What do you do when you've modeled for Versace, trained the world's most elite celebrities and entrepreneurs, and starred in TV shows and films? Start a DTC coffee brand of course...
Go get some Strong Coffee from the Strong Coffee Company: https://strongcoffeecompany.com/
A fervent believer in the balance of fitness and cannabis, Adam takes us through his journey of maintaining optimal health by not just focusing on exercise but also prioritizing good sleep, a healthy diet, and keeping stress levels low. Plus, he gets candid about the legalities and potential benefits of cannabis use for athletes, providing a fresh perspective.
Now, imagine harnessing your ADHD into something that actually propels you toward success. Adam reveals how he's managed to do just that, achieving mastery in various topics and using the same focus and dedication to fuel his eCommerce business. From conquering the challenges of staying lean in business to employing creativity as a major growth lever, his journey hasn't been without its share of hurdles. The crowning glory of this voyage? The creation of Strong Coffee Company, a brand that's as much about quality and taste as it is about the environment.
Speaking of Strong Coffee, we dig into the intricacies of launching a product globally, especially with giants like Whole Foods. We discuss the value versus price point conundrum and the fine line between promoting a product and driving customers into the store. We also address the dark side of the burgeoning obsession with coffee culture and the subsequent disregard for quality. But, it's not all doom and gloom. We highlight the power of creativity in marketing, the magic of word-of-mouth, and how Strong Coffee Company is aiming to disrupt the coffee market and take on Starbucks. Tune in for an energetic discussion filled with insightful revelations and candid anecdotes!
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Ecovice Gold is brought to you by Rewind. Protect your store, protect your revenue. Shopify is only responsible for protecting its entire platform, not your store. Maybe your new app that you've just installed messes with some of your theme code and you need to undo it. Maybe you accidentally delete some custom information or order information. Maybe your store goes down and you quickly need to get it back up. All of these things can be done by Rewind. It's used by Glossier, liquid Death and a number of other in fact, 100,000 organizations across the globe. Go and get it installed today. Ecovice Gold is also brought to you by our friends over at Sendlane. Sendlane are the up-and-coming email, sms and reviews solution that I predict every Ecovice store in the next year to two will be using, because I have seen the features they have and that they are bringing. They are hungry for your business. They're taking a personalized approach. You're probably using someone like Klaviyo, but what have they done to you recently, really, and how good is their solution actually? I've seen Sendlane. You should see it too. Go and check it out. Hey, thank you for tuning into another episode of Ecovice Gold, the show where we interview founders and operators of Ecovice businesses so they can share their stories, their journeys, their lessons, insights and learnings with us and hopefully, we can benefit. The fact that you're tuning into the show tells me that you're passionate about e-commerce, and you're the kind of person I want listening, so please do like and share. Let's get on with today's show, adam. Thank you so much for joining us on the Ecovice Gold podcast today. How are you doing, seth? I'm good man. How about yourself? I'm very good, We're fellow nose ring bearers. How long have you had?
Speaker 2:yours Almost two years, something like that Almost two years. I wanted to get it. Years ago, i mean like probably like 10 years ago. I told my wife and she's like that'll look lame. She's like you know that. And then I was about to turn 40 and I went and got it done and she loved it And I'm like you said it's gonna look lame.
Speaker 1:But Jesus, you look good for 40, bro, what was it?
Speaker 2:40. I'm 41. 41. The secret, the secret Working out Decent sleep. You know I've always prioritized sleep. I've prioritized good food since a young age And I smoke a lot of weeds. So I keep my stress low, which you know can be highly beneficial with aging, and I don't get as many wrinkles from beating me out all the time.
Speaker 1:Is that legal? where you're at Smoking weed?
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, yes. I guess I should have, in our prenotes, asked mentioning the cannabis is all right, But you know it is legal. It is legal. I've lived in fully legal states. There's a loophole in Texas which is really interesting That's some really savvy entrepreneurs have caught on to which is that THCA, which is in a carbolized like strand of THC for the acid, that A is still on it, But when it's burned it then becomes psychoactive, But when it's not burned it's non psychoactive. So it's there's a loophole so you can now buy it in Texas legally, which is pretty fucking amazing.
Speaker 1:Smart They find anyway. Who can blame them? They do, it's industry.
Speaker 2:You know it's true. You know it's true capitalism And there's an opportunity, there's an offer and there's a market. So it's pretty amazing to see people do those things.
Speaker 1:Is always safe. Yeah, it's fairly safe anyway, I think. But I've always been interested in I know you've been in fitness and you can tell everyone a little bit about your fitness journey, if you wouldn't mind in a minute. But how do you balance? Because how does weed, how does it go hand in hand with it?
Speaker 2:Because it I think the greatest athletes in the world probably have smoked weed on a pretty fairly regular basis. You know it reduces your nerve. You know your sympathetic, parasympathetic nervous system response. So say, if you're trying to recover faster because you have two a day training as a professional athlete, you smoke weed, in between, your body's going to go into a recovery mode a lot quicker and come down because you're dealing with adrenaline and norepinephrine. So you're dealing with these neurochemicals that are heightened at a state of, you know, competition or, you know, intense lifting. So there's that. and then, like, there's reducing delayed onset muscle soreness I don't, you know. And there's a lot of back and forth, science. You know I'm not a scientist, right, so I'm not a doctor, but there's a lot of back and forth of whether or not it affects your lungs in the same way that cigarette smoke does. I personally, as well as a lot of people, have no problem running 10, 15 miles, right? So I don't know if that is necessarily true. And my peak heart rate, you know my, my, my ability of going at a very high heart rate for a very long period of time is pretty fucking up there, right, it's in the upper like 98th, 99th percentile. So when I think about that, and the fact that I've been, you know, a daily weed smoker for you know 15 years, that it's not affecting that.
Speaker 1:So I mean you're, you're not passionate about fitness. It's part of your DNA. I would say you might disagree, but yeah, weed as well seems to be a bit of a passion for you. Is that? is that your next business? do you think Some kind of, some kind of crossover there?
