Why the Hardest Part Starts After Launch: Operators Build (E5)

Welcome back to episode 5, Operators Build. We are now officially a month away from launch. It is July 24th, 2026 when we're recording this. We will launch in roughly a month. So when you see this episode, just know this is the timeline that we're on today. What we're gonna do is kind of catch you up on everything that's happened. And to do that, to start, Curtis, I'm gonna get you to kind of walk us through what's gone on with manufacturing, Coman, product formulation. Everything, and then we'll just kind of riff on that today.

Lots has happened. It's been a year and it's been delayed and it's been a roller coaster of challenges and highlights. But, let's take it back. Dr. Borne referred us to a phenomenal co-man. We thought it was going to be smooth, easy, experienced co-man, and then delay after delay after delay after delay. Everything from they got They got acquired. There was a shift in resources and people. We got deprioritized. I don't think they knew who they were dealing with. And we were the new guys on the block trying to launch a brand. And we were like the minions and the small guys that weren't given any priority. We had a shift of our account manager. So the account manager that Ashley was introduced to us got got shifted off of our project and we kind of got lost in the mix. But in the meantime, during that process, we had, obviously they had to formulate our product. We had multiple tests. So they shipped us samples. They shipped us actually different flavor samples, different types of samples in terms of just, you know, based on our feedback, whether it was color feedback, whether it was taste feedback. You know, and so we had to go back and forth quite a bit.

Uh, Mike, you, you made a comment in one of our chats that like you didn't like how long the baby took to, to, to make, but I said the quality is good.

I don't know that I like the duration of the labor, but I'm glad the baby's out. I, I mean, like, I'll rant for a little bit here. Um, this is probably like, it's funny, we're like supposed to be experienced and we're starting a business. Like, this has been a disaster. Like, we, we filmed a bunch of episodes where we thought we might launch this last year. We're like, Almost 9 months, 10 months off of our timeline. And I think like there's a lot of things we could learn from it. Like one of them being that we decided to really lean into this very, very highly tested branded ingredients kind of angle. And we did it without really knowing if that's going to matter in terms of what customers are going to, how customers are going to respond to things and like the things we can say. We hope it will. But I think if you'd gone back and told me a year ago, like, hey, it's going to delay you by almost a calendar year to do this, man, I don't think I would've said yes to it. And it's just a great example of like, you know, the longer I'm in the game, the more I feel like I learn. But we did it. And so like, it was crazy. I mean, that kind of from the outside, it was crazy how long this took. It's crazy that we got dropped as a client, basically. I mean, I've seen that before in in commands that it's just like they know, they think they know where their bread is buttered and they're going to pay attention to those accounts. And if you're not one of those accounts, like you can just kind of slip through the cracks. So, and then we, I think we spent a lot of time on packaging and like there were a ton of revisions on how do we get the wording exactly right. So we're probably not going to get sued, but you know, you also can't get sued if you're not selling anything. So that's, I guess, another way to not get sued. Anyway, I'm ready because I was kind of at the end of my, I kind of like been like, is this going to die? Like, is this going to happen? But we actually have physical product.

Do you have it?

You have it in your possession?

I have it in my possession because the 3PL we're using is Encore in Oklahoma City. And I ordered it and got it within 24 hours. I've used the product, excited to talk about that. Uh, but man, was it an odyssey, uh, getting to actually having the product.

Why did we choose to go so bloody high-end in the input ingredients into the product?

Yeah.

Look, I think, I think that's going to be a very, very small percentage of the people we sell to.

For sure.

But really we should explain for the audience why it's important to get claims. It's because—

It's a marketing thing.

Yeah. It's, it's just what, what can you say in ads, right? If you go on TikTok right now, there's lots of brands saying this will you know, make you taller, this will make you lose weight, this will make you do whatever. Like those, those are unsustainable, unsustained claims. And the way you can use claims is there's companies who make ingredients, they make chemicals, they run clinical studies on those chemicals, and then they have claims tied to those chemicals.

Yeah.

So, you know, you can buy creatine that is made in India and it's cheap, or you can buy What, it's Creopure or whatever, like the German company. And if you wanna use any of the claims, the German company paid the extra money to get those claims made. So, um, even if it's the same ingredient, if there's, if it's not the branded ingredient, you can't make those claims. So that's, that's why we spent extra money on this.

Yeah, I, I guess it's also worth calling out, like Mike, you made this comment to me the other day, I think maybe it was privately, that our approach to building this company has not been like we're, we're trying to stay white hat with everything. Like we're, we don't want to be the ones going on and running ads that are making completely false, totally illegal gray hat, black hat claims, right? Like we're trying to do this by the book, which I think is what Sean is hitting on is like, we actually, we want to have evidence. If we're going to say that we're doing this, like evidence is a good thing, you know, we're all Americans or Canadians. Like we're not sitting on some island. in the middle of freaking nowhere where we can't be sued. Like, we're a real company, real people. We care about quality.

And we're going to record—

We're making a podcast about it.

We're making a podcast about it.

Right.

It would be really bad if we were— here's our black hat podcast about how we scale the supplement brand. We're releasing this from prison. Uh, so I, I think in general though, like, Ecom gravitates towards 2 different types, and one is a very, I would just say amoral cash grab where it's like, I just don't think about is it right or wrong? I think about does it convert? And then I think there's a different way of approaching ecom where even if you're not super high-minded about like the morality of what you're selling, you have like standards and boundaries and I think that we're definitely on the side of it where like, it's not just what converts, it's do we feel good about selling this? Is this actually a good thing to bring into the world? And that's not for everybody. If you're like in the, hey, does it convert camp, probably not the pod for you. And there's plenty of that in the e-com world, but that's not what we're building.

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Yeah, so I think season 2, we try to do this the exact opposite way. Just dropshipper central.

We're going to need to recruit an operator who has no legal exposure.

Yeah, just, yeah, you know, going through this process, we did stuff like trying to be as legit as possible. The thing is, we've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, a lot of effort, we're talking 18 months, and we have zero sales. The other way to do this, what everyone else would do this nowadays, is they would just dropship a random packet of whatever on TikTok Shop till they found a winning combination of traits. And maybe, and maybe, you know, that's the new meta. So, so season 2, we'll try it. We'll try doing that.

Yeah, we'll try to test messaging and test everything first.

You know what, it does highlight that like whatever your founding team is, you have different strengths and weaknesses. And obviously one of the strengths we have is like we're super experienced and we've got capital. But one of the weaknesses we have is we have something to lose. And so we're going to go slower, you know, and like the more you have something to lose, the more risk-averse you're going to become and the slower you're going to go on things. And that's definitely the case here. So we went really slow and I like it's slower than any other project I've been on has moved. Now I think that the product is here. I see us moving really fast.

Oh yeah.

And I think that'll be reflected in the shows. But yeah, it's super interesting.

I just want to say I'm happy you guys move slow because I just got involved and had you guys launched 6 months ago or a year ago, I wouldn't have been in. So I personally don't mind it.

Cody, also, I don't think you actually would have if we were not doing this the way that we were. I don't know that it would be as interesting to you. Like you're coming off building like a very, I would call like Jones Road is a great brand, right? My guess is like you weren't eager to go slum it in the You know, in the dropshipping world.

No, I am. Did you see like the brand I sent you this morning? Like, I'm like all about that. That's like why I left, dude. I'm like, oh, now I get to do this.

I gotta sell some of those boner pills. I gotta get in on this. Like, not enough makeup.

All right. You know, I think we're talking a lot about some concerns about the project. We're on Christmas Eve, right? Like we're, we're going to be launching in 30 days. I think we first talked about this project like February 2025. Someone fact-check me on that, but like—

Yeah, it is.

Yeah, so we've been talking about this, yeah, let's call it 18 months. My big concern as we sit here on Christmas Eve is we built a product that would've absolutely crushed in 2025, right? And what I mean by that is it's powder first, right? I still think sleep's a great category, but since we've done this, I have formulated and launched a powder product already. I have Gut Culture, and we started working on that in June 2025, and it came out in January 2026. And I've seen the challenges of powder as a category. And one of my concerns with this project is I worry that the industry has moved on to new delivery mechanisms. I sent over— there's strips, there's pouches, there's sprays, there's gummies. And if I worry that powders might be playing a game that would only work in 2024, 2025. So as we sit here on Christmas Eve, we have great— we have a great attack vector in sleep going after an older demographic. I think that'd be great. And we have, you know, a high-quality product with great ingredients. I just worry that we missed one of the X factors in form factor. So that's my concern on Christmas Eve. What are your guys' thoughts?

