#29: Dan Zavorotny, Nutrisense

Welcome to From Startup to Grownup, the podcast. My name is Alisa Cohn. I'm an executive coach, an angel investor, and the author of From Startup to Grownup. Each week I talk to founders, creators, advisors, investors, and builders of all kinds about their insights and experiences in going from startup to grownup. This is episode 29, and I'm thrilled to have Dan Zavorodny join me for the podcast. Dan is the co-founder and COO of Nutrisense, which makes continuous glucose monitors, or CGMs. What they do is they track and monitor your glucose continuously throughout the day, and they also give you access to dietitians to help you interpret the data you get. I've personally used a Nutrisense CGM, and it's a great tool to help you with your health. I have gotten a lot out of that process. Dan and I had a fantastic conversation. We talked about how he and his co-founder Alex re-met after a number of years and why Dan immediately gave his 2 weeks' notice to join Alex on the Nutrisense journey. We talk about how they established trust together as co-founders and also the culture shift that Dan had going from his very cushy job at KPMG to co-founding this startup. Dan talked step by step about he, as a finance guy, taught himself marketing. Get ready to take notes. This translates to any function that you're trying to teach yourself. We also talk about Dan's 3-step process for hiring and how Nutrisense built what Dan calls an extreme culture. This is an incredible episode with a lot of very specific tools and tactics. You're gonna love it. So please enjoy this conversation with Dan Zavorotny. Dan, welcome to the show. I'm so happy you're here today.

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

I'm so excited to talk about the journey, your journey, and Nutrisense's journey. But I want us to first talk about you and, and also about, like, Nutrisense. So you're a former healthcare consultant and you're a first-time founder. So we want to get all into that. But first of all, tell us about Nutrisense. Tell us what you guys do.

Sure. We're a company that focuses on preventative health. We strongly believe that anyone can reach and discover their health potential, but they need the data. As well expertise to help them get there. So what we do is we leverage a device called continuous glucose monitoring, and we add on to it software analytics and expert humans to really help people understand how to drive the behavior change as well as get the data they need to really get there. So we launched this about 2 and a half years ago, and we now scale to about 160 people.

160 people, that's amazing. I wanna just say upfront, I myself used Nutrisense for about 3 months to get a handle on my own blood sugar and like what things do. And I also had the delightful opportunity to talk to a number of your health coaches, and they were so informed and helpful in the way they talked about it. So, I just want to say like the product really works. So—

I appreciate that.

Yeah.

I mean, we went out of our way to make sure we actually hired exclusively people who are licensed dietitians.

Yes.

To make sure they had the expertise necessary. And then, we've paired folks with what they're looking for. So, some people are We have people anywhere from pre-diabetics to type 2 diabetics to Olympic athletes.

Yeah.

So we made sure the person got the data.

I fall into that category.

Yeah.

Olympic athletes.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. What, what sport?

Yeah. Yeah. No, no, I'm kidding. I, but I am, I am a very, I'm into fitness. I'm a fitness fanatic and I'm into my health and that's, sorry, I didn't interrupt you, but that is why I decided to, to try the CGM for a little, a few months.

Yeah. I mean, I think the goal here is personalization every possible way. I think people forget, they sometimes say like, oh, you're maybe trying to improve longevity, or you're trying to lose some weight, they give you the exact same advice, work out and eat better.

Yeah.

What does that actually mean? And for what are your goals and what is your baseline that you're starting off? And so our ambition really is to understand that before we start any journey so we can put you on the right path to success.

Yep. I love, I love it a lot. And I want to hear kind of the founding story because I know what happened was you, you, you met your co-founder, if I'm not mistaken, at a healthcare conference and you had known each other before. So kind of play out the story of how you two met and how you decided to form the company.

Yeah, so we were friends when we were kids. We were friends from— we were about like 9 years old to about 13, 14. Both of us were actually immigrants to the US from Ukraine, and we became friends because we both didn't speak English. Since then, I've gotten a little bit better English. So we became friends.

Remarkably so.

Yeah, I appreciate it. And so then we took— ironically enough, as we got to high school, I went to play sports like football, basketball, baseball. He was more of on the volleyball and the swimming team. So as you know, sports define you when you're a little younger. So we've kind of went in different directions and took a break in our friendship from 14 to 30. And then randomly I was in a healthcare conference in San Francisco because—

wait, because you were in healthcare because you were KPMG in healthcare, right?

Yeah, I was doing healthcare consulting specifically for hospitals, insurance companies, medical device manufacturers. And he just saw I was in San Francisco for a healthcare conference and he reached out and said, "Let's get drinks." So, he was wearing this device called Continuous Glucose Monitor and he asked me, "Hey, do you know anything about this?" It just so happened that I was an expert in this topic both because of my consulting background as well as personal relationship. My sister's type 1 diabetic, so I've seen these devices evolve from just idea to them lasting 6 hours and 12, then 1 day, now 14 days. And for listeners, a continuous glucose monitor is a device that it looks like a little sensor. It's size of a dime and it's attaching to your arm or abdomen and it tracks your glucose real time, 24/7, 14 days. And it really gives you insight into how your body responds to sleep, stress, exercise, as well as nutrition, most importantly. So he asked me what this idea was, what I thought about his idea that he's thinking about starting a company. And if I'd be interested. And I kind of said, sure, let's do it.

Well, okay, so wait, wait, Dan, I gotta stop you because first of all, I had the impression that you ran into him at the healthcare conference, but you're saying like he saw you were in town and reached out to you? Or on LinkedIn or like on Facebook, like announcing, I'm in San Francisco.

Yeah, yeah, he saw on Facebook, he's like, hey, you're in San Francisco, let's get drinks.

And was he targeting you? He was like, that guy's gonna start, gonna start the company with you.

No, no, no, no, he was just like trying to catch up about life.

Okay, um, after a 15-year friendship hiatus.

Exactly.

Yeah. Okay.

Uh, so I mean, you know, sometimes you get lucky, and I got lucky in the fact that I was also in the headspace of looking to start something.

Yeah.

Uh, I was a KPMG and had this, uh, application process where they basically donate you and your time for 6, 7 months to one of three areas. It's either work for the mayor's office in Chicago, uh, or help develop an urban undeveloped area, help them start business there, or work at a technology incubator.. And I applied and I was one of two people that won out of like 6,000 applications within KPMG. So they sent me this thing where I still got paid. I got lucky enough to get paid my consulting salary while also getting to work at incubator and just see how hundreds of startups work and learn a lot of things I just knew nothing about. So the mindset was already there. Like, I wanna try those, some of this stuff.

Okay. So you had a prepared mind. I mean, how long did you work at the incubator?

Uh, about 7 months.

Okay, and so you kind of got steeped in— you must got like an education in startups, really.

Yeah, I mean, to be totally transparent, I, I question how much value I brought to an incubator, because what they did is every day they would have like 2 or 3 successful entrepreneurs come and teach classes, and I signed up for every class possible. Everyone else that was trying to like start a company or trying to work at the incubator— I knew that it was not my career to work in incubator, so I signed up for every marketing class, every operations class, every like engineering class for no reason. I was like, I want to go to these things. They're free. And they would charge like $1,000 for your classes because I was part of the incubator. I would just go for free. So I think I'll get something like anywhere from $80,000 to $100,000 worth of free education every month because I would just go to every single event and ask millions of questions. So really got a lot of free education there. Super helpful. A lot of famous entrepreneurs came too.

Did they? Who was the most sort of insightful entrepreneur that you learned the most from? Or what's a lesson that you learned from an entrepreneur there?

From there, I mean, so the Grubhub founders came and they spoke quite a bit, uh, so they were there. Granted, I think it's important to remember, I think insight, it's a little more difficult as people are— sometimes people are too far ahead of you. If they're like, they already have a $5 billion company, it's a little bit harder to understand detailed insights, more of like envisionary and exciting. It's— I've learned the best insight from people who are 2, 3 years ahead of me because, as you know, the world changes so quickly in marketing. I mean, One day people are tracking everyone on iOS, next day you can't, privacy controls. And like for someone who's just starting off, those barriers are now, uh, changed so much that someone else who's leading a company with 3,000 marketers can't simply relate to anymore because now the person's more managing, leading versus executing. So the best insight's been always from people like 2, 3 years ahead rather than a long-term player, you know, player. Yep.

That makes, I think you're not alone. I think that makes complete sense. So you went to sort of incubator college for a period. Yeah. So you kind of got your mind wrapped around and you were all, it sounds like you were already thinking, I wanna do a startup. And then you met with Alex for lunch. Did he immediately pop the question like, hey, do this with me, like at that lunch? Or was there more of a conversation?

