Hello, everybody. By popular demand, I am bringing back the intro to the show. So this
is Cortland Allen with IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.
It's been so long since I've said that. On this show, I talk to the founders of profitable
internet businesses, and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How
do they get to where they are today? How do they make decisions, both at their companies
and in their personal lives? And what exactly makes their businesses tick? The goal here,
as always, is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to build our
own successful internet businesses. Today, I'm talking to Justin Mayers. He's the founder
of Kettle and Fire. Justin, welcome to the show.
Thank you. Excited to be here.
Yeah, I'm excited to have you on and ask you all sorts of questions. You know a lot about
growing businesses. You worked as a head of growth for a company called Exceptional, which
was acquired by Rackspace. You've started multiple businesses that you've grown from
scratch to tens of millions of dollars in revenue, including Kettle and Fire. And you
also literally wrote the book on growth. It's called Traction, how any startup can achieve
explosive customer growth. So why don't we start there? From a high level, how should
founders be thinking if they want their startups to achieve explosive customer growth, Justin?
Sweet. Just jumping right into it.
Yeah, let's do it.
So yeah, so I think that one of the things, you know, we wrote Traction. My co-author
Gabriel Weinberg, who started DuckDuckGo. He and I wrote Traction about five years ago
now. And kind of what we saw at the time and what we still unfortunately see today is that
if you're a founder, in general, you are putting in two to five times as much effort into product
development, product, you know, that kind of stuff, then you are into marketing and
in Traction. And the reality is that like almost all great valuable businesses, not
only do they have a product innovation, but they also have a distribution innovation.
And so we think like, and what we talk about in Traction is that building and developing
that distribution innovation, figuring out how to get Traction is almost as important,
possibly more important than figuring out like how to make the perfect product. I know
this is something that a lot of people all disagree with me on, but I think if you almost
certainly have heard of or found multiple products that you're like, this is just kind
of a shitty product. Like how did this get on my radar? Why is everyone talking about
this? And the answer oftentimes is like, there's a really good marketer behind that product.
And so in Traction, we talk about how to approach the whole idea and solve the problem of like,
how do I get Traction for my startup? And the way that we talk about is through something
we call the bullseye framework, which is this idea of like figuring out what are the one
to two core channels that you want to focus on as a business that will get you Traction,
whether that's SEO, paid ads, content marketing, influencers, affiliate, anything like that.
And then we kind of walk you through a process of like how to test, measure, and then decide
what channels to invest in, in terms of your kind of marketing mix. Does that make sense?
Yeah, it makes perfect sense. There's a ton of advice out there for growing and building
startups. And a lot of it's very bad. But I think if you're a brand new founder, it's
kind of hard to tell the difference between bad advice and good advice. So for example,
here's a time not too long ago where it felt like every week I was reading a new blog post
on Medium about how the only thing that matters is product, product, product, product. If
you want to grow, all you need to do is build something really great. Not as many people
say that anymore. I feel like a lot more people have come around to your way of doing things
or actually there are other variables that matter. Distribution matters. Having a good
market matters. Are there any other bad trends or advice or misconceptions that you've seen
spreading that founders would do better to ignore?
Yeah, I think one of the things that's interesting to me right now that I kind of think is a
bad trend is well, two things. So one, I think it's a really bad idea in general to have,
I think the idea of product managers is often a bad idea. It's like a way for CEOs to sort
of delegate thinking about the product to someone else that has less information and
can make worse decisions. I get product managers in a lot of ways. I think they can be great
with a startup at scale, but oftentimes I think starting out, your job as a CEO is to
make product decisions. It's to set the strategic vision in the company and a lot of that involves
like, what is your company actually making? And so I think early PM hires is something
that people are doing a lot of right now that I think is kind of stupid. And then another
thing that I kind of see out there in startup advice land, if you want to call it that,
is I feel like I'm seeing a lot of people just launching very, I feel like there's this,
there's a sort of trailing effect that I see a lot of where it's like something worked
five years ago or three years ago. Someone made a bunch of money or some set of people
made a bunch of money on it. They start writing medium or blog posts about how they made a
bunch of money. And then people start launching those businesses like two years later and
they're almost guaranteed to failure because it's just a completely different environment.
Like I know that you and I met, I guess four years ago now, I think something like that.
A while back.
Yeah. I think you and I met when like the whole bootstrap by a micro cap SaaS business
and grow it was like a thing that 40 people were talking about online. And then we went
out and did this, my partner Ryan and I bought a business called FOMO, which we'll talk about
in 2014. And now I think like I'm looking at some of these micro cap SaaS companies
and like they're so competitive. You're getting a legitimately horrible businesses that are
getting bid up, you know, four to seven times. Even does just like, Oh my God, like this
too many people made money buying small businesses, small SaaS businesses and growing them where
it feels like that, that field is much more picked through right now and a way, way worse
idea to get into, uh, than it was, you know, in 2014.
Okay. So there's a lot of depth here and we're going to go into it, but let's back up for
a second. I just want to talk about how you first got into this Justin and how you learned
the things that you know now. What were some of those significant early steps you first
took? Yeah. So when I was in college, I was 20. I basically decided that I wanted to be
an entrepreneur. I had like a crazy, crazy year. Uh, personally I call it like my Justin
vortex where I basically like went into the year one person and came out a totally different
person. Like my, my dad like lost his job. I had a friend who had suicide. I like broke
up with a girlfriend, broke up with a best friend, went to college, became an atheist,
just like all this stuff. And so, and so coming out of that, one of the things that I took
was, you know, my dad was kind of a career guy that was working in big corporate America
for, you know, 30 something years at that point, 35 years or so. And he got laid off
in like the 2009 recession, uh, 2008 recession. And so as part of that, we, my dad got laid
off. I got rejected from an investment banking internship that I was like really hoping I
didn't get and was literally working as a janitor at LA fitness. And so, uh, that's
pretty much when I decided like, wow, this really sucks being a janitor. The first day
on the job, someone, some guy had like literally pooped into the shower drain, man's locker.
