Strategies for Finding Product Market Fit

0:00I'm thinking like, well, if I'm going to make one, I should maybe make more in a potential business idea out of that. And as I started contemplating on that, it all kind of made sense. Hey, how's it going? I'm Shuang Esther Shan, back with another episode of Shopify Masters, your companion for starting and building a business. Bill Bashad thought he fully wrecked his chances of ever being active again when he injured his back. But his whole life shifted when he discovered the healing benefits of cold water therapy, which became a part of his daily routine. And like any great entrepreneur, Bill noticed a white space.

0:43Most of the plunge tanks on the market didn't look nice in his backyard and they were complicated to put together. So he launched Renew Therapy. Today, his company is known as a leading multi-million dollar brand within the wellness space. Bill and his team have mastered product development while securing celebrity partnerships and endorsements. I'm excited we were able to steal Bill away here for a little bit to have him on the show. Bill, welcome. Pleased to be here. Yeah. So Bill, you discovered Cold Plunge almost by accident and you fell in love with it. How did it click for you that this was something you wanted to do every single day?

1:24And you thought maybe others would actually want to do the same. In about 2016, I had a back surgery, injury, then a surgery, all the post therapy and all that. And around that time, I had learned about Wim Hof. And so I was kind of listening to everything I could find on him. And the breath work was really helpful. And for the cold part, I was like, ah, you know, my shower doesn't really get that cold. So I was, for a while, always trying to figure out how to do cold without hollowing ice, especially if you're just having a back surgery. And it turned out that a good friend of mine, he's like an architect engineer, and he's also into Wim Hof.

2:10And so we were talking about for like months just here and there, like about the different construction techniques and types of materials and things like that. and ultimately it started out because I couldn't find anything online. There was just, there was one option, one company, and it was pretty janky. And so I thought, well, I could just make my own. And that's kind of where it started was just to make one for myself and one that I would be happy to look at in my landscape, yard setting. I'm really big on aesthetics and design. and I'm not going to just put some bathtub out there with a chiller next to it.

2:55So I wanted something that would be, you know, add to our space, our outdoor space. And so that was the trick. And so I kind of contemplated on it for a while. And I guess it was early 2019 on that trip to Mammoth. I was driving up. I'm sore, which occasionally happens. I'm pretty active. I mean, my sports are surf, ski, and tennis. And I've had two surgeries on this shoulder, one on this. And, you know, I'm 55, pretty banged up. And so I'm driving in and I'm like, this is going to be a tough trip. So maybe I'll just ski with the kids and eat Advils like every four hours. So that was the plan.

3:44And then we did get there, checked in. Kids want to go to the pool. I'm at the pool with the kids and I see this hot tub with a yellow tape around it like that so it's broken don't go in there I look at it the water looks very clean and put my hand in there very cold and so I decided to jump in and do some cold water therapy and ultimately I woke up the next day to start you know a full day of skiing and I felt good and I thought well what if I just do it before I ski. That's probably good, right? So I did that. I skied all day. And then I, you know, at the end of the day, I came back and jumped in again.

4:22So and it's it was it was really working, I could feel the difference. And I was a bit surprised because I'm a bit of a skeptic with Oh, you just do this and it reduces your inflammation. And, and it was like proving it to myself that the claims of cold water really do work. So I just made it part of my routine for the week. Every morning and evening, I would jump in and do, you know, contrast therapy, but mostly cold plunge. I would jump in that cold water and I skied all the highest lifts, toughest runs all week. Like I ripped it and I felt better driving home than I did coming up after all that, uh, all that work on skis.

5:14Yeah. Well, it sounds like you took a week of product testing bootcamp without realizing it when you were skiing. I mean, essentially, like you mentioned, there was no industry when you first started. How do you even take that next step, right? Now you want to actually see if this is something worth pursuing as a business idea. Yeah, good point. So on the way up, the idea was still just, I'm going to make one for myself. That was the idea. On the way back, and it's my wife and I were in the front seat, kids in the back. When I drive, I'll like go through and process ideas or challenges and things like that.