I mean, I would love to tell you a story that sounds more sexy, which I think most founders do. Uh, but the truth is, at first I said, why would anyone wear a CGM? Where are this? This is ridiculous. Like my sister has type 1. I don't understand. Like, why would you do this? And then he said, well, why don't you just wear it for 2 weeks and see what you think?. And I worked for 2 weeks and immediately I realized how wrong I was and just clicked for me. The part that was not great was the manual piece of it where like I couldn't track my food. I had to write it down in Excel and my workouts. I had my Garmin watch, my Fitbit, all kind of like random places. And I said, well, there has to be better than this. He's like, yes, that's what I'm trying to build here. Do you want to do it? I said, sure, let's do it. Put my 2 weeks in and went.

That, oh my gosh. And you just gave 2 weeks notice. Did KPMG, I mean, they just were like, okay, we get it and let you go? Like, or they tried They talk you out of it?

Uh, they tried talking me out of it, but I mean, I was pretty set on it. Um, I think with the way I looked at it, a job is a job. It's going to be there tomorrow. Yeah, it's not a problem. Um, and so I can always go back to a company. I mean, especially within— I came from finance strategy. Yeah, so like it's a relatively lucrative and, uh, opportunity. So it's one of those things where like if you ever need a job, you can get one.

You can get back. Yeah, totally. So did you and Alex have any other conversations about what it was going to be to co-found? You know, in my book From Startup to Grownup, I have this idea that you should have a co-founder prenup where at least you talk through your vision, your values, the culture you want to have. What, if anything, did you talk about before you actually, you know, signed your founders agreement and went?

Yeah, uh, more just like, is there any kind of market fit here? People want to do this. Uh, it was more so, can I trust this person? And that's pretty much it. Uh, retrospectively, probably should have done some of the things you're describing. We've done none of those things. Uh, yeah, we just didn't do it. We just kind of said, do I trust a person? Yes. Okay, let's do it.

Yeah. And where'd that trust come from? That sort of like that long-term, you know, you were friends as kids, or how, how did you, how did you get your mind wrapped around trusting your new co-founder?

Yeah, I mean, I think the fact that Alex, ironically enough, we'd actually signed a final agreement until like 3 months after I quit my job. We were already working 3 months and we're like, we should probably sign a final agreement. And that's when we did it. But it's the fact that, you know, Alex is sitting there working 80, 90-hour work weeks on this. I was putting in time working on this as well. And so to me, it was clearly obvious person cares. I think one of the biggest issues people have is you might be working 80 hours, other person's, you know, fiddling around for 15 hours and doing something else on the side. Uh, and I think that was the biggest disconnect most people have. We didn't have that where you see someone grinding and it's almost— I had the opposite where I'm like, oh boy, I'm not working hard enough, I gotta work more. And that established a set of trust. So that was the motivating factor for us.

That makes sense. So you sort of saw each other and you saw how serious you were early days and you kind of like jumped in and thought that—

I mean, granted, you gotta remember, so it was my first time doing a startup. Alex has been in startups, he's exclusively been in startups. I don't think he's ever done a regular job from like I think he was a, he was the first engineer at Trunk Club, which is a Chicago-based company. I got acquired, I think like $500 million. And he was there when he was 22. He was the first engineer and employee number 9 or 10. So like, who better to start with another, like the options were myself, another first-time founder, or someone who's done this numerous times. And he's been, you know, he was a, another company he got in Silicon Valley got acquired in childcare space. So it's like, what better way to do this? Right.

Yeah.

I will tell you he had more risk than I did because You know, I'm the first-time founder. He's got to teach me stuff. Uh, for him, it wasn't as, uh, for me, it wasn't the biggest risk. Like, what's the worst that can happen to me? You know, I get lucky and get an amazing co-founder.

Yeah, I can see that. I see that's a good way to put it, actually. I, I definitely want to find out more about like what he taught you and also probably you taught him things too. But, but like first I'm just wondering, you had your first, you know, you left KPMG. I love this. Two weeks notice. Like you're like, okay, bye, leaving. And then you jump into— you probably already started Nutrisense. What were your first, like, what was your first week like of your full-time? You know, you're finally an entrepreneur. Yeah, that must have been pretty culture shift.

Yeah, well, so first, you know, my background's finance strategy, and prior to this it was all finance. It was finance operations, corporate finance, all my jobs in finance. So we get there, and the first week Alex is like, all right, we need to get revenue. And we're like, okay, how do we go get revenue? Let's hire someone. And Alex, this is— I say this all the time, but Alex said, Well, when you start off, only two things matter, build and sell. I'm an engineer by background. I'm going to build. So you got to sell. I explained to him, like, I don't know how to sell. I know how to do accounting, finance, strategy, operations. He's like, well, those things don't matter. And immediately he said, well, if you don't sell, then what are you doing here? We don't really need you here, do we? And it was one of those sink or swim moments where I'm like, shoot, there's no like PIP, you know, the performance improvement plan you have in corporate world. You're like 9 months to get it together. He's like, you got to get revenue. Why are we doing this? And remember, we have no final agreement yet, right? We did ours 3 months later. So I'm like, wait, I just quit my job that paid me really well. Well, just, you know, like hang out with executives at corporations and, you know, drink nice wine and enjoy life to just my first week, my co-founder saying, I don't know if you have the skills for this. And I'm like, wish you told me this prior to me quitting. So the sink or swim really kicked in here. And I decided to try swim and it seemed like it worked out to some extent.

Yeah.

So we're here now.

Yeah, so far so good. How did you swim? So you've never done— you're a finance guy, you're a strategy guy, you've never done marketing. Again, like, walk us through the real tactics. If someone right now is trying to teach themselves marketing because they're in your shoes right now, what should they do?

Yeah, step one is I just Amazon ordered as many marketing, best marketing books as I could and really just overnighted all of them because I was like, I need to just dive into this. And then started Googling also, like, what is marketing? I know it sounds silly for people,. But if you've never done marketing, like, what do you start? What does it even mean, right? And just trying to like marketing for startups, startups, marketing. And then I just had to like, I started creating a file and I had like maybe a list on Excel, maybe 50 to 100 different like marketing things, just things to high-level things. Like there's Facebook ads, there's Twitter ads, there's Google ads, there's SEO. I remember at this point I'm like, I don't know what the word SEO means. I have no idea what this stands for. I have no idea how you run Facebook ads. I didn't even know Facebook ads was a thing. Just like literally zero concept of anything. I knew the old school, like billboards. I see people advertising billboards, so I knew that. Or like on trains. And then from there, I basically went through and said, okay, here's a list of all these items. What's my budget? I go to Alex, what's my budget? He goes, zero. I'm like, okay, well, let's cut out whatever I don't have budget for and let's just start crossing things off. After I crossed— after zero budget, I crossed off 95% of it. I only had a couple things available and that was basically like influencer marketing, podcast marketing, and basically just like blog outreach PR. So then I went down and I said, okay, out of all those items, which can I do the fastest? And I realized PR takes a while and blogs take a while. So I said, influencer and podcast. I'll just start messaging influencer podcasters and just started doing it. A lot of rejection at first. Apparently a lot of people want to get paid up front. Uh, we didn't have any money again, so I tried to convince folks to give them referral fee instead of per conversion. Uh, and that started driving traffic and they got paid based conversion. With anything, like anything else in marketing, there's the whole 80-20% rule. I would even argue an influencer and podcaster, it's more like 95-5, where 5% drove like all our revenue, 95% didn't provide much value, unfortunately.

Yeah.

And so if I had to pay them upfront and we paid all those people, We would have just lost a ton of money. But we had the 5% convert. We then said, okay, let's go find people just like those 5%. And then the cash flow was actually great because you spend zero on, you know, getting people to post for you. Then you get revenue. And then like 30 days later, you pay the influencer out or the podcaster out. So you actually had like a negative conversion, a negative cash flow, which is a pot— like you're basically running your business and paying salaries. For the money that you've already generated, which is fantastic, right?

That is a great way to do it. And I love your sort of just resourcefulness and figuring out like, you know, all the things you could do and then all the things that you will do and how to, you know, basically do it on no budget. That's kind of incredible. Out of all the books that you ordered from Amazon, are there one or two that stand out that were particularly useful for you?

