What's up, everybody?
This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.
More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money in the process.
And on this show, I sit down with these IndieHackers to discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and
the strategies they're taking advantage of, so the rest of us can do the same.
Today I'm talking to Kevin Lee, the founder of Emmy.
Kevin is a good friend of mine.
The way that Kevin and I met was that he messaged me about my ads for IndieHackers, and he was
like, hey, Cortland, I love what you're doing, but you're charging way too little.
And I was like, well, if you think that's the case, then why don't you be the first
person to pay the prices that you think I should be charging for ads?
And he agreed.
So if you go back to episode two of the podcast, you can actually hear Kevin's ads in the show.
Kevin's a super talented founder.
He has run the premiere community for product managers online, and now he's working on something
brand new.
So in this episode, we just get personal.
We talk about our own health and wellness.
We talk about looking back from your deathbed, literally, and trying to make sure that you
live the life where you worked on the things that actually brought you joy and you didn't
just do the things that society told you you should work on.
We talked about dealing with the haters and the naysayers and the people who tell you
that your product literally isn't going to make it and who won't talk to you at conferences
and who won't give you the time of day, because Kevin's had to deal with quite a lot of that
with his new venture.
And we just catch up as friends.
I've been thinking that I should bring a lot more myself to the episodes, just be a little
bit more personal on the podcast.
And so I did a lot of that in this episode.
If you like it, ping me on Twitter and let me know.
And if you don't like it, and you don't want to hear about me, you should also ping me
on Twitter and let me know.
I promise I won't take offense.
Enjoy the episode.
I subscribed to a whole bunch of sub stacks.
I had this crazy phase last year, I was like, I'm going to subscribe to every sub stack
and just read everything.
And then I ended up funneling into this new email address.
I thought I was so smart.
I'm like, I'm going to make an email address and get an iPad, and I'm only going to have
my sub stacks on that Gmail.
And it turns out, none of the stuff I subscribed to was important enough for me to ever even
open that email address.
So I had to redirect all of it to my normal email that I actually check, and I just incidentally
see it when I'm checking my real actual important email.
And one of the ones I subscribed to is the Jungle Gem newsletter, which I'm sure you're
intimately familiar with.
I open up the email and I literally just see your face smiling back at me, like a huge
portion of just your face right at the top of the email.
And I'm like, oh shit, it's Kevin.
What's Kevin been up to?
I have to tell Nick that because I remember too that after he published that, you DM me,
I texted Nick and I was like, dude, your newsletter has powers.
I just reconnected with Cortland and I'm going on the podcast.
And another thing came out of it, they pilot that accounting software.
I'm doing a fireside chat with their CEO.
Really?
I just saw the Jungle Gem newsletter and then reached out and so I was like, wow, like more
people should be featured on his newsletter.
It's good, man.
It's like super personal.
Again, like literally your face is right at the beginning of it.
So there's like, there's no question who this is about because like the vast majority of
these things I just archive, like honestly, if I'd read the subject, I would, and that
was it.
Like I would have just archived it.
Like if your face wasn't there and I didn't recognize you, there's no way I would have
read the email.
Wow.
I'm so flattered.
Thank you.
Speaking of which, are you doing anything tonight at 7pm because Nick is actually doing
a talk or not a clubhouse, doing a clubhouse.
I knew you were going to say clubhouse.
It was a clubhouse thing.
Yeah.
It's called audience as a career mode.
Every time in the last two weeks, anyone has any sentence that starts with what are you
doing later tonight?
The rest of the sentence is a hundred percent of the time.
There's a clubhouse talk going on.
It's like Julian Shapiro is actually supposed to do it.
I don't know if he can make it, but it's Justin Mares, Julian, and it's called audience as
a career mode, which kind of feels like it's straight up your alley.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I talk to Julian literally every single day because we're starting a new podcast and we
are, we literally just recorded our fourth episode yesterday.
It's mostly about audience building, but it's mostly just about like bringing on people
who are really good at things.
Like we want to have a huge variety of topics and we've got a talk show format.
So every episode is going to be me, Julian, and then two other people who we think would
just be really interesting to put in the same room together and just see what they say about
that topic.
So we did, uh, you know, Sam Parr who runs the hustle, that guy is like super opinionated,
super fun.
And like, he'll ask anybody, any question completely shamelessly.
And then we've got Ayla who's like this only fans creator from Twitter who's got like 70,000
followers and she's super like personal and authentic and she'll share anything.
I mean, she's literally a porn star.
So we put them in a first episode and we're like talking about audience building, or we've
got one coming up with Jason Kalakhanis and Sean Piri from my first million about podcasting
and like, they're both like super cool personalities.
It'll be fun to talk to you.
These are great guests.
Yeah.
It's super good.
Every episode is going to be great guests.
Heavy hitters who like are not afraid to be brutally honest about things.
That's the exact formula.
Only people who are honest.
The name of the show is going to be an honest conversation and it's like, if you're not
honest, if you're not willing to like share embarrassing information, like we don't want
you on the show.
Oh man.
That's awesome.
Hopefully it'll turn out well.
It might be a dud, but at the very least it's like, it's super fun and it's a good excuse
for me and Julian to like hang out every day pretty much.
Yeah.
I was in like a Julian small writing group for a while.
He was doing like this writing experiment thing.
It was really hard.
But anyway, I loving it.
Yeah.
Did you learn to write?
I had like this writing phase where like Sol Hill and I would spend like every morning
for like three hours and just sit on a zoom quietly and just like write together.
But he was actually writing like a book at the time and he had like a bunch of things
going on and I was just writing for fun.
And then after I stopped at like Julian paying me and he was like, Hey, I'm doing a small
writing group.
And I'm like, okay, let's keep the train going.
It's hard.
It's hard to do like a company and then write proactively.
You really have to prioritize the time.
So yeah, it's a, so I was an interesting guy.
It's always fascinating to me like how much free time he has to just sit around.
He engineered that though.
Like, I think he's like, it's beautiful.
The way he's like created the company, like with like no meetings and all that stuff,
he has definitely designed his life.
So he was on our podcast yesterday and like right after the podcast ended, Julian had
a bunch of stuff he had to run and do.
Jack had a bunch of stuff he wanted to do.
And then me and Sol Hill just had nothing to do.
So we talked for like an hour and a half.
Nice.
I don't know if you know what he's up to.
I mean, he's doing a lot of angel investing.
Like he's one of the first, I think he's the first person to do a rolling fund where pretty
much anyone can just go to like his little notion memo and be like, I'm going to put
in five or $10,000 into your fund style because you're a great investor and you know, you
could take 20% of whatever profits you make for me, which is a great deal.
And he's super good.
I mean, he got into clubhouse.
A lot of great investors can't get into clubhouse.