6:00And I'm thinking like, well, if I'm going to make one, I should maybe make more in a potential business idea out of that. And as I started contemplating on that, it all kind of made sense. And at the time I was getting out of an industry and closing down a business I'd been in for like 27 years that I disliked. It was always something I wanted to get out of, but I always made money at it. So I just kind of kept doing it. And yeah, I was driving down the 395 and I'm looking at this mountain that I look at every time I go to Mammoth. I think it's called Mount Tom. And it's something I want to hike up and ski down like a backcountry.

6:47And every time I drive by, I'm looking at that thing. And at this drive, I'm looking at the mountain and I'm like, coming to the conclusion that I want to start a business doing cold plunge tanks. And I looked to the wife and I'm all, hey, I think I'm going to start a cold plunge business. And she's like, you should totally do that. Like, no worries. No, how are we going to do this, this or that. Just like, yeah, I could, she could see how pumped I was with doing the cold water and the breath work. And so, and it was a big change from what I'd been doing for so long and been burned out on and a hundred percent support from the wife, which, you know, it's important if you're married.

7:36I think what's incredible here is from what I understand, And your old business created emergency kits. Is that correct? That's one of them. We had a company called Emergency Case, which the product was really good. But people don't really think about emergencies. They'll get a little cheap emergency bucket or bag and put it in their car. And if you open those things up, they're bad. There's just like a false sense of security. So we had this really amazing product. But to make it right, it had a high cost. It was, you know, for a four-person family case, it was like$1 ,000. And people don't kind of want to think about that.

8:18And we just didn't get it off the ground. And then my core business prior to that was we did energy-efficient remodeling. So we did any product for a residential property that had some form of energy efficiency. We marketed, sold, and did all the construction work on those. So this is amazing because you, along with the support of your wife, felt really confident to make such a big change when you were entering your 50s to pivot and change your life. I think there's so much discourse on social media with the younger generation where they feel scared and anxious to perhaps take the plunge, start that business and chase after an idea.

9:02What's your advice to them? My advice to those folks would be to do the work, do all your product research, do whatever numbers you can, have some form of understanding of financials. Not crazy. I'm not a financial wizard, but I know how to read a balance sheet and a profit and loss. And I know where different charges get coded to, so it all kind of lines up. Because if you have good financials, then you can make good decisions. And so, in fact, I'm mentoring a, I'm an EO, Entrepreneurs Organization, and I'm mentoring a new member that's trying to get to the membership level of revenue. And he didn't understand his books.

9:50And so all of our mentorship to this point has been me helping him get his books in order so that he can make good decisions on if he wants to invest in new equipment or new locations and things like that. So I would say do the work is the biggest thing. And it's work. So you got to buckle down and find out what the marketplace is doing, how people are advertising, try to get an idea of their cost of goods and their profit margins, and see if it makes sense. And you spent a lot of time doing the work before launching. I believe it was four to five months where you were building, testing, finding production partners.

10:36What are some must-haves in a pre-launch strategy that you think everyone should think about before they commit to a production run, essentially? Yeah, so interesting enough, when I started building goal plunges, I didn't know the market was about to blow up. So there was a bit of a timing element there. But I made a product that I made it for me. meaning I want to go out every morning and I have cold clean water and I'm not messing around with it on the weekend the example I give people is like hey fish tanks are really cool to have in your house you can see the fish and all that but if you have to clean it every weekend it's kind of a lose-lose unless you can afford to just have the fish cleaner guy come over and tune up your tank.

11:33And so I didn't want anything that was going to require a lot of work for me. I wanted to be able to jump in, jump out. Maybe every month or so, I would have to change the filter, but that's it. And I wanted it to look good at my property, like a sense of pride, like a piece of art, which is kind of how I look at the cold stoic, the original. Those were my guidelines that I wanted to stay inside. I feel like those two points are so essential for any routine. You have to make it really easy for people to incorporate into their routine. And two, yeah, it's something that they actually want within their backyard or wherever else on their property.