Yeah, I mean, I think in the end, I think Lean Startup was pretty good. It's just thinking differently about startup world versus corporate world. I, I would say this, but I think in corporate world, you know, several thousand people in the company and everyone focuses on such a niche area. So if you just improve that little thing by tiny little, by 5%, has outsized impact. You might improve something, it might be $150 million savings. In a startup, there's nothing there. And the idea of, you know, Lean Startup is just get going, get them going, and like, don't worry about micro-optimization. Like, going from 0 to 1 is way better than trying to go from 0 to 100. And you need to go to 0 to 1 in 50 different areas. And really that concept sunk into me, just get it going. And I think this is where Alex, my co-founder, he had no marketing experience either. But one of the things he pointed out really quickly is I was, you know, from marketing funnel, always in the weeds on at the bottom of the funnel where, oh, we have 2 people converting past today. How do we get 3 people paid? 4 people? Instead, he pushed back and said, dude, we have 100 people visiting our website, man. What are you doing? Stop wasting your time. Like, you got to get a million people to visit your website. Then you can worry about— once you have a million people, then you can worry about this small improvement at the bottom. But if your funnel's too low at the top, what's the point of any of this anyways? So he pushed me to that. It's a very hard mindset shift because we're so used to micro-optimization in corporate world, and that's our entire lives. And then I try to instill in every co-founder, every employee we have, Hey, stop micro-optimizing. Look at the big picture. What is the biggest lever? Because even if you go from, you know, getting to 5% conversion versus 2%, if you have 100 people visiting your website, you have, you know, 2 to 5 people, doesn't matter. Versus if you have a million people visiting your website, even 2 to 2.2% conversion, like almost nothing, has such outsized impact. So it's thinking about at which stage of the funnel do you have the most impact right now? So it's a very hard mindset shift personally, and I've seen this over and over. I catch myself to this day still doing it, but I step back all the time and say, What is the most important thing?

That's great. So how— I was going to ask you sort of how do you manage people? Because now I assume you have a marketing and sales team.

Yeah.

You have 160 employees now, right? Yeah. So you've marketed. So how— like, you're, you're now a 2-year-old experienced marketer, right? Probably. Yeah. I mean, you know, you're not— you still haven't been doing it for decades, but now you're managing people. And I would hope that you brought in people actually with more experience than you in marketing, right?

Yeah.

So I guess I'm curious, like, how do you now think about managing those people and what other things have you learned from those people people that you've brought in.

Yeah, so I brought— I just give you some context. I got us to about $150,000 in monthly recurring revenue before I spent a dollar on marketing, or before we had a single marketer in our team besides me.

Amazing.

Um, and at that point, I got to the point like, oh, I need to bring some people in. And so number one step was important to evaluate what are the different channels we're going to test. You don't want too many channels right away. You want to go channel by channel. But also, who is the right person at the right time? Because as you start scaling the business, things that work before might not work now, and people need different skill sets. And so we started evaluating who are the right players and for what time frame, you know. And you see this all the time, like anyone who starts like just idea stage is more of like a little eccentric, and they're like gonna growth hack their way versus someone who's gonna, you know, run a billion-dollar company is gonna have a very different skill set. And it should be like that. There's a lot of books about, you know, this and articles about like different CEOs, different CFOs, different COOs at different stages. So yeah, I started building out the areas that I didn't think I was effectively spending my time on. So influencer marketing, as I mentioned, podcast marketing, I hired someone and put them in the driver's seat. I realized my skill set is to learn really quickly a lot of information. So then I moved on to Facebook and I said, let me learn this really quickly. And then hire someone to replace myself. So what I was doing constantly is basically doing a job, hiring someone better than me. And that was always goal. I had to hire someone at least 3 times better than me at that job and then go into a new job. And once I got across, I got influencer marketing, I got Facebook, I got Google, uh, and all those people are better than me. Then I said, okay, now I need someone on this team, and I hand it off. Uh, and interestingly enough, I convinced one of my earliest angel investors to join and run the team.

Ah, yes, I did read about that. Pavel, right?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And, uh, he was a former entrepreneur too. He started a company, he was like 23, and sold it when he was 29. Yeah, he's been retired since then, just investing in startups for fun.

Amazing. How did you get him off the bench, off the couch?

Uh, I mean, I think it's, uh, he was a very— he's very active, always loves to give feedback. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of times they make, they make the mistake of just, you know, taking money and say, all right, I don't need your help, I don't need your feedback. And they like get away from me. Versus he was always giving us feedback and I was very receptive to it. So we had this communication coming along all the time and he was giving me feedback about theoretically what I should do here and here and here. And I would realize like some of these things were also not important. It's like, oh, you should fix this bug on a website. I'm like, okay, great. Thanks, Pablo. Like I'm going to spend 7 hours fixing a bug where it doesn't drive in much revenue. And at one point in time, I just said, let's get on a call. We got on a call and I said, hey, what are you doing anyways? He's like, well, COVID hit, so I have nothing to do. Usually I just hang out with entrepreneurs at coffee shops. And I'm like, you have all these ideas about what we should fix. Why don't you come fix them for us for a little bit? And so he said, okay. So we set up a 6-month contract, part-time, 20 hours a week only.

Yeah.

But month 2, he was working 65 hours a week. And so he fully trained himself in it. And then 3 months later, he's like, guys, I need a full-time contract. This is getting ridiculous. I'm spending more than the full-time job on this. And you know what, it's one of those things where you gotta get people invested early on, right? It's once they're invested fully emotionally and they get attached to it, it's a lot easier to convince them.

I love it. That's so good. Now I wanna back up cuz what you said is you wanna hire people 3 times better than you. I love it. It's, by the way, it's such, it's so precise, right? I love that. Yeah. And we always wanna hire people better than us. Founders certainly do. That's amazing. But like hiring is hard under all circumstances.

Very hard.

How do you assess someone is 3x better than you and what does that even mean?

Sure. So I have a 3-step approach. I'm sure that my teammates probably hate me for saying this because I'm like a broken record. I just repeat it over and over when they hire anyone or if anyone gets down a funnel to me and they're still not 3 times better than me, and I'm like, what are you guys doing? And really it's, I spend a week just obsessing over a topic. Let's say it's Facebook ads. So it's obsessing reading everything about it, number 1. Number 2 is just taking like a small amount of money doing it yourself, like running it, like spend $300 on it, like assuming you're going to fuck it up. That's okay. But no, you have to do— you have to press the buttons. If any button doesn't make sense, what is that button? Reach out to customer support, reach out to Facebook, get them on a call and understand those buttons. Like every single button should make sense to you. And then the third one is finding— I mentioned this before— finding people who are 2, 3 years ahead of you in this topic who've done it well and use them as mentors because there are so many situations that you just like, the data isn't enough. You need, there's the gut feel you develop and that only comes with practice and it comes with decades of practice and I don't have decades. I have 3 weeks to figure this out. So it's connecting with people and just, I'll try to break the system. I would like, I would go on Facebook. I would try to break Facebook as many times as possible in dashboard and just literally I would write out notes, everything that went wrong and why they're wrong. Why did I don't understand in every piece? And then when I show up to meetings with people, other co-founders, other founders, other marketing people, and I would be like, Let me ask you a specific scenario and it'll be like 6 levels deep to the point people sometimes will say like, I've never even had that happen. How did you even get that far? Um, but it really helped me establish this depth level knowledge because I think most people learn things at a very surface level. Uh, I realized when you go really, really deep, yes, you won't catch up someone who's been doing it for 10 years, but you can get like pretty good. Um, so I established that line and got those 3 pieces like learning your own, break it, and then get experts who are only a couple years out of you, and then start interviewing people. And so I'm doing these interviews, I made sure the person taught me something significantly more than I did, because if I've done this for 2, 3 weeks and you've done it for 5 to 10 years, you better know this better than me. And frankly, I'd say 95% of people didn't, which is mind-blowing to me. How many people would spend 10, some people even 20 years running like certain kind of program, like with who's running Google Ads or whatever it is. And he just didn't know more than me. And I was like, this is mind-blowing to me. And then the last piece is, even if they are better than you and you know they're much better than you, I always had one of these experts confirm for me. They would do like a confirmation call because there's things you miss, your blind spots. So I would have them do like one or two of those. It'd be like, out of these two, who do you think? I went from now 100 people to 2 people then. Who do you think? And it would catch a couple more glimpses. Ideal case scenario, this person interviews for you, but like they don't have time. They're going to spend, you know, 40 hours interviewing these people, top of the funnel. So you want to be respectful of their time. But that was the key to really get someone confirmed as well then. And I think I didn't understand it at first, but I realized now that I've— I'm also mentoring a lot of people is why do these people give me so much time out of their day to help me? They didn't need to. I was a stranger. Yeah, who's sitting with 2 hours of phone call talking about Facebook ads with me every week for like a month straight?

Yeah.

And I realized it's because people— I want to help these people and they were intrigued. They were themselves, they themselves were learning. And I, you know, I have this now where people come to me and they're like, give me some advice. And I'm like, sure. And there's people who come in and they go deep and they go so specific where I'm excited. Other people come in and say, how does Facebook ads work? How does Google ads work? What is marketing? I'm like, come on, you got to Google this, you know. And I realized it's when, when people are passionate about something and they get excited, you want to help.

Yeah.