And so he's telling me, I was like, you know, why are you spending so much time on social
media and stuff?
Like I have like 170,000 Twitter followers, I've got more than that on clubhouse in just
the last few months.
By the end of the year, I'm going to have like a million followers on clubhouse.
And if I just get on and I'm myself and I talk about the people I know and the deals
I'm able to get into, like people will invest with me and I get 20% of that and he's already
got like six or $7 million that people have invested with him.
And so it's like, I've never seen a better plan for converting like audience building
and to actual money.
It's like way better than launching a course.
It's way better than starting a community or doing a newsletter because he's like literally
just telling his audience members like, Hey, I will make you money.
You've got a hundred thousand dollars.
I'll turn it.
I'll turn it into two.
And people are like, sure.
So it's super crazy.
I am one of those investors who believes in, yes, when he told me earlier about the fund,
I was like, dude, I don't like shut up and take my money kind of thing.
It's super easy.
Cause it's like, well, you could be an angel investor yourself.
Like you're a well-connected guy.
I mean, like you, obviously you worked at like payer.
You too.
But you don't have a rolling fund yet, unless you do secretly.
No, I don't have a secret one.
If I did, I'd be, I'd be screaming from the top of my lungs on the podcast.
Every episode.
No one will even listen anymore.
But it's super cool.
I don't think it's sort of impossible like five or 10 years ago.
Like number one, there were no rolling funds.
It's super hard to find like an accredited investor who's got a million dollars in assets
and it's even allowed to angel invest.
And then number two, just has never been as easy.
I think as an individual to build like a really big audience, you on the other hand have
gone, have had a very cool winding path because like, as long as I've known you, you've always
been like a tech guy.
You're working at VCs.
You had your own online community talking about like product management.
Like you're all a hundred percent tech.
And then I don't know when you first told me about Emmy.
Maybe it was like, it was somewhere in 2019, I guess.
Cause we were at Phil's coffee and I was like, what are you up to you?
And you were just telling me about how you're sitting in your kitchen with your co-founder
like experimenting with noodles noodles.
I saw it in this sub-stack article too, you're like, oh, my friends think I'm crazy.
Cause I've made like, spent like, you know, hours and hours making 200 different types
of noodles.
I'm like, yeah, that's me.
I'm one of those friends.
It was like, you're crazy.
I remember that coffee where you were, I could see the confusion on your face and I was like,
hmm, this is going to take some explaining.
All right.
So I still kind of think you're crazy, right?
Like tech is so scalable.
You can, you can build a website, you know, a million people can read it.
You can build sort of podcasts, millions can listen to it.
Food is not that scalable.
Like food is hard.
Every time someone's going to eat one of your ramen noodles, like you got to make a ramen
noodle and like, that's expensive.
It's tough.
Why on earth would you decide to get out of tech and start making ramen noodles?
I was actually thinking about it this morning cause I had a feeling you were going to ask
me this question.
I've noticed that there's a recurring trend in the things that I like to do in my quote
unquote career.
Generally it has been this idea of, I call it like helping people, you know, accelerating
movement through Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Ultimately what it is is like, it's just democratizing like access to certain things.
And so in my early twenties, I was really big on like education.
I worked in education tech and I was at like old school, uh, which is building like software
and hardware for education.
After that, you know, I went to funders club, which was this venture capital firm that was
trying to democratize like investing because they were basically the first form of Angelist
before there was Angelist and they like, they went through Y Combinator.
And I guess now when I think about what I'm doing with Emmy, it's this idea of like democratizing
nutrition.
And, and the reason that became more important to me is because in my mid to late twenties,
my own body started just breaking down.
Like I think in the early twenties, I was all about software.
I was like, my mind is software.
I got to optimize the software.
Like that's all that matters.
And then I slowly came to realize like, holy shit, my body is not keeping up with me.
Like I'm not in my, like, I'm not like 24 anymore.
I can't go run a marathon and like be totally fine.
My knees wore down.
My hands almost got carpal tunnel.
I was wearing like braces, like the hand braces for two years.
How old are you now?
I turned 30 last August, so I'll be 31 this year.
I'm going to be 34 in another month.
And I remember, I remember distinctly remember 30, like, holy shit, I'm mortal.
I will someday die.
And we've talked about this before because I also had like repetitive strain injury and
I also had like a year where I was running braces on my wrist and I was like, my career
as a software engineer is literally over.
I thought that when I was like 29, I was like, I'm going to have to like, I don't know, do
something else.
Like I can't type, literally can't type.
It's so scary.
It is the scariest thing because we're both like, it doesn't like knowledge worker mode
and like, yeah, it's, it's everything to us.
And so, you know, I think that happened.
And then simultaneously my, my parents too.
So they have had high blood pressure for probably over a decade now.
And then when I was at old school, my mom, you know, she got a diagnosis for breast cancer
and my grandma also, she has been pre-diabetic for a long time now and she has hypertension
and she actually had a stroke a few years ago that left her half paralyzed.
And so all of these health issues just kind of compounded it both in my own life and in
my family's life.
I think that's where I started moving out of the whole like tech, you know, software
mindset and starting to think more about health and nutrition.
And you know, my co-founder now, his name is Kevin.
So we met 10 years ago at a mobile gaming company called Kabam.
And it's funny because we came to realize at Kabam that we both came from food families
too.
Like the, I wouldn't call it a plot twist, but it's just like my grandparents are produce
farmers in Taiwan.
A lot of my childhood was actually like in the fields with them picking, stemming, packaging,
this type of fruit called a rose apple.
And his grandmother used to sell noodles out of a noodle stand like a hawker stall in Thailand.
And then his dad was running an Asian supermarket and a Thai restaurant in LA selling noodles.
So both of us have it in our blood, but our parents actually immigrated to the US so that
we would not be in the food industry.
So that you could get into tech.
Yeah.
I remember, I just didn't even remember the conversation where like I went to the mugs,
Hey, I'm leaving venture capital.
I'm going to sell instant ramen on the internet and both of them were just like, why are you
doing this?
Like, I remember my dad was like, have you walked in an Asian grocery?
There are literally hundreds of other brands.
Like, why would you do this?
And I like my co-founder K Chen was a, he was a lead product manager at Facebook, like
leading the social video team and his opportunity cost was insane.
It's funny because in your newsletter, uh, the jungle gym interview, you had a kind of
a line in there that sounds like such a stereotypical like founder line where you never quite know
when people tell you like why they're working on something, if it's true or not.
So you're like, uh, what'd you say?
You said we switched to food and beverage because we both grew up in Asian food families.
We wanted to help our parents better manage health conditions arising from poor nutrition.
And like 99% of the time I talked to people who say things like that, like, okay, what's
the real reason?
We spotted a gap in the market and we're going to make so much money, you know, but it's
cool.
Cause this is actually true.
