631: He Built a $125M Brain Food Brand With Just 10 People | Will Nitze

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0:39Just head to omnisend.com forward slash founder without the E to get started. All right, now let's jump back into the show. What if I told you that one entrepreneur went from hustling selling Linsanity t-shirts in his college dorm to building 125 $25 million brain food empire with just a team of 10 people. And he says, it never gets easy. You just go faster. Well, today's guest, Will Knits, the founder and CEO of IQ Bar, who's mastered the art of hyper lean growth in one of the toughest industries out there, CPG. While most food brands burn through VC money and have bloated teams, Will built a protein bar company engineered for your brain using an unconventional funding strategy and ruthless focus on unit economics.

1:25So in this episode, you're going to learn why Will believes bootstrapping is the worst thing you can do in CPG, his contrarian fundraising approach of raising less money more often to maintain control while scaling aggressively, the exact moment five years in when he knew IQ Bar could be a massive company and how he pivoted from direct to consumer to really cracking major retailers like Costco and Whole Foods and why he treats building a company like a knife fight that requires constant reinvention to survive. So if you're building a physical product business or you just want to learn how to grow faster with less, this is an incredible conversation that's going to change how you think about scaling your brand.

2:09Hear the stories, learn the proven methods and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to the Founder Podcast with Nathan Chan.

2:23will you went from selling linsanity t-shirts in your dorm to projecting 125 million dollars in top line revenue for iq bar this year with a team of just 10 people what was that time where you knew that you know software sales when you realized brain food was like really a viable category? I still don't. You know, you know, you never, uh, nothing was viable until it's a hundred year old company, uh, on the long run. But I guess, um, when did I know that it could be a self-sustaining business? I would say five years in. Um, but again, we're still, it's still a knife fight on a daily basis. Um, and we have changed who we are.

3:19We have changed the fundamental identity of the company and our products that, I don't know, over 10 times. Um, and by the way, the market is a moving target. So even if it's viable now, you know, Polaroid was a viable company until it wasn't until digital cameras were a thing and they didn't adapt so you can also be viable and then not viable right so every year we have to go out there and prove viability uh but yeah i would say five years was when we thought okay this could be a big company yeah okay and you started on kickstarter right you raised 73 000 talk me through how you came up with a product idea why kickstarter interesting to take uh you've also famously said that you know bootstrapping is the worst thing you can do in the cpg space so yeah talk us through like the funding and yeah yeah i mean so why kickstarter i had no money is is the like short answer why um and i the thought process was basically i want to go raise money at a pretty good valuation i want to justify at the time it was a four million dollar valuation i was like okay, if I can get some traction, I'm worth 4 million, which is like plucked out of thin air, not really based on anything.

4:38But I thought, okay, if I can generate sales, you know, tens of thousands of dollars of sales, I can convince investors that I'm not just some guy, you know, this thing has legs. And so how do you generate sales with no money to make inventory? Pre-orders. What's the big, you know, the biggest pre-order platform? Kickstarter. And I had also known of a couple other brands who had done kickstarter successfully food and bev is not really a great category for kickstarter board games electronics things like that are much better it's more inventions and stuff yeah yeah totally so it's not it wasn't like perfect uh but it was the best way to start like i wouldn't i wouldn't do it differently than how we did it yeah and so when it comes to raising money starting a business why do you think it's like the worst thing you can do to bootstrap when it comes to cbg space well i don't think everything is so so so so contextual so when you make food and beverage products generally speaking these are not this isn't jewelry this isn't perfume these are not 80 percent 70 percent margin businesses.

5:52These are 30 % margin businesses out the gate that you can expand gross margins such that you can get it to call it 50%. And so, yeah, I mean, unless you have a rich uncle or you're rich or whatever, you need some money to physically manufacture a bunch of stuff, which costs a lot of money. And then you will be chasing cash conversion forever if you are growing fast, which is the entire point of startups to grow. That's the definition of a startup is a company that is started and then grows fast thereafter. And so all of your production runs, manufacturing runs will get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.