I'd like get a knife and like scrape it. It was, no, no. Uh, I still don't know who that
guy is, but fuck that guy. Oh my God. So I was like, yeah, I just need to control my
own destiny. And I kind of decided then that I would rather do something that where I full
controlled my time, even if it meant I made like two to three grand a month, you know,
I'd rather start my own thing, have control over my, my time that I would go get a normal
job. And so I started my first company in college, uh, totally blew up and failed as
oftentimes people's first two, but I learned a lot. And then doing that, I managed to meet
this other guy, Jonathan Seagull, who like took a big risk on me, hired me and like took
me under his wing to run growth at exceptional, which like at the age of I was 23, I was running
growth and managing almost 10 people at exceptional. And we sold that business rack space and like
that was an incredible learning experience. Trying to do it on my own failing and then
learning from someone who knew way more than I did and do, uh, was phenomenally influential
and important to my growth. Starting a startup, it's better than a scraping poop out of shower
drains. I should change that to the, the Andy Hackett attack line. Uh, yeah, that was a
terrible job. Let me tell you, not all jobs are that terrible though. Exceptional seemed
to go really well. You seemed like you learned quite a lot there. Why decided to become a
founder after doing that? Why not just continue to take your skills and get better and better
jobs? Yeah, that's a really good question. I, I think that I, a couple of things I would
say that I went into exceptional with the mindset of like, how can I learn the skills
that it takes to be a founder? I still was very on board and wanted to have complete
control of my time. And I also like candidly, my upbringing, like we didn't grow up with
a ton of money and I, uh, I wanted to like be financially secure. And I thought that
being an employee is a good way to do that. At the time, you know, this was 2014 when
I moved to San Francisco. I thought that I had to be a developer to make money and which
I don't believe anymore, but you know, at the time I did. And so I was like, I don't
know how I'm going to make money as a, as a non-technical employee. Uh, so I guess I
just have to start my own thing. And it also kind of fits with my lifestyle way more. Like
I knew that I wanted to be a founder. I knew that I wanted to try and solve problems. I
get, there's like a certain set of problems in the world that I get really passionate
about solving. And I think that as an employee, you're always somewhat replaceable. You can
be an insanely talented employee, but you know, the nature of a business is to make
the business not dependent on any one employee. And so I think that like, if I look at the
world, one of the things that that's really missing in the world is generally a, there's
a lack of like good ideas and talented people chasing really hard problems. And so I wanted
to try and be one of the founders that like, if I wasn't starting a certain company, no
one else would be and try and like make a small impact on the world. And it was kind
of like what drove me to hop back into being a founder.
Part of being a founder is doing what's sometimes referred to as this explore and exploit algorithm.
So first you explore, you try lots of different things and then you exploit, which means you
pick the best thing and you really focus on that. You've been really good at both sides
of this coin. Let's talk about just exploring for a second though. Can you walk us through
some of the exploration phases you've been through and give us a sense of the variety
of the businesses that you've tried to start?
Oh my God. Yeah, for sure. So after the Rackspace acquisition, I kind of stayed there for a
bit to earn out for about a year, quit three days after my earn out and then went to Brazil
and like was trying to figure out what I wanted to do next. And so I was exploring a bunch
of different ideas. Like at one point, I probably looked at 15 or 20 ideas during that year.
At one point I was and kind of like narrowed them down to three things, which were all
completely different. I was looking at starting or I guess it was five things. So I was looking
at starting a software app that would help people recover from drug and alcohol addiction.
I was looking at starting a real estate play that basically takes advantage of something
called like a somewhat esoteric law called a 1031 exchange and like a public market liquidity
premium. Very random idea. I was looking at that. I was looking at doing a coconut, like
an alcohol kind of spritzer company. This was in like 2014, 2015 that I think like white
claw, like I should show you the designs of super close to white claw. Oh yeah. And he's
like, fuck.
Did they rip you off?
I mean, they found the lost design. They launched it. I didn't get to them, but I was looking
at doing like a 5% alcohol kind of bubbly slim can white, like alcohol drink that was
more healthy and like low carb, which is like almost exactly what white claws. So is that
just a coincidence that the designs are similar or is there like some sort of underlying reasoning
why that design would work well?
I think the underlying reason is there's kind of twofold. Like if you look at a craft beer
and alcohol, everything goes like hard alcohol, kind of dark colors for the most part. And
it's only in the last couple of years that the white more pastel kind of design thing
that looks very bright and vibrant and healthy has started to infiltrate the alcohol space
at all. And so I wanted to do that to kind of signify like, Hey, this is clean and healthy.
And the other thing I wanted to do was the slim aluminum can so that like, if you're
someone who is trying to be healthy and not gain weight, holding a slim little can while
you like, yeah, strut your slim little figure, you know, that that actually is something
that you feel good about. And so was looking at doing that, was looking at doing kettle
and fire. And then I think that's it. And then there was like a software business I
was looking at doing in the enterprise space.
You've also done a lot of writing. I know you started a business with a pen name and
you were, you were selling books on Amazon that weren't necessarily written by you. Tell
us about how that, how that went down.
Yep. Um, not that's hilarious. You found that. Uh, so that's like a joke and inside joke
with some of my friends, but basically there was one phase where I was, uh, kind of in
that year off, I was, I was looking at like, what are the longterm businesses that I can
do and be really excited about? And in the interim, what are some like short term kind
of passive income things that I can also get going. And so one of those was I realized
that there were a couple of topics that I knew a good amount about that there were not
good books out for just yet. And so one of them was I hired a, uh, a ghostwriter to write
a book about like using new tropics for mental performance, published it on Kindle for like
two 99. And yeah, so it did that under a pen name because I like didn't write it. It wasn't
necessarily super proud of it. Uh, and yeah, just do that as a passive income thing, which
sort of worked, but sort of didn't how much money does it cost to hire somebody to write
a book for you? Yeah. So, so when you think book, you're probably thinking like principled
by Ray Dalio. This is probably way more like a fifth grade book report. You know what I
mean? It was like 70 pages. It cost me $550 to get the guy to write it took about three
weeks. Uh, I edited it, did a pass through and, uh, published it for two 99. And I think
people probably got three Oh seven worth of value out of that book. Yeah. You did good.
Yeah. And it did like, I think it did about $1,400 in revenue in the first six months.
Yeah, that's not bad. It's not bad, but it's like, do you really want to spend your time
making 700, you know, $900, uh, for every piece of shit book that you launched that
you're not really proud? Like, no, no, not what I want to do. Probably not. So you obviously
have gone on to start much more substantial businesses that have generated a lot more
revenue and provided a lot more value for people. What didn't you know back then that
was stopping you from starting these kinds of businesses? Good question. I think the,
uh, I think that the biggest thing that I didn't appreciate then is I had a real kind
of scarcity mindset around money when I was looking at starting these businesses. And
so I had this kind of mindset of if I don't outsmart the world and figure out how to like
achieve some value and you know, like make some money, then I'm going to be broke or
unhappy or whatever it is. I think that's totally not true now. I think that had I just
been like, okay, what do I care about more than the average person for me, health and
wellness is way up there. If I just said like, I'm going to do something in health and wellness
because this is a space that I love. I care about it. I'm going to work harder than the
average person because it's something I'm interested in and care about, but I'm just
going to dig into this space super hardcore and figure out how to create value there.
It would have worked out great. Like I kind of just stumbled into it, but I never should
have been looking at real estate things or looking at doing like an enterprise marketing
software tool, just not, not like a good personality kind of founder market fit type thing. So
I think that now I way more value founder market fit and way less value like, or I think
it's way less important personally to try and figure out like how do you hack the world
or figure out an idea that works in a space that might be one you're not interested in.
I had kind of the same transition where I was very opportunistic. I thought it would
be so hard to come up with an idea that it was, there's no way I can limit myself by
only working on ideas that I was interested in, but it turns out that if you apply that
experience, right, you'll come up with even more ideas and you'll be much happier working
on them because you actually care about the subject matter.
Totally, man. I mean, with the real estate thing, it was like, I kind of had a realization
that was like, even if this was the best real estate idea in the world, if that were true,
I would start doing it for six months. Someone else would see that it's a really good idea
who actually likes real estate and they would crush me like, or I would become a miserable
person doing something I hate for four to six years. It's just not a good outcome either
way.