Well, it's funny because in the beginning we actually just wanted to work on like a
better like noodle period.
Like it wasn't instant ramen.
It was just a better noodle because we both love noodles.
That's actually how we first met K Chen and I, we used to work in Canada for Kebam.
And like literally the first time we bumped into each other was we both walked into a
noodle joint because we were actually kind of hung over from the night before.
And we both showed up at the same place together.
Like he was like, dude, what are you doing here?
And I'm like, what are you doing here?
And then we both just got noodles and that's how we bonded.
So when we were talking about starting like a food company, we settled on that.
And then over time, as we like looked at the market, we were like, okay, it probably makes
more sense to work on instant ramen as a category.
So kind of did like back into it that way, but we, we both definitely wanted to do like
food and beverage, which I know sounds really strange.
I feel like we can't gloss over the fact that we both had RSI carpal tunnel scares.
How did you solve yours?
How did you get over that?
I tried a bunch of different things.
I bought like eight different keyboards, like six different mouses.
Um, me too.
Did you get like the Kinesis like split keyboard where it's kind of at an angle?
Yes, I did have that.
Now I'm on a Keychron mechanical keyboard.
I have this.
I don't even know what this is.
This, like a track ball mouse.
Yeah.
I did this weird hand exercise against the wall where you go like this and then you have
to like stretch.
I don't know if you ever did that one.
Yeah.
I've done all the stuff.
It worked.
I've done all of them.
Yeah, it didn't work.
So what worked for me was I took turmeric pills every single day, fish oil, and then
magnesium something that I don't even recall anymore, but I took three types of pills every
single day for like three months straight.
Dude, look at this.
I got a whole bunch of fish oil pills.
I've got a whole bunch of a turmeric spice tea that I've been drinking.
Like this is just random stuff I started a few years ago.
I never thought that it had any effect on my wrist, but like it's your cure and coincidentally
I've been doing the same thing.
It's worked.
I remember we both talked about this and you told me that you actually lifted weights to
strengthen like your wrists and I started doing that.
Okay.
Honestly, I couldn't tell if it was making it worse, but I know for a fact that turmeric
reduced the inflammation.
I don't think it solves a core issue, but reducing the inflammation helped me manage
the pain day to day.
And then I think like the combination of the fish oil with the hand exercises and then
generally just like sleeping better and reducing stress, I think made up a huge difference.
There's so many factors that go into stuff like this.
And it's like at some point you don't care about determining the cause, you just care
that you're better.
So you can do the thing that you want to do.
So you just do all the things, but like I'm doing all those things.
For me, weightlifting is super helpful.
That one I'm almost a hundred percent sure.
It's like when I have strong muscles, like my wrist just never hurt.
And whenever I feel like the pain coming back and I ask myself like, what was the last time
I worked out regularly?
It's always like four months ago, three months ago.
It's like, oh, I stopped working out.
This is almost guaranteed why it stopped.
But it's cool to see that you're better and I'm better because it's like when you're staring
into your future thinking like, I'm never going to be able to work again.
That's a scary thought to have.
Yeah, I thought my life was over, which sounds super dramatic.
And I'm sure you did too, because I've heard the horror stories.
There's people on Hacker News who talk about it all the time where they had to take a sabbatical
for like two years.
And I was like, oh my God, I can't do that.
Did you read these crazy stuff?
I went deep in the rabbit hole and like started reading stories about like people who are
like, it's actually all in your mind.
It was super popular on Hacker News.
It was like the most popular blog posts I found on RSI and Caught Purple.
I was like, this is such bullshit pseudoscience.
You can't affirmations this thing.
Affirmations your health.
You can't just positive bottom away.
This is not like Wim Hof method.
Like, I don't know.
Anyways.
So on a related note, talking about health, and then I swear we're going to talk about
me, today's Thursday, we're supposed to record this last Thursday, but last week I was super
sick.
I had like a fever that just wouldn't break a headache that lasted like 10 days.
My doctor was like, you need to go to the emergency room and like, just get this, it's
just like rule out like meningitis and like stuff that might kill you really quickly.
And I went, you know, days of COVID tests, everything came back negative and I was just
a mess.
Like we were going to record this last week and I just canceled it.
And then on Thursday morning, I woke up at 3 a.m.
Have you ever had night sweats?
Yes.
Oh my God.
I never had night sweats.
I didn't know what the hell was going on.
I like sleep in my apartment with it.
I keep it cold.
I just like to sleep in the cold and kind of cuddle up in my blanket.
And I woke up at 3 a.m. just drenched.
It was like someone had just thrown a bucket of water on me.
My shirt was soaked.
Like everything was soaked.
I was like, what the hell is happening to me?
So I just was like delirious, like hallucinating, like fevered and like drenched in sweat.
And I'm like furiously googling all my symptoms, like what's going on?
And when you put all the symptoms that I had into Google, like this kind of like, I had
like fever, swollen lymph nodes, all this stuff, you put it into Google and it's like
pages one, two, three, and four, all just like blood cancer.
It's like you have lymphoma.
Oh my God.
You have leukemia.
Like you have, like there's another scary one.
It's called polycythemia vera.
So I'm like delirious, pretty sure I have blood cancer, like crying.
Like what am I going to do?
I'm through like all five stages of grief at like 3 a.m. like eventually I accepted
it and I was like, well, what do I want to do with like my career?
Do I keep working on indie hackers?
Like let's say I have blood cancer and like I'm in a, you know, 50% survival rate five
years from now.
Like what do I want to do?
You know, you can kind of simulate like being on your deathbed and looking at like what
your purpose is.
It's not really real unless like you for some reason really think like you might die.
So I'm sitting there thinking like, oh, do I announce this on the podcast or do I just
like go quietly?
You know, like do I keep working on this or do I quit?
And then a cool realization that I had was like, oh, you know what?
I still want to work on any hackers for at least another couple of years, which means
that it's not something that I'm doing just because society says I should do it or because
it's like quote unquote successful, but it's because I find it meaningful and it's cool
to hear that like you have also, I guess off the back of like health issues, been able
to find like what you truly find meaningful and it wasn't necessarily the same thing that
you were doing beforehand.
I love that story, man.
I think that should be a question you ask every single founder is like tomorrow you're
going to die.
Like are you going to spend today working on your company for the next 24 hours?
Okay, maybe not that extreme, but like, yeah, what are you going to do with the last few
years?
You got eight years.
You know, what are you going to do with the next four?
That's like, um, I was reading, I was rereading like tools of Titans or whatever that Tim
Ferris book.
I like reading it like once a year because it's like a bunch of wisdom and one of the
chapters is about how he takes like mushrooms, like pretty regularly because it just resets
everything like his whole perspective.
And he's like, okay, am I, am I prioritizing correctly?
It's not like ego death or whatever that is.
