Why London Lazerson Ditched 10M Followers to Build Final Boss Sour, the Most Viral Sour Candy Brand

0:00I was thinking, I probably should start a company. I probably should start a product and something I'm really passionate about and start making content for said product. This is a bad thing. I don't think this is a good thing, but I kind of ditched the 10 million followers. I kind of put the audience to the side. I'm one of those types where if you chase two things, you don't get either. And I'm like, I'm going to chase this company. And we had a really good idea, me and my business partners, sour dried fruit, never been done, way easier to make, way better for you, and actually sour. And so I'm like, I think I'm going to stop posting.

0:35London Lazar:Welcome to the Hot Start 3C podcast, the show where we break down how celebrities and creators build billion-dollar brands. Today, I'm joined by London Lasersong, co-founder of Final Boss Sour, a gaming-themed healthier sour candy brand. The company has raised over$7 million, grown to 500 ,000 social followers, generated over 1 billion organic views, and recently launched in more than 2 ,000 Walmart stores. We will dive into London's journey as a creator and how he achieved 10 million followers, the broader creative entrepreneurship landscape, the strategy behind building Final Boss Sour beyond this personal following, and what is next for the company.

1:11London Lazar:So without further ado, let's get into the conversation. London, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. First of all, congrats on getting Final Boss Sour into Walmart. What has it been like to seeing your own products on the shelf of the largest retailer in the world? It's funny. And I'm not going to downplay the opportunity because it's a big win for us. But at the same time, when you're working on a product so long, every single day in the trenches, we've been doing Final Boss Hour for just over almost three years now. Just over three years, sorry. And so to see it hit Walmart is on one side of the coin, the most amazing experience of my life.

1:48And on the same side of the coin, another day at the office. Just because we've been working towards this for years. Again, I don't want to sound ungrateful. I don't want to sound like I'm taking it for granted, but we've been working at this for a very long time. So to see it in person gave me the chills.

2:04London Lazar:Yeah, I can imagine. And before we talk about Final Ball Sour, I actually want to talk and start with your career as a content creator. So over the years, you have built an audience of over 10 million followers, but let's go back to those early days. So when did you decide to start creating content and what type of content was that? It's an interesting story. In 2015, 11 years ago, I saw a article on the internet explaining that Logan Paul, who you have Prime in your background, made$50 ,000 from a single post. And this is the first time I'm hearing that creators online are making money. YouTube was huge, but the creator economy wasn't a thing in 2015.

2:44Everybody was doing deals under the table. And I was working a job making$28 ,000 a year. So I said to myself, wow, there is some real benefits to being a content creator. And I was already going down that path. So in 2015, started my content creator journey and just slacked at it. Did really bad at it until 2020 when I decided to take it very seriously. So my TikTok started growing in late 2020. By 2021, I had a couple million followers. and I was doing content around my Tesla. Looking back, it's so cringy. And that's what I'll say. Like I say this to any new or seasoned content creator. If you look back and your content isn't cringe and you haven't grown up from the content, you're probably still cringe.

3:29It's probably time to refresh. So looking back at it, look, it got me to where I am, but I was doing stunts with my Tesla. And then the thing that really took over was somebody along the way was like, Like this kid, my comments actually, my comment section kept saying, this guy looks like the kid from Home Alone. Don't know if you've seen that content, but I started recreating the movie. We started doing frame by frame recreations of the scenes like as perfectly as we could get them. And that really, that went really viral. That was kind of my viral moment. This was like 2022, 2023. And just every Christmas, every Christmas we would do this Home Alone series where I'd post new scenes every single day for the 30 days.

4:13London Lazar:Every November or every December, I'd gain like a million followers, like easy. It was so much fun. It was a hack. Yeah, very interesting. And how has it evolved to what is it today? Like what type of content do you produce today? Well, look, I have completely gone away from being a daily content creator. I don't do it daily anymore because somewhere along the way, and again, I was still early on the TikTok days. Like my, my rise on TikTok was when TikTok wasn't cool, when it wasn't, when everybody wasn't trying to do TikTok. So with that came like ups and downs in revenue. And, you know, I was thinking to myself in like 2022, 2023, I was thinking I probably should start a company.

4:53I probably should start a product and something I'm really passionate about and start making content for said product. This is a bad thing. I don't think this is a good thing, but I kind of ditched the 10 million followers. I kind of put the audience to the side. I'm one of those types where if you chase two things, you don't get either. And I'm like, I'm gonna chase this company. And we had a really good idea, me and my business partners, sour dried fruit, never been done, way easier to make, way better for you and actually sour. And so I'm like, I think I'm gonna stop posting, which was really hard for me because from 2020 to 2023, I had posted every single day.