12:18So it's integrated into their life. The thing is, going in the cold water every day is its own little challenge by itself. I do it every day, sometimes twice. and every time I'm like, ah, you know, it's like, I got to go in this thing. I always feel better afterwards. So I've kind of been through it. So if you have any like friction on that, like, oh, I have to go get ice or it's dirty or I got to clean it or you got to remove all the friction points. So it's just you, your mind, I'm going in. Well, it sounds like within your pre-launch strategy, you were really thinking about the use case. And like you said, you were like the number one customer.

13:02So you really understand how to make this use case as smooth as possible. And the other factor pre-launch that really helped you was that you did have this empty warehouse space from your previous business that you were able to leverage. Talk to us about that transition and like making sure that that was smooth and that was a resource that you can use for this new chapter? Yeah. So I own a building. It's not a big building. And I had my previous business there and it was mostly warehouse that we converted to office. So ultimately, this is before I had made this decision and I was kind of closing down the other business.

13:48And I thought, maybe I'll just sell the building, you know, because I was nervous. You go from making money since you were 13 or 14 doing paper routes all the way up to your 50s and then your income stops. Even if you have a ton of money in the bank or you're fine on assets, there's a mental challenge that it's tough. Like I went my whole life, I go get gas. I don't really look at the receipt. It's like, who cares? And now I'm like, well, a hundred bucks to fill up is actually 120. Wow. And you start, it's just a, it's a mind play. It's a perception thing that you need to overcome. And it is challenging.

14:32And it is, that's a thing that young entrepreneurs are going to have to get their head around and just be confident and do the work and go into it. and yeah i mean it's like everything else it's risk versus reward right so at this point i was i wasn't quite sure so i was like hey you know put the building on the market and this um this guy put in an offer i think they were like in the cannabis space so he's like i'll i'll do like 20 percent over asking five-day escrow here's my bank statements millions of dollars and let's let's do this and so I'd already kind of cleaned out all the office space and all that so it was kind of ready and um the deal ended up falling through uh it got canceled due to um the building complex area we're in they don't allow cannabis and when it happened I was like oh thank god I'm so glad I didn't sell my building.

15:38And so I basically had this blank slate. Like the first day I started, I went in the back and I got a tool apron and just started making benches that I could work off of. And yeah, the first week was really just me building out like a space to work in. and the first thing I built for the Coal Plunge was a wooden box with a pawn liner so that I could see how people would fit in it. I literally drove it down to South Orange County. One of my friends works out at a gym and there's like an NFL guy there, big, big, big guy. And I'm like, hey, can you just sit in this box? And I would kind of take measurements and see how he fit.

16:27And so that's how I gained my first tank dimensions that would work for big people, but not be a big, giant cold plunge. So building the first few units yourself, of course, at a certain point, you do have to look for partners that could execute on your vision and help you make more of these cold plunge units. How did that process come about? Yeah, so good question. So at this time, I'm making the cold stoic original, the version one. And although it's a great cold plunge, I couldn't build them fast enough due to the type of construction and type of material. And I was building all these in-house.

17:14I had a small team and we were building units. And ultimately, when I got the Shopify store up, I put it up, I think on like July 4th or 5th, right around the holiday. And I'm like, we'll see what happens. Yeah, I have no idea, right? And so I get an email. Hey, do you have a new order? This lady, Lori, is in Arizona. I remember her name. and I was like, whoa, like she never called. She just bought it online. And I wasn't in e-commerce prior to that. All the sales and construction-related sales we had to do was all in-home sales and very different. And here, this lady just bought the most expensive deck and the whole thing, never called, just, and there's an order.

18:13And then shortly after that, there was another one. So, yeah, I was pretty excited about that. And I called every customer, hey, thanks for the order, and just got to know a little bit about them. I can't do that anymore. We have a team that does that. But I really like that, getting to know my customers and why are they buying a cold plunge. And this lady had had a knee surgery, and the rehab wasn't working so well, and she wanted to get into cold water. It was, yeah, it's crazy. it was exciting and then you know with this the original cold stoic with the work requirements and the time it took to build those i was like i have to get a new type of production but i want to have the cold stoic 2.0 look as close to possible as the the first version because i know people like that they like the design they like the shape they like the size So that took me six or seven months to get that sorted out.