Yeah, it's a slippery slope back to scoop and poop out of shower drains, huh?
Exactly.
But you have to blame yourself in that case because you started the business.
Totally, man.
Most people don't have any ideas because they can't seem to think of anything unique. And
then there are people like you, you've got dozens and dozens of ideas. What's the difference?
Man, I wish I knew the answer to that. I think my ideas have gotten a lot better over the
last seven years since I've been thinking about it. I think probably the answer is some
combination of having really good conversations with people who are smarter than you, working
with people who are smarter and reading a lot probably. But I don't know the exact thing.
Whenever people say they don't have ideas, I'm like, God, that sounds so nice. I don't
know. Come to me. I'll even be like, please. I feel like I come up with a couple ideas
a week that I think are interesting and could work. It's just the average idea requires
a lot of hard work and time, which I just don't have right now.
Is there any sort of pattern or formula for how you typically come up with ideas?
So I think that one of the biggest things for me in terms of coming up with new ideas
is I have become much more sensitive to what things are hard in my life or what things
I don't like doing. And thinking about how could I potentially solve this, like Kettle
on Fire is a great example. Making bone broth is a pain in the ass and a terrible cook.
If there was a high quality packaged option, that's probably something that would work.
And if there's any number of people like me, it should be a decent business. I think there's
a ton of things like this that, and that's sort of heuristic of what is hard for you
or what are you not like doing. That something that solves any of those problems is high
potential would be a good business.
And then the other thing I think that's interesting is assuming you're not one of the Collison
brothers or Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs, you're probably, but you're probably not, no offense.
It's hard to just come up with super visionary ideas. And so I think the other thing that
works really well is seeing what is actually working in one industry and applying it elsewhere.
Like one of the things that we actually saw and that I've seen multiple times is like,
okay, wow, SaaS being in software, SaaS is taking over people's workflows, it's doing
all this stuff, yet moving into CPG and the space that we're playing in right now of like
physical retail, there's almost nothing in software. Great. That's probably a huge opportunity
to apply an existing technology to something that doesn't exist.
My partner Ryan and I are actually doing this right now with, we both worked in like tech
kind of developer workflows and developer tools, Git commits rollbacks, like a lot of
this sort of developer management stuff is incredibly common when you're building software.
However, it's still important, but doesn't actually exist in e-commerce. And so one of
the new companies that we launched is called Store QA, which is like a basic way to manage
and manage your kind of like e-commerce websites workflow and tell you, is this thing broken?
Are checkouts working? Are coupons working? Like just do the basically, you know, continuous
kind of testing and QA process that is really standard of existing software and tech companies
that didn't exist to e-commerce. Now we're building it. Like that's probably a good idea.
This reminds me of a quote, it's a little bit morbid because I'm pretty sure Joseph
Stalin said it, but he said, quantity has a quality all its own. And I don't know what
he was talking about when he said that, but probably something very, very dark, probably
something not great. But you apply it to business and you think about you, you know, talking
to all these different people, working all these different industries, coming up with
so many different ideas. I just think there's a lot of reasons why this is so much better
than becoming wedded to one specific idea and sticking with it no matter what and not
really going through this exploration phase. For example, if you start lots of different
companies, then you develop kind of a familiarity with what an average business feels like,
which makes it way easier to recognize when something really stands out. It also gives
you kind of a scientific testing ground where you can start to recognize, okay, this principle
that I've heard about seems to hold true for this particular industry, but not for that
industry. It gives you the breadth of experience to do what you're talking about and kind of
cross pollinate ideas where you can learn the best tactics or business models that people
are privy to in one industry, and then apply them to another area where nobody seems to
know about it. What are some of the advantages that you saw from trying so many different
businesses? And how did that help you narrow down to just one?
So I think that one of the things that I realized is kind of what you were saying, where if
you are like after seeing and testing a couple different ideas, I realized that when I tested
another thing I tested that I didn't talk about was basically this idea that I think
I called OptiMonks or something like that, but it was basically this idea that a bunch
of software companies spend hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars a month on their AWS
and other server hosting bills. Those are generally relatively easy to negotiate down.
And so we were doing a service or testing a service where if you're spending 50 grand
on AWS bill, we get it down to 38, we'll take about half of those savings and just be the
kind of assholes on the phone that are negotiating your cloud service provider thing.
After testing that idea, I did some people that were excited about it, but it was somewhat
of a lukewarm response. I had a couple of customers that were game to try it, but at
the same time we launched a landing page for Kettle and Fire or for what would become Kettle
and Fire that was just kind of testing interest in and how excited people were to buy bone
broth online. And when we launched that, we were spending $5 probably a day on ads and
we're driving people to a landing page for a product that didn't exist that was drastically
overpriced where they had to pay PayPal to preorder something and people were converting
like crazy. Like we were spending $5 a day on ads and making probably a hundred to 150.
And so for me, I was like, that's a really good response. This is the world's shittiest
landing page. I've paid someone $5 on Fiverr to Photoshop a logo that I paid another Fiverr
person to make up onto an existing competitor's box. The whole thing looks trash and scammy
and we're doing really, really well from a return on ad spend standpoint. This thing
probably has legs if we can actually figure out how to make the product.
So this idea of a smoke test, putting up a landing page, driving traffic using ads comes
straight out of the book, The Lean Startup. What are your thoughts about running successful
smoke tests like this in maybe 2019? How do you avoid getting a smoke test wrong?
Yeah, it's a good question. I think there are a lot of people that have different thoughts
on this, kind of the Lean Startup concept. I think that like, Keith or Boy is someone
that I really respect who hates the Lean Startup and thinks it leads to suboptimal outcomes.
I think he's actually right if you're trying to win the Startup Olympics and build a billion
dollar business, you probably just need really high conviction in an idea and fact-checked
or idea-checked that idea with a bunch of other smart people. And then if it's a big
enough idea and you have to raise a lot of money to go for it, fuck yeah, go for it.
But if you're chasing something smaller, I think that the risk most companies run into
is market risk. Is this product or is this idea something that people actually want?
And I think if you're at all worried about market risk, then in that case, you want to
do some sort of smoke test and figure out what is the response like or is this something
people are actually excited about? And in the case of Kell and Fire, at the time, there
was not really an existing comp that we could point to online where people were selling
bone broth. And it's like, hey, if we do this better, we'll probably capture some percentage
of this market. It was like very uncertain if people actually wanted to buy bone broth
online or how big that market was. And so given that, I think that in those cases, doing
a smoke test makes a lot of sense and you want to look for how excited are people by
the response that they're having to the smoke test. And if the answer is blazingly obvious,
you put $5 into the smoke test machine and it spits out $150, that's a really, really,
really good indication that this is something people actually care about.