Where some people just reach out and just ask for general help and you're like, this is just not a good use of your time.

Totally. Dan, I'm totally resonating with what you're saying. You know, a lot of people want to quote unquote pick my brain because I'm a coach or like get advice or thoughts because I'm a coach or their friends will send them. And some people get on the call and they're like deep and like into it and they have specific questions and they want to like engage. And some people are like, I don't know what coaches do.' And I'm like, 'No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, this call's over.' That's so disrespectful, right?

I feel like— I almost feel like a jerk sometimes because I've ended calls within 2 to 3 minutes of a call.

Yeah.

An hour call up two minutes on them. Like, 'I'm sorry, we're not doing this call anymore.' People look quiet because they would ask me literally, like, 'What does Google marketing?' And I'm like, 'You're joking right now,' right? You know, like, 'I am working, you know, 80-90-hour work weeks. I'm taking an hour to help you and you're asking who marketing is? Come on, this is ridiculous.' Right, right.

People have got to do their homework.

They have to, right? Because it's like, they're not— they're not getting the value out of you either though, right?

Right, totally. Very true. So I want to— this is fascinating, and I want to definitely talk a little bit more about hiring because I understand that you want to learn something from that person. Fantastic. And I also understand that you vet them with, you know, somebody else who knows what they're doing. Are there also cultural aspects Are there other, other things you do, I should say, to make sure they're going to be a fit, quote unquote, whatever that means to you? Are there cultural aspects you look for?

Yeah, I mean, we are very extreme culture. Um, one of the things that we've done is we've realized that we have to be extreme culture because we want very talented people, and talented people go to Google and Facebook. They love the big tech. They go to KPMG and they go to McKinsey and Bain. So how do you get those talented people to join you, especially for less money, by the way, right? We know this. And you have to be a culture of extremes. If you're very bland or you're normal without the brand name yet, hopefully get the brand name soon, but without the brand name, how can you do it? And you have to be in a stage where you just set things so extreme that people either love or hate it. And we have a lot of people who go through our interview process and they're like, I hate this. And what's fun about it, but so number one is get people out of the they save you millions of hours of time. And I really mean it's so much time because a couple things happen when you're extreme. One is people cancel themselves out of the process. Yeah, remove them so they save time for interviewing. It's exhausting interview. People forget, but like, like I've been on their side and I took it for granted, but interviewing when you're an interviewer is probably more stressful than interviewee because you have to make sure you ask the right questions, right fit. So number one is you save time, right?

But what would I hate, Dan? I don't mean to interrupt you, but like what would I hate about your interview process?

We would say that this is not a company of life-work-life balance. This is a company that is, you will come and you will work hard and you will grind. You will get a lot of opportunity to succeed. You'll get a lot of opportunity to promote. You'll get opportunity to do things you've never done before. The opportunities will be there, but it will not be the 35-hour workweek company. Some people are like, well, I want life-work-life balance. I'm like, probably not the right place for you. We would say we are not a fun company. Some people want to join a fun company. We're not a fun company. Yeah, we're a company where— and it's funny, we call it— it's— we recently talked about like what makes our members unique, and they're high effort. We call high effort people because these are people come, doesn't matter what they come for, whether they come for type 2 diabetes or Olympic athlete, but they're high effort. They're putting effort into winning or improving their life, whatever it is. And we realize that that's our culture. Our employees are high effort. Like, nothing at a job is impossible. I mean, unless you're sending rockets to space, doing brain surgery, like, this is not hard things. You just have to put the effort into it. And people who put effort into it, just like school— school's not hard, just people, some people try, some people don't. And so if you're willing to put the effort into it, we want you. But if you're not, you're probably— you're not going to like it here. And a lot of people, like, I'll tell people, like, very often you're gonna work more than 40 hours a week. If you happen to be a world expert already, okay, maybe you could not— maybe you could do 40 hours, but most of us aren't. Uh, and therefore you're gonna— it's the extra hours aren't going to be you doing like actual work, you know, like physical work. It's more gonna be like, I need to learn something I've never heard of before. And guess what? You did really well, you get promoted 6 months later. Now you got to learn a completely new skill set, and you got to get promoted again. You got to learn a new skill set. And that's the— that's the trade-off. The trade-off is that A lot of people want opportunities and promotions, but they don't actually realize those things require time and talent to learn, skill. So if we give you, you know, a new job, you now have to learn how to do a new job in a month with someone else that's 7, 8 years to figure that out. And so if you want the opportunity, you have to put the effort into it. And so we call it high effort. People are very— people join company, very high effort people.

That seems like it goes along also with fast learning and with curiosity. Right, exactly. Like self-determination, self-driven.

Yeah, I mean, I think the other pieces offhand, um, are— so for example, people always say that, hey, I hate being micromanaged at work, I hate being micromanaged. But there's a spectrum, right? There's a spectrum: micromanaged, managed, and just, you know, on your own, dependent learner, and depend on your own. And people often confuse the word manage and micromanaged, um, because we oftentimes will just let people come in and say, okay, here are your KPIs for the next 30 days, hit them. And they go, what do I do? Well, hands-off management, figure it out. And people are shocked, culturally shocked. They're like, what do you mean? You don't tell me what to do? We say, you don't want to be managed. You want— the whole point is freedom here, you know? So these are extreme values that some people are like, whoa. Everyone thinks they want freedom, but to a certain extent. And so like those kind of things, extreme flexibility. You know, we have people that live all over the world. A lot of Americans. We had a woman start with us. She's American. We hired her when she was living in France. Then she moved to UK, then Australia— I'm sorry, South Africa, then Mexico. Now she moved to Australia. And like within a year and a half. We don't care where she lives in the world. We just want her to succeed. And if she gets value out of that, that's awesome, right? I think we, we don't believe in this idea of like separating work and life. We think that it should be one thing together because people work, work, work, and then go on vacation, work, work, work, go on vacation. Here, if you want to live in a beach house in South Africa, do it. Why do you have to wait for the next 6 months until you had a vacation 2 weeks accrual? Like, just do it.

Mm-hmm. I love it. So it's, I love those values and I love how clear they are. By the way, are you having trouble attracting talent during this time where we think there's a talent war, talent crisis?

I mean, there's always going to be a— let me take a step back. I think top talent, no matter what situation you're in, is always going to be hard to attract.

Yeah.

Because top talent, everyone wants them. We all unfortunately think we're top talents, but some of us are not. Everyone— it's an ego thing, right? Like I said, I was shocked how I thought I was top talent too. And then Alex said, go sell. I'm like, wait a minute, sell? It's not my skill set. And so there's no matter what the situation is, top talent's always going to be demand. These are folks that whether it's a recession or not, they're not the ones getting laid off. A lot of times they're there because people realize they're the best. And so there's a fight for them always. I think because of the way we speak, it both repels and attracts people at the same time. We've— some of the folks we've— I mean, give you some context. So we hired our investor, we hired our VP of operations right now. Was our 7th customer. All right, like, uh, we hired a couple people who just reached out to us on LinkedIn who are amazing people who like what we were doing, and they just said, I want to join. And these aren't like average Joes. I mean, some people went to like Stanford, Princeton, Northwestern, you know, these are top people, PhDs, MDs. Um, it's people who are just a little wild, uh, really want to win, uh, and want to make a difference in the world. They're passionate about what we're doing. And so I think hiring has not been an issue for us. It's the biggest issue is the velocity of hiring. Sometimes you gotta, you know, every month you gotta readjust the org structure because all of a sudden a person went from, uh, you know, individual contributor to manager to the director to VP within like a year span. And you're like, wait a minute, what's going on? Yeah, so we gotta upskill people sometimes because, you know, you do need— some people need a little bit of time to adjust to all that kind of speed.

Yeah, mostly most people need some time. So actually, if you're going to be hands-off— and by the way, I love everything you're saying, and also people should be self-studiers and they should look things up and they should teach themselves marketing. And also, it's helpful to have mentors. And I'm sure you are— have some management, right, and coaching inside. But also, they can teach themselves to be leaders to some extent, but they also need coaching managers to teach them how to be managers. How do you handle that when you're growing at such a quick velocity?

Interesting. So I went through Techstars, and Techstars probably hates me for this, but Love you, Techstars. But I went through and all the people we met there, I would then try to get my leaders attached to those mentors from Techstars that were never a part of it. And so we're like 3 years out and I'm constantly like, hey, X person or hey, Y person, let me introduce you to Katie. Let me introduce you to Ivan. Let me introduce you to Kara. And they're like, what, were they part of Techstars? I'm like, no, no, but they need mentorship in this or XYZ topic. So all my leaders have like 5 to 6 different mentors in different areas like finance, operations, marketing. That they've never met, but I just introduced them to, and then now they get like weekly calls with them, uh, because I realize I don't have time to get them trained and we need to hurry up faster. And so now they got the relationship established and it keeps going.