I would agree. And then my immediate thought goes to like, okay, then what do we do about it? Right? So like we have a product, it's a very high quality product. It's going to be, it's quite effective, efficacious, I believe is the word there. Look at me, dictionary. And I think the question is like, if we've lost the attack factor, or maybe we have, I don't know.

I don't know.

Um, if like that particular angle, then how do you fight against that, Sean or Cody? Like, how do you guys think about that?

Look, and like gut culture is able to get cacs close to $100, right? Um, but the, let me, let me explain why I think powders are hard. Um, there's powder fatigue. Okay. How many powders are you going to drink in a day? And we're competing. There's tons of morning, AG1's a morning powder, right? And then you have electrolytes throughout the day and then we're coming out, We have a new angle, which is a night powder. I don't think anybody else is really doing night powders, right? But still, you're asking somebody to use 3 or 4 glasses a day, right? So, you know, I'm helping, or I'm gonna be an investor in Jordan Menard's new brand, and I'm advising him against powders for this reason, right? He wanted to do 2 powders you have to drink in 1 day. And I worry it's just like, it's a lot of ass to have someone consume a lot of liquid and the dirtying of glasses. So— Yeah.

And like, for people listening, the challenge we have is that to get proper, and this is what Jordan's running into, Sean, is to get the doses that you need of certain ingredients. It has to be powder.

This is the problem with gummies. We'll just go ahead and say gummies are perfect. They seem perfect in, in terms of like, they're tasty and people want to eat them. Like, I love eating gummies, but like the actual science, all kinds of gummies.

Yeah.

Big gummies.

Anyway, you just can't, like, you can't get a lot of the ingredients in there and then they fall out of the gummy. They, they like leach out. And so like, we've got a lot of different, I mean, pretty much everything in our packet. It's not an insignificant amount of powder. Like it's all active ingredients. And there's just no way that you could make a gummy Uh, with that. And so I think the other problem with gummies, I'll, I'll say one advantage of powders over gummies. When we first bought for Trevi, we definitely didn't know what we were doing. And so like when it came to flavors and formats or whatever, and we way overbought some 28-counts when we ended up being like, we don't wanna be in 28-counts. And we bought some flavors really heavy that we were like, oh, this isn't actually our bestseller. Well, the reason why that matters with powder is like, this stuff lasts forever. Like we were like, they were like, you have to put an expiration date on it. And they're like, but that's like because the FDA forces you to, not because it actually even expires.

Mm-hmm.

So like when you have powders, gummies will get like, you put gummies in a, a warehouse that gets too, or a truck that gets too hot, guess what happens? You know, like they, they just straight up melt and turn into a liquid and you've got a big gummy. Like my first package I got from Create, which I think's a great brand. It was all melted. It was, it was a unigummy. It was like one big thing. So I, I just, the grass is—

You like gummies.

You like the unigummy. That's right. It was, it was like I ate 800 grams of creatine at once and I regretted it immediately. But anyway, the, the, the point I'm, I'm getting at is like, I think all of these have kind of fallbacks and trade-offs and I'm, I, I just don't know that there's any like magic arrow, but I will say The number one thing is it has to work. It just has to freaking work. If we're going to do this in powder and we're going to talk about the sediment thing, like it's just got to be really effective. And I think what I've seen in my own life and in the lives of other people is like, if it's really effective, they'll jump through whatever hoops. You know, my wife is having trouble sleeping and before I used to make her like these little like supplement packs and she would just not take them unless I pretty much like forced her to like a kid. Like I sat there and I was like, you're I'm going to take these right now. But when she stopped being able to sleep and she saw that I was taking glycine and some supplements and different stuff, she started being like, will you please bring it to me every night? And she's like taking this stuff now because it's helping her to sleep. And I think that that's what we're going to find with Winks is just like, if it actually works, if it's actually changing people's ability to get sleep, they'll jump through all kinds of hoops to get that outcome.

Yeah.

I mean, what Sean's hitting on is, is important. It's like there's a lot of consumers that don't, I don't know that they care how efficacious something is. They actually just want the most convenient thing.

Do.

And, and we just described, Mike, very, very beautifully why powders are good for us. Okay. And I know for a fact we made a very good product and people trying this will have a very good experience, but now we're in the, we're going against dropshippers and black hat people on Facebook.

Totally.

Right? And it does not matter if the sleep, uh, Zen pouch doesn't work, right? What matters is getting somebody to try it and subscribe to it. And I love that idea.

The, the sleep version, the sleep Zen, you just put, you just put it right in your mouth.

Okay, so how do we fight this, Sean? Like, if we're going up against these guys, like, what are some of the ways? And Cody, maybe this is why.

Yeah, well, so, so one thing, and I'm trying to look at Google Trends and stuff, like, There also is like, I think Groon's did a fantastic job of it. And that's like a mass, right? That's like positioned to everybody. It's not trying to be like luxury. I think positioning is really important. There is a subset of the population that is more sophisticated and will pay premium. And there is a lot of value, especially maybe less scale, but there is a lot of value in being a little bit more premium and using that, you know, positioning. And there's a lot of supplement brands that do this well, right? Like trying to think who would be an example, but like Momentous.

I mean, IMA is priced way up there.

Yeah, right.

Where it's like, hey, like, we are more, but like, this is why. And like, if you want the best of the best. And I also think my hunch is like, there's probably a little bit of a reversion to the mean where, you know, gummies are ripping, everyone tries them. And then I think now it's like, all right, cool. Like, I don't even know if they're doing anything for me. And again, it's not everybody, there's probably less people, but there definitely are enough, I think enough people might be a little naive, that are willing to pay a little bit more, willing to do it. Like, I'm a powder person. Like, I, I'll take some Groen's gummies. It's more like a, like an insurance snack for me at night. It's like, hey, I want some gummies. But like, I take, I take creatine in a powder. I take, you know what I mean? Like, I'm willing to take a few. Like, I know that some people are still willing to do a lot of capsules. Like, there's still, you know, is it Thorn? Throne? I forget. But they're like the L-carnitine back. Like, they're like a $400 million company right now. And they're There are capsules, you know, like, so I still think there is a market for it. And wellness is such a growing market that there's a— I think what's important though is how we position it and being very clear.

And there's a larger thing I think that you're getting at, Cody, and you're getting at Sean, which is everybody wants to get into supplements and consumable supplement type products right now, but they do compete with one another. It's not like they just stack like, oh, I drink 8 different powders and then I also have 15 different gummies I take. And then I also take these 35 pills, like, Nobody's doing that. I might do that, but nobody, nobody normal and sane is doing that. And so we're getting into a world where it's like, hey, we're also competing with Liquid IV and we're also competing with Create, even if they're doing different things, because each of these things has to be consumed and you're just going to spend your whole day mixing up powders and taking different things. So that's something to be aware of.

It is, Sean. Like, you know, I viewed it, I mean, Mike did a good job describing like why is it good as a business. I kind of viewed Powder more from the lens of the customer and that like you ultimately, if you want to build a— I agree that we're— it's hard to compete in the auction, so we're gonna have to work really hard like in, in ads. But then at a customer experience level, like the best product probably wins over time, right? So like somebody basically selling you snake oil But that's tasty and it's convenient. I don't know that that wins over time. It might win day one, but on time, over, over like a, you know, whatever period of time, like the more people that take the product and have it work, 'cause it is actually a great product, the better for us is how I looked at it. 'Cause like the customer experience is overall better.

I'm not, I'm not suggesting we get into gummies because gummies have the same fatigue issue. Right. Um, I think that the tolerance for gummies per day per person is one pack or less. Nobody wants to eat 6 packs of gummies. Right.

You'd have to take 32 gummies to get our ingredient load.

Yeah. But, you know, you brought up pills.

I'm going to take some gummies.

Yeah.

