2231 - From Basement to Business: Transforming Dreams into Reality with Supliful's Martins Lasmanis

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1:05With us right now, it's Martins Lasmanis. Martins, you are the co-founder and CEO at Suppleful, found on the web at suppleful.com. We're going to talk about what you do before we do so. Thank you so much, Martins, for joining us. Thanks for reminding me, Josh. It's great to be here and looking forward for an exciting conversation. Yes. Well, before we talk about Suppleful, tell us about yourself and very specifically, what is something that you've been geeking out on lately? Yeah. So, of course, what defines me is the work that I do at Suppleful, but I wear multiple hats. and the other hat where I spend a lot of my time is I'm a dad of three kids.

1:52So I have a daughter and a son and another son. Two of them are preschoolers. So that takes quite a bunch of my time. But as you understand, I really need to unwind from them. And then what I do, of course, I binge watch some series. Just recently watched Yellowstone, which was... Quite interesting. They published it on Netflix. So it was very easy. And another thing that I have recently found interest, it's kind of also binging is reading like novels, more of like mystery and puzzle novels. Oh, yeah. And what ones that ones that keep you guessing? So it's called the Hawthorne Legacy. Hawthorne Legacy.

2:41Yeah. So they have like three books and pretty much the plot is that this random girl inherits like billions and billions of dollars from a random guy, kind of. And then it all starts to unravel throughout these books. Apparently it's a TikTok sensation. So, but it hooks you. uh well the reviews on goodreads and amazon are through the roof so yeah it looks like this is a classic what they call page turner yes yes yes like when you when you start it's like so the author did a really good job in making and i like finished the first book and i thought like i kind of but then they had these like first three chapters at the end and you start reading these first three chapters and you're like, okay, I need to start reading the next book.

3:34So, oh boy, I'm going to share this with my wife. She loves a series like this. And by the way, to our friend that we're listening is the series is called the Hoth or the, the inheritance games is the series it's by Jennifer Lynn Barnes. So wonderful. Hey, thank you so much for the recommendation. All right. So let's talk about what Suppleful is. The website, by the way, to our friend that's listening is suplifull.com. We have the spelling for that in the show notes. But what is Suplifull? So Suplifull is pretty much a digital platform that allows small and medium-sized businesses to launch and grow their own fast-moving consumer goods products.

4:15Basically, we list more than 250 white-label products in skincare, supplements, speciality, coffees, pet care products. You can label these products with your own brand and start selling online or offline on your stores with the click of a button. The best part is that you don't need to pay anything up front for the inventory. We handle all the logistics on your behalf. And it's extremely short time to market. So you can test different concepts, test different angles of marketing these products, and we will do the rest on your behalf. Well, an interesting topic right now, for my friends that are in e-com right now, margins are under attack.

5:07And in fact, I think you said that very specifically in your social media post. Again, this might be old news by the time this publishes. It's crazy how things, I mean, it's just, there's a lot of chaos right now. So just kind of back and forth and stuff. But, you know, if you were to get, let's just kind of speak more broadly around turbulence regarding, you know, maybe some, you know, obviously the impact of tariffs, but I mean, who knows, right? It's, I think the bigger issue here is just a little bit of turbulence and chaos. What is your advice that you are sharing with, with e-com business leaders right now?

5:44so yeah at the moment is of course as you mentioned there's a lot of turbulence so number one is stay calm and carry on and see how things play out but secondly given the fact that there's a big movement to onshore manufacturing in the US we are providing that almost like manufacturing OS for these goods producers. So what it means, it means that we only focus on goods that are produced in the U.S. market. We interconnect across these producers. Therefore, we have efficiencies in terms of the supply chains. We reduce the out-of-stock situations. And people, again, access these products rapidly instead of there being bulk shipped somewhere from China.

6:34The supply chains get disrupted. There are different tariffs put on those products. So we really focus on ensuring that these products are made locally. Second, using Suppleful is a way for you to, you know, increase your average order value. As you said, margins are thinning. So you could, let's say in your checkout flow, you're selling some sort of non-recurring item like a massage gun or something. then you can just install Supplyful app on your if you're using Shopify it's even easier you install the Supplyful app and you pick like a massage cream from our catalog and use it as an upsell to increase your average order value and we're actually seeing about 30 % increase in average order value across the board that these e-commerce businesses are implementing this type of solution Yeah.

7:33And what would you like, aside from this, if you were to give a state of the union on e-com right now and, you know, again, I guess, what would you say in thinking about the road ahead as well, particularly given and it looks like, you know, particularly given the opportunity that's available? yeah so i believe really kind of the state of the union on where this is headed and also with all the

8:03things that are happening around ai we will see more and more stronger movement around solo founders meaning that super small teams super efficient teams will be able to build you know 100 million, 200 million dollar businesses. And they all would be looking for solutions that would provide them this type of infrastructure to let them to give them access to products. So that's one aspect. Another aspect is that. I strongly believe that micro brands and more personalized brands is the trend of the future. So speaking to a specific niche and a specific audience with tailored messaging, with tailored products is where e-commerce is headed.