I think that's pretty extreme, but it's just like another resetting.
So well, let's talk about, let's talk about Robin.
What's your co-founder's name, Kay Chan, Kevin Chan.
We can call him Kay Chan, just to make it easier.
Kay Chan.
You've met at this noodle shop and you've decided like, you know what, these noodles
aren't great.
We need a better noodle.
Or what was like your thought process?
Cause I've eaten at a lot of restaurants and thought it wasn't good and I didn't decide
to like go start a company.
Well, I think the first and foremost thing is like what we knew we wanted to start was
a better for you food and beverage brand.
That was like the simplest, most high level thing.
Again, the reasons for that was, you know, we were seeing that both like our own bodies,
our families were kind of going through these chronic health conditions.
And a lot of that stems from just like not knowing how to eat properly or like poor nutrition.
And so that was the first step.
And then the second step was like, okay, well, like what product we actually want to work
on or what's, what's like the broader vision.
And it kind of made sense that we both grew up in Asian food families.
Like quite literally both of our families are still in Thailand and Taiwan in the food
industry.
They're like, okay, well, we should probably work on an Asian food business because that's
something we're like uniquely suited to do.
And we just kind of love that food.
And then from there it was, okay, well, what's the product?
Like what's the actual food that we want to work on?
And again, we kind of like backed into this because we, we both just kind of jumped to
noodles.
Like I distinctly remember he was at my apartment.
We were like talking.
We were like, what food do we want to work on?
And then we were like, let's work on noodles.
Like we both met that way and like we both love noodles.
But the reason we feel terrible after eating noodles is like you kind of feel bloated.
It's like a lot of carbs.
There's generally not like any nutrition really with like the wheat flour.
Like is it possible to make a low carb noodle?
That was like the first question we had for ourselves, but we just knew we were like,
look, if we can make like a healthier version that's low carb, then that's good.
So that's how we set out.
And then, and then we started from there and then slowly moved into this idea of like low
carb high protein instant ramen.
And that's what version one is.
It's super trendy to be honest, because you know, if you think about like how we grew
up, like you're talking about like families on knowing how to eat, right?
Like my parents like took me to McDonald's all the time.
Like I was just like, all the kids love my house because we had every soda.
We had every sweet cereal.
We had like, I don't know if you know what little Debbie's are.
We had all that stuff.
Like the word nutrition did not exist when I was growing up.
We just ate everything, you know, were you the kind of, were you like the one where you
open the refrigerator and just like, it's like beautifully lined up with all the soft
drinks.
That's exactly what it was.
Like I'm the kid who went to college and people were drinking water.
And I'm like, why would you ever drink water you, but now like people are just like, we're
smarter.
You know, like our whole generation is just like more educated, like, Oh, this stuff that
like we were sold is not good and we need better, healthier food.
It's it's funny that story.
When my parents, so my parents immigrated here from Taiwan, they also didn't know any
better.
And they honestly just had no money either.
And so for them going to Safeway and just picking up whatever was available, that's
that was just like all they knew.
And my dad grew up extremely poor in Taiwan.
And so he was always hungry.
And so his goal was like, okay, I'm gonna have a son in America, and I want to make
sure that he's fed it like to the brim till he's bursting.
And so we would always go to like Safeway, I would like pick up the like the extra large
lunchables and like, I you know, that's that I would eat a ton of processed food.
It's just pure sodium.
It was just like, yeah, it's just terrible.
It was like refined carbs.
And I told my girlfriend Josie, I was like, look, I was actually overweight as a kid.
And she's like, you weren't overweight.
You're like, you're exaggerating.
And about like a month ago, I went back home to my family's place in Fremont to get some
like kid photos for our website.
And I found one of my photos and I showed it to Josie and she was shook, like straight
up shook.
She was like, I did not believe you were overweight.
But like, I cannot believe this.
Like, I don't talk about that storyline.
But like, yeah, that was most of my childhood.
If you read there's a book out there called salt, sugar and fat by this like investigative
reporter, he basically examines all the food giants and all their practices, and how they
were like trained by the tobacco industry on how to use deceptive advertising to basically
push salt, sugar and fat to like the American public.
And if you read that book, you'll be shocked because there's all these crazy things you
learn like those Cheeto puffs, how they invented them, it's like, because they like melt instantly
in your mouth.
It's basically like your brain thinks it's like an empty calorie.
So it just like, it doesn't think it's eaten anything.
You can just like keep eating the entire bag and you won't even realize the crazy things
that happened with the processed food industry.
That's kind of like the gap in the market kind of angle, right?
Like this is...
You're just deconstructing our business here.
That's exactly what we're gonna do.
We're gonna break it all down.
Because I'm trying to figure out like, why start this, right?
You've got the personal reason, the family reasons, you've got the gap in the market.
There's also just like straightforwardly, like the financial opportunity, right?
Like when you look at the food industry, and the fact that like, again, it's not that scalable.
I mean, you obviously can scale it, but like, break it down for me, like, how does this
work?
Like, what are the unit economics?
To make a successful ramen company?
You know, one of the things I saw a few years ago was...
So like my friend Justin Mears and his second employee, Wilson Hung, is actually a good
friend.
And I remember a few years back, Wilson was like, hey, I'm leaving, you know, I think
he was at Sumo at the time with Noah Keg and he's like, I'm going to work with Justin on
this bone broth company.
And I was like, why the hell would you do that?
This is super random.
You're leaving software.
And you know, Justin, like, I don't know if he revealed any figures, but obviously Kettle
on Fire was the fastest growing bone broth company in the US.
Him and his brother, Nick, basically applied everything they learned in the tech industry
to selling bone broth online.
And I watched them grow Kettle on Fire and I was like, holy crap, there's clear opportunity
in the food and beverage space in e-commerce right now.
And I don't think I need to explain the common cliches that, you know, e-commerce is going
to continue to grow, like, you know, people are getting more comfortable with the idea
of buying groceries and food products online.
That's all there.
I think what's interesting is, like, if you look at the food industry, a lot of these
conglomerates, most of them are public companies.
And the CEOs of these public companies, they have certain incentives or in certain like
vested interests.
And you look at like the Kraft Heinz's of the world who have been pushing the same kind
of like processed food for the past few decades and like the bulk of middle America is like
buying their food.
And that's why they're, you know, they're making billions and billions of dollars.
But the CEOs of public companies are generally graded on like quarterly basis.
And so if they decide tomorrow, they're like, look, we know that American health trends
are are moving towards healthier things, we need to adjust our portfolio, then like naturally
probably what's going to happen is like sales are going to drop because you know, the core
audience is going to be like, wait a second, why does this taste a little bit healthier?
What's going on here?
Yeah.
Why is it this melting in my mouth?
Yeah.
Like, what's going on?