Pills are just powder, right? Like, yeah, it is with a different delivery mechanism. And all I'm pointing to is I'm, I'm somebody who currently has a powder in market who launched in 2025. And I'm telling you guys, it's a worse time to launch powders now. There's— we're going to be competing with more sophisticated operators with more sexy delivery mechanisms, and maybe they're, they're worse over time. But actually, I think customers have a very, very high tolerance for snake oil. I think they actually, if it tastes good and they think they're getting something out of it, the placebo effect is real. And my evidence is, if you go on Etsy, there's people making millions of dollars a year selling spells, okay? There's people who ship wishes on Etsy. So I do think the consumer kind of tolerates a lot of snake oil. So we, the education is going to be hard. I'm just letting you guys know. Churn rates on powders are higher than if we did a different category.

So let's talk about that though, Sean, because I think there's some really like practical things we can do with that. And the, the, hey, let's go into another year of product development angle is probably not it. But like, I think that what we could be trying to build towards is a family of products where Winks offer solutions in a variety of different form factors. That like, I could see that being a way that we expand. I mean, we've thought about this with Trevi. There's like electrolyte gummies out there and it's like, I don't know. I mean, that can make sense. Can we make gummies that taste good, taste kind of like Trevi and, and have like whatever portion of the, the serving? So I could see a world where we eventually, like, that's part of the product roadmap is how do we get Winks to some kind of product market fit, um, as powder? And then how do we introduce some of these other form factors? The only place I'd push back a little bit is that like groans, like how it's not really verifiable how it's impacting your body, right? It's like, but sleep is more verifiable out of all of the supplement categories. It's the most verifiable of like, we're all wearing these trackers. Like it's a little bit more concrete whether or not you got results out of it. So I think that probably counts for something. And, but I mean, I hear what you're saying on the placebo effect.

Oh, I think he's— yeah, I mean, it's all true. Like, I think this is it. It's like we're gonna find out real fast.

Look, yeah, and look, I'm trying to say, like, what are my concerns on Christmas Eve, right? And, um, look, I'm not saying we're dead on arrival because we're smart and we chose sleep as a category. If we were— if we had another electrolyte powder with our difference being we had branded ingredients, I would have exited this project, right? And Mike, I'm not suggesting we do another year of product development. But I do wanna point out the next product needs to launch faster, right? Like, I totally get the first one being hard to build, but like, if we actually want to win in this category, you brought up Create. Create's doing powders because they did gummies, and then they're gonna have a whole suite of products. I bet they're pumping those things out. Like, you gotta just do it fast, right? And I look to Waterboy.

Sure.

They're dumping out flavors left and right. If we're going to be in the category, if we want to launch new stuff, we're talking it has to be 6 months minimum turn— that's the longest turnaround time possible. Yeah.

You know what worries me? If that's so, like, I don't worry about the powder for those reasons. Matt said a few times, just like in conversation, he's like, no one owns sleep. Like, we can own sleep. And I'm like, is there a reason no one owns sleep? I'm like, maybe are we going to look back in a year and be like, damn, this is a terrible thing?

Yeah, dude, Cody, this keeps me up at night. It's like, I can't find a brand that owns sleep. And I'm like, either we're a genius or we're stupid. You know, like, I think this is like, we've talked about this in the pod before. Like nobody owns, every sleep product is a product in a large catalog of products. Like every supplement company has a magnesium or a melatonin or something, but there is no wellness brand, real one, big one built around sleep.

Well, all we're doing is really just enumerating the challenges we're about to face, which I think is good. This is what we're up against. Like, and you know, you can do this. Like, you, this is why entrepreneurship is so hard. Like, if you sit there and start talking about why it might not work, you can come up with a really long list. And there's a lot of reasons why this might not work. And I think, Sean, you're doing a really good job of calling them out. We are going to have to have answers to that. Like, yeah, okay, we gotta go up against all these other founders. Okay, we've got some disadvantages relative to what other people are doing on their acquisition, um, funnels. We're gonna have to be really good if we're gonna be able to make this work. Like you said, Sean, like we're gonna have to be willing and able to pay really high CPAs to make this So I think these are all really good things that we're getting out here right now, because it is going to be— there's a reason these companies are worth so much when they work. They're hard. It's hard to really stand them up and really get to product-market fit.

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Yeah, and look, I don't want people to, well, I don't want you guys to be like, we're doomed, right, right?

Oh no, not at all.

I do think this is the locker room speech before we go out there. I also just want to have a clear-eyed view of what CACs are going to be, right? It's like, look, we— I think the first month we're going to have CACs of $800, okay? And then we're going to work really hard to get the CACs to $500. Then we're going to work really hard to get CACs to $300 and then $200. And then I think we're going to be cruising if we get CACs to $100, right? And then we have 3 to 6 months to prove the churn pays for that CAC. Um, but just— and then, and then nobody owning sleep. I do want to point out the reason why sleep is such a good category It is— there is prescription drugs trying to solve this problem. It is one of the hardest problems in human history to solve. Like, and 95% of, of your sleep habits are what you do, right? When you eat, being on your phone all the time, your stress levels.

Yeah.

And, um, we're gonna be a small piece of helping that, but it's like, yeah, this is— this is like obesity. It's like, yeah, there's a, there's a drug you got to inject now to cure it. And sleep, sleep's that level of, of challenge.

Consumers pay attention to it now. That's the difference. Back in the day when we grew up, it's like you were the hero if you could operate on no sleep. Now, kids aren't drinking on a Friday night and they're actually prioritizing their sleep more than ever. And, one of the reasons why is because everybody's wearing a goddamn wearable whether it's Oura, Whoop, Apple Watch, and measuring how effective their sleep is. And so, there is a category there, but I think also the challenge is that A lot of people don't have healthy night hygiene. Like they just don't, they have no routine besides brushing their teeth and going to bed, like zero. Like, you know, for, I know when I was younger, like we were part of a generation that we'd wake up in the morning, have a protein shake, take our supplements and go to the gym. And, you know, that, that regular routine and habit, like I'm questioning if we have to actually educate the consumer on how to actually build proper behavior in the evening because people don't have it. Like still, I mean, it's getting better because of wearables, but it's not the same routine as what people have in the morning. Yeah.

Yeah.

Look, I actually, I like all of this. I think, Sean, I don't take any of this as, I just think that's just being a good operator. It's like, if you're not going in eyes wide open and knowing, like if anything that you can see, if you choose not to see it, that is not a good choice. What are you doing? Like putting your head in the sand is not a good way to build a company.

I think one of the things that is coming up with this conversation, which I think is good, is just we need to have clarity about, I heard this quote once that like every startup needs at least one miracle to work.

Yeah.

Um, you just don't want to be in a startup that needs multiple miracles. And I think it's a really good question of like, what is the kind of miracle that we have to have happen for this to actually really work? And I do wonder if it's kind of going back to how we did the packaging. So if we could talk about that little piece. Like we definitely wanted to position as kind of a family brand.

Yes.

And have kind of that angle. And the reason why I think that matters is that if we can really get multiple people in a family drinking this, then our chances of success are an order of magnitude better, simply because the CAC that you can play, you can pay to acquire all of a sudden is just like a multiple of what you, it can with one person. So like $100 CACs are not scary at all if you can get 3 people in a family drinking this stuff. Like you can pay for that many times over. And I think that this is part of the ones that have really worked, like Groon's. One of the reasons why they've really worked is that you get the whole family eating these things and that plus the price point, you just get these kind of insane user values. So maybe that's just a call out is like, Hey, we're not gonna be able to make this work selling this to 24-year-old guys. Um, because I mean, maybe they can, I'm not saying they can't buy it, but like, we're going to need families. We're gonna need moms, head of households buying this and buying it for multiple people for multiple months in order to have the kind of user values to really scale up marketing the way we want to.

I, I think ultimately, Mike, too, that plays into retail. The reason we made the packaging the way we have is like, you want something that can work in retail. 'Cause if we do figure that out, like if all things are true, right, to some degree, like on a spectrum, we wanna be omnichannel. We don't just wanna be D2C. And we thought that through. Does anybody have the packaging, by the way? Can we show, like if somebody's watching this?

'Cause I think it'd be good to show people like where we landed.