Dan, I just want to say that I feel like you have 160 employees and then 160 rabid volunteers around you.

I would probably say it's like 400 volunteers. It's a lot. It's a lot of people.

That's amazing. How do you— well, I mean, I was gonna ask you a little bit later in the conversation, but since we're here now about networking, I mean, how did you kind of begin to realize that networking and building relationships was so important? And what specific advice do you have for founders to tell them that they must build their network and how they should build their network?

Yeah, interesting. Um, I don't know, I don't feel like I'm that good at networking, to be frank, mostly because I forget to do it. But I've noticed that There, I mean, so a lot of areas, like, people want to help people who are ambitious. Like, there's people reach out to me on LinkedIn out of the blue, and I help them all the time. I think when people just like, oh, especially, especially people who are also passionate, and these people who are all former entrepreneurs, um, I would just ask, right? I would just ask. And it's just like, it's the same as— it's kind of silly, but same as a marketing funnel, um, where a lot of times we reach out to people, they would just ignore us. And then you go down to the funnel. Now you're 5% left and 5% are interested, right? But even when I reached out, I made sure it was a personalized reach out, a personal introduction, personalized request. Like, I love what you did in this podcast. I liked what you did here. I love what you did there. It's not just a blank statement. I'd like to do XYZ. You know, I need help with this. There had to be some kind of relationship like that because people respect that. People reach out to me and I saw you did— you were on Techstars. I know you guys did your Series A and you did XYZ. I'm impressed. Can we chat? It's different versus, hey, I need your help. Let's talk.

Yeah, I totally get that. So it sounds like really you rely on your, the sort of personal touch to then engage people. And then also when you talk about ambition, that ambitious people are attracted to other ambitious people. And if you're into it and passionate, you find a tribe of people around you who can help you. Yeah.

I mean, I've also, I mean, this is gonna kind of a cheat code, so please hope listeners, hope you don't have too many listeners. It's ironic because I want you to have listeners, but I also don't want not too many because I don't want to steal your cheat code.

This is going out to millions of listeners, so go ahead, Dan.

But one of the things I've realized that people like, we all as human beings like to be around people who are successful. However, if I brag about being successful, I sound conceited, cocky. It's not attractive. So what I would constantly do is brag about people on my team and brag about my co-founders, which are very impressive people, by the way. And my other teammates and about things they've accomplished that's impressive. And so people are attracted. They want to get to know those people. And I would just say, hey, you should talk to my X or Y, Z person. They're super interested and just start connecting. And a lot of these folks, these talented people that we brought on team end up joining not right away, but 6 months, 9 months, 12 months, because what happened is they build a relationship with me, then build with someone else, a third and fourth person. And also they're listening to podcasts. They sign up for a newsletter. You got to look at hiring in a similar fashion as you look at marketing. If you actually think about what hiring is, it's just creating a brand that people like and slowly funneling people down. I mean, if you think about like the— what like McKinsey or Bain do, they Harvard out of the— to hire out of Ivy League schools. They create like a recruiting pipeline and they build that over and over and over, and they create that brand. People want to go and work there, and then more smart people go work there, more smart people want to work there. And more smart people want to work there and go there, then the more these big corporations love them and they want to work McKinsey, Bain. So it's just a constant cycle of like, you get smart people, they build great stuff, great stuff sells, that's great stuff sells, you get revenue and it keeps going in a circle, you hire more smart people. And so it's creating that brand of everyone here is smart and everyone has opportunity to succeed. Um, the biggest thing that smart people, specifically smart people, uh, is they hate is the lack of opportunity. You know, I always say, take a job that you think a smart person would want and combine it with another smart job and make it twice as hard. And people who are really go-getters want that job. So we do that.

I love the philosophy. It's so great. Speaking of ambition, I just want to acknowledge that you just raised your Series A, $25 million. Congratulations.

Thank you. Appreciate it.

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. And before we hit record, you were sort of giving me a little bit of the history of life as a fundraiser. So paint the picture of us in the early days of Nutrisense and your experiences raising money.

Sure. Yeah. So I mean, as I mentioned before, I quit my job and we were trying to, you know, build revenue. And we decided we're going to go raise venture capital money. We're like, let's go get raised venture capital money. It's going to be great. And then COVID hits. We're like, wait, what is happening now? And everyone, we even had a conversation, we just closed their checkbook. And now it's me and Alex. We have employees now. We have 3 people on our team. We're paying ourselves zero already, but these people need to get paid. They need medical insurance, they need dental insurance. And what do we do? Me and Alex kind of meet up and we say, well, what do we do? Do we go back to our nice jobs? You know, I had a good consulting job, paid well. And I kind of looked at it. I was like, hey, I'm 30 years old. I just want to take a swing and see what happens. The job will be there. Opportunities like this will not always be there. And if it doesn't work out, okay, I spent a year, year and a half on this. Who cares? But if it does, then that's great. And so we just both agreed we're going to take a swing at it and go all out. And then we just did. And we just kept increasing revenue. Didn't stop. We got a Techstars program that gave us a little bit of cash in Chicago, and then, which is also still canceled halfway through, by the way, around during COVID because of COVID So they canceled Techstars halfway through? Yeah. Well, they just said, just do it all online, but we don't have any online programming yet. So just like, do your pitch online and, you know, you're supposed to get the money from pitching, but again, also didn't really work at all. But, you know, it was fun. We met a lot of mentors there.. And so a lot of those people were also helpful in the future, but we just kept going, going. And then finally we raised a little bit of money. Uh, and it's, it's another reason our mentality is so different. It causes us to be frugal. I think that when you have constraints and you have limitations, it causes you to think about being effective and being smart. Uh, I've heard a lot of people talk about this concept of like, are you hiring— was that, I think, guns or gunpowder or something like that? And it's— think about the idea of like, you want to hire guns first because you have all the gunpowder in the world, but if you don't have a gun, you can't shoot. So how do you find these rock stars, the amazing people who can help you shoot and get things done faster? Uh, and it's helped us find those people and isolate them versus the old school way where, okay, you just raised $10 million, great, now you go to Facebook, Google, and figure out who you can poach. And sometimes people work out, sometimes they don't. Sometimes you just have a nice pedigree, they don't work out. But with when you have to be frugal.

Yeah.

And you have a certain amount of budget, you have constraints, and you're like, I gotta pay rent, you know. Uh, then it makes it— forces you, really does force you to find the best people at the best value and who are going to find the most value and truly believe in your mission. Not just saying they're going to read your website for a couple minutes and then say, you know, quote back to you what you wrote on there.

Yeah, I love that. I think the other expression is that startups die more often of indigestion than starvation.

Yeah.

Right. The idea of being overfunded.

We've had a lot of players in the space who raised 3, 4 times more than we did and pre-revenue and all this other stuff. And, you know, our revenues are still double, triple theirs. Mm-hmm. Um, and it, I think it's because they just had the abundance of things.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So I, I think that's really great. It sounds like you're, you're focused on building the sustainable business. Are there other things that you guys do now that you think is sort of like the vestige of those really lean years early on.

Yeah, yeah. And it's, it's something we always struggle with as we get new people, where I constantly remind people to be frugal. You know, I think one of the things is, you know, as we get bigger and we need now, let's say, an applicant tracking system— you know, I never thought I'd be in a place where I'd need an applicant tracking system, but we're at that place now. You know, when you reach out to the company and they give you a contract, and, you know, sometimes the younger folks who are newer in company will just accept that contract. I will never sign these contracts. I was always getting a call and convince them, give us a discount. And ironically enough, you can go from a $30,000 contract to a $5,000 contract for the same thing within a 20-minute conversation. And I'm constantly just reminding people, hey, let's not get rid of this frugality mindset. I'd rather take that $20,000 and give it someone's employee salary, right? I think that's a big piece. Another piece is And I, you know, some people probably against this, but I want everyone who joins to feel a little bit of kind of hurt in some way. What I say by that is I don't mean physical hurt. I'm referring to, I want everyone to get equity and I want everyone to take a little pay cut. It could be $5,000. They could be making, I don't know, $200,000 to give me $195,000. But it's the fact that it took a sacrifice, a little bit of sacrifice, the idea of the sense of loss. That they exhibit and they feel cause them to care more. I've noticed this over and over and over. So I want them— so I always try— we always give 3 offers, and one offer is closer salary they're currently making, one is significantly less, and we give you significantly more equity and take a significantly less salary because we want you to have the upside and be in the same boat as the rest of us.

Yeah. Wow, I love that. That's like— that's, I think, such, again, important— you know, you're very, um, consistent when you sort of thinking about culture. And as you're sort of describing all these things, I'm just curious especially as you get bigger, you the founder, right? You and Alex both, and you have a third founder, right?