Speaker 2:No, i mean I've played around with the idea of doing some collapse with strong coffee. I always want to have my finger on like the pulse of culture, right? I feel that building a brand is more than just selling a product, right? So for me, i've looked at, you know, some pretty different ideas that a normal like coffee company wouldn't look at, like doing a THC collab, you know, and doing like a release and like MedMen in California with like a cannabis company. or, you know, doing something with like people who are doing like eminita mascara, you know, which is like a psilocybin type, you know, mushroom, where it's like oh, you could do eminita mascara with like instant coffee and make this product that people could kind of get like a little bit of like a hippie flip in the morning, you know, get their brain moving on like a micro dose of mascara.
Speaker 1:When you say mascara, you mean like the makeup.
Speaker 2:No, no, no, no. So it's an eminita mascara mascara. I believe I'm saying it right. It's a mushroom, so it's like psilocybin, but it doesn't have psilocybin. It's actually what's called like the reindeer mushroom. I believe It's the red and white capped mushroom that we popularize see, like on toad from like Super Mario Brothers, how it's like a red mushroom with like the white dots. That is eminita mascara, which is actually like where, like the tale of like Santa Claus comes from and like the whole red and white. And there's this like whole story about how Santa actually sold mushrooms. You know, he was like a mushroom dealer in a way, so it's a pretty interesting. There's like a whole shaman, like history to it And they're. They used to decorate trees with those mushrooms and then they would ingest the mushrooms. And if reindeer's reindeer's love eating these mushrooms, they get high as a fucking kite And they just like they're like stumble around and shit the woods And they know that's what's going to happen. They love eating them.
Speaker 1:Tripping reindeer. How and why do you know this information?
Speaker 2:You know, deep passion of health and fitness, laced with trauma, right. So when you, i once, i once was told like, if you find yourself in hell, you know, just keep going right. So I have used other means to understand how to like continue to go forward through trauma. And at first it was, you know, weed helped me a lot with certain things. And when my brother died, i did my, you know, i tried my first psychedelic experience not too far after. And then when my dad died, i, you know, and my first daughter was born, i did my first heroes dose, where it was like over three grams of mushrooms and like went really deep and came out. And I believe that my career trajectory, my life, my ability to continue to move forward stemmed from that. You know. Larger dose of mushrooms that day, going on like a seven hour walk barefoot, like through the city.
Speaker 1:And what does that feel like? What is that? I've heard these stories about mushrooms having the ability to reset. You can maybe give us some more information about that. But what's the what? were you think what we hoping would happen going into that experience and what actually happened to the other end of it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, i mean the idea of being able to cut through fear and anxiety and these voices and just have a deeper connection with your inner self, versus like all these things that are layered upon you through others, experiences and through what people tell you. the world is like. death is bad. Well, it depends. What did you die for Right? What kind of life did you live Right, like, instead of being sad about somebody passing? maybe you could celebrate their life Right Instead of mourning it. So, being able to peel back these layers of societies, impressions and other people's deep pressure, you know you are able to, you know truly have a new perspective that is not influenced by other people's opinions And, because the mind is stretched, it cannot go back to it just, or it cannot go back to its original shape or form.
Speaker 1:Sounds so, so would you recommend it? Would you recommend it, and if so, who to? is it?
Speaker 2:I think I think everybody in the world should do three grams of mushrooms right now. I'd like you to predispose schizophrenia or some type of multi, kind of bipolar type of thing going on. That's super deep, like bad, like no right. Again, not a doctor, not a scientist, but I do know that. I do know that you should not do that if that's a thing that runs in your family. But if you are depressed and you are taking anti-depressants, if you are on anti-anxiety medication, if you are on any of those things, if you are dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder, three grams of mushrooms I mean they have the studies that they are doing Military athletes with military and athletes with post-traumatic stress disorder is absolutely bonkers. They're saying like two, three gram doses and these people's like suicidal, you know thoughts are just completely gone Years later, years later. An old client of mine So this is another connection of what I have to. I've had a lot of clients in my life when I was a coach and I got to that elite status that believed highly in psychedelics and then I started learning that much more about them. Former client of mine, the founder of Toms, blake Mikosky, just donated a hundred million dollars to psychedelic research. I mean, some of the biggest entrepreneurs in the world understand the importance of this thing and have put hundreds of millions of billions of dollars into this with very little to gain. Right, they're just true beliefs, like altruism, you know, at its. You know reciprocal altruism at its best.
Speaker 1:I wonder how many of those dollars you influenced through your training, through your talking about it, and if you could attribute like 10 cents on the dollar.
Speaker 2:Certain clients of mine I know didn't do that kind of stuff when I met them and I, you know, did introduce them Like I remember getting one of my clients stoned for the first time and you know they've done a lot now in the cannabis industry. Like seven years later, it's pretty wild. I know, yeah, i was like dude. I'm like I know you're trying to not drink so much. Have you ever tried smoking weed? He's like dude in high school didn't like it got all paranoid. I'm like yeah, because like you don't know what you are smoking. I'm like that's now is grown in a very certain manner. It's enhanced with terpenes, which are extracts from like fruits and different things like that that can influence the way you feel from like a you know more euphoric state or a more grounded state. And they're like, really, you know. And then they try it and they're like, oh, wow, dude. I'm like trust me, whatever negative there is to smoking weed or psilocybin, it is far less than drinking alcohol.
Speaker 1:Yeah, i'd have to agree with that. I don't drink but I don't smoke weed anymore in the UK. Yeah, stuff you get hold of was pretty. I don't think it was very good quality, i just put it that way. And I saw what it did to my friends, like they turned into reclusives, a few of them who were kind of heavy users and haven't done much with their lives. But I wonder if that's about the timing of when they were smoking or what they were smoking. I don't know, but it definitely didn't seem to have a net positive effect on them. But yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's not for everybody, it is not, but like the, i do believe that mushrooms and their magical effects are pretty fucking special.