I mean, we can flash it on screen or render too, and you can go to the site, getwinks.com, and actually look at it, but. Um, I, I do think that Mike's hitting on an important part, which is like, that stuff matters. I actually think, Sean, even the positioning is also how we fight against the, the fatigue. Most supplements, most powder, most everything is sold to like a, uh, 30-year-old dude.

For sure.

Like almost all of it is all sold to like the same guy.

I was talking to a guy last night who had an amazing business. selling to 55-year-old women. So I would love to sell this to 55-year-old women, right?

Well, yeah, perimenopausal women is where we're starting.

Yeah, like the older, richer demographic is just a better demographic. Here's my last piece of negativity, guys, okay? I'm just trying to be as realist as possible.

I love it.

Do it.

We're on Christmas Eve. I'm sharing my concerns. The packaging that he's about to show Those are the football pads that we bought to go play the game. Okay? So this is not success in and of itself. We have the football pads. The hardest part of this journey is going to be going to Facebook and trying to win in that ad auction. Like we spent 18 months buying the football pads. Now we have to go light a ton of money on fire trying to acquire people. So I'm very glad Cody's here, but that is the hardest job for sure.

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Okay.

Yeah, I'll just show you guys packaging. This front, I've opened this bag. Um, you can see we have kind of like our hero character that we talked about. Um, I think packaging looks and feels pretty good. We're in this gusseted bag, which, um, just as kind of like a, a side note, this will come up later. We've talked about Amazon and one of the things we'll we'll talk more about is probably doing maybe a different count on Amazon so you can hit a different price point for acquisition.

Yeah.

But when you do the gusseted bag, what it does is it makes it, makes it wider. And that, um, Amazon charges fulfillment based on, um, kind of, uh, cubic volumetric weight. Is that, is that right? Um, anyway, so like, uh, it's one thing you can do is like the, the thinner you can make something, the less you pay to ship it. Just anyway, a note from me. Packets look good. I think, I think the branding and the professionalism of things, you can see like about this much of the packet is just full of powder. So about a third of the packet's just kind of full of powder. And I think it, I think it's good. Like one thing I noticed on the packets that like we can do better is like it's a little bit hard to tear it open sometimes at the top, but that's again, is a thing that you can kind of clean up.

Mm-hmm.

Pretty easily for version 2. So I'd say overall, when I first saw the product, like just kind of out of the box, great impression on— I think you're right, Sean. Like this is obviously just like kind of a piece, but I think this piece came out good. Like if you're gonna take a really long time, this did great. A couple callouts that I had for the group when I first got it on the back, it has like, you've got your kind of nutrition facts panel. And you've got this kind of like, uh, explanation of how to use a powder and the cute little, uh, guy and what happens. Um, don't pour this directly in your mouth. You pour this in water, mix it up, blah, blah, blah. Um, a couple things that I thought were interesting. We didn't put calories on here and I'm, I actually thought you had to have calories on here. So I was surprised by that and we're zero calories. Um, so like people care about that, like with Trevi.

We should add that.

Uh, we, we should add that. We should add calories and we should also add, um, we don't at any point tell them that this is sugar-free. And that's another thing that people care about. Some people do not want sugar and will, are more likely to buy Simply based on the sugar-free. Um, that's been a big thing for us with, with Trevi. So anyway, overall really positive. I've got probably 4 or 5 things that we could do for version 2 of this. How many units of this did we buy?

5,000.

5,000.

Okay. So for our very first purchase order, we bought 5,000, which is not very much. Um, and we can, uh, that's keeping Cody up a little bit.

It is a little bit. Can we talk about that again?

Yeah, let's do it.

So what's our, what are our thoughts? Or like, what's the conversation that's been had? Obviously we don't want to go and buy a ton and we will have to probably iterate, but we also, I'm assuming we won't want to wait or be able to wait until we get a ton of feedback back to buy more, you know? Um, what, what are lead times and like, how are we going to approach or like, what signals are we thinking of looking at for Next POs?

That's a great question, Mike. Maybe let's start with you. I have some thoughts, but—

Yeah. So the way this is supposed to work with this type of product, and I am going to be really honest, I'm sure our co-man is full of very fine people. I have not met any of them. And the performance of the last year has me at a very low confidence in them right now. But, um, it's supposed to go pretty quick once you have one of these. Like one of the benefits of this type of product, Cody, is it's, uh, are, are they in the US, Curtis? Or are they in Canada?

Yes. Okay.

So when, when they're domestic manufacturers and it's just this powder, uh, it can go pretty rapidly if they have the ingredients on hand. So like we, I need to know some details, like do they have the ingredients that they're using on hand or did they just order enough for these 5,000? And that's something we can actually do as a brand is we can tell them like, hey, We want to buy the raw materials and need to keep the raw materials so that we can just kind of pull them down. So like, I think that there's just kind of this like really high-level question of like, is this going to work at all? Is there any kind of product-market fit? And then once we answer that, we immediately start attacking the supply chain so that the command is able to hit much tighter turns. So like, we had a situation recently with one of our flavors that's doing really well. Uh, where we PO'd to having it in our possession in 4 weeks, I think, uh, or PO'd to having it in Amazon in 4 weeks, uh, which, you know, we just could never with Simple Modern do anything close to that.

So fast.

It's so fast. And, uh, you know, we'll, we'll talk some about payment terms and things like that, but I think we're like net 60 with them. So we're literally like, there's situations where you can place the PO, you can be way on the right side of the cash conversion cycle. So, um, I, I think that one of the things that, the reason why I bring up all the changes is that, uh, one of the big things before we order more of this is to just, are there major changes to the powder inside that we wanna make?

Yeah.

Um, and then what are the kind of packaging changes that we wanna make? Um, and, and 5,000's not very many. So like, but I also don't know, you know, how long it's gonna take us if Sean's right and we're coming outta the gates at $800. CACs, we aren't gonna be doing a lot of customer acquisition. You know, like, uh, what is $800 times 5,000? You know, we're not gonna do $4 million worth of, uh, uh, burn here. So like, I think that there's, it's kind of like we probably should go ahead, Curtis, and start documenting all the ways and we'd wanna change packaging and stuff in V2.

Yeah.

Um, we need to have a mechanism for gathering customer feedback to understand if there's kind of a fatal flaw here. in the product, or maybe not fatal flaw, but there's just something that we want to change with what's inside the packet, whether that's maybe a little bit more flavoring or, you know, want to add or remove something. And then I think we need to kind of probably base our reordering based on you, you and Matt's progress of, I guess you, Matt, and Sean are going to be more of the marketing kind of core, like When you guys start hitting certain CACs, I think it's going to be getting closer and closer to go time. So, you know, Sean, with your model that you kind of threw out, like, I think once you get, once you start seeing progress, you know, hey, we broke 200, we're heading towards 100, certainly like we're going to be starting to be like, okay, we got it. We got to get more, but probably not until we get into spitting distance of sub, of 100 or sub-100 CACs would we even need it from just like a numbers perspective.

Yeah, look, we need to get to 1,000 subscribers. And I think if we can do that by the end of the year, that's a massive success, right? And 1,000 subscribers, we'll probably sell 3,000 units to do that because there'll be some amount of churn or whatever. It gives us the 6 to 8 weeks or whatever to place an order and get it in our hands. And if we start seeing 20 subscribers a day at a $250 CAC, that is the best we could possibly hope for right now. So I think we, we, we look for those, like, and we'll build a dashboard just like every single day we'll measure like a, like new subscriber CAC and we'll have a monthly churn number we look at. Um, but those, those are the most important metrics.

And that's why I'm like, just do a dashboard, give me like 2 to 3 numbers that are like what matters. And then Matt and I will just like laser focus on those. We'll just do like a twice a day standup on those, Matt.

Yeah.