There's this continuum between, on one hand, entering a proven market where perhaps customers
are already paying for a solution to this problem. Perhaps you've got lots of competitors
and you can see that their businesses are working pretty well. And on the other end,
blazing a new trail. Maybe no one's ever sold bone broth before. Maybe they've never sold
it online before. There's a lot of uncertainty there as to whether this can even work. A
lot of people, in order to mitigate this uncertainty, will raise money from investors. Why didn't
you consider raising for Kell and Fire?
It's a good question. I think it was two things. I think one of the things was I have somewhat
of an aversion or had somewhat of an aversion to raising money. Now, I think I have less
of that aversion. But the second thing was I really was not certain that Kell and Fire
would be a meaningful business. And so, in my opinion, the worst thing that you can do
as a startup founder is raise money for a business that ends up being mediocre or in
just too small of a market. I think it's fine if you raise a bunch of money, you blow through
it and you die quickly. Or if you raise a bunch of money and you sell, obviously it's
great. I think the worst thing you can have is raising money for something that just doesn't
take off, but that you have a fiduciary duty to run for four to six years. That just sounds
like hell to me.
And so, I didn't want to be in that situation. And I was also fortunate enough that our first
production run was about 100K and I was able to take some of my earnings from the exceptional
acquisition and plow that into paying for our first production. I didn't have a lot
of leeway after that, but I felt pretty strongly that if I didn't want investors, I was concerned
the market wasn't going to be big enough. So, it would make raising a bad idea. And
then after all of that, I was also majorly concerned that... Or I ran the numbers and
saw if these ad metrics hold true, the worst-case scenario of me starting this business and
plowing all this money into inventory is that it takes a year to sell through and I make
my money back and I've wasted a bunch of time, but I'm financially fine.
And so, that kind of gave me the confidence to be willing to invest in the inventory and
not want to raise money.
So we are now at the exploit part of the explore-exploit algorithm. You've hit on Kettle and Fire.
The smoke test went really well. How do you exploit a great idea like this once you've
hit on it?
Yeah, I think you move quickly. You're optimized for moving as quickly as you can. And so,
for us, we realized that we had a pretty meaningful advantage. We saw the first month we launched.
Coming into Kettle and Fire, I thought this was going to be like a 5 to 10-cam-month business
after one to two years. And the first month we launched, we did like 20 grand. The next
month, we did 40. The month after that, we did 60. And we're like, wow, okay, this is
like really picking up steam. And that was with a very, very minimal amount of paid advertising.
And so, we just pressed down on the gas pretty hard. And we're willing to aggressively invest
in growing our distribution, growing our business, investing in new products, investing in the
team. I did not take a single dollar out of the business until I started paying myself
a salary in 2016, which was about a year and a half after we launched. And so, we got pretty
aggressive on the growth front. But it also meant that we did like 280K in the four months
that we launched in 2015. We did like 2.8 the next year. We did 10 a year after that
and have continued to grow. And so, it's just been a... Yeah, we've been pretty aggressive
about growing.
So, a lot of your experience came from the tech world. Obviously, you were the head of
growth at Exceptional. Kettle and Fire sells bone broth. It's certainly not tech. What's
different about getting into consumer packaged goods? What's the same?
There's a lot of things that are different. And one of the things that I think was advantageous
was I came from a tech background. Most people in CPG kind of world, consumer packaged goods,
which is like what our industry is called, they will start a business like Kettle and
Fire. And the roadmap historically has been, I have this nice little bone broth product.
Now, I'm going to sell it into 10 stores around the neighborhood that I live. Then I'm going
to sell it to 50. Then I'm going to go statewide. Then I'm going to try and go like in the region
I'm in. Then eventually national. And it's like a multi-year scale up kind of thing.
I knew pretty quickly that I wanted to leverage my skills with online marketing. And so, we
went online as soon as we could and built out a direct to consumer capability that even
today very few food brands kind of have on there internally. So, we exploited that advantage.
And in a lot of ways, it's like growing a bone broth brand using best practices from
like the tech growth marketing world works really well. And it works even better because
you're not competing against incredibly well funded other SaaS businesses that are using
the same tactics. At the same time, things are different. At exceptional, we had like
financial reporting that was basically, hey, here's how much we made this month. Here's
how much we have to pay in salaries this month. That's about it. It's really hard to, if you're
making more money than you are spending, it's really hard to go out of business. If you're
a software company, if you're making more money than you have expense was in a CBG brand,
you can die instantly. It's crazy. And so, figuring out how to do financial controls
has been by far the biggest learning and is so different from tech. Because like, do you
mind if I give a quick example of what?
Yeah, yeah. Go into the details.
Yeah. So to give you a sense, like when we were growing in 2016, I guess 2017, we went
from like 2.8 2016 to 10 million in 2017. And so we grew more than 3X that year. What
you have to do if you're in that position is if you do a million dollars in revenue
in January, you basically have to plan, and let's say you're growing 3X, so effectively
you're doubling the business every, I don't know, what is that, like 3 months, 4 months.
So you basically have to like, if you have a million dollars in January, you have a million
dollars that hits your bank balance, you then have to pay as if you're going to grow to
1.4 million the next month. And so you have to overspend on inventory, assuming that you're
going to grow. And so as your business grows faster, the more and more money you have to
throw at inventory, which means the less and less money you have in the bank. So I had
a very memorable meeting with one of my advisors that year, who was like, who has experience
in CPG. And I was like, we're crushing it. We like double last month. I think we're going
to like have another huge month. And he was like, how much cash do you have in the bank?
I was like, I don't know, like a couple hundred grand, we're fine. And he was like, oh, so
you guys are about to be out of business. And I was like, what do you mean? And he was
like, just trust me, you're about to be out of business. You need to get out like a line
of credit right now. And he was totally right. And there's just weird growing nuances when
it comes to building inventory for a physical product brand.
Did you ever read Shoe Dog by the founder of Nike?
I did too late, but I did.
Yeah, that book was a nightmare. I read it and I was like, oh, there's no way I'm ever
selling physical goods because it was the same story. He kept selling more and more
shoes and eventually was doing, you know, 30, $40 million in revenue and had like no
money in the bank. It was on the verge of dying and the growth was amazing. And it's
just such a foreign concept for somebody coming out of a tech world.
It's crazy. The only way in these businesses, the only way that you actually get a bunch
of cash out the door is if you stop growing, which no one really wants to do. Or if you
have like done a poor job of planning inventory and you've like massively underbought and
then you can take cash out. So let's talk about growth. I look at the
parallels between your story and Nike, for example, at that point in time, people weren't
really running and the running shoe was like this newly popular thing that everybody was
kind of getting into. And so growth just continue to accelerate and never really stopped. With
what you're doing, you're sort of writing on a trend as well. People are eating healthier.
People care more about what's going into their bodies. The fact that you could come onto
the scene and start selling, you know, this very healthy keto friendly bone broth that
others weren't selling is kind of an indicator that you're a little bit early to the market.
What are some of the bigger factors that helped you grow, cut on fire and keep growing so
you didn't go out of business? Yeah, I think one of the main factors is
that we were early. We were like the first shelf stable bone broth. And so if you're
someone who makes bone broth at home and you realize it's a huge pain, you realize it takes
24 hours to make and it's something you want to have as a staple of your diet, like we're
a really good way to solve that problem. And so I think that like we have really good product
market fit kind of from day one. And then in terms of keep like, how do we keep growing?