5:32Two of those years, I had posted three times a day and I hadn't ever missed a day. That's how much in the trenches I was. So to leave that behind and now create content for Final Boss Hour was really hard. But I mean, we're in Walmart. We're in 2000 Walmart. So it's starting to pay off now. It was a little bit of an ego bruise, not seeing the views, not seeing the likes, not seeing the comments come through every day. But I am glad I did it. And now I'm gonna start to get back to my audience and restarting sucks. It doesn't work all the time. You can go to my TikTok. I've got 9 million followers on my TikTok.

6:07And the last post has like 2000 views. Like that is where I'm at. But again, final boss hour is the priority right now.

6:13London Lazar:Yeah, it's so interesting. And I hear this from so many great entrepreneurs like yourself, like they have been solely focusing on creating content and they have now built an audience that they can leverage to build a company on top of and basically leverage their audience to put free eyeballs on their own company. But once they launch a company, they now actually need to allocate time to that. And it means that they have less time to create content which gave them that unique advantage in the first place. So it's really about leveraging those two. And then for two or three years, they're focusing on building their company and now they want to get back to content creation.

6:44London Lazar:But the content that you put out three years ago doesn't work today anymore. So you kind of have to reinvent yourself as a creator. No, exactly, exactly. And now I'm just lifestyle. Like I'm just posting what I want to post. I don't, again, if I was generating revenue from my channels or if that's how I paid for my life, then I would make it work. Like I just would, I would, I would get back on the grind and get back in the trenches and I would, I would start to go viral again. There's, there's no questions about it, but final boss hour is infinitely more important than any channel I can create.

7:15Unless I'm going to be the next Mr. Beast, which I'm not because nobody is. But unless you're going to get to that level of, you know, Mr. Beast, Eric, Mark Rober, if you're not going to get to that level, short form content fizzles, man. And you see it. You see creators who were at the top of their short form game now, nowhere to be seen, no company and probably probably working a second job. And I just did not want to do that.

7:40London Lazar:Yeah, I feel you. You already spoiled a little bit about what Final Boss Sour is, but can you tell us more about what is Final Boss Sour and what is also the founding story behind it? Yeah. So we in 2022, 2023, you know, my business partner now was like spicy is having such a big moment in social media, viral moments, right? You have hot ones, you have the one chip challenge. And when we were kids, warheads were the challenge. Sour candy was the challenge. You know, you'd save a dollar, you'd go buy some warheads and you and your friends would make faces and try all the different flavors. And like, that was fun.

8:16In today's world, all of the sour brands aren't sour. I don't know when the last time you had Sour Patch Kids was, but it's like a sweet treat right now. Literally. I had it just the other day and I'm like, this isn't even sour. It's called Sour Patch Kids. It's not sour. So that was kind of the genesis of the idea is there aren't any sour challenges out there. Okay. So we had this idea of a sour challenge, bringing that to social media is very easy to demonstrate. We get free content because people want to post their sour faces. Right. And once we started exploring what the actual sour product was going to be.

8:50We had the idea of doing sour dried cranberries. So literally what is now 48 flavors and, you know, 25 different fruits was sour dried cranberries. We started with three levels of dried cranberries and they sold. Okay. I mean, they don't, they didn't sell near as what we're doing now, but that was, that was the original thought. Can you take something that's mildly sour already and natural literal sour dried cranberries, add a little bit of citric and malic acid to it and make a sour candy. It tastes like sour candy. The texture is better than sour candy and it's more sour than sour candy. And we're the inventors of doing sour levels.

9:29So for example, if you want to try our mangoes, you can get it in three levels of sour. If you want to try our cantaloupe, you can get it in three levels of sour. And because of this, we became the world's most viral sour challenge because there wasn't any other sour challenges out there. Now you see a lot of our competitors, which, you know, still haven't done the dried fruit thing, but they're doing levels of sour and that's kind of become popular as well. And yeah, over the course of, over the course of three years, we've, um, we've done 48 flavors. So we launch a new flavor every single month.

9:59It's a different level of sour and a different fruit. And we've even gone as far as now we can flavor our way in a moderately healthy manner, our fruits. So we just launched watermelon strawberries. I mean, and they're insane. Let me, let her right here let me grab them so we just launched these once a month we launch a brand new flavor and we've got a subscription model where people can sign up and get it because these sell out quick i'll show you what we're working with so this that is a real dried strawberry our biggest misconception because we just call it candy just for sake of branding but our biggest misconception is that people buy it and they go whoa this is a real dried strawberry this is a real dried mango there's a real dried kiwi it's really dried and uh these taste like watermelon all right

10:42London Lazar:yeah it's it's so interesting level three also okay look so it is it's quite sour already i mean people are like people think i fake it but i'm like i don't have a high sour tolerance as is they're sour they're just oh they're just sour and how sour is level four like do you have any comparison with like a famous sour product just for like comparison look some of our customers say it's the most sour thing they've ever tried. Other customers compare it to, you know, Warheads or there's this company that's kind of disgusting, but it's called a toxic waste. What I will say is since it is dried through and we can't control those components, you do get a variety.