19:15And so now the units, the shell, which is built similar to like a Yeti cooler with the heavy insulation and all self-contained, those are now built in Arizona. And then we have another facility in Ohio. And so currently they ship the shells to us and then we do all the post-production in-house in our shop here. We have another shop up in Ontario, California. And from there, they directly ship out to the consumer. So we do all the build-out, the testing of the mixture, everything's working good and wrap it up, send it off. Well, amazing. It's poetic that the first order was from Arizona and part of your manufacturing is from Arizona.

20:02I didn't think of that, but yeah, good catch. Well, why is it so important to have your production in the States? And how did you go about finding the right partner to say, this is someone I want to work with? A lot of talking to people, a lot of research, a lot of finding contacts. The first vendor I used, which is in California, they didn't have the skill sets. And so that burned a fair amount of time that I wish I could get back. But I learned a lot, right? So, yeah, they just couldn't make the parts right. And so I moved all my, you know, my molds and things like that to the company in Arizona after we had a lot of discussions.

20:46And I vetted them through different outside resources. Hey, oh, yeah, this guy's really good. They have a great company. They'll serve you great. And they're still one of our top. The main guy was just down here this last week. So it's a good relationship and they make really good parts. They ship them to us on time and then we just build them out and ship them out. Amazing. Well, great to hear. It sounds like it was a very organic process and you were doing so much of the building in the early days. We're going to chat about customer education next. But first, I would love to take a moment to thank you, our listeners, for tuning in today.

21:28Wherever you're listening, make sure you are subscribed to Shopify Masters and take a moment to send us some feedback in a review. We love reading them and incorporating them into the show. Thank you so much. So it sounds like the process of building different units was also helping in customer education and really teaching more people about cold plunge in general, which I think it's also important because you're essentially building a new category. So yeah, talk to us about educating customers, using social media to just spread the word about the whole process of cold therapy in general. I started an Instagram account early on, and this wasn't anything I was familiar with, this type of marketing from my previous world.

22:19It was more like telemarketing and like door-to-door, that kind of thing. So, yeah, like the first event, I'm talking to all kinds of people that they don't even know anything about cold plunge. And so I'm like, just go in, you know, 15, 30 seconds, jump out, see how you feel. And people would come out of that first plunge and be like, wow, I feel so good. And then I would see them every morning or afternoon through those three days. And I had a lot of opportunities to speak to people about what I'm feeling and what it does for me as far as my injuries and things like that. So it was a good way to test how people thought about this.

23:05And then there's also content creators, celebrities that have really loved what you're doing and they've become partners and give endorsements. What's your advice for establishing those relationships and building on those relationships as well? Good question. So there's a lot of people that reach out and want a free tank. They don't have enough followers. The interactions aren't really there. So a lot of it's weeding through all the requests and finding the right people to work with. So I didn't do a lot of outreach, but I got a lot of input for people that were like, hey, this thing looks really good.

23:47I like how it's got like natural wood. It's I can custom different colors. And I really want to work with you on a, you know, a cold plunge. And so so we just did deals with different people based on what I thought the impact could be. And I think like cold plunging, when someone adopts it, this is something that becomes their lifestyle and you have the chance to essentially be a part of their routine every single day. How do you leverage that element to build the relationship with your customers for the long term? Well, it's really easy. The cold water does all the work. They get it, they're excited, they try it out.

24:29And then, like you say, they add it to the routine. And basically every day they're going out on their deck or their property looking at something that they like to see that offers so much to their health and to their mind and well-being. And so I just get tied to that, which is very nice. When you started Renew Therapy, you truly created this new product category. Now there's a lot more interest, a lot more competition. What are some growth strategies you're using to expand your customer base? Basically, just make the best product that people really want to have at their house. And I mean, I'm all about design and function, right?