I want this, I want this to be at the bliss point, which is like another term they created.
Well, the CEOs don't have that incentive, right?
And so if they try to change their formulations, make things healthier, sales drop, and they
get fired, fired by their board.
And so there's a lot of turnover naturally at these companies now.
But you know, I think for them, they have no choice, they basically have to buy smaller
companies in order to innovate, just because the incentive structure is not there.
And I think that's pretty interesting for anyone looking at this space, because, you
know, it's not like bone broth, maybe it started out as like a $20 million market or something,
like maybe it was small, but now it's like 100 million, that's still like a huge chunk
of the market.
And for a huge food conglomerate, that may be a drop in the bucket for them.
They make so much money that they may not be able to divert attention and like focus
on a startup that's peeling away these tiny bits of market share for them.
So I think that's, that was like a very interesting insight that I kind of gleaned when I spent
more time looking at the space.
Another thing too, was like when I was at my previous venture firm, Pear Ventures, somehow
I kind of became like the, you know, head of food and beverage investing there.
Like Pajman, the founder, found out that, you know, my grandparents are farmers in Taiwan
and he knew I really love food, because I kept talking about it.
He was like, and then after a certain point, he was just, he would just introduce me.
He'd be like, here's Kevin, he reads food and beverage investing at Pear.
And I was like, all right, I better own up to it now.
And I started like, I just kind of used that opportunity to learn a little bit more about
the space and talk to like buyers at supermarkets, talk to food and beverage founders.
And I think that's where I started to learn like, holy crap, there's a huge shift happening
in the grocery right now.
I don't think I have to explain it to anyone, especially if you're in like the bi-coastal
regions of the US, where you walk into a Safeway versus a Whole Foods, it's just like night
and day, right?
Like every single brand at Whole Foods is like, I've never heard of them before, because
I never grew up with them.
They're like totally new.
It doesn't matter if you're in the pasta aisle, in the cereal aisle, in the frozen food aisle.
It's always like fancy sounding brands that are all like super clean ingredients.
This whole thing about new food brands are able to peel away market share, larger food
conglomerates can't focus the attention to combat this.
Health trends in America are generally changing.
I think there's also some like social dynamic thing, like cultural things at play.
Like obviously we have Instagram where with a click of a button, you can follow your favorite
celebrity, your favorite influencer.
And like generally when your social economic status rises in America, you can afford to
eat healthier foods.
So like most of these celebrities and like influencers are all eating like the kettle
and fires and hopefully the Emmys of the world.
And so if you see that you're going to aspire to be like that.
And that's, I think a big reason why you look at like millennials and Gen Z and everyone
kind of all of a sudden is caring about their health a lot more.
You're describing the classic innovators dilemma where the incumbents like they just don't,
they can basically do everything right.
They can operate well.
They can like hit their numbers every quarter and still get completely disrupted because
they just don't have the incentive to really go down and try to innovate and target like
a very small yet growing cohort of consumers and like, that's where you can come in.
And so like, what I want to know is like, you're still facing these huge conglomerates.
It's still not easy to break into the food industry and like, and do what you know, like
Justin has done and what some other people have done.
And so I want to know like, what's your like playbook is for how are you going to do this?
When we were thinking about applying a tech mindset, we did look up to Justin because
he published a lot of case studies around how he demand tested, you know, he did like
unbalanced landing pages, he used celery to collect pre-orders, we did the exact same
thing.
We were like, we don't need to reinvent that.
Like, that's how you should demand test anything.
It doesn't matter if it's software or like food and beverage.
So we had an unbalanced landing page.
We had a friend do a mock-up for like 20 bucks of a design.
We had like a table comparing the value props of like, back then it wasn't even called Emmy.
I forgot what it was called.
It's something else against like traditional instant ramen.
And then K Chan, because he was coming from his PM position at Facebook, they give free
ad credits, which I probably shouldn't talk about this.
But he had some ad credits that we were able to use, it made it cheaper to test.
And so we kind of looked at the numbers and we were like, holy shit, the conversion is
good.
Like there was people giving us their credit card information, we were collecting pre-orders.
We would email these people and be like, hey, we don't have products.
Do you want a refund?
Or do you want us to keep your money?
And like 50% of the people were like, no, keep my money.
Like I really wanted this product.
And we were like, okay, that's, that's clear demand there.
And then that's really where we then put on a different kind of hat to learn the whole
like food science piece.
I don't know if it's like naivety or ignorance is bliss type things, but we had zero preconceived
notions of how to start a food product.
And it's funny because I think I remember like around like 50 iterations in, we actually
approached a bunch of food scientists and 80% of them were like, no, this is an idiotic
product.
Like there has never been a low carb, high protein noodle.
Here's all the reasons why it won't work.
Like XYZ hydro colloids, like pretty much protein content.
And then we, a lot of it just honestly like went over our heads because we were like,
we have no idea what the fuck you're talking about, but I guess we're going back to the
drawing board and we're going to do it ourselves.
So when we started formulating, we did what anyone else would do, which is we went on
YouTube and we literally watched those like YouTube chefs.
Like they would have canned rolled noodles in their kitchen and like let the dough rest
and they use like pasta machines.
That is literally what we did.
We just replicated their process just to get an idea.
And then over time, K Chan had the idea of downloading these research reports that were
like Chinese and Japanese research reports.
And then we would just run them through like Google translate, and then we would just copy
the formulas and then try those.
And so that was like the second phase.
And then once we hit this theoretical limit of, you know, hey, like, hey, we have no idea
how to proceed from here.
We actually reached out to a few friends in the industry who connected us to people.
So we had this chef and this food science, food science PhD, who were also interested
in our idea.
And they were like, Oh, that sounds super cool.
We'll come help you as advisors.
And what we learned from them that I think is super interesting is when we were formulating
in our kitchens, I would say our throughput was pretty slow.
We were probably making like one formulation per hour.
And we had this like Google spreadsheet, we were trying to be all techie about it.
Like we were like, we all these nice formulas and we're like iterating down these formulations,
but we were just really freaking slow.
And the food science PhD, basically what he did was he came in and he improved our throughput.
He was just like, look, here's something about your process you're not doing right.
Or like you're isolating like two variables at a time when you should be doing one variable.
Or why do you have 10 ingredients?
Like you can simplify this, you can just cut it down to four ingredients.
And what that did was it basically like four to five extra throughput where we were able
to make like four to five formulations per hour and do them in parallel.
And that just increases the cycles of like feedback loop.
And then the chef in residence, the other thing that he did was he, I would say what
he did was he broadened our vocabulary of what ingredients were out there.
So it's almost like if you're developing in a certain programming language from the eighties
and then all of a sudden someone's like, dude, have you heard of Python?
Like you can probably save a shit ton of time by using this language.
And that's basically what the chef did for us.