And as a side note, this is one of the reasons why I would want to launch on Amazon sooner rather than later, is that what Amazon is great at is it's great at more affordable customer acquisition. And because there are so many people that are like, it's kind of the equivalent of, you know, what's better than an in-market audience is like somebody who's like, I want to buy a sleep product, Right now. I'm like, literally like put things in front of my face so I can buy right this instant. And so, but one of the things that, uh, like I said, we, we've talked about is I don't, uh, uh, we'll, we'll have a different episode where we talk about pricing, but the pricing numbers we're talking about for our D2C offer aren't going to work on Amazon. That's not going to fly, especially as a new product. So that, that's gonna bring up some interesting questions of like, do we wanna put in another order for a smaller format? Do we want a 10-stick count version of this that we can sell at a much different price on Amazon? And then how quickly do we want to get that going? Because to your point, Sean, what we need is we need customer feedback and we need some initial critical mass. And I think Amazon could be helpful to that in that if we can go and pick up 15 customers a day at $10 a customer on Amazon, that's not trivial when you're at zero. Um, so anyway, I, and that's a place where I can help. Like I've definitely done the Amazon thing before. Although I, I need to do some research on the Amazon keywords and how much I think we're, we're capable of doing there. So that might be another reason that we, we could potentially, like if we decided that a sampling route would be good here, Cody, like, um, a smaller pack, then like that could be another reason to put in, um, another order. But in general, it seems like we're kind of trying to push the other way where it's like, instead of like, hey, buy a little bit so you buy more, it's gonna be like, hey, go ahead and buy 3 months.

Yeah.

Um, and if we're, we're doing that, then, then it's less relevant.

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Look, and I'm glad this is the nitty-gritty. This is where hope meets pavement, because all of us can sit here and be like, dude, sleep brand for older women with great ingredients, I'm on board, let's go out there and do it. And now we have to actually go out there, win the ad auction. We're talking like, okay, let's go get our first customer and it's going to cost like $1,200. Because that's just what it takes to warm up a pixel. It's been a long time since any of us has done this. We just did this for Gut Culture and it's just a massive pain in the ass. So the sooner we get started, the better.

If we're getting reviewed well, and I don't know how we'll get reviewed on Amazon, but if we are, I can pretty much guarantee you that I can get us to some kind of non-trivial number of new users on Amazon because I've just done this exact thing. Like, I know I've spent enough time in that world in the last 18 months that like, that can be a secondary growth engine, or it might even be that it's easier to get to 20 customers a day on Amazon than it is on the website. But the website, if we really want to scale this thing, we've got to get this D2C loop figured out because there's just going to be a ceiling to how much we can grow on Amazon and how quickly.

I'm much more confident than Sean on this. I don't, I think we can do this. I think we can scale it. I think we need probably a different offer on Amazon, just like Matt and I were looking at like what, what, you know, competitors are doing like retail and stuff. It's just more of a matter of when, like if we want to place that PO, because I think the pricing strategy will just be so different because for D2C, we need to drive this obviously LTV up super high, but we have to drive, you know, AOV up super high. We're going with a, you know, we'll talk offers different episode, but like we're going with, you know, bundles, we're going with, you know, 12-week packs, like we need to do that. We're We're also, so that we can afford these discounts, we're, you know, and have a good hook for acquisition. We're, we're driving up the one-time purchase pretty high. I just, from what I've heard from you, Mike, about Amazon, like we're going to need a smaller pack with a lower price point.

Yeah. I mean, I think here's the big question that we need to figure out, guys. Like, so what Sean's doing is the most helpful thing, which is we need to be skeptical. Like you got to have hope and belief to kind of build the thing. And then we should actually have skepticism about it. Like it needs to prove to us that it is the quality of product that people want and it is the form factor people want. So like, I think that like until we get to product market fit, we should approach this thing with skepticism from this point forward. So if that's our mindset, this is one of the things that we've been talking about within Simple Modern. We've been taught, like we used to just call everything a product launch and I've just kind of like, I've kind of tried to push away from that messaging and what I'm calling it more is product validation. Like that anything we put in market, we want to have a product validation phase. And we're really trying to validate 2 things. We're trying to validate, do people want this? Like what is the demand and what is the quality level of the product? And because I've just kind of come to, or like the way that people are going to respond to it in reviews. And if you don't have both those, then you don't have something worth really going into a full-on launch with. So that might be the question that I would be asking. We're not really going to be able to get good feedback at scale very quickly on the website about the product itself. And so I would just kind of push the group that whatever we do, whether or not we wait on Amazon or do it earlier, um, whatever mechanism we use, we have to validate if there's anything we want to do to the underlying product before we really try and ramp this thing. Because the biggest mistake is trying to ramp the product, trying to ramp acquisition before the product is really good enough to be ramping acquisition. I bet if we went— yeah, if we went inside Groove, if we went inside Create, what they would tell you is they went through 3, 4, 5, 7 variations of the product before they got to the one that was worth scaling. And so like maybe out of the gate, this is good enough, but Like just my knowledge of every other product I've ever done is that there's probably 2 or 3 iterations in here that we're going to go through. And the big question for the group is not just how do we get these acquisition numbers we want, but how do we get the feedback we need to make the necessary iteration on the product? Because what happens is if you scale up manufacturing too quickly, then you're just kind of stuck in an old formulation, right?

Mike, I want to add 2 things to this and then, and then I'll, I'll done, I'll done be the most negative guy on earth. Um, one, on, on the Amazon piece, uh, I would list the current one we have on Amazon at a price we're not comfortable selling it at. And what I mean by that is we should take the 28-pack or whatever we have that costs us $20 to make, and I'd sell it for $20 on Amazon because then we'll get positive Vine reviews and we'll get people actually using this thing. And then over time, on that same listing, we launch a 10-pack or whatever. Right. Like we—

exactly. That is exactly what I would advocate for, Sean. I think you're completely right on this.

Yeah, we have, we have one bullet right now. Let's, let's, let's use that bullet as many places as possible. Right. So let's take the current thing, plan to lose money on Amazon because to tie to point number 2, we should be very comfortable losing money. We're going against people who lose $1 million a day. That's the industry standard, right? So like we're, we should be super comfortable losing money going out there and doing this. And then the second thing, and this is actually for the, for the audience to hear, the amount of effort that we put in to start it does not have any meaningful correlation with the success at the end. So it was very hard to make this product like awesome. Like we made something really good. There are people doing 9 figures selling dropship moringa on TikTok Shop right now, right? And that's a very successful business and they put no effort into it, right? So It's like what really the point I'm trying to make right now is execution is everything, right? So, yep. You know, we made something really great. If we have to tweak it or whatever, we have to do it so rapid and so fast. And that's, that's my concern going into it. You guys have heard me on that. I'm gonna stop beating that dead horse. And now that it's Christmas Day, I'm excited.

I wanna, I wanna just kind of like deconstruct what you just said there for the audience, because I think it's, it's something that an experienced operator would do, Sean, like the advice you're giving, which is, It's easy to say, okay, well, we want to be on Amazon, we want to be on the website, but we really on Amazon, the way that we're going to hit a different price point is ultimately we're going to have a different stick offering, right? If we're doing 28 on the website and we're charging $2 a stick, then we'll charge $2 a stick, but we'll do 10 sticks on Amazon. And maybe that's where we get eventually, but in the very short term, like you don't want to be buying more inventory to just avoid channel conflict. You're like, I would just rather sell the same thing and eat it. And like, as an example, sometimes if you're really worried about channel conflict, instead of buying more inventory, just call this a 10-count and sell 'em 28-counts. Nobody's gonna be mad about that. Like the, like, but it's, it's a good example of like, people just try and get ahead of themselves in the game, right? They try and like make it more complicated than it is right now. We need to make the 5,000 units we have go as far as possible. We need to get as much information as cheaply as possible with those 5,000 units. So like, yeah, we absolutely need to be on Amazon. There might be more potential to Amazon than we know. It would be insane to not even try Amazon right out of the gate, but we don't need to be buying more inventory just to try Amazon. So Sean, it's so much cheaper and faster to do what you're saying. And people will be like, well, what about the unit economics? The unit economics don't care. They don't matter right now.

Yeah.

Right? None of that matters until we find product market fit. And so like, You can do all kinds of things that don't make sense on a unit economic basis early on, as long as you know that you can actually get it to the right unit economics when the time comes. So we did stuff with Trevi that made no sense on a unit economic basis, but I knew that I could get it there if I could find the spark. And it took us quite a few months, but then once we found it, it was like, sure enough, we could do it. So I love the idea of just taking some of this and allocating it towards Amazon and playing there. I think that's the right strategy.