6:39So even is after you turn profitable, you're still living hand to mouth because you're putting everything into inventory because you're going to need more inventory because you're going to sell more product the next month. So that's just not conducive to bootstrapping. It just isn't. And so you could technically bootstrap. You could say, I'm going to get all the X, Y, and Z credit card that has 60 day payment terms, and I'm going to do all this crazy stuff. But the reality is you will grow slower by doing all of that. Even if it's technically possible and can work, you will grow slower. Let's say 50 % slower.

7:17So is it worth it to grow 50 % slower and own 20 % more of your business? I don't know. Maybe for some people. Certainly not for me. I think that's a bad trade-off. But again, I'm building a company to sell. That is the purpose of what we're building here is a get to sale and hopefully be long lasting thereafter. But once you take in an investment dollars, that is the point to sell. And so, you know, how do you sell? You create a high growth, profitable company and all that. But it's just that the nature of the game we're playing is an old school unit economics game and economies of scale game.

8:02So you have to get to high volume to right size your financials in categories like those that I play in. And to do that, you have to grow really fast, really quickly. And to do that, you need money. So it's nuanced, of course, because I still believe firmly you should control your company. You never want to have a boss. So it's something nuanced. And we raise money, I would say, in a sort of contrarian way. We raised less money more often. A lot of people will say, go raise two years of runway. And we did it totally different. We raised, we never raised more than one year's runway. And we bet that we could get to the next revenue tranche such that we can justify a higher valuation such that we could raise again at that higher valuation.

8:51We did that such that, you know, we raised just under$10 million, but still, you know, know i still control the company um how less money more often so i'd love to talk about the growth more but before we go into it tell me around how you came up with the product like and and as you said it food and beverages is is expensive you didn't have money you used kickstarter to get really proof of concept then to go raise money to obviously fund a decent run of your of your first run of product you said you've done at least 10 iterations um so so tell me how do you conceptualize the product? I conceptualized it.

9:33I don't know how most people do it. So I basically the first idea was brain food. I was like, yeah, let's pick a category. Well, even before that, what's the category? Cause I was interested in a lot of categories, beverage and whatnot. And I quickly learned that the unit economics for beverage were just going to mean that I would have to raise whatever 50 million dollars let's say and it's just such a beverages cpg on hard mode so it's like okay i'm not going to do that i'm going to do food and what is a category that can check like 10 boxes so one box is it works on e-com and works in brick and mortar meaning it's light long shelf life small cubic inches e-com friendly a lot of people buy it online but also a lot of people buy in brick and mortar and da da da um checkbox number two large total addressable market and growing you know blah blah blah blah and so there's a long laundry list of check boxes and bars checked all of them and also at the time i was starting roughly 2017 2018 the rx bar sale had happened they sold the kellogg's and it was this big 600 million dollar exit and i was like boom like that's like a blueprint that i can follow and so that had an impact and influence on me within bars then okay what where what where can i carve out a niche and for me brain food was this kind of cool idea because everything was body body body so it was build muscle improve digestion you know so on and so forth um but there's nothing for your brain and i thought that was so crazy because everyone has a brain.

11:13Everyone cares about how their brain works. There were products like Bulletproof Coffee at the time that were geared towards mental acuity. So clearly there was demand. It just didn't exist in this form factor in this category. But that was the original thesis was like, if I make brain food, they will come. And that was wrong, by the way. But I think it was a half decent thesis. It was a starting point. And that was the... And then in terms of how I actually made it the beauty of bars is you can make it in your kitchen you get a kitchen aid and a bunch of ingredients you throw them in a bowl and you mix it and you have a bar and it'll probably be terrible and you know you're gonna have to iterate a zillion times but um if you just put in the brute man hours you can get to a really good prototype um of course like there's so much more work to do because then you get into you know how much what are your cogs um is this viable can i hit a price point that's going to move units on on shelf like there's so much more but the starting point is not all that complicated yeah and how many man hours do you think it took for you to get to a place where you felt comfortable with the first prototype bar thousands thousands yeah just mixing around in the kitchen yeah i mean i spent a full year uh so what what's what's a work year right a work year is 2080 hours 40 hours a week times 52 weeks right so a work year is multiple thousands of hours and it took me a full like a year and a half really to and and that was working at nights and on weekends i had a full-time midnight every day and then I would work all weekend and um because I knew nothing I had no background in it I didn't even know anyone who had a background in it I was like truly starting from zero and so I just had to build up that muscle memory and then I had a lot of like sort of rabbit holes I went down that ultimately I pulled myself out of you know so I started with brain food right so what is good for your brain curcumin resveratrol all these kind of wonky inputs, but have a bunch of data that says they're good for your brain.