Speaker 1:So, just before I ask you just to walk us through your professional background or your working background right up until today, what's something I like to ask? What's something that most people misunderstand about you most?
Speaker 2:What do people misunderstand about me the most?
Speaker 1:Yeah, What are their assumptions of you and what's something you like to prove them wrong about?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, i mean, it's funny man I've been. I don't know if it's the tattoos or maybe the cauliflower on my ears or something, but there I've always seemed to have this impression with people that when we talk that I'm a lot smarter than they thought. I don't know, i'm like okay, but really, you know, my passion for fitness stemmed at a really early age. I was like a necessity, right, and I was pushed around physically and verbally abused by my dad. So when I, you know, put my attention into something, even though I was ADHD, i could achieve really incredible things within that category. And I believe that my, you know, i would love to go back to like each one of my teachers that didn't believe what I was going to do in my life and be like, ha right, like I just didn't want to listen to your shit. So it's like, effectively, i've used ADHD. You know my ADHD when highly focused, i've accelerated to the top of any category of anything I've ever wanted to do in less than five years, you know, and it's just like that's, you know, like the, that's like the 10,000 hour rule, almost exactly Right. So five times 2080 is 10,000. 10,000 hours is mastery, right. And I think that for somebody who is a pension deficit. I'm pretty damn good at sticking to something and hitting the top. That's usually where I kind of get bored, and but I'd like I was with e-commerce. I've not gotten bored, you know, because there is no top to that, but I am at least respected by top people now in this space that you know when it comes to product and brand innovation. So it's pretty wild. So I mean, i think, like people underestimate, have underestimated me and my ability in business, because they see me as a fitness guy And I have proved all my investors wrong and each one of them have admitted it to me that they didn't believe I would really get this far. But they invested in me because they believed in me.
Speaker 1:But they didn't think that strong coffee would go this far I should say, you've maintained an incredible physique from as far back as I can scroll on your Instagram. What's harder Maintaining a low body fat percentage and a good muscle mass or grinding it out in e-commerce?
Speaker 2:I've been grinding it out in e-commerce. It's the cup of the wind though. So being lean and mean is not complex, right, it really isn't It's. We are all underfed and overstressed. You would be blown away at how little I actually do work out to maintain like the physique I have now, and I do it through, you know, more protein. I do it through better sleep. I do it through more efficient exercise. I walk a lot. You'll never see me taking a fucking phone call and sitting down right. I am going for a walk. I am jumping on my slack line, i'm putting my headphones in. I'll do a 45, one hour full-on conversation while walking back and forth on my slack line, doing pistol squats intermittently or whatever. I literally fall off my slack line while in the middle of the conference. I didn't tell anybody. I'm like, yeah, so I think that with Ecom, it's moving so fast, it's changing so fast. Your body is not, you know, and the science is not. It's simple, it's do reps eat clean food? you know. Don't beat stress. With more stress, you know decompress, and with business, that's not enough. There's never enough. You know. It's always that Somebody else is winning, i'm losing. You know my CAC is. You know it's like uncontrollable at times. You can control. You can control yourself, right? You could be like I don't need to eat that.
Speaker 1:Do you use a similar playbook In fitness? you have, like you said, you've got workouts that you can do, macros that you can hit and track, certain things that you can do, And you know roughly what the end result is going to be if you do those things within the margin of error. Do you approach the commerce of that mindset or have you got a completely different approach?
Speaker 2:No, it's actually super similar, yeah, i mean so I'm actually like more of a creative at heart. I'm more of like. You know I'm an. I was an art. You know I loved art and I was in. You know I took all the extra art classes I could throughout middle school and high school. You know I was really good with, like, metals. Actually, i found myself kind of gravitating towards sculpting and things like that. So I, because I like the idea of also doing something with my hands, which is why I've been so hands on with strong coffee, even like doing the fulfillment up to you know, almost 100 orders a day and you know, having that piece like connected to you know, like our house, literally like, so it's like always something I can tinker on. So I think that the, the, the fitness aspect and business correlation really came in the deeper. I got in on numbers and understanding like key performance indicators. You know what's my CAC? It's like, okay, what's my vertical? I'm like, okay, well, if I could jump over that, you know it's like. You know like there's all these different things that I can that I can look at. That started allowing me to like dashboard my mind around my entire business, just like I do my fitness, so I know where to check in when I see revenue take a dip. I know where all these components are because I treat it like it's like an extension of my own self, in that manner of how I treat my, my body.
Speaker 1:If you wouldn't mind just giving everybody the origin story of strong coffee, maybe the condensed version of it, before we jump into sort of how you built it up.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So originally in 2012, i tried launching strong coffee and within our first order, we like first month we sell out and we were the first company to actually make a non protein dairy, non protein coffee. Protein based, non dairy coffee creamer had an MCT. They'll see me and all this stuff. Within a couple of months, my daughter my first daughter was born and within three months after my daughter was born, my dad passed away. So I shut down what I was doing with strong coffee because I also was running a gym and I also just got casted on strong by NBC and Versace for these like back to back modeling campaigns. So my time was stretched super thin. I'm a new dad. My dad just died. Like there's so much going on. So in 2018, after the TV show I was on went on hiatus, i had moved me and my family out to California and I was sitting at Sunlight for organic and an acquaintance now a good friend of mine comes up to me and he's like pointing to his phone. He's like what is this? He's clicking on his phone. He's like what's strong coffee? And I go, oh dude, i'm like that's a coffee company I tried launching And that was like early on, you know, e-com, cpg, like 2012 and like that sense of you know, like that would have been like the early stage. That was like right before vital protein, yeah Right. Like that became a billion dollar brand selling collagen, like that's what I was doing, right, and we were getting our collagen from the same fucking place. No way, it was crazy. It was crazy similarities of our story, but I just I took a right, you know, he went left, i went left, he went right, i guess, you know. Initially So in 2018, khalil, the founder of Sunlight, you know talked me back into the idea or not really talked. He convinced me. He was like hey, man, like you should watch this. It's going to be like your legacy. So, yeah, he talked me into it And I hopped on my phone and this is now like a part of a process that I teach everybody. It was like first, when you have an idea that you think is great, you go to the US PTO, you check for trademarks, then you go to GoDaddy, then you go to Instagram. If it passes those three boxes, i'm like then it's a great fucking name, you know, and it's like that's exactly what I did right there.
