#29: Dan Zavorotny, Nutrisense

Welcome to From Startup to Grown up, the podcast. My name is Alyssa Cohn. I'm an executive coach, an angel investor and the author of From Startup to Grown Up. Each week I talk to founders, creators, advisors, investors and builders of all kinds about their insights and experiences in going from startup to Grown up. This is episode 29 and I'm thrilled to have Dan Zavarodny 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 Remet after a number of years and why Dan immediately gave his two 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 three 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 going to love it. So please enjoy this conversation with Dan Zavarotny. 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 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 focus on preventive 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 two and a half years ago, and we now scale to about 160 people.

160 people. That's amazing. I want to just say up front, I myself use Nutrisense for about three months to get a handle on my own, but blood sugar and, like, what things do. And I also had the. 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 paired folks with what they were looking for. So some people. We have people anywhere from pre diabetics to type 2 diabetics to Olympic athletes.

Yeah.

So we made sure the person got.

I fall into that category. Olympic athletes.

Yeah, exactly. 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 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 try 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 of your starting f. And so our ambition really is to understand that before we start any journey so we can put you on the right path. 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, 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 U.S. 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 a. 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 healthcare conference and he reached out and said, let's get drinks. So he was wearing this device called continuous ghost 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 too them lasting six hours and 12, then one 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 abdominal 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 got to stop you. First of all, I had the impression that you ran into him at the health care 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, I don't know, I'm in San Francisco.

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 me.

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

After a 15 year friendship hiatus.

Exactly.

Yeah. Okay.

So I mean, you know, less than actually you get lucky. And I got lucky in the fact that I was also in the headspace of looking to start something. Yeah, I was a keeping gna, this application process where they basically donate you and your time for six, seven months to one of three areas. It's either work for the mayor's office in Chicago 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 startup work and learn a lot of things I just knew nothing about. So the mindset was already there. Like, I want to try some of this stuff.

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

About seven months.

Okay. And so you kind of got steeped in. You almost got like an education in startups.

Really? Yeah. I mean, to be totally transparent, I question how much value I brought to an incubator. Because what they did is every day they would have like two or three 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 a thousand dollars 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 to $100,000 worth of free education every month because I'll 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 is 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 girl pop founders came and they spoke quite a bit. 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 insights. People who are two, three 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 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 has been always from people like two, three years ahead rather than long term player, you know, players.

Yeah, 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. So you kind of got your mind wrapped around and you were all, it sounds like you were already thinking, I want to 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 you two.

I mean, I would love to tell you a story that sounded more sexy, which I think most founders do. But the truth is at first I said, why would anyone wear cgi? Wear this? This is ridiculous. Like my sister has type one. I don't understand. Like, why would you do this? And then he said, well, why don't you just wear it for two weeks and see what you think? And I wore for two 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 wash, my Fitbit, all kind of like random places. And I said, well, that 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 two weeks in.

Went that. Oh my gosh. And you just gave two weeks notice. Did kpmg, I mean they just were like, okay, we get it and let you go like. Or they try to talk you out of it.

They tried talking me out of it, but I mean I was pretty set on it. I think would. The way I looked at it, a job is a job. It's going to be there tomorrow. Yeah, it's not a problem. And so I can always go back to a company. I mean, especially within the I came from finance strategy.

Yeah.

So like it's a relatively lucrative and opportunity. So it's one of those things where like, if you ever need a job, you can get one. It's not.

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 Grown Up, I have this idea that you should Have a co founder prenup or 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, more just like, is there any kind of market fit here? People want to do this. It was more so can I trust this person? And that's pretty much it retrospectively. Probably should have done some of the things you're describing. We've done none of those things. Yeah, we just didn't do it. We just kind of said, do I trust the 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 sign a final agreement until like three months after I quit my job. We were already working three months and we're like, we should probably sign a final agreement and that's how we actually 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 15 hours and doing something else on the side. 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 got to work more and that establish 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 was, I.

Mean granted, you gotta remember. So it was my first time doing a startup. Alex has been in startups, he's exclusive in startups. I don't think he's ever done a regular job from like I think he was, he was the first engineer at Trunk Club, which is a Chicago based company, got acquired I think like $500 million. And he was there when he was 22, was the first engineer and employee number nine or 10. So like, who better start with another? Like the options were myself, another first time founder or someone who's done this numerous times. 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. For him it wasn't as for me, it wasn't the biggest risk. Like what's the worst can happen to me? You know, I get lucky and get 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 to some 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 nutrients. 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 like, all right, when you got to get revenue, and we're like, okay, how do we go get revenue? Let's go 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 him like, I don't know how to sell. Know how to do accounting, finance, strategy, you know, 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 swing 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 nine 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 three months later. So I'm like, wait, I just quit my job that paid me really well. Well, just, you know, like hanging 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 of swim really kicked in here and I decided to try swim and it seemed like it worked out to some extent.

Yeah.