8:48Second or third part of this is consumer savviness, meaning they want to see upfront the ingredients. They want to see how transparent the supply chain, where the ingredients are coming from. And they don't want to do a lot of search themselves. They want to see all that upfront so that they can make the best purchase decision. And kind of as a bonus, I'd say we're seeing a lot of growth in all the wearables, just generally data collected around, you know, sleep, movement, heart rates. So all this information comes in. And then again, these companies will be looking for ways how to monetize these type of data.

9:35So again, through ultra personalized, fast moving consumer goods products, this can be achieved. So these are, we would say like four trends going into e-commerce that will happen in the next, I'd say, five to 10, 15 years. Yeah. And so do you mind kind of explaining a little bit more detail? Where does Suppleful, how does Suppleful make this journey much easier? And maybe you could just kind of talk about the typical path that someone has if they want to be able to source products and resell them. How does Supplementful increase or just kind of increase the rate of success or the chance of success?

10:17Yes. So the first part to answer is we don't, let's say, we increase the rate of success or chance of success because you have this low friction of bringing these products to the market. So if before you had to spend like months to talk to manufacturers, you had to invest tons of money in inventory, set up your own distribution without really knowing whether the products are going to work. We are pretty much 50 ,000 investments, 6 to 12 months in development. We are reducing that to like two days if you're savvy in e-commerce. And what you do, you register on Suppleful, you browse the catalog, you pick a product, you design your own label according to your brand guidelines.

11:06And with a click of a button, you publish it on your already made store. Your job is to drive traffic to the website, to drive engagement, to distribute pretty much. Now, what we're doing at the same time as we keep collecting a lot of data on how these people are distributing these products, we, as an initial step, developed educational material. but eventually we're looking at AI agentic solutions that would at scale actually help these different kind of e-commerce businesses to fine tune their go-to-market strategies, if that makes sense. Yeah. And maybe you could share a story or two of someone that has partnered with you and kind of what their success has been.

11:54so yes sure so one of our actually initial um initial like say superstars users found suppleful already back in uh 2021 uh they were kind of savvy in e-commerce but pretty much uh the person was still you know living with their parents living in uh in uh almost in their parents basement but lo and behold they found Suppleful and to date he has built more than eight-figure business sorry seven-figure business using Suppleful on a year-to-year basis and pretty much has been able to move to Miami travel the world and our business almost enables the American dream for people to giving the tools to do entrepreneurship to build brands to be part of this e-commerce hype and pretty much reducing friction and just allowing people with their own hard work achieve their own dreams, build their own brands that they can either later resell or just leave them as a nice side income for themselves and build even multiple brands.

13:12Yeah. And then Martins, share just a little bit about your company, Suppleful, how you've grown and what your growth plans over the next year are. Yeah. So Suppleful's founded a bit more than three years ago, back in 2021. And since then, we have shipped out more than half a million items across the US and close to 40 million in revenue has been generated by e-commerce businesses that have actually launched their own brands using Suppleful. Last year, we did close to 10 million in net revenue for Suppleful business itself. And that's a relatively rapid growth, given the fact that we're only at that point, we're three years into the market.

14:03And this year, we're aiming to at least double our revenue. But But the biggest aspect that we continue to build out where we excel compared to any other similar solution in the market is that our product catalog is exceptional. We have built this manufacturer network and we keep strengthening that manufacturing network. And one of the major aspects where we want to build Supplyful into is to enable full product customization. meaning instead of you pick white label products already made you actually design your product you pick the packaging you pick the contents you pick the ingredients even on the product level you design your product on our website and launch it on Shopify with just a matter of days and that's kind of the future what we plan to build out and which is a big kind of a part of also solidifying our presence in the U.S., raising our next funding round by the end of this year, early next year, to achieve that vision.

15:13Yeah. To engage Martins, do you mind giving just a general idea? Because I don't want anyone to think that, you know, they could just show up with$50 in hand and kind of get going. Do you mind maybe sharing, like, who would be the perfect person and what resources should they have on hand? um so usually we are of course working initially with you know the founders the ceo the ceos of these companies um it's less about the resources but i would say it's more about your commitment and willingness to to try something out because as i mentioned the setup costs are very low it's almost like um investing pretty much more or less time and effort into the into the integration into selecting products and launching all that.

16:01We can, of course, give you a handheld throughout the process. And that's usually anywhere between 1 ,500 to about 3 ,000 of setup fees if you're looking to do a white glove service from our side. So that's kind of just the initial setup that you might need to take into account. All right. The website is supliful.com. when somebody goes from here. Now, it's interesting. I clicked on pricing, and I see that the base runs all the way from, you know,$23 a month on an annual plan, you know, all the way up to for a business caliber. It's just$349. Are there other, if someone needs more services on top of that, can they get more support?

16:50Yes. When you click under services on the website, you actually get a breakdown of what we are offering on top of that. There's also like enterprise solutions where we, you know, do a totally custom approach for you. We like do fully custom products, custom packaging, but then we agree on what's the setup costs. Our main DNA is that if we both motivated, then we move fast. We do it efficiently. And as long as you know, the incentives are aligned, because that's just literally how we like to work. Yeah. Martins, your website, again, is suppleful.com. And you'd mentioned this. So in terms of getting started, again, just go to the website and click start for free.

17:43You're the co-founder and CEO, Martins, and I appreciate you being here. Thank you so much for this conversation. Thanks, Josh, for inviting me. And it was a pleasure to participate in the podcast.

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