Speaker 1:So I went through those I was made, you got Strong Coffee Company. How did you, how was that available? you know.
Speaker 2:So I mean I had it before, right, and there was so, and then it, you know, i didn't pay for it and went away, and then it was still there waiting for me, right, and it was like it's like, if it's yours, let it go, if it comes back to you. It was meant to be right And that's exactly what happened, Like it was meant to fucking be. So I bought, I bought the shit within like three months And I had it work like within Three months. I had a co-packer and a working sample and the idea had changed When I shut it down in 2012,. I was like it needs to be combined with instant coffee next time, so that you don't even have to brew anything. It will be built for the modern America to match almost the other global trend that almost 70% of other people use instant coffee. Coffee consumers threw out, like Europe to Africa. It's such widely used versus we believe everybody's doing French pour overs and it's like no, that's not what's happening, so only in America. Carbon footprint-wise, instant coffee is actually better for the entire planet on a carbon footprint level. The fact that we're not doing it on a country level more pronounced is pretty wild to me for a country that acts like they care so much about the environment. So I was like instant coffee, it's got to be combined with that. So it was all right, find high quality instant coffee, It's got to taste good. So, combined with these incredible ingredients proteins, healthy fats, nutrients, things that will enhance the coffee experience because, honestly, coffee is a let down. It's like coffee does a fit of what you imagine it's going to do And ultimately you're robbing from Peter to pay Paul. Those jitters, the come down, all that type of stuff is going to have a negative effect on the back end of your coffee experience And unless you visit your drum dealer again I mean your barista you're going to be like, oh man, i just need some more. While strong coffee was fixing that, it was the idea of calmly picking you up and letting you just cruise with different amino acids and utropics and not relying on higher amounts of caffeine. But that was. It's like cuisine meets science, right, like creating something delicious at the same time, right, and very early on after launching strong coffee, you know. And so I had these samples. I tested them at trade shows that I was getting free boots at, because I was emceeing on stages in return for free boots And I would just have the product there and I'd have surveys, ask them what they think of it. Next event, i'd have a new variation. By the time I launched it I think I was on like my seventh or eighth variation of you know formula before actually putting it in a product And got an investor. You know, a small angel investor who was a brand new client ran out of coffee that day And I showed up that day first day, tried the coffee, because I happen to have like two cups left in this container meant to be. I make a cup for him and his wife. They asked me if there's more. I said no. They say how do we get more? I said I need money. They said how much. They gave me that much And they give it to me. I gave them a piece of my company, but you know it was the. The idea was to just create a delicious cup of coffee that did more for you And ultimately it was short work for me to make it happen because I believed in it so much that it was all I could think about. Right, and I'm like training, like the world's best people. I'm like this celebrity, this pro athlete, like making killer money And I let all that go. Once I launched this took, like you know, like probably like a $70,000 a year pay cut and became a you know, a born again entrepreneur Right.
Speaker 1:Like what was the motivation there? Were you thinking about the future? Were you thinking about how big the company could be trying something new? Like you said, you got bored. What was the? what was your feeling at that time?
Speaker 2:You know I was. I wanted to be one of the best. I wanted to be the best trainer in the world. I wanted to be on covers and magazines, i wanted to be on shows, i wanted to do movies And I did all those things And I wasn't happy doing it anymore And I had a gym and I loved the effect that I could have on a community, right. And then I went to training high net worth people where I'm only like helping six people, right, and I'm pouring like all my energy into these six people all the time And I'm so good that nobody fires me Like I've fired clients, right. And I was like I want to help more people, right. I want to form a community, i want to affect culture, i want to change the way people think And I have a solution for a problem that exists for a lot of people, and not only is it one solution, but it's multiple solutions Coffee that takes less time Right, because you need more time. Coffee that doesn't give you jitters, because who the fuck wants jitters and anxiety? Coffee that gives you protein, because you're low on protein Everybody is, you know it's like. Coffee that has hydrating factors in it, like potassium and magnesium, and you know sodium, because you're dehydrated and 76% of the planet is So it's like there are these problems and I saw the solution and the same thing that people are consuming every day, you know, and it's like and it's not serving them. So I'm like all right, starbucks is not your master, you know. It's like, it's like it's time to look elsewhere for your experience. And I'll tell you, like all these energy drinks there's loaded with sucralose, they're loaded with shitloads of caffeine and none of the nutrients that actually will assist the brain in managing all of those stimulants. And the amount of just kind of false marketing that exists out there around the energy culture. Like, look at the back of your can. If it says it doesn't have caffeine in it, it probably has feel bromine in it, and feel bromine is just a different strand. That is caffeine, right, it literally works on the same receptors, all the same shit. And there's doing that And I just like, personally, i kind of like to sheriff situations when I was like a train, when I was, when I love fucking training. I share if the shit out of people on social media until, like social media and it's got so big, i couldn't fucking, i couldn't heckle everybody that's talking garbage. You know, it's like I give up, i give up. That's literally when I started giving up on Instagram because I was like, all right, it's gotten so big social media that I simply can't berate all the fake people out there, right, and there was just so much to it. I asked them. Dude calls himself the sup bouncer, tried, tried, tried. Coming at me saying that organic neuro factor didn't exist, which is like an ingredient that has a shitload of incredible science behind it that we have in our product. Man, i'm the wrong CEO to try to pull that fucking. Yeah, i took his comment on green screen, i jumped on it and I was like this dude, you know, and then I'm like talking about my COA, it's like I know product in this space and brands and what's in things, probably better than almost anybody in this space. So it's like that is why I got into this space. Because my second passion to fitness was supplements And I always said I was going to start a supplement company. When I was younger, i made my own supplements by ordering bulk materials and I used to put them in Tang because I know I needed sugar for my pre-workout and everybody was like going no sugar. So I would take like creatine and centrally malate and beta alanine and amino acids and I pre-measure them on a scale and I just throw them in a big thing of Tang and shake it up and I called it monkey juice And I threw like a monkey on my bottles and, like you know, it was just like a thing I did for my own pre-workout because I didn't want all the artificial sweeteners and you know bullshit. So I started from Cockle.