13:39Well, cool. Let's put those in a bar. Oh, wait, if I put curcumin in a bar, it turns my fingers orange when I touch it and it doesn't taste good. Well, not going to use that. Like resveratrol is a compound in grapes that's good for your brain. Let's put incredible compound. Let's put it in the bar. Oh, wait, the bar is going to cost$10. Like pull that out. Yes, it's there's so much start and stop going on, let alone getting, we actually made our lives a lot harder too, because we, you know, the thought was, let's be super low sugar and super low net carb. And it turns out it's just incredibly hard to make something that has more or less no sugar in it and have it taste good.

14:25It's just, and have it be clean label. You can go the Celsius energy drink route and put and low sugar and low to no sugar but tastes great well yeah but you're using a lab made ingredient so if you if you want to be low sugar and high protein and clean label and taste good that's really really really really hard i mean it takes years and years so we definitely like did not make it easy on ourselves and i think look that level of naivety is usually how a lot of families step into a space right because if you knew how how difficult would be you probably wouldn't do it right i probably would do it but i would uh i would think a lot harder about it that's always a funny one like if i knew would i still do it i think i still would because here's the thing i knew the alternative i had a job out of college and i was selling software to oil and gas companies and i just really i was like insanely not passionate about it and i just you know it's like most people you dread monday and you're making powerpoint decks and flying to the client delivering them and you're just like oh i can't do this for 34 years and so that i'm so glad i did that because i i was able to juxtapose that whenever things got hard entrepreneurial or entrepreneurially i could juxtapose that and be like but at least it's not that you know so i would trade that for anything yeah i look i i i respect your honesty i remember when i started founder i was doing the exact same thing and i had a similar drive to you i i just wanted to do work i was passionate about i think life is too short to not do work that you don't enjoy you have money and all that kind of stuff is great but fundamentally we spend a big part of our life working.

16:20Does that mean that you have to start a business? No, but you definitely need to do work that you enjoy. And I didn't enjoy the work that I did. And that was a big driver for me. And there's part of me that misses those early days as well. Like it was less care, less responsibility, a lot less stress. It was just fun, like more solo operator. So I really respect the fact that you've kept your team intentionally really really small i don't want to talk about that so you know you guys are on track to do 120 million plus will you be able to do that last year okay that was last year okay so you've done 120 million so you've got 10 people like revenue per employee is is insane it's like 10 mil um do you think that is how sustainable is it to have that less amount of people extremely sustainable we were doing i mean stupidly high revenue with like five people uh we i mean you can build a five million dollar business as as one person like there's no question so it's just part of it's a little bit of a misnomer of like how many humans are working on the brand more than the w-2s that you know on the team right so we have we created what's called what i like to call all hub and spoke models.

17:46We have the hub, which is, let's just say 10, 50. We now actually have 14 people, but they're all just like savages. That's the hub. There's spokes that come out of each of those people to third parties. We have a paid ads agency. We have an Amazon agency. We have a Costco broker. We have a Walmart broker. We have a Target broker. We have a blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There's a lot of spokes and there's a lot of humans working on it. There's just not a lot of there's the hub is just very tight very intentionally so and we've like one of the things i realize is a lot of people give you advice on how to professionalize and they're like quote unquote and they're like oh you need to like build out this team and this and that way and for a while when you're a naive entrepreneur you you believe them and you're like oh well they must know because they're older than me or they did it before or whatever and we've tried to build out the hub to be bigger and we've just like always regretted it uh we've found that it's better to keep it small and like the analogy i would use is let's just say you're one person who has two holds two different things in your head at the same time so let's say you're a COO slash CFO.