We've got an incredible marketing team that we way over invested in digital marketing,
especially from a personnel standpoint to build what I think is truly one of the best
growth teams in direct to consumer food that's out there. And so because of that, we were
doing stuff like investing heavily in Facebook ads, doing subscription programs, doing influence
or marketing kind of before people were talking about it. And so hitting these channels before
they were over optimized and like overcrowded meant that we were really the first brand
to get our name out there as a bone broth brand. And so it meant that as more people
found out about bone broth and their friends drinking at their favorite celebrity, their
trainer, you know, whatever talking about bone broth, we were one of the first brands
that they went to and they heard about, which is really cool. And that meant that like,
as the trend grew, because we forced our way to the top to be the number one brand, we
kind of like grew along with the trend, which is really, really helpful.
It's super good to be number one, because number one gets like 89% of the intention
share number two, a few people have heard of number three, no one ever, no one knows
who they are. So you really accumulate these great advantages by being number one in a
growing category, I would say in a kind of static category, I think that like, if we
wanted to start a chip company, that category is not really growing, I think you could probably
carve out an amazing niche and amazing lifestyle business. And you don't have to worry about
being number one. But you grow a hell of a lot faster if you're number one when it comes
to like a trend that's growing really quickly.
So let's talk about some of these growth strategies and detail you mentioned advertising,
you mentioned influencer marketing and a couple other things. What do you think was the most
significant for growing Kettle and Fire early on?
I think influencer strategy was a big one, we launched in 2015. And we're one of the
first brands to start really building out a strong influencer program. And so that was
one of the things that I think really propelled us is we had pretty early on several hundred
influencers that were talking about Kettle and Fire and talking about bone broth at
a time where like, they weren't really talking about that many other brands. Now it's way
common you scroll through your Instagram and you're like, Oh, whoever John Mayer is
talking about like the new brand of me undies that he loves, it's like, cool, I don't give
a shit. At the time, it resonated way more with people. And so we just were pretty quick
to get out there in terms of building a brand that influencers were talking a lot about.
And that led to a lot of our growth. And I think that was for sure our biggest channel
for the first like two years of the company.
I think one of the kind of truisms about growth and something you talk about in traction
as well is that oftentimes you have to switch channels. A channel stops working as well
over time as it did early on. And you have to leapfrog onto something else. Did that
ever happen to influencer marketing? Or it kind of petered out and you needed to switch
to something else?
Oh yeah, for sure. I mean, we saw it get more expensive. We saw it become more challenging.
It's way more crowded now, like I just mentioned. And so now we're a super boring brand. We're
in retail, we're in about 7,000 retailers, every Whole Foods, and that's like our main
growth channel. We timed that leap really well, but it's certainly not a sexy growth
hack to say like we put our product on shelves at companies that are paid to sell it. It's
like sweet. It's pretty standard stuff, which is also another learning I've had. I used
to think about things in terms of growth hacks and a lot of that kind of stuff. Now, I think
about that way less. I think that you might have an amazing growth hack around like how
to sell product and get people to care about what you're doing on a Twitter. But for us,
that channel is just not big enough to move the needle at this point. And so we don't
worry about it. And so we now think way more, way less about growth hacks and way more about
like how can we take advantage of large channels that if we get them to work, we can actually
make a material dent in our business.
How do you think tech founders should think about brand marketing? Because when I talk
to people working on physical goods, I hear the word brand all the time. When I talk to
people starting tech businesses, I rarely hear that word except for the biggest companies.
Yeah. I think that brand is code for companies that have raised too much money and don't
know what to do with it. I think that in general, you can talk about like a way luggage probably
says about how they're building a brand. It's like, yeah, are you building a brand or are
you spending 3 million a month on Facebook ads? And the answer like turn off your Facebook
ads, take your app, take your brand marketing every day. And I can guarantee you will happen
to your growth. I think that brand is like a word and a term that bad marketers probably
do because they feel like it's something that should be done. I think it's important from
a positioning standpoint. I think it's important from a design and look and feel standpoint.
I think it's important from a choir standpoint actually, but I do not think that it is something
that actually improves or like I don't think it meaningfully has a meaningful impact on
a company's outcomes. I'm super skeptical of brand in general.
So brand might be important for some of the intangible things, but for actual growth,
it comes down to distribution, it comes down to advertising, it comes down to products
on shelves.
Yeah, I think it comes down to distribution and it comes down to your product position.
Like I think if you're Craigslist is probably a great example of this, like they're a by
all accounts, Craigslist is the worst brand in the world, but they have a strong brand
promise and they're fucking everywhere. And so they crush it. Like I think that that type
of stuff, I don't know, I just think that there's so many well-branded companies that
just fall flat on their face. To me, I just think brand is a almost certainly a waste
of time for most businesses and that that time and energy would be far better focused
on investing in building your own unique distribution channel, improving your product or building
a real, real kind of like competitive advantage.
So let's switch gears here for a second. I met a lot of founders.
By boring you, Courland.
Yeah, we got to get up and stop. I can't listen to you have a brand anymore, Justin. Jesus.
Not to make the show interesting. I want people to listen all the way through, not drop the
episode 30 minutes into it.
Not kill themselves out there.
Let's talk about people for a second. People are interesting. I know a lot of founders
who build successful companies and they do it in almost total isolation. They're not
part of any sort of scene. They aren't really particularly well connected. I would say you're
pretty much the opposite. You've been great at connecting with people who are smart, who
are impressive. People here all the time vaguely that they should be networking. What are some
of the tangible benefits that you've gotten from it?
Yeah, so I don't love the term networking, but I think that there are a lot of really
smart people out there. I'm not a super smart person, and so I've benefited a lot by being
around people that are way smarter than me. I've certainly met people who are off the
charts intelligent and can just come up with amazing, interesting, brilliant ideas all
on their own. I don't have the ability to do that. For me, being in San Francisco and
being around people that are way smarter than me meant that I got exposed to a lot of really,
really cool things.
I think that there's no doubt that meeting people, I did a couple of things that I think
were tremendous from building my network, if you want to call it that standpoint. I'd
say there's two things I probably did pretty well. One, when I was in San Francisco, I
wanted to learn way more about growth marketing. It was something I cared about, and so I started
organizing a meetup that was totally informal. It was invite only. It was called the growth
group. We met once a month.
I was this guy who was running a growth, had seven direct reports at a time. We'd been
acquired by Rackspace. We were doing $3 million a year in revenue, and I was organizing this
group where we had heads of growth from GitHub, Airbnb, Lyft, and Mozilla come. That was insane.
These people were so much smarter than me. I would just sit there and take notes and
be like, oh, cool, and then moderate the discussion, which was crazy.