Speaker 1:Stendlain are taking an incredibly personalized approach to win the email market. They're coming up with innovative features. They're plugging the gaps we all wish were plugged by Clavio. They have an incredibly awesome email, sms and reviews solution And it's no wonder that they're the talk of the E-commerce town and I would highly highly encourage you to get on their radar. Go check them out. If you haven't already grabbed a demo, get booked in. It's probably the solution for you. You're basically a mad inventor, so I mean that in a lovely way. You know, i love all of the things that you're doing there. It reminds me a lot of the guy I can't remember who sort of co-founded Nike Bowerman or whatever his name was. He was constantly fiddling with shoes to try and make them better and come up with his own sort of you know patterns and ways to improve the product. So how did you go from that person with a love of art, hands on dealing with people face to face, to a businessman running a successful E-commerce company? Because there are other elements to running an E-commerce brand that maybe you don't enjoy as much. I don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, i mean I've. I mean, admittedly, i have never in five years, up until up until like this last six months, have ever done any financial accounting Like never once looked at a profit and loss statement Ever. Fuck that Like that. That is not how I'm making decisions in strong coffee. That's why we're cool as fuck, because that's not how I made decisions. But you know so. Now, once I finally did it and I saw how my decision making worked, it reinforced certain things and it allowed me to see other things as being not good Right, and I'm like God check. So when I look at you know doing business, i have really, you know, leaned into my electrical route, my, my, my electrician days, when I was a union electrician And for five years I was taught to get to this place where I could run a job Right, and that job would entail 10,000 pieces of information Right. It's like I was. My last job I was on as a union electrician was the Minnesota Twin Stadium And I was given a pile of schematics and shipment dates of boxes of lights and these like metal structures and these schematics that had measurements and all these different things on it. Basically, i was personally responsible for mounting every single light that lights the field of the stadium and perfectly calculate them based off of angle and all these things. So I knew that I could take all these pieces, a million pieces, and put it into this one thing Right, i could take this exploded diagram and I could see it, and I could consolidate it into this single finite thing that works The pipe light, right, and follow all the rules in between Less than three, you know, less than 180 degrees of bend, no junction boxes here, here, here, like all these laws, right. So I was really good at all of a sudden, understanding product development. I understood claims and benefits and how to work around FDA regulations and stay up to date with them, just like I had to stay up to date with. Like electrical codes, right. And because like electrical code is like literally becoming a lawyer, i mean you're given a book like this big that has like section A reference, one B, go to section T, you know, go to page 143 unless you know, and you're like pfft. So there's all this happening And I said, okay, like you created a brand, you created an incredible product, so I create a community. And I just kept leaning on the things that I was really good at, and as I got to a certain place where you couldn't just rely on what you were good at, i looked how far can I go before hiring somebody else? And I went maybe like a couple months. At that point I hired somebody else, right? So it's like okay.
Speaker 1:What was your first time? What was that high?
Speaker 2:It was a like a operator email writer, like a assistant operator, slash copy email guy. So somebody that, somebody who could read paperwork and fill in things. That's all I gave a shit about, that's all I gave. That's all I wanted to sign off on, right, i just wanted that away from me is having to write which is funny because I'm a good writer but I didn't. I didn't want to write emails around sales copy and shit like that. I like creative writing, so that wasn't what I wanted to do at the time. There was certain things I didn't want to fill in paperwork for an event. I didn't want to upload new product on Shopify like this, and that I make marketing ads, i go to events, i get on podcasts, i innovate product. I do all these things I'm really good at. I hope these other things will take care of themselves. In a way, it works until it doesn't You get to a certain place where it's like we launch globally on Whole Foods and it's like we have to bring on more help.
Speaker 1:Ultimately, it's not there, would you? on the Whole Foods, what was that? I just wanted to pause on Whole Foods quickly, because that is a tough thing to do Launching globally, especially in Whole Foods. Just walk us through that experience, my man. What was that like?
Speaker 2:How has it been Well. It's been two years since we initially launched there and we're actually exiting in October. We are just not big enough. We had incredible sales. For instance, we beat vital proteins competitive product on the shelf right next to us. That is a better price point, not a better value. But most customers don't understand value unless they do a home work. We beat them by four times revenue. They were gone in one year. We were still there. That was a huge win for me. Going into wholesale retail different things We were doing, like globally. We were doing about 50,000 a month at Whole Foods All the stores combined which is not as much as they wanted. They wanted us to spend tons of money. We spent probably like 140,000 on advertising and store and doing sales. It just still wasn't enough. These brands are spending a half a million in promotions and shit like that.
Speaker 1:That's usually just fun money for the partnership. You've got a 10X there on the ads to drive people into the store.
Speaker 2:The good thing is I was good enough to get into strong. I was good enough to get into Whole Foods. We were good enough to be there for two fucking years. To anybody that sees that if we just were to go out and raise a bunch of money, it's like, oh well, we'll jump into sprouts or somewhere else. We're launching on targetcom right now It's like our Amazon is crushing it for us. Our shop, my store, is consistent. We have such a high rebuy rate We just want to focus on e-com. Anyways, really, as Whole Foods was kind of just like this Hail Mary that I threw out, i didn't really think I knew we were good enough to get in, but I thought that we would get picked up globally, but at the same time the odds were super low. You don't buy a lottery ticket because you think you're going to lose. You buy a lottery ticket because you think you're going to win, but you know the odds are fucking low of you winning. But you still buy a lottery ticket If you want to win. I'm like yo, i want to win, i'm going to go into Whole Foods. I'm going to get globally launched. Everybody's like no dude, that never happens. Maybe they'll put you in a region or two regions and do some tests or whatever. They're like you're going global in Whole Foods. I'm like, yes, i didn't care about anything else. Actually at that point I was just like I got picked up in Whole Foods globally.