25:17It looks good and you have to repair it every week. That doesn't work. So it has to be for people that are busy, entrepreneurs that don't have the time for another project, but want to have the benefits of cold therapy. And that's kind of where I was. And that's why I started making cold plunge tanks. Because you have to, like I was saying early, you got to reduce all those little barriers and frictions so that you can include it in your daily. And you certainly don't shy away from competition. You actually have a designated section on your website that compares Renew Therapy and its competitors.

26:03Why did you decide to do that? Well, I feel that when someone that doesn't know anything about coal plunges goes to do the research and buy one, I think that they should know everything about all the options and have – I'm trying to give them the information so they can make a decision. And sometimes it's like, hey, our price point might be a little bit too high. That's fine. They know what – they can go down to some different models, different companies and things like that. So I'm just, I'm trying to showcase what is so good about our product so that people can quickly identify the benefits and make a decision educated right there.

26:49So you name your first cold plunge unit, the cold stoic. A lot of founders struggle with branding and naming their different products. What's your advice for that? Oh, that's a fun story. Yeah, so to me, I was like, okay, I have the company name, and then I could name the products and try to have some kind of alignment. And I had this super long list of names, kind of related to cold, trying to be obscure. And I had a few I liked. And then a friend of mine in my business group, he does a lot of SEO, this company is SEO. And he was interested in a cold plan. I'm like, hey, come on down and check out, you know, the unit.

27:36And so he came down and I'm like, oh, while you're here, I want to ask you about like company names and branding and things like that. And he's like, yeah, well, let's do that. I'm like, no, just go do the cold plunge first. Then we'll do it afterwards, which is very smart because when he got out of the cold plunge, he was so high. Like he was just pumped. And he's like, well, I already know the name, man. I'm all, what's the name of my company? He's all, Renu, R-E-N-U. I'm all, yeah, I like that. Because he's in that space, so he's like, you don't want big, long names. A lot of the companies have like four letters in their name, like Hulu.

28:18Apple's like five. But to kind of keep it short and simple, easier to identify, I'm like, oh, yeah, I really like that. And so that was done. Check that off the list. I was able to get the domain and all that. And then for the product, I wanted to give tribute to one of the things that helped me get to where I was at at this point. And that was stoicism because going through a winding down a business that you've been in for 27 years, back surgery and all the other issues with life in general. I read a lot of books on stoicism about, you know, it's your perception. And it just really, I really identified with that.

29:04And so I wanted to give tribute to that. And so I thought, why don't I name it something around stoicism to give back a little bit? Maybe more people think, oh, cold stoic. Oh, I don't really know about stoicism. And maybe that opens some doors for folks and helps their lives. So yeah, I came up with the idea of the cold stoic. I feel like there's also a lot of time that's needed for you to focus on productivity and then also rest and balancing your own mental health as you're scaling the business. What's your advice for founders who are reaching that point of growth where they really need to take care of themselves before they can take care of their business?

29:48Yeah. And you mentioned productivity. That was a tough one. The way I say it is quoted by, I think, Tim Ferriss is if you own the morning, you own the day. And that's true for me. Once I get into work, it's hard for me to go work out or go jump in the sauna or something. Once you're on the train, you're on the train. So I do all my workouts and breath work and cold therapy, mostly in the mornings. weekends I'll go out like if I'm working at home I'll go jump in the plunge throughout the day jump into my stoic and um and get that little boost but uh I say morning time is you could just get up earlier like my gym my uh my training is at five I don't like to get up that early but But I'm done at six and I feel great and it's done.

30:50And then I can work all day or do whatever I have to do. As far as productivity, this is an exciting time with all the technology out there. So that can be really leveraged. And so I was having some serious challenges with too many things to do. with the growth we've had since day one, since when I put the website up, it's been just, it's crazy. And I'm grateful for that, but it presents challenges as far as operations and just generally running the business and then getting the most out of yourself. So I found a really good podcast on productivity. This guy, Sam Korkos, he works at Levels Company.