He came in and he was like, why are you guys using these like proteins?
These are so old school.
Have you reached out to this ingredient supplier?
Just tell them you're a food manufacturer and they'll give you free samples.
And we were like, wait, you can get free samples of ingredients.
So we were literally buying stuff off of Amazon.
Like we were like, we would buy it from like Bob's red mill, we would wait like two weeks
for it to arrive and then we'd be like, oh cool, here's a new ingredient.
And that's why our throughput was so slow.
So this guy was like, just email like 50 suppliers, they'll ship you a pound or something of their
free product.
And then all of a sudden we had like a huge encyclopedia of ingredients to play with.
So I think it was the broadening the encyclopedia of ingredients, improving our throughput that
got us to our 200 iterations a lot faster than would have been possible without their
help.
And I think that's why we were able to get to this version that we were comfortable bringing
to a manufacturer to bring to commercial scale.
I like that you had haters, you had experts who were like, this is never going to work.
I mean, everyone has these stories.
It's funny because I think the longer you send in an industry, the more critical you're
going to be of it.
Right.
I saw this too in venture where every time we were diligently in a company, we would
reach out to the experts in that industry.
Like if it was a FinTech, we'd go to a FinTech expert who spent like 20 years and they would
always say, there's no way this is going to work.
I've been in this industry for 20 years.
There's no way.
Think of all these things they have to battle through.
And at a certain point, it's like, wait a second.
Like there is something pretty counterintuitive here, which is if you know nothing and you
go into this industry with nothing, you might end up doing better because you just won't
talk yourself out of these problems.
Like you'll just kind of do it because you're super naive.
Now of course, this is like survivorship bias, like for every one of us, there's probably
like 99% of people who just didn't know anything and failed.
But I think you can't talk yourself out of it is what I would suggest you.
I think it's remarkable how much you can sort of catch up to like kind of the gold standard
of knowledge.
Like people kind of think like you have to have been an expert in something your entire
life.
But I've seen time and time again, like I used to use this framework for programming
called Ember and it was partly created by this dude, Tom Dale, who didn't really even
know how to code for a while and then he learned how to code.
And then I've taught a bunch of people how to code and what happens to most people is
you just plateau.
You get a job and you're like, all right, I'm good.
I'm going to stop learning.
Learning was really stressful.
I'm just going to coast and make a lot of money.
And this dude just kept challenging himself.
And in like three or four years, he's building one of the world's best programming frameworks
and he's just like better than people who've been doing it their entire lives.
In any field, there's not that much knowledge.
If you just keep digging, like you can probably got to catch up to the gold standard in like
three or four years if you just don't stop.
That's 100% true.
And it is funny because I think a lot of these industries, they have all this like terminology
and all this jargon and the jargon is really just meant to keep people out, right?
It's like these experts want to create these barriers to entry.
And there were times we did feel really stupid.
We would we would reach out to this food scientist and we'd say, hey, you're a food scientist.
We need a food scientist.
And then, you know, she would be like, do you know how like dumb of a question that
is like going to like going to like a back end programmer and being like, we need you
to do like, you know, front end and everything like it's like everyone is specialized in
this industry, right?
So a cookie food scientist is not going to know how to make a noodle.
So we were like, this is really self critical.
Those dumb business business people who go like, I need a co founder technical engineer
to build everything like that's how it was in the early days.
And then over time we were like, okay, no one's going to do this for us.
We need to just learn this from first principles and make this ourselves.
I think there's something about being willing to be dumb though.
Like that's how you learn.
People are generally much more willing to teach someone who isn't really ashamed to
ask them questions than they are to teach someone who seems like a know it all.
And if you correct them, like it's going to be this huge fight and you're going to crush
their ego.
You went through like these 200 generations basically gradually accruing more knowledge
meeting the food scientists who aren't assholes and he saw the potential and thought it was
cool.
What point did you have a breakthrough?
There were a few breakthroughs.
One was a complete accident.
We were actually up in Seattle meeting with our like chef and food science advisor.
And we ran out of a core ingredient.
It was like the number one ingredient.
It was like a protein that I think at the time it was like a sunflower protein or something.
And we were like, Oh my God, we're out of this ingredient.
We forgot to bring enough from San Francisco where we're super screwed.
So we started calling all the supermarkets in the area.
And one of them, it was like this natural grocer, super small ones like, Hey, we might
have some.
So we went there, all four of us.
And unfortunately they had made a mistake, like they didn't have it.
And K Chan was walking in this like nuts section and he, like his leg brushed up against this
jar thing.
And it was a jar of pumpkin seed protein.
And he was like, screw it.
Like that's the only thing we have.
Let's just bring it home.
And we brought it.
And when we started making the noodles, it formed really, really well.
And the noodle tasted really good.
And we were like, Holy crap.
This is like those stories where you invent like penicillin, like from a pure accident,
like, okay, I'm not comparing any ramen to that, but like that's how it felt at the time.
It was like, wow, this would have never happened if we just like didn't run out of this ingredient.
So I would say the second breakthrough was just finding a manufacturer.
I think most people, most food founders, the biggest struggle they have is you create this
formula in your kitchen.
You think it's like the best thing ever, but you need to bring it to commercial scale and
you have to convince a manufacturer to work with you and take a chance on you.
And these manufacturers, they're basically like venture investors.
They are, they likely is the chance that they already have all of their production lines
running with like other clients.
And for them to take capacity out of that line to let a brand new startup use that line
capacity is a huge risk for them.
Because if their line's not running, they're not making money and they have no idea of
your product's going to sell.
They have no idea who you are.
And so you basically have to fake it till you make it.
You got to pretend like you're someone worthy of them taking a chance of letting you run
on their lines.
And this process is not fun.
There is no online marketplace or Craigslist to find food manufacturers.
It's actually like speaking of incentives, it's in their best interest not to be in a
liquid marketplace because they want to have the information asymmetry.
They don't want you to know like how much capacity they have.
They don't want you to know how much they charge.
They don't want you to know who the other manufacturers are because then they can charge
whatever the hell they want per unit.
And then you have to pay it.
It's zero leverage.
So I remember there was a period of time, maybe for like three months, where we were
brute force cold calling every single noodle manufacturer we could find, both domestically
and internationally.
And there was this one manufacturer.
So Kachin had actually sent an email to their VP of Sales.
And the VP of Sales said, no, I'm not going to work with you guys, you guys are too small.
Then like six months later, because like we did that six months ago, and then six months
later he emailed again, the guy said, no, we're not going to work with you.
And I remember Kachin was sitting with me in the living room and Kachin called this
guy, the VP of Sales.
And the guy was like, I remember you.
You sent us two emails.
Why are you wasting my time?
And he hung up on Kachin and I was sitting next to him and I remember Kachin looking
at me and I heard the conversation.