Since 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 overnight 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 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, 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 it stands for. I have no idea what fate, how you run Facebook ad. I didn't even know Facebook ads was a thing. Just like literally zero concept of anything. I knew the, you know, old school, like billboards. I see people advertising billboards so that 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 want budget for and let's just start crossing things off. After I crossed after with zero budget, I crossed off 95% of it. I only had a couple of things available and that was basically like influencer marketing, podcast marketing, and basically just like blog outreach, pr. So then I went down, 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 podcasts, 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. We didn't have any money again. So I Try to convince folks to give them referral fee instead of per conversion. And that started driving traffic and they got paid based conversion. With any like anything else in marketing, there's the whole 18, 20% rule. I would even argue an influencer and podcaster. It's more like 95.5where 5% drove like all our revenue. 95 didn't provide much value, unfortunately.

Yeah.

And so if I had to pay them up front 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 paid an influencer out or the podcast or 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 end I think lean startup was pretty good. It's just thinking differently about startup world versus corporate world. I would say this, but I think in corporate world you have, 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 outsize 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 stuff 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 sucking sunk into me. Just get it going. And 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 two people converting past today. How do we get three people paid four people instead of. He pushed Back and said, dude, we have a hundred people visiting our website. Man, what are you doing? Stop wasting your time. Like you gotta 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. And it's a very hard mindset shift because we're so used to micro optimization corporate world and that's our entire lives. And then I try to instill in every co founder, 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, you have a hundred people visiting your website, you have, you know, two to five 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, you have 160 employees now, right. So you've market. So how like you're, you're now a two year old experienced marketer, right?

Probably.

I mean you're, you still haven't been doing it for decades, but now you're managing people. And I would hope that you've 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 that you've brought in?

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

Amazing.

And at that point I got to the point I'm like, oh, I need to bring some people in. And so number one step was important to evaluate what are the different channels we want to test. You don't want to do too many channels right away. You want to go channel by channel. But Also, who is the right person, 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 validating 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 little eccentric and they're like gonna growth, hack their way versus someone who's gonna, you know, run a billion dollar Companies can have very different skill set and it's. 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 a 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. That was always goal. I had to hire someone at least three times better me that job and then go into a new job. And once I got across, I got influencer marketing, I got Facebook, I got Google, and all those people are better than me. Then I said, okay, now I need someone to own this team. And I hand it off. And interestingly enough, I convinced one of my earliest angel investors to join and run the team.

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

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

And he was a former entrepreneur too. He started a company. He was like 23 and I sold him. 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?

I mean, I think it's. 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 recept, 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 three, 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 seven hours fixing a bug. But it doesn't drive in much revenue. And at one point in time I just said, let's get on 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, 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 six month contract, part time, 20 hours a week only. But month two, he was working 65 hours a week. And so he fully trained himself in it. And then three 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 got to 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 want to back up because what you said is you want to hire people three times better than you. I love it. It's. By the way, it's such. It's so precise. Right. I love that. And we always want to 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 three 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 ever hire anyone or if anyone gets down a funnel to me and they're still not three 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 one. Number two is just taking like a small amount of money and doing it yourself. Like running it. Like spend $300 on it. Like assuming you're gonna eff it up, that's okay. But no, you have to do. You have to press the buttons. And if any button doesn't make sense, what is that button? Reach out to customer Support, reach out to Facebook, get him on a call and understand what the buttons like. Every single button should make sense to you. And then the third one is finding. I mentioned this before, finding people are two, three years ahead of you in this topic who've done it well and using 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 three weeks to figure this out. So it's connecting with people. And just I would try to break the system. I would like, I would go on Facebook and 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 were wrong. Why did I 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 six levels deep to the point. People sometimes would say like, I've never even had that happen. How did you even get that far? But it really helped me establish this depth level knowledge because I think most people learn things at a very surface level. 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. So I established that line and got those three pieces, like learning your own. Break it and then get experts who are only a couple years ahead 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 two, three weeks and you've done it for five to 10 years, you better know this. But than me. And Frankly, I'd say 95% 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 like program, like whether it was running Google Ads, whatever it is, and they 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 the one of these experts confirm for me. They would do like a confirmation call because there's things you miss your blind spot. So I would have made them do like one or two of those would be like at least two. Who do you think? I went from now 100 people to two people at the end. 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 at the end. 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. Two hours of phone call. Talk about Facebook ads with me every week for, like, a month straight.

Yeah.

And I realized it's because people. I want to dub these people. And they were intrigued. They were. Some 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 good. Use 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. 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 do coaches do? And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. This call is over. That's so disrespectful.

Right? I, I. I feel like. I almost feel like a jerk sometimes because I've been in calls within two to three minutes of a call.

Yeah.

An hour call up, two minutes. And I'm like, I'm sorry, we're not doing this call anymore. People are quiet because they would ask me, literally, like, what is Google marketing? And I'm like, you're joking right now, right? You know, like I working, you know, 80, 90 hour work weeks. I'm taking an hour to help you and you're asking. Google marketing is like, 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 going to 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 aspect? 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. Another cultural aspects you look for?