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This is sort of the, I think the thing, anytime I tell somebody what we're doing, their first question is, look, well, how much water are you asking somebody to drink before bed?

Right?

And then that comes down to like the whole, how well does the powder dissolve? How much? Yeah. Like what is the actual experience? How far before bed does somebody actually have to drink this?

And I don't—

Curtis, if you have like guidance on that, like, is this something that people are going to take an hour before bed? Like a small glass of water? How small is that glass of water? Mike, and you've been trying it, Like you've been trying the finished product the last few days.

Yep.

Um, I'm just curious, like where you guys are both thinking on this.

Uh, yeah, well, I'll answer your questions around, uh, amount of water time before bed. You know, what we've done is we've made it, tried to, tried to make it as simple as possible. So 8 ounces of, uh, water in a glass, uh, 30 minutes before bed, you know, and the reason why 30 minutes, most people digest things between 25 to 45 minutes. So, that's when the ingredients are going to start kicking in. And, 30 minutes is nice because hopefully you're doing it, i.e., right before you brush your teeth. For kids, you're winding down, reading a book, whatever their routine is. And, I would say that the 8 ounces of water, I mean, it depends on how you like it. Is that not a lot? No, it's a small glass of water. And, I think at the end of the day, what I've found, I mean, my kids have tried it and my kids' initial response is like, Dad, this grape flavor is awesome. And, one of them said it's actually too sweet. So, the nice thing about a powder is that you can actually make it more concentrated or less concentrated obviously depending on how much water you put in it. And, I think we want to lean in to a little bit more on the sweeter side. And, when I say that, not sugar-based, stevia-based, but we wanted a little bit more so that people actually had a good flavor and a good flavor profile because there are some ingredients in there like ashwagandha, it doesn't taste the greatest.

Yeah.

And so, if we actually had a nice subtle grape flavor, and the reason why we picked grape is if you actually look at everything from the Tylenols of the world, all the way to even Freezies. Besides cherry, it's actually one of the most frequent flavors that are geared around kids. So, grape is a quite neutral flavor for winter, for summer. And so, that's the one that we went with just because of a variety of things.

Mike, what about you?

Okay. So, I've drank this the last few nights. I think that my overall take is we, with the flavor, we do a pretty good job of masking the underlying elements. And that, as we mentioned, the underlying elements are a lot of times people will take 'em in capsules like ashwagandha. So I think that we do a pretty good job there. There's always a little bit of an issue with sediment at the very end. And this is one reason, Mike, when we're talking about free gifts, I think the frother idea, you know, resonates with me or a shaker because I do think how much you get this shook up, like, um, at the very least.

Yeah.

Frother.

Yeah. You gotta stir it. You gotta do something. You can't just put it in a cup and then pour in 8 ounces of water. It's not gonna, that you, you are gonna have to do some kind of mixing. Um, but going back, this kind of goes back to the product thing. One of the things I've been taking is glycine. There's really good evidence on glycine. And it's actually something that we didn't use in here. And I'm kind of have been doing some math, but glycine's super cheap. And if we added 3 grams of glycine to this, and glycine just is like, it's real weird. It looks like sugar and it just kind of tastes like sugar too. So it's almost like a natural sweetener. Super interesting. So what I've been doing with this is adding glycine to this, which makes it even a little bit sweeter and probably more effective. And so like glycine and glycine, super cheap. Like if you go look at it on Amazon, like tub of it's like, you know, $15. Um, so like this is a good example on the product side. I could see us adding glycine to this.

Mm-hmm.

Um, you know, Matt, I think you said you were a little bit worried about the, um, size of package, but like, you know, we're only really using this much of the package.

Yeah.

There's room in there.

There's definitely room to, to get glycine in here. And so, you're, you're talking about an ingredient that's going to make it sweeter and that we have the space for and isn't going to add that much cost. Anyway, that's my main thought so far taking the product, but I think it's, I think it's good. And I think we're, if we, when we were talking about our offers, definitely one of our free offers should be something around the mixing of this would be my take.

Yeah. I think my, my number one, the first thing that comes to mind would be, is 8 ounces of water too much for the average person? Right? Like, do we run into the whole, like, I got to get up to pee issue? Uh, especially like older, the older your customer gets, the more that becomes a thing. Yeah.

I think you can do it with 4. Um, but it just gets stronger.

Um, and that's, I've been like, when I try it, I use about 4 ounces of water.

Yeah. And, and I think you can, I think you can do that. Um, but I, I think you're right, Matt. Like that's a thing. Uh, as a man in his 40s who used to have an iron bladder and never got up, it's like, I, you know, I never thought about when I drink. things. But, as you get older, you just have to start to be— one of the things I do is I'll work out late at night and it's like if I drink an entire water bottle while I'm working out late at night and then I go to sleep, it's like I'm popping up throughout the night. So, I do think this is something people pay attention to. You asked the question earlier, I think 30 to 45 minutes, 30 minutes to an hour before you go to sleep is probably the right timing on this.

Yeah.

I do it about an hour before just because I don't want to drink Like too much 30 minutes before bed. And my wife does the same. So she's like 45 minutes to an hour is typically when she's taking this. But I get the timing element too, right, Curtis? Like there is sort of a, yeah, there's a window, right? Did we, did we put any of this on the package, by the way?

Oh yeah.

Is there instructions? What does it say?

Yeah, it says mix 1/6 pack with 8 ounce. Yeah. Drink 30 minutes before you need to, you're ready to sleep. One other point, um, that's interesting about the ingredients we picked, um, this Afrin saffron.

Yeah.

What a great name. What should we, what should we trademark our name?

Afrin.

Yeah. Well, just take the ingredient, just drop the S. It's cleaner. Uh, I like saffron is from my understanding, the number one like supplement you can take for depression or for like feeling mood. Yeah. And it's got really robust evidence. And so that's another question, Cody and Matt, for you guys to have on your radar is like, how much are we saying like, hey, this is a sleep product, or are we saying like, hey, yeah, this is going to help you sleep, but it's also so like. You look at some of the ingredients, um, whether the ashwagandha, the magnesium, the theanine, like these are all, uh, kind of more general nervous system. Like they, they do a lot of things to just calm you down. Um, and so obviously like that helps you to sleep, but also there's all these benefits probably when you're awake, if you're regularly taking this.

Yeah.

We, we mentioned this, uh, I think in one of the group chats, but like this is another, uh, thing that I think could be an angle for why you would push somebody towards buying 3 months at a time. Like, I bet there's some studies out there that say, yeah, when you take saffron for a week, you get this effect. If you take it consistently for 3 months, you get this effect and it's bigger because a lot of these are like kind of cumulative over time. So anyway, there's some really interesting stuff there that I think we can, we can use.

But, uh, I think also, you know, you look at why kids aren't sleeping these days, right? On screen time all day long, overstimulated, whatever it might be. And so, some of these ingredients actually help, has been proven to help out with anxiety, anxiety, mood support. And, you think about that winding down period, that's what's not happening with kids these days because they're on their screens, the blue light as an example, let alone the light in our environment. LED lights in our homes. A lot of people have that energy efficient. And, and so, you know, for us, we pick these ingredients as much as we talk about it being a sleep aid, it's equally an anxiety aid, like, you know, and kids can't sleep because of that. And so if we look at that, that is another angle that we got to think about. And one of the things that I wanted to talk about with Cody and Matt is we talk about You know, the sampler, the 10-pack. But if you think about it, if we're gearing this towards families, a 28-pack for a family of 4, that's a 1-week trial for all 4 people, right? So, you know, it's not a lot if a family wants to try this out. They get 7 days each, you know, for a family of 4.

Well, yeah, no, dude, I actually—

what makes it powerful is exactly what you're saying, Curtis. If you're saying, hey, this is something that when you can't sleep, you go and you make it, then I think it's going to be hard to make the economics work. If it's more like, hey, this is something that you get into the routine of taking every single night before you know if you can sleep or you can't sleep and getting your family doing it, then like, that's a totally different kind of LTV.