19:04That would be an example. Or you're the CMO, but you're also the head of e-com. If that person is a savage and they can hold those two things in their head, the amount of dots they can connect in their head is insane. And it requires no meetings. It's ultra efficient. It just happens in their head. And so they can say, oh, that thing operationally happened. Here are the five financial ramifications of that. And therefore, I'm going to go take this action. When you have two separate people, it's, oh, this operational thing happened. Let's set a meeting with finance for Tuesday. And then the meeting, half the meetings, like getting finance up to speed on what happened.

19:44Oh, let's talk it through. Why did it happen? Okay. What are the financial ramifications? Finance says, oh, let's do another meeting later this week and I'll have a report on what those are. So then you have another meeting and then blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now multiply that by like 100. When you have a big organization, you're always having meetings about stuff that happened. If all the people just held multiple things in their own head, you just don't have that many meetings and you move way faster. So that's just been a major learning for me. It's like if we can keep the core small and latch on third parties who, by the way, are scalable.

20:24So we could 2x our Amazon business and our agency can just scale up what they're doing much quicker than we can scale up hiring internally then we can then it's ultra sustainable and what a fascinating approach don't you find though like and i'm asking from experience like agencies are great they have domain expertise but they have like so many competing priorities because they've got so many different clients oftentimes from my experience you could start with an agency like for example media buying like you know facebook ads whatever but then over time you if you brought that capability in house you get a better outcome because that one person is just obsessed versus a media buyer that is focused on 10 different accounts like that that's just from my own personal experience i'm curious to hear your take i think you have to decide what is your core competency and there's no right answer, right?

21:23Some people who are really good at buying ads, that is their core competency as a company. They are not good product people. Almost never do you see someone be good, like truly world class at two, three things. Usually it's one thing. And so they're like, we're great at buying media and we're going to go into like some commodity category because we can just buy a product off the shelf and we can move it because we're really good at paid media. Cool. That's your core competency. You can build a company around that. Our core competency for the most part is operations and minimizing cogs and maximizing economies of scale and output and hitting really aggressive price points.

22:09It's not paid ads. And that's fine. Like My answer to you would be like, if your core competency is what ours is, you're actually okay with an 85 % result. You know that if you were better at paid ads and you hired someone who's a beast and you can maybe get that to 95, maybe even 100, but the model works at 85. And so just create an internal model such that you can have, you can know that the agency is technically not as good as a unicorn that you hire internally. But if it still works, that's more scalable. And by the way, unicorns are like unicorns. So sure, it's easy to say, just hire some really, really good person.

22:58But why are they working for you? How are you progressing their career? You're going to have to pay them a lot of money. They're going to want equity like none of which is true about it an agency so i think it's in a way oversimplification to say like yeah just like hire some beasts um i think hiring is the hardest thing in the whole freaking game in my opinion yeah yeah i i i agree with you a thousand percent it's like your number one job as a founder is is to get the right people on the bus so i'm curious how do you find these people that are effectively effectively like 10x 10x uh team members or 100x marry them my uh is the my first piece of advice now uh my wife it was uh joined two years in and she's just like so good and competent at what she does and she runs our whole e-commerce engine she's kind of like the ceo of iqbar ecom um and that is an epic unlock because she cares so much um and i trust her and like i just don't have to meddle in her affairs she just has it um we hired our first one of our first investors who's our head of sales and he's so invested literally in a good outcome so he's just he just works 10 times harder because he owns like a decent chunk of the the company so it's like how do you find how do you get these hacks of because really what it comes down to is do they care how much do they care and so your wife's gonna care a lot and someone who's an early investor is gonna care a lot um but of course you'll exhaust that group of people who like really really care and then it's like okay how do you find how do you you know find that next tranche of of people um we you know what honestly one it's a really boring like hack but has been really impactful finding a great recruiter we i never liked the idea of a recruiter because it's like it's expensive you pay a percentage of the person's salary.