I was surrounded by people that were way smarter than me, mostly because I took the initiative
to organize groups and do things that these people wanted to do, but didn't have time
to organize on their own. The second thing I think I did well is I tend to be... I think
that there are a lot of people that you can meet, especially in San Francisco, who you
meet up with them, you sit down, and they're so clearly ready to just suck you of all your
information and then walk away and just leave you drained and lifeless in the corner at
the cafe. I actually think the opposite. I plan on starting companies for a long time,
and I really want to work with smart, awesome people that I would consider my friends for
the rest of my life. I take an opposite approach of trying to connect on a personal level with
people, not because I think it serves me better or anything like that, but because, although
it tends to, to be totally honest, but because I really enjoy talking to people, and I love
learning about shit. I love seeing other people succeed. I was super pumped up when indie
hackers sold a strike. Fuck yeah, Portland did it. It's really cool. I think those are
two things that really helped. By meeting those people, it gives you permission to say,
hey, we're in a growth slump right now, which we have been at various times. How did you
think about getting out of this rut? Is there anyone I should talk to? Is there anyone I
should interview? Is there anyone I could connect with to figure out how do we get over
the next growth hump, or how do I solve this very specific problem that we're having right
now?
Yeah, I love that point about not always trying to suck everybody dry of all their information
like I do on this podcast. You're giving people a platform. It totally doesn't apply to you.
You're fantastic at this.
You and I have a mutual friend, Julian Shapiro. He's been on the show a couple of times. He
did this when I started Indie Hackers. He reached out and gave me all these helpful
tips on how I could grow indie hackers and increase my revenue. It was crazy helpful.
Almost nobody does that. If I get 1,000 emails, maybe one of them is from someone who genuinely
took the time to figure out what my priorities are and offer some help with the high priority
stuff. Why do you think more people don't do stuff like this? It's not uncommon advice.
Yeah, I think that for a lot of people, they just get tied up in stuff. They become busy.
They make it not a priority. I think a lot of people say that they want something and
they don't actually. A lot of people will say that they want to be in amazing shape,
but they're not willing to take the trade off of what does it take to actually be in
amazing shape. Well, it means you can't eat Oreos every day at 3 p.m. A lot of people
say they want an amazing network, but they're not willing to invest in that time building
relationships and being helpful to people when they have maybe a family they want to
go home to or they want to hit the gym or they want to watch Netflix for 2 hours. I'm
not judging whether those are better or worse. I just think that for most people, time is
their maximum constraint and people do a really bad job of evaluating what they say they want
versus their actual revealed preferences.
Yeah, for a lot of this stuff, it's just so easy to underestimate the costs. It's hard.
If you want to be helpful to somebody, it's probably going to require several hours if
not days of being thoughtful and really working to be helpful. I know you've done this a couple
of times. You were able to help out Andrew Warner, the host of the Mixergy podcast, and
you also co-wrote the book Traction with Gabriel Weinberg, who from his perspective, you were
totally an unknown quantity at that point. How have you been able to get on people's
radar and be helpful?
Yeah, that one was super. Both of those are super easy. I mean, I sent him a cold email
in Andrew's case. His onboarding program I signed up for Mixergy. The onboarding experience
was awful, comically bad. I just sent him this long email of like, hey, man, this is
your main source of revenue. If you can improve this thing by 20%, you're killing it. I just
sent him things that I would do differently, questions I would ask all of this. I didn't
realize it then, but at the time, I was thinking like, oh, he's Andrew Warner. He knows all
these business people. He's running a successful thing. He must know everything he was about
to tell him. The answer is yes, he does, but now that I'm running a meaningful business,
I way more appreciate how often and how true it is that I know that there are 10,000 things
about Kettle and Fire that could be better. I just haven't had time to focus on them and
prove them and do all that kind of stuff.
Just being the person that says, hey, this sucks. Here's how I would solve it. Want me
to do this for you becomes incredibly easy. I did that with Andrew and I offered to solve
it for him for free. He was like, no, I'll pay you $200 or whatever the fuck it was.
I did it. It was great and it kicked off a long, really good relationship with that.
The two of us have.
Yeah, I get a ton of emails for any hackers that are also pointing out things that I already
know. There's a bug here or want to be great if you had a mobile app. Well, I've got a
list of a thousand things that I know are good ideas that I know are bugs. I know should
be fixed or improved for any hackers, but I don't have time. I don't have time to work
on the 800th most important thing. I have to work on the top most important thing. Exactly.
If you just email someone and say, hey, this thing is wrong and this thing could be better.
That's not that helpful because they probably already know. Like if you want to be helpful,
you have to do steps number two and three that you laid out, which is to say, here's
how you can fix it. And Hey, do you want me to fix this for you? Exactly. Let's talk about
your book traction for a bit. You wrote this book with Gabriel Weinberg, the founder of
DuckDuckGo. Again, this is an extremely busy person. You were somebody who was relatively
unknown at that time. How did you get onto his radar? And how did that collaboration
actually work as far as the division of labor and other operational stuff?
It was pretty easy. I think like he had done seven interviews on traction and the top of
getting traction. He bought the domain, tractionbook.com. He had an email sign up list and had said
on his blog multiple times, I don't have any more time to do this project because DuckDuckGo
is taking off, which is crushing. It's crazy. It's amazing. And so I reached out to him
and was like, Hey, I'm recently graduating college or about to graduate college. I have
nothing going on in my life because I'm not successful or smart yet. And like, can I help
you push this project through to fruition? And so it just turned out he lived in the
Philadelphia area, which is near where my family lives. And so we got together twice.
And basically I was like, look, I fully appreciate that you probably don't think I can write
this book. And so what I'm going to do is give me like one interview and one topic and
like, I'll show you what type of chapter I can write. And so I spent a week, two weeks
writing the first chapter of traction book and just sent it to him. It was like, Hey,
is this good enough? If so, let's actually write this whole thing. And he said it was.
And so the arrangement worked out really well where my time was far less valuable than his.
And so I wrote the first draft of almost every chapter in the book and then would send it
to him. He would edit. We would go back and forth and we'd like align on a final draft
of that chapter and kick it to a real editor and just kind of did that for the 26 chapters
in the book until we had a finalized book after about a year of writing.
Well, it's really blown up since then. I feel like everybody I know owns a copy of traction.
I've got it on my bookshelf behind me somewhere. Let's say you could go back in time with all
the skills and the knowledge that you have now. Maybe you don't know about crypto, right?
But you know about growth, you know about marketing and starting businesses. Uh, would
it still be worth it for you to take the time to reach out to Gabriel and write traction
all over again? Probably. Yeah, probably not. Um, I probably wouldn't have been worth it.
I think I honestly, I'm incredibly proud of it. I think it massively helped with my learning,
my network, met a bunch of friends and it was just a tremendous experience. It was something
I wanted to do forever. It was just write a book. But I think that if I look at like
we wrote traction, which did really well, like beyond what I thought it could have done
because neither of us really wanted to be authors, we kind of wrote it and then just
stepped away, you know, like put it out in the world and didn't do anything with it.
I think that if I had wanted to be a thought leader or like monetize that doing consulting
or speaking or whatever it is, workshops, consulting, then yeah, that would have been
totally worth it. Uh, I think that because that's not what I want to do from a career
standpoint, I probably wouldn't do it again. Uh, unless it was something that I think directly,
like right now I would write a book on health before I would write another book on marketing.