Yeah, I think Curtis, the, what Mike's hitting on is it's like the, Sleep is all about habits, right? Sean mentioned it. You mentioned it. So like having this as a daily, like this is just a ritual, right? It's like every single night, 30 minutes to an hour before bed, small glass of water, you take your Winks. And that's just like, that's, that's part of your sleep hygiene.

Right.

I think what people don't realize is that one night of sleep can't be, you can't recoup You recover your sleep deficit with one good night's sleep. So, you talk about sleep hygiene, this is like going to the gym. Just because you didn't go to the gym for a week, you can't make it up in one day at the gym. There's a compounding effect here not only with the ingredients like Mike mentioned but just overall sleep deficit. You have one night of sleep, you're not recovering from one good night's sleep. And so you have to actually build the routine and the hygiene so that if you're sleeping 6 out of 7 good nights in a week, if you have a bad sleep, those other 6 better be good. You know, it's not like, you know, you can't fill up the tank with, with, um, with one good night if you're on empty.

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Curtis's point about like people will go through them pretty quickly. It's obviously great for our numbers if we can get a family on it. And, you know, Mike talked about that in the group chat of like, how can we really show people that like, hey, if the family sticks to it, it'll be better. We won't have data on that in the beginning, but I think that'll be incredible. But then also, I think that helps it also stick as a habit. Because like, I'll give you an example. Like, I have an almost 4-year-old daughter, and like, my wife will give her gummies before bed, just some like, you know, nightly stuff. And obviously, kids at that age don't want to go to bed. So they'll come up with anything. And every night she remembers like, no, we can't go to bed yet, we need these. And so if you have like a family routine that there's like multiple people in on, it's just so much easier to stick to. So it will be great for AOV. And I also think that would be really helpful to like have it be a habit. And then obviously, like, You need the whole family to sleep. So I think that'll be a big thing is like, how do we really get people in, in those helps, helps AOV, and then we'll help make it a habit.

And that's what we were thinking actually, like, you know, from a gift perspective, instead of a frother or something like that, like, what could live in the bathroom? You know, honestly, like, how could you have a stick pack in the bathroom or a little cup or, you know, with a little bedtime bestie, you know, on it, something that like Makes it a routine because the one thing that people do consistently is they brush their teeth before they go to bed. It's the one thing that they do, you know, most people.

Most people, it's like saying everybody watches their—

Headshot. Sean does. 'Cause you see that face, man.

Like, uh, yeah, look, we're about to find out, guys. This is, I think this is like now where the rubber meets the road. And I think Cody, Cody said this great to me. He's like, this is basically gonna be a marketing masterclass. Like we now have to execute. at a very high level. I think that's true of all supplements, guys. I don't think that is just true for us. I think to win in these categories, you just need to be excellent. I'm confident that we'll be excellent. I'm like, we're going to put the reps in. Like, I have a level of obsession that is unhealthy, and I'm pretty sure Cody does too.

Uh, so we just, we, we have to have the best product. Like, yeah, in the end, if you're, if you, we really do have a product that helps people to sleep and that the entire family can take. You do not need, like, think about it this way. This is really crazy. Like, let's say a family of 4, um, drinks this nightly. How much are they gonna spend on it in a year?

Oh man.

Cody, what do you think that number would be based on the way we're thinking about pricing?

Well, I'd say $150 a month.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So let's just say it's $1,800 a year for per family. Right. Okay. So I'm just gonna do some math with this. The average consumable brand is probably going to get 4x revenue. Okay.

Right.

Right now. Okay. So how many, here's a question for you guys, because it's kind of counterintuitive. How many families do you think we need to drink this on like a, you know, that kind of every night basis to be a $100 million company? Just off the top of your head, if you say—

50,000?

A family drink, a family of 4 that are drinking every night that are spending, you know, $1,500, $1,800 a year on this 4x multiple on revenue. How many families?

Matt, you said 50,000 to 60,000.

Curtis, what do you think?

Yeah, I was going to say 30, but then Matt trumped it.

So, okay. Cody, what do you think?

I'll say 20, but you know, you know this, but you're going to have like that, that, that those families will make up a large percent of your revenue, but it'll actually be a very small percent of your customers. Right.

Right.

14,000. You need 14,000 hardcore families. And the only reason I'm doing this, and Cody, I'm sure you saw this in makeup, like everything's power laws, but I'm just kind of trying to illustrate a point that we tend to, with e-commerce, we think about breadth, but all the value is in the depth. And like, if we can just have a product that's so good that 10,000 to 20,000 families swear by it, this is a 9-figure company. And that's the motivating thing I would kind of end on is like, that's doable for sure. That's doable. And it's the reason why we just got to make sure that regardless of on the acquisition side, if it's going to make any difference to add glycine or to do this or to do that, it matters on the retention side. And that, that's where ultimately all the money is. All of the making the numbers work is going to be. So yeah, you have to have a great product.

Yeah. And, and The great thing is about sleep, I know there's a lot of challenges that we have, but it's a true pain. It's a true pain. And the mom, like if the mom's the buyer, she doesn't want her family going through that pain at all. Kids, it's a problem with anxiety and everything we talked about. And so, who are those sleep, I won't say the word, that are totally focused on sleep? You know, the moms that are, you know, extreme on routine, getting the kids to bed at 7, 7:30. Like, we need those ones. We need the champions of sleep in every household. And we know them. Like, I'm sure you guys do. I can tell you 3 moms right now that were anal with their kid bedtime, focused routine, you know, and would not waver on anything. There's some cultures that do it all the time. There's some other cultures and people that won't, you know, won't give an inch to bedtime routine, bedtime, like the timing of bedtime. And so to your point, Mike, like who are those 14,000 families that are, you know, really strict and disciplined with, you know, the desire and priority of sleep over everything else?

Well, and the thing that it really frames is it really frames you know, like unfortunately you can't just know who those people are, but it frames the way that you think about customer acquisition cost.

Mm-hmm.

Because obviously, like, what would you pay for a family that could drink $1,800 worth of this in a year? It's like, I would pay hundreds of dollars and feel great about going and acquiring 'em for that. Um, but unfortunately you can't always get that dialed.

Yeah.

Um, with, with your marketing, but it just kind of relativizes the What's fortunate, the thing that can make this work and that has to make this work is that the user value of the right customer, we don't need that many nominally. And the user value is so high that there's, that we can definitely pay whatever it costs to get them. As long as there really are 20,000 families out there that'll love this stuff enough and get enough good results that they'll take it daily.

But I think that's, Mike, that's why I'm so happy that we did take the time and we did invest in the quality of the product and the quality of the ingredients. with the claims, because that is everything you're saying is true, but it's hard to go get that if you don't have a product that works.

That's right.

Like the product has to work.

And that's why I'm like, hey, if we can add glycine and it makes it a little bit better, if we can make it where the packets are a little bit easier to open, if we can make it where it, you know, it makes stuff a little bit better. Like, yeah, we gotta do, we gotta do all those things.

Yeah.

Yeah. Obviously those, those things are the most important thing. Extremely important. The other thing I'm really, really excited about, if I'm able to throw a little positivity in here. I was telling Matt yesterday, like, there are so many angles. And what is so important on paid social is these personas and having this like breadth of angles. And like, yeah, Zach Stuck has done it really, really well with Mars Men and finding different things. There is not part of your life that is not ruined by bad sleep. And so it's not just do you have bad sleep, take this. It's are you struggling to lose weight, take this. Do you have anxiety, take this. Are you struggling at work? Do you have relationship problems?

And that's, that's kind of what I've been encouraging you guys to look at, Cody, is that I would break it down on these ingredients. We have the ingredient list that— and I think everybody has access to it.

That's right.

But, I would actually, instead of going from sleep up, what I would do is I would start with each of these elemental ingredients and say, what are the 5 or 6 things that people use each of these things for? And, what you're going to find is you have 30 different personas that are hit in some way by this product and that sleep may be the front door, sleep may be the primary one we use. I mean, Because of the way we named the brand and the packaging, I think it probably has to be like the primary value prop to a lot of people. But the secondary persona stuff is, there's a lot of different angles.

We're going to meet $200 CAC after 30 days, not $800.

If we can get to, I actually, I think we can get to $200 CAC.

Maybe $250.