Speaker 1:It sounds good on paper, doesn't it? It sounds great on paper. It sounds good when you get the PO, but you've been a mess, yeah, but it's a mess.
Speaker 2:It's a mess headache and you lose connection with your customer. Yeah Right, like all these things and I love our customer. Like I love being at events and people coming up to us and being like, oh man, i love you guys, i get my shipment every month. I love seeing you at events. We don't like clothes that drops at events and people come out and you don't get that when people are buying your shed at the store.
Speaker 1:No, and it's size, like you said, it's just size. Mike Beckham, who has Simple Modern, he has a very similar story. They're a nine figure brand now, but they went into retail too early and they had to do a huge buyback. I think it pretty much netted them to zero. They had to buy back about a million in stock. Cool, Yeah, mike Beckham, simple Modern, and yeah, and they just went a bit early, and now they're in every single possible target Walmart that you can even imagine and they're a nine figure brand in Crushin.
Speaker 2:But yeah, whole Foods did us pretty dirty. We had a reorder, like four months after the initial stock and they sent us like a $1.2 million total of POs. And we're like, are you sure? We call our people at our distribution facility and we're like, are you sure They're like yep, we're sure, we're sure We're getting all these emails saying like your stock is low, like this, and that There was just a lot going on at Whole Foods. They were very unorganized at the time. And they're eight weeks later they're picking up the product and they literally cancel it as the truck is pulling up and they cancel $1.2 million in POs And all of a sudden we have like $700,000 plus worth of product, our cost and bill that I'm sitting on for manufacturing this. That this is like welcome to E-commerce retail. The first mistake true mistake I made was strong coffee was I had a gut feeling that it was too early, but seeing $1.2 million looks so good that I was like do it. We should have waited, but now it's given us an awesome opportunity to grow online and we have a shitload of product that we are moving and it has been moving very well And we're doing a lot of different offer optimizations on our site and launching a new site. That's just going to be a very clear offer which I think will help a lot with new customer acquisition and continuing to grow.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what channels are you using to drive those customers You eat? primarily Facebook. Where does that new customer acquisition come from? online.
Speaker 2:Fake-trick. Instagram and Google have all performed historically really well. For us, youtube is something I want to get into. I want to get a little bit more proactive on that. We have strong SEO. So if you Google like best instant latte or different things like that, like our articles are the first articles. Or there's some niche terms like BDNF brain-derived neurotropic factors which is an essential protein in your brain that determines is kind of a determiner of your brain health, and BDNF helps with forming new neurons and neurological health, and our coffee has an ingredient that's clinically studied to increase that protein in the brain by 143%. So we have a strong SEO on that kind of anti-aging protein brain thing where we get like a nice draw from those articles around that Like sex and coffee is actually like a really high performer too, where it's like we get a couple thousand views a month just from these articles. So we've done a little bit of that old school like SEO. We get huge influxes from being mentioned on podcasts or being on a podcast. When I was looking at my cohorts from last year in January, when we were mentioned on Joe Rogan for like three minutes, our cohorts was like 3,000 new customers. No matter It was like holy shit, it was like 1,500 and then it drops to like 600. And it's like whoa, but we have a high. We have a high RIVI rate. We have a low CAC And that's kind of a positive So you first mentioned profitable, primary.
Speaker 1:I mean, imagine you are, but you first mentioned profitable. So what's the minimum unit they can buy online? Like six, is it? I think Six, what? But what was the minimum amount they can buy online? I looked earlier but I can't remember what it was. It was six. The boxes, oh, yeah, that's low.
Speaker 2:That's been crushing it for us is selling those bulk boxes of the product. That's like our overage stock. So, we're like let's just sell a whole cases of it so we don't even have to like break it down in our fulfillment center, repack it anything. We just throw a sticker on the shipment pack box and get it out and give people awesome savings is been crushing it for us, but we are profitable on most orders. Yes, first orders, right, so we're adjusting for that right now. So our our AOV went down when we introduced a the travel packs versus the bags, because the price point was almost $10 less, right, but that brought our AOV down significantly. So we realized we had to bundle the travel packs in boxes of two versus the boxes of one. So you have to get 14 servings and travel packs or 12 servings, so kind of like. but like showing like a savings, it's like, hey, you still can buy one box, but you're going to save if you get this.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so we're kind of creating that new sales, you know, offer to drive our current AOV about up 10 more dollars is our, is our hope, and then we would be extremely profitable on our first order, which would be fucking awesome. And our on our LTV is, you know our LTV is nice But like if you could increase AOV, you know, then clearly it's more likely that that lifetime value will go up over long term as well, Because if we can get more product in somebody's hands, if we can get them to try it for 30 days straight, they won't like the way regular coffee makes them feel anymore, Right? So that for me is like a big deal is getting somebody to really get away from coffee for long enough to understand the difference of how you feel on this versus how you'll feel on that.