Uh, cause I think that like that actually fits with a lot more of the goals and things
that I want to achieve in my career way more so than, than a book on marketing.
So at some point while you're working on kettle and fire early on, you did something that
I don't think any of my other guests have ever done. And that's how you started a second
business that you grow to eight figures while you were running your first business.
Yeah. Eight figures in revenue. And you bought a third. So let's, let's do, uh, what order
did that happen? Yeah. So we launched Kettle and Fire in August, 2015. We bought FOMO in
August 2016. No, April 2016. And then we launched perfect keto or started perfect keto November
or October of 2016. So, okay. So that's a lot. And like basically the span of a year,
it's a little bit over a year. We won't talk about FOMO as much cause maybe I'll be a bit
of Ryan on the podcast at some point in the future. He can go into a crazy amount of detail.
He would be controversial and awesome. I know he'll be, uh, he's a controversial guy like
talking to him on Twitter. He's one of those guys. I have to DM on Twitter cause I can't
have those conversations in public. Uh, how did you first, like, why did you do that?
Why would you distract yourself from your first business and start another one?
Yeah, it's an excellent question. I think it was probably foolish, although it, it worked
out. But I think the reality is that I mentioned earlier, uh, for me, the biggest risk and
the biggest thing I was curious about in Kettle and Fire is like, can this be a real business?
And at the time, you know, we launched in August, uh, six months later or eight months
later bought FOMO. I was still like not sure that it was going to be a real business. Wasn't
really sure if it would become, uh, the business, you know, the size and scale that I wanted
it to be. And so I was still kind of looking at other ideas and it was a, we had hired
an incredible team. Uh, we had put the right pieces in place, I think, or, you know, as
best as we could knowing what we did then. And around that time, I also like being in
the space, I was like, Oh man, there, there's this like the fundamental arbitrage that or
the fundamental opportunity that I think I saw and still see is not that like people
want bone broth, but can't get it. I think it's way more actually that there is a whole
set of products that people want that are better for you and actually make you a healthier
person that consumer product companies and food companies are just not making. And so
as I'd seen with Kettle and Fire, like, wow, if you make a consumer product that is branded
fine and meets an actual value proposition and you like know how to do online marketing
where you can reach people, uh, you can grow a food brand effectively faster than has ever
been possible in the history of launching food brands. Like you're one or you're two
of most, most, uh, food brands are, you know, single digit hundreds of thousands of dollars
if you do really well. Uh, and so with perfect keto being on fire and talking to customers
and interviewing people and saying, just being in the space, I saw keto was something that
was starting to gather steam. It was something that I was trying in my life and I felt amazing.
Uh, it was something that like high performance people, Tim Ferriss, Dominic Bagostino, like
a bunch of athletes and people who talk about the stuff we're starting to talk about. And
it was something that if you looked on Amazon, there were literally like two products that
were serving that, that niche. And so again, this was like, but Kettle and Fire would be
a side business was wrong, but in a good way, my buddy and I, my partner, perfect, uh, perfect
keto Sky, Anthony Gustin, we launched the business thinking it would be a side of business
just cause we mainly wanted to work together. And the goal was like, let's launch this thing.
And when it makes 20 grand in profit, we'll like spend it on a trip to Japan, uh, just
cause we want to hang out with one another in Japan. And we're like, that'll probably
take 18 months. Uh, and it took like 40 days. And so we, uh, yeah. And so just saw that,
that trend and saw that people are excited about keto saw that the two existing companies
in the space were doing a horrible job, didn't know online marketing. We're putting a bunch
of terrible ingredients in their products and just decided to launch it. And it, and
it took off on us. So explain to me exactly what perfect keto is, what were you selling
to consumers? Yeah. So perfect keto is a, is a food and supplement brand for mostly
for people who want to incorporate a low carb lifestyle or keto into their life in some
way. And so our first product was what we call an exogenous ketone, which is basically
like when you're in a state of ketosis or which comes from eating a ketogenic diet,
your body makes endogenous ketones, which are like ketone bodies, which your body burns
for energy. It effectively burns fat instead of glucose, AKA sugar for energy. Uh, so what
we made was an exogenous ketone, which gives you a lot of the like energy boosting effects
that you get from being on a ketogenic diet, but without necessarily being in a state of
ketosis. And so, uh, there've been studies that supplementing with exogenous ketones
can help with weight loss, can help with decrease cancer inflammation, can help with, uh, a
lot of different metabolic markers and things that people generally try to improve their
health with. And so that was our first product. How different was your playbook for growing
perfect keto than it was for kettle and fire? It was the exact same. Uh, with one notable
difference we fucked up, uh, when we launched kettle on fire and we totally ignored Amazon
thinking like, Oh, we don't know how to do Amazon. We'll handle that later. But we didn't
realize that people would buy our product and resell it on Amazon, uh, which totally
messed up that side of the business for us. And so when we launched for a keto, we were
like, we're going to go ham on Amazon on day one and follow the kettle on fire, like online
growth playbook, which we did.
Okay. So I want to get a little bit more into just the details of launching a food business.
Because again, you came from the tech industry. You're a marketer. You don't know how to make
food. At least you go and do it. Like, how did you, what goes into that? Like, who do
you need to know? Who do you need to contact? Like, how do you get something from not existing
to creating a box of bone broth?
Yeah, it's tough, man. We, uh, we emailed like 400 something manufacturing partners
to ask them like, Hey, this is the product we want to make. Can you help us formulate
and actually manufacture it? And it was really hard. We got told no 399 times. We had one
group that fortunately, the way the dynamic works is it's incredibly hard to find a co-packer.
Once you do oftentimes they're looking for new business. And so if you say like, Hey,
if you help us formulate this, we'll then work with you to actually make this product
in production. That's kind of the, they're bread and butter. And so they're willing to
do it. But yeah, it was, it was a lot of cold email. It was a lot of like talking to founders
of CPG companies and saying like, how did you go about this the first 12 months? Uh,
all which paid off, but yeah, it was, it was incredibly hard.
So again, it reminds me of a shoe dog where he was working with basically a manufacturer
in Japan to sort of work on the shoe together and the manufacturer would contribute ideas
for how the shoes should look. And eventually it turned into sort of a competitive arrangement
where the manufacturer was like, this is going really well. Like, why don't we just make
our own shoes? Uh, are there any parallels in the food business?
Um, some, uh, there definitely are. You kind of have, we were lucky. We met someone early
on who knew a lot of the pitfalls that these emerging brands fall into. And so from day
one, we designed contracts that meant that we would minimize the risk of that happening
to us. Uh, so that, that was really helpful. I thought you were going to pull out another
Joseph Stalin quote there. So I'm impressed. You never know. I'm really restraining myself.
Yeah, maybe Hitler next or something. You know what? Why don't I go a step further
and just quote you just seriously. Um, you wrote a pretty great blog post that I totally
agree with that talked about something that advice that people give that you don't really
agree with, which is the idea that, uh, your idea doesn't matter. It doesn't really matter
what you're working on. It's all about the execution. And as long as you execute really
hard on whatever idea you're working on, you're going to succeed. I have the polar opposite
opinion you do as well. Go into that. Why don't you think good execution is enough?