25:20And so I thought, oh, I can find someone. Even if you can, it's still not the right move because this isn't what you do all day, every day. The recruiter, literally all they do all day, every day is vet these people, talk to these people. And so we got this guy, Jay, and he's just like, he's an animal. We'll give him a role. Within a week, he'll have like three excellent people people i don't even know how he finds them like i would take me a very long time to find these people he has them and he hand delivers them here you go and um that was just a huge unlock for getting that next try so um and then like the only other thing i would say is you have to make hard decisions so some people will not work out and and you this is not new advice like everyone says this but it's so true you have to move fast um on people and we you know you're gonna have a 50 hit rate and and that's okay just build that into your mental models of like i just hired this person they seem great 50 chance they're not yeah it's uh it's interesting to hear your experience on recruiters yeah man i can't relate to that like i i actually did like this exercise of the past like you know five six years of people that we've hired and i trace back that unfortunately and i thought the recruiter like the competent people like like yeah i couldn't crack that one like yeah my best have come from usually either job boards or people that we know and and through the network people you know is best right and that's why i hired my wife that's why i hired the investor like and uh referrals are great right like if people especially if you bring someone over and they're like hey just so you know i've worked with this other person for 10 years and they're so good and they already have that report great like easy hire i agree i i love that that's my favorite i just found like from my own personal experience and like we like you said at the start of this podcast like it's it's always contextual it's always situational it's not one size fits all it's all your own experience but i found that if a if a recruiter finds an absolute beast and pulls them out of your business that pulls them out of that business they're somewhat mercenary like and so then if another opportunity comes around that that like yeah and even still even if you've got traction all these different things you know it was like a couple of pieces you know yeah yeah so that's just from my experience the other thing too i mean this is maybe obvious success cures all like what you're saying is so true like the mercenary thing if you keep winning and growing people aren't gonna leave unless you're just like a horrible person or it's like a truly horrible experience but it just does help if your business is on an upward trajectory it just does um so you will retain people you will retain people longer and and have better people if the business is doing better.

28:44I agree. So let's talk. Okay. So I think we've got a pretty good headline, like nine figure business with only 10 employees. That's pretty impressive, man. I speak to a lot of founders. So let's talk about the retail piece because in the first six months, because this will be helpful. We have a lot of e-com founders that are part of our community. In the first six months, you landed 4 ,000 CVS stores. but on the first day of production the rappers wouldn't seal how'd you resolve that how did you maintain not losing that contract and how'd you even get that contract and what it cost you so for starters that was uh not the right place to launch but uh you know if i knew then what i know now i would do quite a few things differently but um i don't regret it we we were in boston at the time and cvs is fairly local they're like 45 minutes away in providence rhode island and i knew a guy who had gotten his product into cvs and cvs at the time was thinking like oh we're this old kind of stodgy retailer and we need to innovate and get a younger person walking in the doors and so let's take on like startup-y brands that are on trend you know their keto or their whatever pastel colored gut health gummies or you know how do we appeal to millennials and younger let's say and so anyway that I knew this guy who had gotten his product into a set that was kind of like that type of products and he connected me with the people who got them in at CVS and they're like an innovation SWAT team type people.

30:30I talked to them, they like trialed the product and they said, yeah, this is cool. Let's give it a try. And yeah, one thing led to another very quickly. And they're like, okay, if we put in a PO for, I think it was like 3 ,500 doors, could you fulfill it? And I was like, hell yeah, I could. And of course i couldn't there's no way we were with at the time a tiny co-packer that could not make that much product and so i said yes and then immediately thereafter i turned to the guy alex who was running our ops i was like dude we need to figure out how to make 250 000 bars uh so within a span of like a month we found a new co-packer onboarded with them got materials to them and yeah we're all poised to make 250 000 bars our biggest run before that was like 25 000 bars so uh but yeah to your point i show up and i showed up at like 5 a.m because that's when these people start producing and the product mixes well slabs well slab is like the line that it goes on, cuts well, goes into wrappers, wrappers go into boxes.