Yep. Cara Collier.

Cara, yeah.

Brilliant, brilliant person. She's our VP of Health.

So between the three of you, and I'm thinking about you specifically, how do you make sure that people tell you the truth, right? Because you've got this sort of, you know, the certain kind of culture, and I can already get it's a sense of, you know, we're all going together and it's fast moving. But nonetheless, people have to be able to tell you, we're going the wrong direction. How do you make sure people feel safe to tell you what's really going on? Yeah.

So, I mean, a couple things. I think one, maybe I take a step back for a second. I think we mentioned, you know, people, people that we describe these values very often and we make sure we filter out people who have this culture attribute. So I will often throw an F-bomb in an interview. Not because I want to, but I do it because some people are really turned off by it. But it's a little bit controversial, right? And I don't mean a bad setting. I'll just say like, someone effed up. Or like, if you eff up, how do you deal with it? Or give me an example of time effing up. So it's both them having to explain when they effed up, or it's just the idea of I'm saying the F-word on an interview, right? It immediately— if people are okay when they explain to you, they're already on board being honest. Mm-hmm. And sometimes people give you a high-level answer and they give you some, you know, like a fake answer where they're like, I'm just too much of a perfectionist. I just try too hard. And I go, give me deeper, go deeper. I don't want that. And if they go deeper and they tell you the truth, you already built a culture of like, they're going to be honest people. That's number one. Number two, I do agree with you that there's a lot of things get bigger if they're finger-pointing. He did it or she did it or I did it. We tried to do couple things with this. One is we try to communicate openly. When I say that, that is we— Slack is, you know, our use of communication mostly. And so we will have conversations on Slack channels. So if I want to— we used to not, but we started doing to do this, to promote this, where we have a marketing conversation, I'll ask the CMO in front of everyone on a marketing Slack channel something, and he will say something to me, uh, and we will have a debate. And we let people— someone who could be an individual contributor question the CEO. Um, by seeing people can question up, it makes people feel comfortable. There have been, you know, and so this has to be constantly evolving because we have people say like, oh, I don't feel comfortable saying anything. Or we've been in meetings, I'll present something, let's say financial information to all the managers, and I say, do you have any questions? And everyone says nope. I'm like, really? The customer support and direct manager don't have any questions about finance analytics? And it's about having those difficult conversations where it's not comfortable, but growth and improvement is supposed to cause you discomfort. When you take the finals week exam, you're gonna feel stressed. And so on that call, I will say, hey guys, so if you don't ask me a question, I'm just gonna pointing people out and asking you questions like a test right now. And it is very uncomfortable. Uh, but by the second meeting, we have hundreds of questions. People get ready. They, they're used to it now. I mean, there's essentially— there's a lot of studies about this where they show where you study for an exam and never take it, and you might know 100% of it, but you'll forget about it. But if you take the exam and you actually got a C in an exam, you'll retain it better than someone who didn't take the exam. You know, you knew less knowledge. So the stressor in your brain causes you to remember things, understandings better. So I'm just artificially making that stressor in their life. In the moment, I'm sure they're not happy with me, but after the fact, people with retention and improved understanding of things dramatically improve.

Yeah. Also, you've set the expectation that you're expecting questions.

Yeah.

And you're surprised that there are not any questions.

If there— I always say this to everyone. If anyone ever in an interview— you get interviews too— if somebody doesn't ask me questions or ask me detailed questions about a job, I'm always hesitant to hire them. Because after a 30-minute conversation, it's impossible for you to understand what we do, what we are. And like, I cannot clearly paint a picture that well. As much as I'd love to pretend that I'm a great speaker, I'm not. And I cannot communicate in 30 minutes to you everything you'll be doing daily and day to day and how your life's going to be and what the pressure you're going to feel like. So you must have questions. And if you don't, then you probably aren't thinking deeply enough. And so we do it internally as a company during onboarding. You better have questions. We're not good enough to call into you have questions and good questions. The interview is probably not going to go well if you don't ask questions. Us as a company, it's for you to decide if you want to be here. Because here's the thing, churn is one of the biggest costs a company can have. You brought someone on, it takes them 3 to 6 months to onboard, to learn stuff, and then finally they got it and they're like, I'm leaving. Why? Because this is not what I expected. So we make sure that people are aware. And by the way, during interviews process, like I've said, we have these extreme values. We give examples and we say this is a positive and negative. Positive, you'll get promoted really quickly if you do work hard. Negative, you're going to work 60-hour work weeks to get promoted, right? And so I want to make sure you're aware of this. Are you okay with this? Because if you're not, you're going to be in for a real rude awakening when you start here. Most companies just kind of, you know, say, oh, we're the best, we're amazing, join us, we love you, you know, we're entrepreneurial. But like, what does that mean, entrepreneurial? Yeah, I think last time I read Deloitte was entrepreneurial, even though it's 80,000 people now, right?

Not this kind of entrepreneurial, that's different. I love it. Well, speaking of discomfort and of learning, Dan, what is a time where you got feedback that made you upset and that, you know, you learned from it, but it was painful?

Yeah. I mean, because we opened this communication line again, I always have my mentors who give me feedback and I always ask them for feedback because I try to get better. One of them was, we were growing so quickly that I, you know, we started with 5, 4, 6, 7, 10, 20 people. I was communicating with everyone every day, but we get bigger and bigger. Now we're 160 and I'm still communicating with like customer support, not even customer manager, customer support, right? And we have a director, VP, you know, executive VP. And so I took for granted the fact that when I speak, my words have much more impact than when their direct boss speaks. I was still speaking to them the same way I was speaking to someone when there were 6 of us and maybe the person, a different person at the same job, but there were 6 of us. Now all of a sudden, the person never interacted before, so when I say something, it's amplified. And I realized that I need to be much more softer in my language, as well as be new— make sure the nuances are very thoughtful. And maybe oftentimes their manager should speak to them, or their director, not me specifically, because of this. Uh, it took me a little bit to grasp that concept.

I think you're not alone. In fact, I know you're not alone. And I think that that is like a maturation that so many leaders go through. And as you continue to grow, you're going to keep shifting the way that you communicate to the company overall.

Yeah.

Will you say something else?

No, it's tough sometimes, right? You like, you want to give some feedback directly because you know they can improve right now. It's a small thing. But like, if you give feedback, they think, oh my God, am I getting fired? Immediately.

Right.

But if their manager gives them feedback, it's just like a way to get better. And so you have this tendency as a founder to improve and prove things, move forward, and you care about little things. But slowing down and saying, oh, I'm not going to give them feedback, I'm going to give the director feedback, I'm going to give the manager feedback— that's what the irony of this all is. It's like, as you start a company, it says go do everything everywhere else. And then, but as you mature, you shift from kind of, uh, eccentric people, 100% eccentric people, to maybe like 15% eccentric people and maybe 85 normal people, right? And if you get to IPO, I was talking to a co-founder, one of my co-founder buddies, uh, and you get to IPO, it's like 99% normal people and 1% eccentrics walk around, right? That's the goal here is you get more regular people. Um, you go from, you know, generalists to specialists. And so that changes really quickly.

Dan, you seem so confident. You have such great experience. Have you ever experienced imposter syndrome or severe self-doubt?

Um, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think, but it's particularly around raising money because we see, we would see all these companies in our space who had a third, a quarter, a tenth of our revenue raising 5, 10 times more money. And I'm sitting here thinking like, how is this possible? How are we have such better, so much better product? Uh, we provide value to our members where they get what outcomes they want, and someone else is just like selling rubbish on the internet basically. And they're just able to get the PR, they're able to get the funding from the most famous firms in the world. And you're like, how's this happening? Makes you question a little bit of your reality because how does that work? Of course, a lot of times, I hate to say, but we've been competing with Silicon Valley companies. We're based out of Chicago. So Silicon, I realized quickly that Silicon Valley lives in a different reality, not like the rest of the world where someone has a nice pitch deck and a friend and here's $30 million. I didn't realize that Silicon Valley world and Rusty world was very different, but it was just like, I try to be logical where like A plus B equals C. So revenue plus people and high metrics give you funding, but apparently it could just be just funding because you were connected. And that to me was just that shift of, and question like, what are we doing? Is this working? Because we're not getting that traction. From the funding side, it was, you know, makes you question yourself a little bit.

How did you, how did you handle that?