Speaker 1:We want really table stakes for any e-commerce store. It backs your store up consistently and it offers you an undo button just in case something was to go wrong on your store which, let's be honest, can happen. And it also provides you a staging environment so that you can have a carbon copy of your live environments. Do all your good testing on your QA, try new ideas and not have to worry about breaking something on the live environment. Check code conflicts, app conflicts, everything in between It's a must have Go and install it. That bigger difference, huh. So so you're going to do a good job by. Imagine you've got some scalability left in Facebook and places like that. You can probably get to where you are right now, but at least mid-eight figures just doing that. And then are there any other like supplement brands that you think have done a really good job of good quality ingredients, great products, but then have managed to diversify or use their brand power and positioning just to really hit the home run in the space that you think is worth emulating, or even just any brands but I say supplements because you know your stuff in that arena.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I thought they did a pretty good job with their marketing Some of the old school fitness brands. I mean, are you going to follow some of those more traditional fitness brands or are you going to try and carve your own route? I know there's been some interesting coffee brands, like Chamberlain Coffee and people like that, that have used influencers to sort of leverage their sales. Have you got a game plan for what's next or are you just sort of playing day by day?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I definitely have a plan We spend. I'll give you an insight of 2022 because I don't want to talk about 2023 yet, but we're a small family company, right, We give off the perception that we're much bigger. I have put very little of outside capital into the company. In 2021, we did 600,000 in digital sales. In 2022, we did 1.3 million and we spent 89,000 on digital apps. Wow, And that was it.
Speaker 1:Amazing. So how did you do that? Where did those sales come from?
Speaker 2:Well, having a high quality product And a significant network of individuals landed us one, me being on Skinny Confidential, which is a massive podcast, and our product was talked about on Joe Rogan twice by Knees Over Toes, which was not. we had no fucking idea. I mean it almost fucked us. We ran out of product and we couldn't fill our subscribers. There was like it wasn't like we. I mean we're so thankful it happened, but it's not like we were like oh, dude, man you know like no, we just were working out. He tried the coffee for the first time. Then the guy that does Knees Over Toes And he's like dude, i fucking love it to solve all my problems. I want protein in the morning, i want coffee, but I don't want my stomach to like, you know, bother me from an empty stomach. But I like, need you know, like, and it's like this is incredible. It tastes so good, you know. So seven days later he's on fucking Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan is like what are you doing in the morning? He's like well, i don't do it, i don't do any supplements. He's like well, i'd be lying. Actually, i started drinking this coffee. It's called strong coffee, it has proteins, you know. And all of a sudden we just, I see, like a $20,000 day.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:And I'm like what the fuck? You know, like we're familiar with like two $3,000 days, you know, and all of a sudden it's just like boom. Next day is like 15. Next day is like 12. You know, it's just. You know, we grew 150% in one month And we just retargeted them with a clip from the podcast. All the people that were coming had a massive traffic ins, you know, in surge. We set those ads up the same day that the podcast came out, started running it, still are running it. That's an ad that still crushes for us Because fucking Joe Rogan and Ben Patrick are talking about strong coffee.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Like, it's like you can't buy that, right. But what bought it was all the work that I put into the culture, the product, the brand, the community, the trust factor of like who I am and what I would get behind. You ask, like, do I look at ghost Ghost puts crap in their supplements, but they have a dope brand, right, like. But like super lows and like all these things. It's like man, like that stuff's awful for you. Like, some of the quality of the ingredients that are in these fitness brands are disgusting. So I come from this biohacking fitness space. Right, I love bodybuilding, but I love bodybuilding so much that I turned into a nerd And the nerd route made me super aware of how unhealthy bodybuilding is. The culture, not just work, not working out, but the fucking culture of like not caring about the quality of their meats, you know. Like not caring about the like, the source of their carbohydrates and sugars, like different things, that to inflammation. So I started eating grass fed beef when I was like 21,. I started, you know, eating only organic foods. I started like shifting everything and that's that's biohacking, right, like you're optimizing your body. And then I got really nerded out on it And that just kind of continued to grow And, ultimately, i think the brands that I've looked at, or I've looked at myself as like the compass of like what would you be proud about if your heroes were to try your product Right? That's what. That's how I built it.
Speaker 1:Now, i just have interest.
Speaker 2:Man. I mean I have many, but I mean Mark Siffin has certainly won. He started Primal Kitchen, you know. He started with Mark's Daily Apple. He was a blog writer that you know just done incredible things in the fitness industry. You know, i on popular opinion, kanye West, i mean the guy, the guy owns his shit. You know, i mean he said some stupid stuff, but I'm not not condoning anything he has said, but he is an incredible creator. He has a, you know his mind is insane and he doesn't hear no one in his head. He hears yes, and I think that's pretty amazing. You know there's there's a bunch, there's a bunch in there. I'm like drawn a little bit of a blank. But Mike, you know, mike Mayhew, marvel comic book artist. He reimagined the way that comic book characters could look. I got to work with him and actually be a model for him and got to be like Nova, protector of the galaxy. You know it's like, yeah, such a. You know there's so many talented minds out there that people like I could say like Miguel Torres, and everybody be like, oh, i love this guy. You know I could say Robin Sharma, and it's like Robin Sharma is a friend. I wouldn't say he's a hero, you know he's. I wouldn't say he's a hero of mine, right, but he's a friend, like Neil Strauss is a friend. Like I have friends that are crazy, like fucking talented, like the top of the fucking top at what they do, but like none of them are my heroes, they're influences in my life. I think that you know we are the sum of the six people we spend the most time with, and I spent so much time with so many of these people that I've really allowed myself to be like that voice. If I was to look at like brands specifically that I've looked at to understand how they did things or how they recreated the space, i would say Rx far. I've always said that like strong coffee would be the new Rx far crave Right, where it's like similar nutrients, nutritional factors, but no sugar, and it's an experience you get to make it and enjoy it. So it's like when people go, oh, how do I take strong coffee? I'm like you don't take it, you make it, and you enjoy it Right?