If you can get to $200 to $250 and you're getting moms, then we probably are there. Is my guess. Now, like, it's like if, again, this is like if we're selling to single people and if our mix isn't very good, then that may not be good enough. I think that that's the thing we don't know right off the bat. We'll see. But I mean, that's also—

I think, I think Mike, Jordan, Cody and I have been talking to Jordan and Zach and I, they have a very different opinion on than what Sean is saying.

So—

Well, I think what Sean is, is Sean's, you know, Sean's in basically electrolytes even though Gut Culture has fiber and Like the way that I think about it is no matter how gifted the entrepreneur is, you walk into a market and you have to kind of say, there's a lot of established dynamics and competitors, and I have to kind of play the hand that's dealt me. I could not run the Winks playbook in electrolytes. I could not go at the price points that some people, you know, like I don't personally have the skillset to be able to say, here's how we're going to sell electrolytes at $1.50 or $2 a stick. But when I walked into the category, that particular category, I was like, if I can sell it at 50 to 75 cents a stick, I think I actually do know how to make this an awesome success. And so, like, to some extent, it really does matter what are the market dynamics. And I think that that's part of the reason why Gut Culture's been really hard for Sean is that the electrolyte market dynamics are very, very challenging and there's not a lot of white space.

Right.

And, and she's like, Well, what, what should I take? You know? And it's like, I don't know, Benadryl. Like you, there really, it just shows the lack of options. Yeah. From personal experience that there is no like, hey, here's the thing you can take every night and it's fine. And as a parent, I don't have to worry about this disrupting you.

Yeah, dude. Melatonin is the devil. We know that now.

Yeah.

Uh, it's useful for like, certainly for kids traveling to Europe.

Certainly for kids it is.

You know, it's not great for kids.

It's like, it's definitely not great for kids. And kids are one of the groups that have the hardest time sleeping.

Yeah.

And it's just like, if you're not, if it's a tool, right? Uh, you know, you're going to go to Europe, you're going to disrupt your circadian rhythm by 9 hours. Like, great. Melatonin can help you. If you're at home, you should not be dependent on that. Like it just, it, all the science is saying you should really not, you should try everything you can to not be dependent on melatonin.

You have a natural sleep agent and that agent teaches your body on when to go to sleep, when to wind down, how to shift your hormones, you name it. And melatonin hijacks that agent. So, if you want someone to hijack your sleep or your circadian rhythm, sorry, not your sleep, circadian rhythm every night, it literally removes the body's natural ability to sleep. So, to Matt's point, you're traveling to Europe, your circadian rhythm out of whack, you need to get back on track or get back onto some unique time zone, it's a different story. But, at home, daily stress, daily issues, you name it, melatonin, you don't want someone come and hijack your natural sleep agent.

It's almost like, could we have a clean sleep versus dirty sleep kind of angle where it's like what you're saying, Curtis, where it's like a lot of people are basically there to try and make their sleep better. They're using all of these dirty ingredients that are just jacking up their bodies in all these other ways.

Well, and I think about this, bedtime bestie, right? Why don't we have a hijacker? Call them the melatonin hijacker or something like that. It's like, because that's what he's doing. And so, to your point, Mike, I want to go back to how we actually position this product from more than just sleep. Obviously, it says right on the packaging, your bedtime bestie, sleep aid, you name it. We're in a category that most people are using. If they're not using melatonin, they're using cannabis gummies or they're using, hopefully not for kids, But, Benadryl or some other product that's going to just zonk them out. But, there's a lot of benefits to these ingredients. I just threw it in chat actually when we were talking. And, it is amazing. I mean, this is why we designed it and included a lot of these ingredients because of the mood, the anxiety, the brain health. L-theanine is phenomenal for brain health. And, What sleep does is a moment in time where whether it's 8, 10, 12 hours, hopefully more than 5, that your body, that's your body's time to recover. And that's not just the mind, that is your muscles, that is your brain, that is your gut, that is your everything. Like every organ in the body, every function in your body, sleep is designed to actually recover. And, you know, there's a reason why you should wake up in the morning and have a full 8-ounce glass of water is because your body has just gone through 8 to 10 hours of dehydration. But the reason why I say this is that it's almost like the positioning is, do you want to sleep better but also recover better? Like, you're actually equipping your body to like rejuvenate through the night. And a lot of people think, okay, I'm just shutting my eyes and, you know, calming the mind down for 8 hours. But it's like everything is rejuvenating.

Everything.

Our cells are rejuvenating throughout the night. And so, it's like there's a lot of benefit if you look at the ingredient profile. And once again, all I did is I actually just took a picture while we were sitting here through it and chatting and say, hey, tell me about these ingredients and the benefits. And, it just blew up that it's very extensive and it's way more than just sleep.

I think it's a great point, Curtis. And, I think kind of an observation I would make that I think we're going to be able to really market off of is that we don't have to convince people that sleep's important. I think just kind of in the cultural trade winds, that is very understood. And there's probably more tracking of sleep, deep sleep, REM than ever before. But most people still don't really understand anything beyond that. I should get sleep and there's these different types of sleep and that's kind of all I know about it. And so the opportunity there is that we are able to actually step in as an expert and explain it to people. And like, if we can do that, we can position ourselves as like the sleep experts where we're actually educating people about what's going on. I think that that adds a ton of credibility to the product.

Mm-hmm.

And it creates a lot of really interesting opportunities for follow-up emails, Cody, like that really, if you can explain what is going on in your body during sleep and how it leads to you having a better life in very simple and understandable ways. I'm even imagining like you're, you know, you're incorporating this guy and you're making some animated things with AI that just are like these little short 30 or 45-second videos that are just explaining different things that are going on in your body and why this particular ingredient makes that go better. Um, like there's a lot of opportunity there. And so like a lot of this, maybe some of this is on more of like the kind of lifetime with a customer, how you're just gradually building credibility every single month. Maybe some of this is on part of that initial offer and like, you know, whether it's an ebook or videos, you know, whatever else, I don't know. But I do love the positioning of like what you're really trying to do is when you wake up the next morning, your body is in a great place. That's really the outcome you're trying to get. You're not trying to get a quantity of number of hours of sleep. You're not getting, trying to get a quantity of number of REM hours. What you're trying to do is that like, I get the most, my every day I have to go to sleep and then the next day I'm going to wake up. And what you hope is when I wake up that I'm actually my best self and our product is going to help you do that. So yeah, maybe it will. Go ahead.

Yeah, I think also, you know, think about supplements, right? You take a pre-workout before you work out and you do a post, you know, some sort of post-workout, whether it's a protein or, you know, something after the fact. Um, I think we have to look at this going, this is your pre and post all in one. Like you're preparing your body to go to sleep, but you're also fueling it for the 8 hours it's sleeping. To accelerate recovery. Like, that's what you're doing. You're like, so even if you sleep well, it doesn't mean you actually have all the supplements to actually optimize recovery while you sleep. So like, like, I think what we have to do is we have to get into position where like, yeah, sleep might be the problem for sure. Might be the main reason why you initially buy this. But it doesn't mean you stop when you start sleeping well, because you actually can feel your body before you go to sleep to accelerate brain health recovery, gut health recovery, like mood recovery, like all of these things, nervous system recovery. Like your nervous system, yes, obviously sleep is the number one thing to help out with the, you know, underregulated or, or, you know, overregulated nervous system, but you can actually fuel your body before you go to sleep to accelerate so many other things.

Yeah.

So, this is kind of like your— the pre-workout The pre-workout is preparing your body to sleep. The post-workout is essentially fueling your body. So you get pre and post right before you go to bed and you're optimizing that 8 hours. So I think, you know, we have to remind people that this isn't just taken just because you can't sleep. This is taken every night before bed to accelerate recovery while you sleep.

I'm really excited about it. And I think I'm very optimistic. for that reason that like, all right, you, you, you guys are, you guys are great at this and I'm, I'm gonna be excited to learn.

Cody, let's go.

Let's do it. We got it. We got our work cut out for us. $200 CAC, here we come. Yeah. $14,000.

$100.

Well, I'm saying month one.

Raving families. Yeah.

Month one, $200. Yes.

Yeah. That's the goal.

Great talk, guys. I'm getting really fired up.

All right, boys.

Yep.

That's the pod.