11:25You know, sometimes you'll pop in our level four green apples and it's more sweet than it was, you know, than it was the last time you had it, depending on the apple we're using. So we do have a little bit of variable, but the general consensus is our products are the most sour thing that people have had either in their life or in the last decade.

11:45London Lazar:What I think is very interesting is that most companies, they typically innovate on one thing. So they innovate on the product or they innovate on the go-to-market strategy. You guys have completely reinvented the wheel when it comes to selling candy. You guys have obviously a different go-to-market strategy with all these challenges you have a subscription model and you have these 48 different products in three years which is just insane so talking about that whole product innovation how do you guys approach product innovation and always coming up with these new flavors like 48 in three years is more than 12 a year and then also why has that been important to have that many skews for you guys it's really interesting and actually i actually had this ready for you i have the list of our flavors right right here.

12:29Yeah. So, I mean, let me just, let me just list some of these just so the viewer or the listeners can get an idea. So it went cranberries. So dried cranberries. These are all dried, obviously. Cranberries, blueberries, strawberries, strawberry, mango. We did chocolate strawberries, which was insane. So we covered sour strawberries and chocolate. Then that led us to sour colada, which was dried coconut, dried mango and dried pineapple. And then that led us to cherries, dried cherries. So dried cherries. We did a margarita. We did a jungle juice, strawberry kiwi, blue raspberry mango, sour grapes, which was like green raisins, which were incredible as well.

13:06We've done a Halloween pack, churro apple dippers. So you lick a dried apple and dip it in sour churro. It somehow worked. So this is all kudos to my business partner, Tommy. He's over operations. It just makes it, it sounds insane to do 48 flavors in three years, right? Because you talk to, um, you talk to Sour Patch Kids, which have done, uh, 15 flavors since 1993. And that's just because they're having to like artificially concoct these toxic chemicals together and get the flavoring just right. And then mass produced. It's just difficult with us. we're getting on the internet and saying, can you dry cantaloupe?

13:48And then we order a sample. Oh my gosh, cantaloupe is amazing. Okay. Can you dry ginger? Like we just tried ginger. I don't think we're going to do it, but the product is already made. The product is already made. Now we just add our sour and we test our sour levels to it. So again, it's not that complicated. Now to get the recipe perfect, like we've done very complicated. You can't just go buy, you know, know, you can't just go buy the strawberries and get the citric acid and make it good, right? The way we mix it, the way we tumble it, the correct amounts of citric acid we use makes the product what it is today, but the product is already made.

14:23And I think that's why a lot of people are behind it because they're eating at the end of the day, they're eating a dried strawberry or they're eating a dried mangoes. Then once you do the normal flavors, now we can do the additives, right? We can, we can add, we can add a little touch of flavor, like watermelon strawberries. We've done it. We've done a ton of different strawberries. And what was the second question?

14:41London Lazar:Yeah, like why is it important to have that many excuses? Perfect. I love this question. We launched with sour dried cranberries. Kind of a small percentage of people who even want to try that. Every time we launch a new flavor, we're acquiring so many brand new customers and so many repeat. So our philosophy is we have a flavor for everybody and we just need to launch it. For example, when we launched our, I think this has acquired a thousand new customers over the last. So that's a thousand people that have probably seen our ads, are probably in the funnel, who just didn't want to do the kiwis, or didn't want to do the sour oranges, or didn't want to do the mangoes.

15:17And then you go, oh, watermelon strawberry? That sounds good. Click. And it's just badass. The last Friday of every single month, you can count on a new final boss sour flavor. That's like what Crumble did so well. They have their rotating weekly menu. So we're in that vein for sure. So again, I believe that everybody in the world will get the chance to try Final Boss Sour. It just depends what flavor.

15:39London Lazar:Yeah. Obviously, collectibles is now a big thing. So I can't wait for your company to be acquired for multi-billions of dollars. And then there's going to be people who are like, look behind me. I got the 150 flavors first edition of Final Boss Sour. And it sells also for a couple of 10 ,000. Wait, I actually have a really cool collectible I want to show you. I see a prime bottle. Right. But not just any prime bottle. This is from the very first batch Prime ever released. So Logan Paul in 2022 put a link on his Instagram story saying this is the first batch we were ever gonna release. I bought two cases of it and I drank all of them.