I was like, holy crap.
Like this guy just like hang up on us and call us a waste of time.
And I remember being furious.
I was super freaking pissed because I was like, you don't have to be rude like that.
And so what I did is I went on LinkedIn and I typed in that manufacturer's name and I
found this one person who works there and I saw that I had a mutual contact who was
a Twitter friend who I had never met in person, but I had like met like, actually, I think
I met her like once for coffee and I was like, Hey, can you introduce me to this person who
works at this manufacturer?
And so she made this blind intro, I convinced that person to get on the phone with me.
I gave him the full pitch and then that person was like, well, yeah, this sounds super interesting.
Like maybe we can chat further about this.
And then I shot them an email and I was like, Hey, by the way, we're actually going to be
in your geographical region next week for other meetings.
And this person was like, Oh, well then why don't you just swing by the office?
And of course we were not going to be in the area, but we just booked a flight, both of
us.
And literally the next week we flew to that location.
And like when we arrived, like I told Kachin, I was like, dude, I think we should dress
in like suits just in case.
And it turned out to be like the most formal pitch meeting I've ever seen.
It was like a full board room.
It's a huge manufacturer.
Like it was a girl who brought their director of sales because apparently the VP of sales
was too ashamed to be there.
And like we did the full pitch and convinced them to work with us.
And it turns out that that person who I reached out to on LinkedIn was the basically related
to the CEO and like they pulled us through because I don't know, we took a chance on
reaching out and like finding a mutual introduction.
And I always remember that moment.
And I always tell the people like sometimes you just have to do whatever, whatever freaking
takes even if you get rejected three times, you've got to find a way.
And sometimes you can't brute force through the door.
Like you got to make sure you're going through the right door.
But at the time I think it was the right decision.
Like they were the only manufacturer who could produce the type that we were looking for.
COVID was like starting to get underway so we couldn't go international.
So yeah, I'm very grateful for that breakthrough.
And it's the only reason we have product in the market now, granted like our version 1.0
has a lot of flaws because they had certain constraints we had to work with.
So it's not like the optimal product necessarily, but it got us to market.
What a story, man.
Have you ever read Shoe Dog by Phil Knight?
It's like the story of how he's created Nike.
It's just like that.
He's like trying to get these shoe manufacturers to work with them.
He doesn't even speak Japanese.
Like they're all in Japan and he's got this tiny little shop and he's trying to convince
him to take a chance on him.
It's exactly it.
It's funny because after this meeting, both of them were like, look, we want to give
us a try.
Why don't you send us 50 pounds of your flour and we'll test it in our machines.
And we're like, yeah, yeah, that's no problem at all.
We'll have our team take care of that.
And it was just like me and K-chan sitting in a living room.
And so we fly back home and we're like, dude, how the hell are we going to get 50 pounds?
I can't really put that in context, but it's a shit ton of flour.
It's a lot.
It used to be the two of us in a mixing bowl, mixing by hand.
With 50 pounds, you have to make sure that all your ingredients are mixed properly because
if they're not, it's not going to run through the machines and have a product that's equally
blended.
So I remember we stood in our living room with these huge gallon bags, this is super
unsanitary.
I hope they never listen to this.
And we pour the ingredients in and both of us jumped up and down for like an hour, like
taking turns, shaking this bag.
And it was brutal because like we somehow like cut ourselves in the process.
So like one of us had like a leg that was bleeding.
We were both sweating because we were just trying to shake this bag between ourselves.
You know that saying it's like your blood, sweat and tears, like that literally felt
like the moment of blood, sweat and tears where we were trying so hard with two people
to pretend like we had this team taking care of this trial sample.
And then we had to like carry this to the post office and then they wouldn't let us
ship it.
And we had to find this workaround.
It was so painful, but we got it over to them.
And I know both of us at that time, like when we were shaking the bag, we both looked at
each other and we were like, why the hell did we leave the software industry to do this?
But then you still have to do what is still kind of the hard part, which is market this
product and distribute it and like get customers actually interested in buying it and sell
it.
Totally.
Which might not be the case.
I mean, you did like these test runs, which I think is super smart in the very beginning
where you're sort of figuring out like, would there be demand?
Almost everybody I know who's had any sort of physical product has done this.
So we talked about Justin Mayors from Perfect Keto.
I talked to the founders of Tuft and Needle.
They did the same thing.
They also sell mattresses, but making mattresses is super hard and expensive.
So like we need to do smoke tests, put up fake landing pages and see if anybody will
buy a mattress online beforehand because it's just so high risk to spend, you know, years
making this thing.
And then no one actually wants it.
You did the same thing.
What's your, what's your sort of marketing strategy for Emmy?
How do you convince people to buy ramen?
After we did this demand testing and we said, okay, great, there's demand.
We actually did a series of, well, A was we wanted to know which audiences resonated with
this product and also what value props resonated amongst those winning audiences.
And so we did two phases of ad tests where we kind of figured out like, okay, it's this
like 25 to 65 year old female who lives in middle America, who's interested in like health
and wellness and oh, the value props they care about the most are low carbon high protein.
Okay.
Other ancillary benefits like plant-based lower sodium were kind of like also on that list,
but it was like low carb high protein because in the beginning we even thought, oh, we gotta
make this gluten free.
Like we gotta make a grain free gluten free.
That's what everyone cares about.
Turns out no one actually cares about gluten free.
I don't mean to be offensive to anyone who's gluten free out there, but when you're in
this space and you're in the health and wellness food and beverage space, you think everything
is a big deal.
So for us, we were like, oh man, like gluten free has got to be there.
But when we did our testing, it was like two people responded really is this gluten free.
And so we realized through a lot of the demand testing that we shouldn't spend too much time
on product development, focusing on those areas.
And then the next phase from that was we started funneling people from these attests into a
private Facebook beta community.
And we ended up growing that beta community to around 3,800 people.
We also built an email list around 35,000 people prior to lunch.
And what's interesting about this beta community is that these are people who were bought in
since day one.
This is when we had nothing, when we just had those smoke tests and we would talk, we
would share behind the scenes photos.
We'd share videos like when me and K-chan drove to like a mixer to get stuff mixed.
Like later on, we grew a little bit bigger.
There's like a lot of these like random videos and I even posted like bowls of noodles I
was eating for dinner.
Like I had nothing to do with any, I was like, Hey guys, I'm eating udon for dinner.
And like people be like, Oh my God, I love udon like can't wait for me.
It's fun because you know, you share, you share your life with these people and I'm
all about building a public.
I think it's so important.
I know you do that a lot too.
But we had this community that thought of us as like, literally there are there are moms
in there who have said, K-chan Kaylee, I think of you as my children, like, I'm so bought
into this.
You guys are my babies.
That's how they feel.
And that really was our marketing.