Just keep going. Just keep going. I think one of the best ways to do it, and I've actually told people now as well, is having base— everything in life I think has to be, and I've kind of thought about this too, is having a baseline of what expectation is and where, where are you based on that. When you say you got to go talk to investors, lots of them, to raise money, You talk to 20 people and you get 20 nos, it hurts your ego a lot. And you're like, oh boy. Of course they all have ideas. You should fail this because of this. You shouldn't do this. You shouldn't do this. However, when you have a number, and number, what I've heard now, and I've just read from blogs and asked people, I would start asking people, how many times did you talk to people before you raised money? Right? And there was people who talked to 3, 4 people and raised money. But the consensus was about 150 people they talked to before they raised money. So when you have that number in your head and you're like, all right, Once we get to 150 nos, then we are, uh, not doing so well, right? But it's like, use it more of a checkbox, right? But it has you have kind of a guiding light that you still have 100. Okay, you're on 30 nos, you still got 120 left to go, and that's okay. Versus if you're just getting nos without knowing to like what is considered good or bad, it's hard to tell. And consensus I heard over and over was like, oh, it took me 137 times, took me 163 times, 149. And you're like, all about 150. There's always exceptions. Someone did like 400 nos. Someone else did like one no. But in general, that was consensus. And once we had that number, we just looked at more of like, you got to talk to more people, not so much as emotional hits. And that helped a lot.

That's so powerful. I think that people don't talk about all the nos and all the rejection. People just aren't honest about it enough. It feels like, ta-da, we raised the money. And, you know, there's like that Silicon Valley glamor of it, but I always tell my clients, like, keep a spreadsheet and go out and get 100 nos, and then let's talk about it.

And that's the key. I mean, 100's similar, you know, 150, 100, similar directionally. So that's the thing, like, but knowing 100's a number, you need a number because every no is like a stab in the heart and you're like, oh, how, how is this? Like, there's only so many you can handle emotionally.

Yeah.

Once you take it less so like it's me getting rejected and it's just a spreadsheet like you mentioned, and you are just going through down one by one, it becomes more mathematical formula than anything else.

Yeah.

Because I will say, once you get, once you get like to 200 nos, you should reconsider. Maybe there's something you're doing wrong.

How about though, that's, that's such a great example. How about for you personally, as you've grown as a leader, has there been any moment where you've thought, oh man, I'm not going to be able to get this, or like, I'm not doing this right?

Yeah, I mean, it's a hard question because there's so many, right? It's like every other week I'm like, huh? Right? Yeah. Uh, yeah, there are just so many. I think the big— I mean, the biggest thing is just like, it's always around people. I, yeah, I think it's bigger. I mean, mostly it's been about hiring the wrong people and or realizing how different people are. You know, historically, the mistake we often make is this: we go look for someone just like ourselves, right? And we hire 7 people, they're 7 Dans. And so if you have 7 Dans, you think exactly the same and you do the exact same thing. But you already have me. Why would I need 7 of me? I need to find someone who's completely different than me. And so using the criteria to evaluate people based on yours, like your framework of validating people is just silly, right? So it's how do you create a new framework of evaluating how good someone is? And that's so many mistakes I've made in that. And you could see, for example, if you hire a salesperson versus you hire an engineer, the mind— the difference is just mind-blowing. And we can talk about all we want, but it's crazy. Like an engineer could say something like, this is wrong, this is stupid. And it seems normal for them. If a salesperson says that, it's like the end of the world. And having those people communicate or making sure we have the right people in place, like that's been the most learning for me. It's the ability to understand the different emotional states and logical mindset of just different people. I would say this over and over, but like, and people will win, like nothing else matters. I've seen many average products win because they're the best people. I've all seen incredible products that lose because the people aren't the right people on the team. And sometimes it's actually having the right people in the right places. I'll give you context, a mistake we almost made, but we ended up pivoting. We hired a woman to run or help us run ops, and we thought she was smart. She was failing. Oh, every single thing, she was just failing, failing, failing, failing. And we were at a point where we were like, should we let her go? Uh, but then I just said, let's toss her in this other area in marketing. We pushed it in there and she just crushed it out of the park and one of our best leaders. It's the same thing as like I run— I do marketing, finance. Imagine tomorrow you put me in backend mobile engineering. I'm probably going to fail. And we often just use, again, this criteria of validating people based on certain aspects that aren't correct.

Yeah. I love that story. I think the best leaders do figure out like, "Oh, this person's in the wrong role. I bet they'd be much better in this role.". But I bet there are some people you just made mistakes and you just like didn't hire the right person. What do you do? How long do you give someone and what are the markers for you to realize this is not just an adjustment period? This is actually a bad hire.

Well, I hate to say this, but I have fired someone on the second day. Hmm.

What made you do that? That's fascinating.

Yeah, it's, uh, the individual started with us. They told us how great they were. This is pre-us doing giving people tests. Now we give every single job requires a test, no matter what it is. Doesn't matter if you're doing customer support, doesn't matter if you're an engineer, doesn't matter if you're a marketer. Every single job will require a test no matter what.

You mean an exercise related to the, to the job?

Yeah. Okay, exactly. And so two things happen in that test. Um, one is it gives the person an insight in what the job is going to look like. So do they actually want to do this? So it's not a sexy thing, right? The second one is, can they pass it? Because I've, and I've done this with influencer marketing, I would say Like, how many influencers can you onboard? And they're like, 500. Like, wow, how long? 30 days. I'm like, that sounds like a large number. And they're like, yeah, for sure. I'm like, okay, give me one. I'll pay for one. Just give me one pre-start. Show me. Because I'm thinking like, if you could do 500 in 30 days, you should be able to get, you know, like 35 a day, right? And a month would go by and they'd feel back like, I'd like to leave the process, please. They couldn't get one, right? But they're so confident about the way they speak about getting influencers. And they can't get one. And so like, guess what? You just— you now, you know the job. Now we already know you're gonna fail. Um, so before, we used to hire people based on conversations, unfortunately. And conversation only gets you so far, uh, because you don't know if the person just is great speaking, selling. Also, maybe they were at a fast-growing startup, but they were there, the team, but they're not the one doing it. It's always hard to distinguish. Are you the one doing it? Are you just there when someone else is doing it? Uh, and so this person promised me they were amazing, these— all these things they've done.. And we used a thing called Airtable, uh, just to run some of our databases. And the first day they couldn't figure out how to do filter in an Airtable for 3 hours. And I'm thinking, how are you going to run operations for us? You can't figure out filter in Airtable. Like, it's just not going to work. This is something where like our customer support staff knew within seconds. And he's like, well, I could take a course on Airtable. And I hate to say it, but it's just Yes, you can. I think you can learn it, but it's going to take you 6 months just to learn how to use basic technology that we already have assumed that you know how to use and are really good at. And like, we don't have time. Speed is the only thing startups have over corporations. The reason why startups show up and take over the market, because they move faster. They don't have money, they don't have the brand, but they move faster. Speed is a key attribute. So You know, as I mentioned this, we look at speed of ability to learn. How fast can you learn? If it's taking too long to learn, like, you're probably not putting as much effort into as you should be. And we tell you right away, be like, hey, by month 2 you should be here, month 1 should be here, but week 2 should be here. We give them KPIs where they should be onboarding, and some people hit them, some people don't. And we know that, again, these are not complex items. These are, did you put effort into learning something new? If you're lucky enough and you already knew technology, yeah, you're lucky, but not everyone does. So just learn it. And some people don't.

I love it. That's so— I think it's so analytical, but also I think people just let these things go. And it sounds like you're really in the space where you're like, we don't have time to let these things go.

Well, here's the problem, right? When you let things go and you let someone who's a C player on your team, here's what's going to happen. Yeah, that person's going to now attract other C players and sometimes D players. Then number one. Number two, you have a bunch of A players who look at that and they're like, this person's not that good, do I want to be around this? And also, maybe I don't have to try so hard. Why am I working crazy hours and trying to improve things? Well, this person doesn't care. And so you're losing your current talent, and then this other person bringing poor talent as well. And lastly, the biggest thing, this is the most important thing. If you have 100 A players, and this is the— maybe it's a rationale, but I looked at it as If you bring in poor players and they don't bring value, you're impacting these other 100 people who are amazing negatively. You promised them that you were going to give them value and they're going to get something out of this. They took a pay cut a lot of times, and now you're basically kind of screwing them over by bringing other people on who are not bringing value, and the likelihood of you succeeding goes down. You made a promise to A-players that we're gonna win. And, you know, it's like you look at any sports team, you look at a football team, and you have You just, you have amazing football team and all of a sudden you hire the worst kicker in the country and the team's gonna be like, what are you doing? I don't want this kicker. We wanna win. Remember, this is the end. Like we wanna help as many customers in our area as possible and help customers. You need to be able to deliver on our promise too.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, I had Paul English, the co-founder of Kayak on my podcast and he said, when I hire someone, it's a contract and I, I make a contract. We're gonna bring the best people and we're gonna have a great environment and is defined by all all these different things. And if I let someone stay around who's not adhering to that contract, then I've lost my contract, my faith with those original people. So, it's really what you're saying. It's very powerful, Dan. It's a very powerful philosophy. I guess I'm curious, how have you managed your own personal growth as the company's gotten bigger and as you've encountered things you haven't seen before? Yeah.