Speaker 1:I was wondering. I was going to say is like there was an America I can't remember when it was they. They brought out these kind of not pre made meals, but I guess they're similar to television meals. They're sort of like a bit of a similar to shake and bake And all you had to do is basically put them in the oven. And this was at a time where women sort of cook for men, and you know, talking back in the day, and they didn't. Yeah, yeah, yeah, because it took the element of cooking out of the process. So what they then did is said well, actually, no, they reinvented the products and they didn't really need it. But they said you have to crack an egg, a fresh egg, then cook it, and that simple addition, the being involved in the process of cooking, save that company, made it very successful. And it's a similar thing with coffee, isn't it? You want to be part of that process, you want to experience it a little bit? you know, blend it your way, do it your how you want to do it. I guess it's got a similar, similar thing to it. Do you give, like, certain instructions? I know people that drink coffee are very specific Some people to the pressure of how they blend their coffee, but with yours, with the instant. How do you overcome that barrier? Or do you just target a slightly different demographic? It's not like the hardcore coffee drinkers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, i mean, i think that you know to fully answer. To finish answering the question before this one is Like the other brand would also be athletic greens, right, and I think this would also help some kind of feed into this next question, which is that some people see everything they do as like mindful, like a tool, right, and it all has their function, and brands like athletic greens and the fuel and some of these brands that have exploded online with a consumable product at the price point of like somewhere between three and four dollars, promising be it gut health, protein, energy, reduced anxiety, like whatever it is, strong coffee hits all those same fucking benefit factors, right, and we're not asking you, though, to introduce something new to your day. We're asking you to replace it, which is a little bit right, So it already has space for it. I'm not asking you to start drinking this weird green shit. I'm asking you to stop. I'm asking you to stop brewing your black coffee, throwing it in your blender with your collagen, adding a couple of drops of stevia or monk fruit with some butter and MCT oil you know whatever else you put in your coffee or taking your sugary, creamy shit out your fridge and pouring it in your black coffee. I'm not asking you. I'm asking you to stop doing that. I'm asking you to stop going to Starbucks, standing in line for 20 minutes and spend $6 and 50 cents on a couple of fucking diabetes. Right, That's what I'm asking you to not do. So I don't think that's too much to ask for. I'm not asking the guy with the French press and the fucking pour over with the six minute routine, with his beads on and his flat hat and like that guy, that's not the guy, Right? I'm not talking to that guy, Right? I'm not talking about the guy who spent three months in Guatemala and he's part of the people. Now You know, like all these people, these stories, that they you're not. Maybe some of these jokes are fully landed on you because you're from Europe. You're from you know, but like in America man. The pretentiousness of people. You can gauge them by the level of their coffee beans in their house, right, my man? that is not a sustainable thing, nor is it good for their environment that they're growing them at the rate that they are, right. So when I look at what people are, you know, so like in love with cool, fucking being in love with that. I don't care about you, but if you go to Starbucks, you don't even like coffee. Like, because there's a good coffee. I'm talking like real coffee. I'm talking like, oh shit, like, i got this micro filter on my, you know, on my espresso and it's I drip it at this. You know like I don't. You know, it's like all like calculated. That's not what's happening and everybody knows that people are like yeah, starbucks coffee fucking sucks. Right, That's why they're number one. Shit is always like vanilla lattes and you know pumpkin spice lattes and unicorn lattes and pride Latte's, whatever fucking thing they can. So it's like cool, like that's what we're focused on. That's like why, strong coffee? That's why it's like okay, cool, let's take the worst thing in the coffee industry Sugary, lactose filled, gmo, red and latte's that cost six, seven dollars. It's a snicker bar in a cup of coffee, right, like that is literally what they're handing you without the nuts, right. So I just wanted somebody to like make that switch. So whenever anybody asked me, like who's your competition? they're always expecting to hear like this brand, this brand or this brand. And I'm always like Starbucks, fucking Dunkin Donuts, Right, and they're like you know, that's a big opponent. I'm like, yeah, well, imagine if I just took 1% or 10, you know, 110% of their, of their market share. I'm pretty sure that strong coffee would be wildly successful at that point. I mean, that's got to be a hundred million dollars, right, and it fucking hits, you know. It's like all right. So if we were doing a hundred million plus a year and it was taken from Starbucks, i will have done my job, or Starbucks can buy me.
Speaker 1:Right, Would you sell? would you sell that I?
Speaker 2:would totally sell the Starbucks. I would totally sell the Starbucks. I would stop bashing them then as well. Right, they serve. So but I would totally, i would totally sell them under the stipulation that they wouldn't change the formula. Right, it's like, make this, like, hey, if you want to, like, try to improve the flavor, cool, but we can't allow these ingredients. So work around that. Right, there will be no sucralose and strong coffee. But I promise you, this is my, this is my thought. Right, is that they once believed in skinny lattes? It was literally the thing that created the crape, the kind of the real, like. Women drink coffee and it's delicious. Right, with the skinny latte, because all of a sudden, you could have a skinny latte and not get fat. Well, strong as the new skinny. Right, nobody wants to be fucking skinny, People want to be full body, people want to be full body abled. So, starbucks, when you're done fucking around trying to make your own protein disgusting shit, you know. Or making instant lattes, but nobody wants to buy it because they're not delicious, it's like buy strong coffee at a fair price of $50 million right now.
Speaker 1:There you go, starbucks. If you're listening, which you may well be, he's open, he's wide open. Maybe you're not going to be Nice. You can't even buy it at 50 million. This umbrella has been. It's been eye opening.
Speaker 2:I've loved getting out for you What was that.
Speaker 1:I said, it's been eye opening. I've really appreciated learning how creative you are. I wasn't expecting that necessarily coming into this. I got the nerdy bit. I got the bit about like really taking it seriously. Wasn't expecting the creativity, so that was a refreshing surprise, because usually we're just talking about digits and high frequency shit. So it's great. Get raw and real and get back to kind of building communities and getting in front of people. Where can people find you and where can people find strong coffee?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and real quick to what you said, I think there's so many highly intelligent people in the world that are great at those numbers and the analytics And we need those people The more than ever we need creativity, right. We need people that are out there innovating, creating solutions to problems, right, and that is what I love to do, and you can find me doing it at Von Rothfelder on Instagram, or I will actually be launching a course on smart marketer, which is a pretty bad ass deal. I was asked by Molly Pittman and Ezra Firestone. And I'm going to be launching a product brand innovation course. So, which is something they've never dabbled into, is getting into the creative aspect behind products and things that we market, and you can find out more about strong coffee at strong coffee companycom or at strong coffee company on Instagram and check us out. We would love to have you on the strong side.