16:15Right before I opened this one, okay, this was my last one, he posted, and this is probably a month or two after Prime had launched, he posted that the very first batch of Prime ever had a typo. Did you know this? No, I did not, no. Okay, so instead of ingredients,

16:30London Lazar:it says Ingrid diets. Interesting. Okay. Is this going to be worth money one day? Probably. I've got a bigger plan. Actually, I want to encase this in epoxy and give it to Logan Paul one day. Give it back to him. Yeah. Logan Paul is obviously one of the biggest collectors himself and he has companies investments into the collectible space. So I think he would love that. Yeah, for sure. Ingrid diets. So that is really cool. I've held onto this since 2022. So yeah, you recently launched into Walmart and how does managing such a large amount of different SKUs, different product actually translate into retail because they're not going to give you 48 different slots?

17:07London Lazar:No, no. So, and let's, let's, um, let's back up on the 48 flavors. Most of those are limited drops. Most of those you can't buy. And to your point about collectibles, some of our flavors, they buy once they become obsessed with the oranges, they run back to the website. It's not available. And And so that is more ammo for them to subscribe to our thing so they don't miss the flavors, right? Yeah, so with Walmart, we just did a six-week test. I don't know if you know how Walmart works or if the listeners know how Walmart works. Unless you're Mr. Beast or a giant household name brand, you don't just get into Walmart permanently.

17:43You gotta go through a series of tests. We're probably gonna be doing one or two tests. Our first test ends tomorrow. Most of our products is already sold out, which is great. So our first test ends tomorrow and they're going to get us data back and then give us the okay if we go permanent and where we go permanent. So our next test might be back of store, might be in candy aisle, which would be awesome. And it might just be another front of store test. So right now they took our four best SKUs, which is level four green apples, level three watermelon kiwi, level two strawberry mango, and level one strawberry lemonade, which is my favorite.

18:19and we did at every checkout. So we did a front of store checkout test and it was a crazy month getting all that product ready. 2000, so we tested in 2000 Walmarts across the country. The operations team was up day and night for like three weeks trying to fill these pouches because we had never done an order that big.

18:43London Lazar:Yeah, I can imagine. And how has been the first initial feedback? Has it been positive? It's been positive. You know, there's been many days where we've doubled velocity and there's been many days where we've come short of velocity. So I think on average, I think we're doing about what they expected us to do. And we just hope to get to the next the next phase. You know, a Walmart account, like a full year of Walmart account is going to triple our revenue. And that's just one account, right? That's just one account. Right. Then you get Target. Yeah. Then you get Costco. So it's exciting. It's daunting.

19:17And I never expected to be in this position ever.

19:20London Lazar:Yeah, I can imagine. So many creators that are launching their own brands, they're happily building it around their own personal brands. So Chamberlain Coffee from Emma Chamberlain Prime by Logan Paul at KSI. You've decided early on that you didn't want to do that and build something independent of yourself and also with success. Because if you look at the social channels of Final Ball Sour, you've seen that you guys are the most followed sour candy company. You've established more than 500 ,000 followers across social media, generating over 1 billion organic views and also become the number one selling candy company on TikTok.

19:54London Lazar:So could you elaborate on that strategy and the positioning, why that was important for you? We thought to ourselves, okay, obviously Prime will be acquired one day, you know, or Prime will start acquiring people. What happens if Logan Paul steps down? Is there going to be a dip? I mean, probably not. Hot Prime is massive. It's widely distributed. But that was the first inkling of our thought. Does London Laz's face need to be attached to the brand forever? And I didn't want that because I knew what we had. I knew this product was going to be great. I knew people would love it. I knew there'd be a flavor for everybody.

20:30A faceless brand that people love has way more runway than a brand where you only buy it through a person. I think about the way actors go about movies. It's like you only go to movies because of this actor, right? And you don't realize you're really watching the movie because of the director, right? Of course, you need a good actor, but a good director. I go see movies primarily because of the director nowadays. And I think about that. I want people coming to Final Boss because of the brand, not because of me.

21:02London Lazar:Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Like what we also see in the market is that the best creator found the brands that are always supported by a creator, but not dependent on. And it also has to do with the sales cycle because like a creator might help you sell the first product, but the quality of the product is going to determine if people are going to buy it the second, third and fourth time. And that's obviously where you build a real business on. So I definitely think that strategy is the right one. Yeah. I mean, look, we were talking about Joyride and some of these other gummies. I would love to know their repeat customers.