I mean, that's the working crazy hours part, right? I think I've consistently made a conscious effort to reach out to mentors of my own, and I just keep them updated. I think the goal— I realized that no one's going to teach me unless I go teach. So I reach out to mentors and I give them scenarios I'm in and ask them how they would deal with it. Another piece is I'm constantly moving different areas. Right now, for example, I'm in HR and recruiting. I'm running that team now, uh, and I realized, guess what, I don't know anything about HR recruiting. Um, and so what I would do is I would go sometimes find expert consultants who can maybe give us, you know, 5, 10 hours a week. Um, the one piece people sometimes forget is, hey, like, you see a high— like, say we talk to someone and they charge $500 an hour for startup. Sounds expensive, sounds very expensive. I don't want to do this. But I realized that in one hour, this person will save me 20 hours of time. So yes, I can go do it on my own without the $500 an hour, but like, I'd rather have this person just tell me what not to do.

Yeah.

And so what I would do is I oftentimes bring it to like, we have a right house woman, she's an expert. We bring her in and she spends maybe 3, 4 hours a week with us. And then we just come in and we just unload questions on her. Here's what 35 things we're thinking about. And she'll tell us like, ooh, don't do that. I've done it 17 times and it didn't work on my 30 years experience. Or don't do this, don't do this. And why you should do this or that. And so we basically have her teach us constantly these topics. Um, and in some ways, even though it's more expensive per hour, you save hundreds of thousands of dollars later. Yeah. Um, the goal here, I mean, I always believe this, like, that, you know, smart people are always learning from their mistakes. I'd rather not make mistakes. I'd rather have someone else teach me their mistakes and skip it. And by the way, this happens often where I bring him, like, here's the 3 scenarios I'm thinking, which one should I pick? And she goes, oof, none of those. Here's a fourth one you should think about. And I'm like, shoot, I don't even know that existed. Because you don't know what you don't know, right?

Right.

This is why I mean with coaching, I mean, I'm sure people talk about coaching with you, but like, you pay what you get for, you get what you pay for, right? Like, so hate for an expert who knows what they're doing. Like, you can't be an expert in everything. You just cannot. No matter how smart you are, it's impossible, right?

Totally. Dan, just a couple more questions. What do you wish you had known earlier on your journey?

One, I think, is specifically, I mean, I, you know, I keep going back to this, but it's the hiring and people. I thought it would be the raising money that's most important, or like the cool tech. But it's the hiring people. It's just, it's— I didn't realize it would be this difficult and this strenuous, where sometimes I know, Joe, I do 35 to 40 hours of just interviews all day, every day. That's number one. Number two is like the amplification effect you get from good people. This isn't like, hey, you're better, so therefore you get 50% more productivity. This is like, you're better, we get 10 to 20 times more. I mean, so if you think about it, I always like you get 150 people who are amazing, it's like having 1,500 people on your team. And it's mind-blowing, but it really is like that. And you think that it can't possibly be like that. How can someone be better? Like, it doesn't make any sense, but it really is. Um, you see us in corporations all the time. Like, you have like sales teams. It's easier to do when you have quantifiable numbers. When you see like in corporate world, you have salespeople, uh, and you see one guy selling $10 million a year, whatever else, on $500K a year. They all the same job, they all get paid the same. Um, and so that to me never made sense outside of sales. But now that in other areas you see this too, it could be, and it could be anything like customer support to dietitian, it could be any job you could think of. You see this constantly where this person can have the 3 times the output at the same time and you're like, how is this possible? And it really is. And so how do you identify those people? And I think it's important to also remember to say when we talk about A players, Everyone always says, oh, let's compare him to the CEO of the company. No, no, no, no, no. The A player in the seat they're in, it's very vital, right? The expectations are very different. Customer support agents versus director of marketing. And so one is recruiting those people is difficult. And number two is hiring those people and then onboarding and make sure they succeed. Because recruiting piece, everyone, all these people have great jobs. And so these people fall into two categories, right? These rock stars, either A, they have a great job, they get paid a ton. They don't need to leave to go pick up a paywall. Or option 2, they go start their own thing. So they're going to start their own thing, like, why do they want to join your thing? So how do you find these people in between? They're like, maybe their thing didn't work out, right? Uh, which ironically enough, the funny part is all these people I find that are great, sometimes I hire them. The reason their thing didn't work out is because they don't— they had— they were amazing and they didn't get more amazing people on their team. There was just them driving the ship, and they got a bunch of okay people. I mean, they just thought they could do it themselves. You got to muscle through. I realize it's impossible for me to muscle through, and for me and my co-founders, we need like 30 more people who are muscling through. Yeah, breaking through walls. And it's finding those people, understanding that. Um, and so when we hire, actually, this philosophy where we hire two categories of people: job-specific and, uh, the other group called really fucking smart people. Uh, and oftentimes we interview these people, they're like, what's the job? And I'm like, I don't have a job description for you. I'm just gonna find out what you're good at.. And we just ask what they're good at and based on that, we just create a job for them afterwards because then we'll just figure it out when we toss them in there. We'll just move them around and see where they fit and what they like because like there's enough stuff broken that we need some people to figure it out and just keep growing to be more stuff broken. So they're really fucking smart people and people make jokes about it too. Like, um, because they're like, oh, I'm the really groupie. And they put in quotation around button. Like, yeah, that group works pretty well for us. Right. You always gonna need those people.

I love your two groups. Those are so great. And there's such wisdom around understanding you have to get the right people. It's so true. I really appreciate that. Dan, last question. What advice do you have for other founders as they embark on their journeys to grow into leaders?

As they grow into leaders? Yes. I think it's important to realize who you want to emulate. Because there's hundreds of leadership books out there and leaders out there, and they have very different values. There was some, a couple leaders like I mentioned that I'm friends with, they said like, we want to have the most fun company. They mentioned that's their mission. And so if you read any of their biography or if you look at anything they aspire to, you will become a very fun person and it's awesome. But again, Is that what you want? So determine what is that you want as the value and find people who have done that effectively. I think that is something I think very, very critical because if you don't pick anything, you're just going to run around in circles. And it's impossible to have both a KPI-driven culture and a fun culture and remote culture, also hybrid culture and also in-person culture, because everyone wants different things. We've had people tell us, by the way, interviewed, like, I want to be in person because I don't want to be remote. We're fully remote. We have no office. So we've chosen this on purpose. We do not plan to get an office. We don't want an office. Uh, that's number one. And number two is also remember your startup journey in stages, uh, both around like 6 areas. There's different— you can classify 6 for— we, we look at people, process, governance, technology, um, data. We have one more piece, but around people. But thinking about like now with this is our future, right? As I mentioned, at the early stages, we want people who are all very eccentric and generalists. When you're IPO, you want more people who are specific, specialized, and more normal, as I call them. Uh, and so think about that. What stage do you want when you're grouping people? Because like, there are people that we hired that we needed when we were starting. If they applied now, they're not the right fit anymore. And in the future, it's going to change as well, right? So start thinking about that, having that framework of like, What you did then and now, uh, just like run policies and procedures. Do we have, you know, we used to just— when we started, we didn't even have medical dental insurance, right? Now we have, you know, very well-defined PTO, very defined benefits for dependents, you know, very well-defined, uh, maternity leave policy. Everything's defined because now you have a bigger company. So thinking about in gaps of like, or stages of phases, however you want to phrase it, like next 12 months, next 24 months, next 36, and realizing how will your personality change, how will you adjust, things like that. It helps versus just picking a mindset and doing it forever because like execution is one thing I was doing all the time. Now I don't execute as much. Now all I do is recruit. Now I do retention of our teammates, not even customers, teammates, and finance basically. Those are some ways I do it.

Finally, you can do finance.

Yeah, exactly. Finally, 3 years later.

You earned the right. Dan, thanks for joining me today, and thanks for the honesty and the wisdom you shared. And congratulations on the rocket ship that is Nutrisense. And, and I appreciate— I'm just looking forward to so many great things from you guys in the years to come.

Yeah, I mean, we're hoping to help— we're not that ambitious, we're medium ambition level— so we hope to help 10 million people in America, uh, improve their health and find their passion.

I love it. Keep going.

Thank you. Appreciate it.

Thanks, Dan. Thanks for listening to From Startup to Grownup. If you like what you heard, give it a review on Apple Podcasts so other people can find it. And if you know of a founder or someone else who is meant to be on this podcast, drop me a line through my website, alisacohn.com.