31:46We look at the box, it looks great. We're high-fiving. Our whole team is there. And then the line manager walks up to me and goes, we have a problem. The wrappers aren't sealing. I was like, what? Like, how is that even possible? And so anyway, it was a faulty glue pattern on the wrapper and wrappers didn't seal so we scrapped all the product i called like 10 different wrapper vendors one of them's like i can get you new wrappers in a week we got new wrappers produced the 250 000 bars the following week we took a hit i think i think it was like 30 grand or 35 grand which for at that time was like a death blow it was like devastating but we had this huge po from cbs and we're like we got to make it and we and we made it and then there was a whole journey thereafter of like we went into cbs's and like the back left corner and it's like random set there was like a brain health set and the product did not move and had a ton of product expire on shelf and got a bill back for i think it was like six or seven hundred thousand dollars and so that was a whole journey even after we got past the wrapper thing yeah so i'd love to know what advice would you give to founders that are looking to hit like a crack into retail like give us a source man it's so contextual so i would like look at it more like a framework than i would have oh just go here so it's massively if you're selling a beauty product of course sephora and ulti ultra are uh or ulta are the you know costco walmart targets for me um so but i would just say like here's my widget where are the most of this widget sold um and like start there and you'll get like whatever 20 accounts and then i would look at which of these accounts have the best most favorable energy and revenue out ratio.

33:59So everything we do is according to energy and revenue out. Everything. So an example of something that would be favorable on that ratio would be like, let's say Costco, because it's one SKU. And so you have, it's a variety pack. And if we can make this variety pack and price it right and get into X number of doors, it's a lot of energy but like the the revenue output is like a thousand x that energy versus a chain of six seven eight nine ten bodegas it's actually more effort up front because it's like okay we want this assortment of three different flavors and i think this like fourth flavor could work because it's kind of funky and so we'll give them the matcha bar and just a lot of thought and then we have to go through a distributor and so we have to onboard with them and there's all this paperwork and just a lot of energy.

34:57And then the revenue output's like 10 grand. But that's the conventional wisdom people say is start there. And I think it's like terrible advice. I actually think you should start. Well, first of all, you should start online because you're going to be able to iterate into product market fit, change packaging, change product, change listings etc but once you feel you have product market fit you should be going big early so go where you have the best energy and revenue out ratio it would be generally my advice and how do you still break through those doors because everybody wants to be stocked in costco So e-com is extremely helpful to do that.

35:48You were talking about Nick Shackelford, right? He's like right below you with Breeze. How did Breeze get into Fresh Market and all these other retail accounts? They built a great e-com business first. And when you build a great e-com business first, retail interest falls out of the sky. It comes 10x easier. so why did walmart reach out to us which by the way i can't tell you how different that is than us reaching out to walmart um they did that because they looked at the fastest moving bars on amazon literally that's what like the guy said to me and we were like four or something at the time and that and then we got into walmart so it's the order of operations is so important had we first knocked on Walmart store, they'd be like, get lost.

36:40I could do that for, I could waste three years doing that. But because I ordered e-com first, build traction there, Walmart just fell out of the sky. And so that's why I say another reason I say start online. So let's talk about, excuse me. So let's talk about the DTC component. You know, you said, that your wife is leading that function. But I'm curious to ask you, you rely on a low barrier to entry sample pack offer to acquire customers online. Could you talk us through the unit economics around CPA, LTV, the amount of people that move from a sample pack to then a long-term customer repeat purchase?

37:30Can you talk us through that model? And is that what you guys have always done or it took you a while to work that out? Man, my wife would answer this way better than I would because candidly, I spend most of my time on the retail side now. But generally speaking, we want to approximate trial. Think about me at a Costco handing out a free sample. How do I do that digitally? Because if the product's good and it converts well when someone puts it in their mouth, then trial is the number one cheapest way to acquire customers. So, okay, if that's true, how do I do that digitally? You have a really low price entry-level offer.

38:13And ideally you can still make money on that or at least break even on it. It may even be worth it to lose money as a loss leader if the LTV is long enough.

