we have an understanding of like where our expertise falls into and who will kind of like make the decision in like which area yeah i mean i think

41:41Nicola Buffo:it's about also keeping each person like in whatever they're doing keeping them accountable for that so if I trust Nico as my co-founder then and he's doing all the operations then why would I have any say into like how our relationship with the supplier is and vice versa like if I'm doing all the social media why would he have any say on like what time I can post my reel you know like so I think we do have it it's not like higher arching like it's not about maybe investors or things like that, where it can be like a little bit more like the higher level sort of things. But I feel like for the things that we do for the departments that we're kind of like working on, we do have like we're our own bosses for that.

42:22Nicola Buffo:And I feel like that level of trust works because if we were both like micromanaging each other, then I think it would be really hard to get anything done.

42:30Francine Voit:I think that came after in the beginning. We're like always taking meetings together, always doing everything together, always sending emails together. And I feel like it was great in the beginning because I feel like we both got to like really understand the basis of like all these different like areas of the business but as we started growing realized that we needed to like really divide our areas and one of us took over one side and one of us took over the other side and there's always things that we come back together and like talk about it we have our we kind of have our one-on-ones every week in which we talked about how the week before went what we can do the week ahead and all of that kind of stuff.

43:07Francine Voit:But I think it's super important, both in the early days, to do as much as possible together to really understand each other and to really get a sense of how the business works in 360 degrees. But also once you start growing a little bit, for each to have our own areas of expertise and for us to focus on what we do best.

43:29Nicola Buffo:Yeah, I mean, we were coming from art school too. So we have to think about the fact that like none of us had, neither of us had any experience, even like with an outside job or with operations or with business and like any of those things. So we kind of had to learn it together because we didn't have a choice that like one of us like had a degree in business management, like nobody had that. So it was just both of us trying to figure it out together. And I feel like that helped us be like, oh, OK, maybe I like this part of the business a little bit more. Or maybe I'm really bad at this. So like you should try and take it over.

44:02Nicola Buffo:And that's kind of how we started. I definitely wouldn't recommend it to everyone because I do think we lost a lot of time like taking these meetings together in the beginning. But if someone has like already the skill set for one part of the business, like why wouldn't they just take that over and the other person take over the other part? You guys started with like the in the humblest of fashion, right? Sampling at farmers markets. Then you launched D2C, which is thriving. You have these wholesale accounts throughout the country. You're popping up in these bespoke fashions in cafes. You launched your first limited edition SKU recently with the date bark, which I'm going to go by as soon as we are done recording.

44:43Nicola Buffo:What's next for Pistachio?

44:45Francine Voit:I think continue growing, continue. Our mission is trying to make it easier for people to shop us. Right now, our distribution is still fairly concentrated in the Pacific Northwest. aside from like the few independent stores. But we really want to grow pistachio into more stores nationwide to make it easier for people to shop us. And while we do that, try to make it accessible to as many menus as possible. We see the food service and the grocery channel growing together hand in hand. So we really want you to go to your grocery shop and find pistachio on the shelf and then go to your local cafe and find pistachio there and then go to your local ice cream and find pistachios or topping.

45:25Francine Voit:So we really want to be there for people at all these different touch points and really make it easy for people to eat more pistachios.

45:34Nicola Buffo:Yeah, outside of just needing more product too, because we have been kind of going at the limit every single month with the amount that we're making currently in our space. We just need to continue growing and being in a bigger space. And we're probably going to start working with a couple of co-packers too, to help us like meet the demand that we're having. but but we're looking forward to like being in all of these coffee shops and all these food service accounts because I feel like that is where people are really looking for us and that's where they find us the easiest so it's doing really well just like that because people can taste pistachio literally anywhere they go and the mayo and the mayo yeah we love collabs cues so if AO is listening we would be happy to do a collabs cue there you go you heard it here first Molly.

46:24Nicola Buffo:Thanks to both of you, Fran and Nico, for being here. This was so lovely. Thank you.

46:29Francine Voit:Thank you so much. It was great being here.

46:32Nicola Buffo:Our show is produced by Shuang Esther Shan, Gogo Zoger, and Alicia Clark. Our engineers are Matt Schwartz and Miku Betlam. Rachel Reich is our senior content lead, and I'm your host, Serena Smith. For more Shopify Masters, hit that follow button. We drop every Tuesday and Thursday. And be sure to follow and subscribe to our YouTube channel so you can catch our video interviews as well. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. Thank you.