I think that execution is, and I don't know the first person to say this, but I think
the execution is effectively a force multiplier. Um, but I think the thing that most people
don't talk about, and maybe I should write a blog post on this. Um, I think that most
startups don't get killed on the execution side. They get killed due to like market factors.
Like you make a condom for goats and it turns out no one wants that. Like that is a market
shocking, right? I don't know. Maybe that's a huge business. I've no idea. But so there's,
that's like a market risk thing that you're exposed to and you don't even get the chance
to execute well on it. And so if, if I think about like where most startups fail, it's
almost always in the market risk phase, which is effectively, you just have a bad idea.
Like I think of market risk as this like hurdle that you have to clear to then try and scale
this like bouldering wall of execution risk. And so if your idea sucks, you're not even
going to get to play the like, are you a good executor game or not? And so I think that
it's actually incredibly important. And the value of really, really good ideas is insanely
overvalued, especially because in today's environment, at least, you know, 2019, there
is a huge lack of good ideas and a huge lack of big ideas. And if you have either one of
those, you can suck executing, like read the, uh, bad blood book by Elizabeth home, but
all accounts, she was a trash operator, like a horrible team. 40% of her team is quitting
a year. And like she had a massive idea that she could sell and granted she was a fraud,
but still it's like she raised $800 million. I mean, if you have a good idea, money will
come in this environment. And I think that's never been more true.
So I can't miss this opportunity when I have you on the podcast, Justin, you're a super
healthy guy, super fit, you're looking well muscled and you're sure inflatable. Um, we
all hear about diet and exercise and sleep. Obviously it's easier said than done. Otherwise
everybody would be super healthy. You seem to do a good job at these and you're also
running multiple health food companies. Why are so many founders getting this wrong? And
what are some ways that founders can do a better job preventing their businesses from
making their health so much worse?
It's a great question. I think this is one of the things that a lot of people in Silicon
Valley are stupid about. I think that in general, the sort of engineer mind thinks about the
body as like this thing that I can hack, like, Oh, I need 2000 calories a day. And if I get
them in perfect proportions, like I'll be totally healthy. So I'll just drink soy then
all the time. It's like, no, that's really stupid. Like the body is an incredibly complex
system. We literally are still finding out new systems, new, new things about it. Like
every year, uh, it's not just something that you can throw pasta McDonald's and Soylent
into and expect that your health outcomes are going to be the same as someone who's
eating like a paleo non-processed whole food site. And so I tend to think that what you
put into your body is incredibly important. It dictates your energy levels, your mental
wellbeing, your emotional wellbeing, your like clearheadedness, everything. Uh, like
one of the most impressive things about Reid Hoffman to me is how much he's achieved while
being like someone who's not super healthy. He must, his mind like, Oh my God, if that
guy got healthy, he could run the world and like take over America. It's incredible. And
so what I do in general is like, I eat a mostly paleo diet. Uh, I focus on getting enough
sleep. I try and cut out toxic relationships in my life and make sure that like the four
pillars for me are like food, stress, uh, sleep and movement. And like, as long as I'm
getting enough of those, as long as I'm moving some, I'm not crazy stress, which means my
relationships are good and I'm not killing myself at work, uh, on a daily basis. And
you know, my sleep is good. My diet is good. I'm, I'm good. I think this stuff can be a
lot easier than people need, you know, tend to tend to make it out to me.
Yeah. It's all interconnected. And if you're sitting down and you start up every day and
you're sort of, if your brain's foggy and you're not coming up with good ideas, you're
not able to work or stay focused, it's probably related to all these other things that you
might not think to connect it to.
Oh, I mean, I think it's crazy that like so many tech companies in the Valley will serve
pizza and beer at 5 p.m. and then have like peanut M&Ms and Coca-Cola on tap. It's like,
what a recipe to like make everyone at your company tired and super unhappy. It's crazy.
Yeah. Yeah. Stripe's got the polar opposite thing going on. We're at lunch. It's a lot
of salads and vegetables and proteins. Uh, it's very low carb. It's almost no bread.
Of course. Call some brothers. They know their shit. Yeah. I know what's going on. Um, let's
close out here. One of my goals with this show is to get more people to start companies
just because I think it'll be awesome and life changing for so many people if they can
get over that initial hurdle of hesitation. Justin, what would you say to somebody who's
considering getting started, but they're telling themselves now's not the right time. I don't
know enough. I'm not ready.
I would say that if you're, I would think about lowering your risk. So for me, I was
not sure that I was ready to start a company. Uh, and so I did it in an environment where
failure had a really, really small cost. Like if you told me when I launched kettle on fire,
you're going to launch a bone broth company. I would have been like, Oh God, no, that sounds
scary. I don't know what I'm doing. But instead I told myself like, I'm going to test a landing
page for an idea that happens to be a bone broth company. If that fails, extraordinarily
low risk, nothing, no downside. I've lost maybe three hours of my time. And so for me,
at least with the way my psychology works, the only thing that's ever worked for me is
like breaking, like removing this idea of I need to start a massive company and instead
just breaking it down into really easy, concrete next steps that at no phase are you risking
the feeling of like, I may be a failure if this doesn't work out. And that's the only
way I've ever been able to do anything.
Cool. So you just break it down into baby steps. So every step you take is not that
big and not that risky.
Well, yeah. And I think the biggest piece there, at least for me, is just like not risking
my I think it's really hard to risk your identity on something unproven. And so if I was like,
I'm going to launch kettle on fire and I fail, I'm a failed startup CEO fail founder. That
sucks. I don't want to do that. That's super scary to me. If I'm like testing a landing
page and have this identity of someone that is testing an idea and trying to figure out
what he's doing next, it becomes really incongruent if I'm not actually testing ideas. And so
I think you want to shape your identity to like your conception of yourself to guide
you in the direction that you want to go and make it so that failure does not feel so costly.
Sage advice. Well, listen, Justin, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been
a pleasure. Hope you're not too drained after being peppered with questions.
No, and that shirt kept me away full time. I'm gonna have to put these on YouTube. Now
we've got video for the podcast. It's like a whole another element. Thanks again, Justin.
Can you tell listeners where they can go to find out more about what you're up to you
and ping you online if they want to? Sure. Yeah. On my website, JustinMares.com or I'm
on Twitter at JW Mayors, M-A-R-E-S. Thanks so much, Justin. Listeners, it would really
help the show if you took a minute to reach out to Justin and just let him know that you
enjoyed hearing from him on the podcast. He is, as he said, JW Mayors on Twitter, and
I would really appreciate it if you just showed him some love. I also appreciate hearing from
you myself. I am CS Allen on Twitter. That's C-S-A-L-L-E-N. If you learned something useful
from the podcast, let me know. Or if you have any suggestions at all for what guests I should
bring on, topics I could cover, or other ways I can improve the show, I'm all ears. It's
super hard to get feedback on a podcast, so I love it when you reach out to me on Twitter.
As always, thanks so much for listening, and I will see you next time.