38:27so yeah we i mean and and we try to offer maximum variety right because each we have a seven bar sampler for instance which is very intentionally chosen for dimension purposes weight purposes but also variety purposes now you have seven at bats you only have to like one out of seven to then convert and buy that flavor in a 12 pack so we just maximum at bats and we even have now an ultimate sampler which is hydration products and coffee products because we sell we operate in those categories as well um so yeah i mean but generally i could be butchering this but i believe we try to acquire customers now for 25 or less um we look to have a ltv to cac of over two um Um, and the repeat purchase rate, like quite good in food is 30%.

39:24I think we aim for 35 to 40%. Um, and then, you know, it's like nothing novel. Subscribers are better. Like we'll push people to subscribe. Of course, default to subscription, um, give people reasons to subscribe. um but we are sort of purists as it relates to dsc we are happy if you buy on amazon we're happy if you buy in store the the ltv the true ltv has gotten quite a bit bigger it's just harder to track given we're so widely distributed in brick and mortar and so there are many people we know tried us on amazon and then they just buy us at costco right and it looks like we lost money on that person and in fact we made a lot of money on that person it's just harder to track so all your metrics get better if you have the brick and mortar to e-com flywheel going yeah and i'm also curious you guys when it comes to margin you've also said publicly that you want to make at least a 50 % gross margin.

40:39However, you guys, when you started, we're at kind of like a 30, 35. At what point in time and what volume of scale did it take to get to a much higher gross margin? I don't actually look at it on a gross margin basis. I look at it on a holistic business, like profitability basis. like if we could be profitable at a 20 % gross margin, like that's cool. Like ultimately the only thing that matters in business is the business metric, which is net profit. And so gross margin is just a way to get there, but ultimately that's what you're optimizing towards. So for us to get to business wide net profitability, it was roughly 30 million units a year was where we had enough scale to where we could make a big enough gross margin to where we could be net profitable yeah got you and then after that it gets you know everything gets quite a quite a bit better got you so 2024 you did 60 mil top line at a 13 percent EBITDA and in 2024 he did 125 at a 17 percent EBITDA so he basically doubled the business more than doubled um what what was the primary growth driver there because that's massive growth man brick and mortar so here's the other thing about like d2c versus brick and mortar um i sell food food is bought in stores food is not bought online when's the last time you bought a bag of chips online true yeah maybe never never probably never never i never bought a bag of chips online no so if you want to build a big chip company you're a damn fool to focus exclusively on e-com so um that the beauty though about certain categories like bars is there's actually a very big buyer base online for bars because you know it's not going to like chips break in transit and there's a ton of air in it and blah blah blah like bars are very compact it just works online but still the final boss even for bars because it's food is brick and mortar because people grocery shop right it they buy 50 different things and you want one of those things to be your thing so once you you know get to whatever a couple decam deca million and e-com revenue like you need to be thinking very hard about what your retail strategy is because that is the final boss.

43:28That is how you get true, true, true volume.

43:33So yeah, that was the biggest growth ever. But again, and again, that then helps your e-com business grow. So it's totally circular. You just want more touch points. And this is especially true in 2026. The consumer is less loyal every year so how do you convert them even though they're less loyal you get more touch points with them so we want them to see us on amazon but also d2c but also costco but also walmart but also target but also sprouts but also erwan etc yeah and you're building a synonymous brand in the space and in the category and yeah it's yeah it makes sense um so a couple last questions before we wrap up and I got a dinner to go to.

44:21So you've been building a personal brand. You have 50 ,000 followers on LinkedIn. You've got a podcast called Eating Glass. Then you often recite the phrase, it never gets easy. You just go faster. But I'm curious why, you know, you talked about energy versus revenue. What is the return on the energy spent on building your personal brand, producing a podcast. You talk about the unfiltered reality of CPG on LinkedIn. Talk us through why. I like writing and I need an outlet. And so some people journal and I view writing out thoughts, musings, whatever on LinkedIn or Twitter as just journaling. And so the beauty of that is it doesn't need to have an ROI from a business standpoint because it's inherently ROI positive to me because it's journaling and it makes me feel good and just fun.