Like in the early days, we were like, look, we can't win on Facebook tax, like we're just,
that's not going to happen.
Like they're so expensive.
We have to go community first.
And as you know, like the first time we met was when I reached out to you, I was like,
Hey, I'm running product manager HQ.
It's the world's first and largest product management community.
And so I knew how to build community and K-chan was, you know, when he was leading so
social video team at Facebook, he was building products for like content creators to manage
their communities.
So that was like, we're like, look, let's just take a community first approach, play
your strengths.
So we know how to do.
And when we did our soft launch, our beta community had ended up generating like 40%
of our overall revenue.
And that may not seem like much, but for a beta community of like 3,800 people, that's
extremely high conversion.
It's not a big audience.
And so that was pretty shocking to us, but I think it just like it works.
And now we have all these people there who are like evangelists who will comment on our
now we have Facebook ads, they will literally comment on our Facebook ads and like fight
against other people.
There are people who'd be like, nine packs of ramen for $56 is insane.
And you'll have like four of our community members go in and be like, these guys work
super hard over a year.
And like, here's why their prices are so expensive and like, here's what they're doing to bring
them down over time.
And they're like preaching the things that we've been telling them over the past year.
And it's really crazy to see.
This community building and building in public is fascinating because it's probably the approach
among any hackers that has grown the most over the last year.
Like it's super popular to build in public, but I think a lot of people don't, they don't
do it in a way where they actually authentically cause people to care, you know, it's very
easy to build in public and it just kind of comes off as you just like constantly advertising
your business and you don't end up building this cult of people who are going to defend
you against the haters and you're going to talk about how your high prices are actually
a good thing.
What do you think most people are getting wrong that you guys got right?
In the beginning, we tried a bunch of things like at one point we had this bot that was
scraping all of Reddit and it would look for any keyword.
Anytime someone mentioned low carb ramen, low carb noodle, keto noodle, it would ping
us in Slack and I would click in, go to the post of the comment and I would respond.
And then I would like backlink to our landing page.
And that was like super kind of transactional way, right?
Because it's like, Oh, this dude is just like looking for every opportunity to like backlink
to their website.
And don't get me wrong.
It got like thousands of signups.
It was how we kick started or email us in the early days, but it wasn't sustainable and
it took a lot of time.
The second thing we actually did was we made like YouTube videos where me and K Chan made
noodles in the kitchen and we made recipes like beef noodle soup or like bacon carbonara
using low carb, Emmy noodles.
And it was super low production.
We filmed each other.
We made these recipes.
We would cut them into little gifts, like gift recipe videos.
And then we would post them on Reddit and we were just trying to like provide value
to the Reddit community.
We were like, Hey guys, we made this really cool recipe.
Oh, by the way, like, yeah, one of the ingredients is like low carb noodles.
You can use whatever noodles you want though, but these will probably be launching later
this year.
And that was kind of the middle ground, right?
It wasn't like transactional.
It was like, Hey, at least we're providing value to you.
And that did really well.
And there was a period of time where every single week we were like on the front page
of the cooking subreddit number, like top 10 and we were like going viral.
So that got some signups.
And then at some point we actually got banned from the keto subreddit because we were just
doing it too much.
And then the, and then like the community thing was like kind of this, like it was like
the perfect point of the spectrum where it was like, Hey, now we're like truly providing
value because these are people who are already interested in the product, but like we're
sharing a lot of behind the scenes where we're asking them for feedback.
We're like, Hey, here's a poll.
Do you prefer a wet seasoning, like a liquid one, or do you prefer a dry seasoning?
They were like, Oh my God, you guys are listening to us to like develop the product.
What?
You guys are like, that's crazy.
Or we'd be like, Hey, what do you guys feel about this packaging versus this packaging?
And that was kind of that nice sweet spot where it really started to work and that's
where we doubled down.
I could talk to you about this for two hours and it's already been well over time.
I mean, I'm, I'm a, I'm a fan.
I'm going to join your community and be one of the people making packaging demands and
defending you against the haters.
I'm super looking forward to your V2 noodle.
I'm going to eat all my V1 noodles.
And what would you say that, you know, fledgling indie hackers and maybe even experienced founders
should take away from your story?
Cause you've been through the wringer.
You know, me and K-chan had 10 years in the tech industry and like we loved it.
And from the outside looking in, like people are probably like, Oh, you guys looked very
successful.
Like at 8 PM, you went to like, you started this, like, you know, this bootstrap company
with product manager HQ and you became a VC for K-chan.
You went to like Facebook and it's hard to leave to work on what you truly care about.
It's for us, we were like, one day we were just like, look, let's go work on a better
noodle and it's scary.
And from the outside looking in, people were kind of like, dude, what the hell are you
guys doing?
Like, this is super stupid.
Like you guys are going to work on instant ramen.
And I remember like we would go to events.
This is pre COVID and people were like, what do you, what do you guys do?
And we're like, Oh, we sell noodles on the internet.
Or like, that's what we're trying to do.
And then like, people would just like walk away from us.
Right?
It's like the typical like, and then like, yeah, you, you, you sometimes feel like a
little shameful at first because you're like, Oh, now society doesn't really think I'm successful,
blah, blah, blah.
But you know what, like a year and a half later, like I'm the happiest I've ever been.
K-chan's the happiest he's ever been.
We're literally selling noodles on the internet now and it feels fucking amazing.
I guess the second thing is if you want to try something and the experts are telling
you, no, they probably have an incentive.
I don't want to go into the whole first principles thing.
I think that has been really over killed, but it kind of is true, right?
You can go on YouTube, read the research reports, do it from scratch, go through 200 iterations.
You can figure it out for yourself.
And you don't need to let an expert tell you, no, you can't do this.
Or someone who has like a 20 year career, be like, no, you can't start that new business
idea because of XYZ reasons.
Those are like the core indie hacker principles, like do the thing that you want to do and
don't let anybody tell you that you can't, you know, we live in a permissionless age.
The internet is democratized pretty much access to all information and even resources, maybe
not manufacturing facilities, but like everything else, you can go do it and no one can get
in your way.
All right, Kevin.
Thanks a ton for coming on.
All right, man.
Can you let listeners know where they can go to find out more about what you're up to
with Emmy, join your community, watch our YouTube videos, all that good stuff.
Yeah.
Emmy Eats, that's I-N-M-I-E-A-T-S.com.
The brand is called Emmy, but we couldn't get Emmy.com.
So we just got Emmy Eats, but everyone calls it Emmy Eats.
It's not Emmy.
It's just Emmy.
That's where you can find more about this product.
And we have a version two coming out later this year that we're super excited about.
For personal stuff, you can find me on Twitter, Kevin Lee and me.
Yeah.
Thanks for having me, Corinne.
Thanks, Eats.