Yeah, I mean we are very extreme culture. 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 Europe's normal without the brand name yet hopefully we 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 envy process and they're like, I hate this and what's fun about it? But so number one is get people out of. They save you millions of hours of time. And I really mean it. So much time. Because a couple of things happen when you're extreme. One is people cancel themselves out of the process.

Yeah.

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 right questions, right fit. So number one is you save time.

Right. But what would I hate, Dan, I don't introduce you but like what would I hate about your interview process?

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, succeed. You'll get a lot of opportunity, promote. You'll get opportunity to do things you never done before. The opportunity to be there. But it will not be the, you know, 35 hour work of your company. Some people are like, well, I want life work, life balance, 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 are a company. And it's funny, we call it, 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, improving their life, whatever it is. And we realized 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 the 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 get to work more than 40 hours a week if you happen to be a world expert. Ready? Okay, maybe you could not, maybe you could do 40 hours. But most of us aren't. 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, stand up, hurt up before. And guess what? You did really well. You get promoted six months later. Now you gotta learn a completely new skill set and you got to get promoted again. You got to learn 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 seven, eight 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 a company, very high effort people.

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

Yeah. I mean, I think the other pieces offhand are. So, for example, people always say that, hey, I hate being micromanaged 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, independent. On your own. And people often confuse the word managed and micromanaged 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 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 in all over the world. A lot of Americans. We had a woman start with us when 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 they go on vacation, Work, work, work, and 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 six months until you hit a vacation? Two weeks accrual, like, just do it.

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

It's. I mean, there's always going to be. Let me take a step back. I think top talent, no matter what situation you're in, is always gonna 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 it 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 seventh customer. Right. Like 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 want to like Stanford, Princeton, Northwestern, you know, these are top people, PhDs, MDs. It's people who are just little wild, really want to win and want to make a difference in the world, are 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 person went from you know, individual contributor to manager to then 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 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. They were never part of it. And so we're like three years out and I'm constantly like, hey, X person or hey, Y person. Let me choose you to Katie. Let me choose you to Ivan. Let me introduce you to Kara. And they're like, were they part of the tech? I'm like, no, no. But they need mentorship in this or XYZ topics. So all my leaders have like five to six different mentors and 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 because I realized 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, 60 rabid volunteers around you.

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

That's amazing. How do you. Well, I mean, I was going to 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. I don't know. I don't feel like I'm that good at networking, to be frank, most 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, especially people who are also passionate and these people who are all former entrepreneurs, 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 where a lot of times we'll reach out 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, personal introduction, personalized request. Like, I love what you did in this podcast. I liked what you did here. I love what you did here. 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 these people respect that. People reach out to me. And I saw you did. You're in techstars. I know you guys do radio 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 feel, find a tribe of people around you who can help you.

Yeah, I mean, I've also. I mean, this is going to kind of a cheat code. So please hope listeners. Hope so. You don't have too many listeners. It's ironic because I want you to have listeners, but also one, not too many, because I don't want to steal the cheat code.

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

But one of the things I've. 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 attractive. 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 you build with someone else, a third and a fourth person, and all of a sudden 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 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 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. The biggest thing that smart people, specifically smart people, is they. The hate is the lack of opportunity. You know, I always say, take a job that you think a smart person would want and then combine 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 bucks. 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 fundraise. 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 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 and 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 three 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, 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 a lot 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 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 finally we raised a little bit of money. 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. I've heard a lot of people talk about this concept of like, are you hiring 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. 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 just have a nice pedigree, they don't work out. But with when you have to be frugal and you have a certain amount of budget and you have constraints and you're like, gotta pay rent, you know, then it makes. It forces you, really does force you to find the best people at the best value and who are gonna find the most value and truly believe in your mission. Not just saying they're gonna 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 three, four times more than we did, and pre revenue and all this other stuff. And, you know, our revenues are still double, triple theirs. And I think it's because they just had the abundance of things.

So I, I think that's really great. 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 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 money now, let's say a 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, and you reach out to the company and they give you a contract and you know, sometimes the younger folks who are newer company will just accept that contract. I will never sign these contracts. I was always going to call and convince them, give us a discount. And ironically enough, you can go from a $30,000 contract to a $5,000 contract to 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. But it's the fact that it took a sacrifice, a little bit 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 three offers and one offers 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, I think such, again, important. You know, you're very consistent when you're 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're you.

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 off 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 F 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 F word on the interview, right. It immediately. If people are okay when they explain to you, they're already on board being honest. 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 try 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 marketing conversation. I'll ask the CMO in front of everyone at a marketing slide channel something and he will say something to me and we will have a debate and we let people, someone who could be an individual contributor question a CEO by seeing People can question up. It makes people feel comfortable. There have been, you know, and it's always, 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 dietary manager don't have any questions about finance and 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, if you don't ask me a question, I'm just gonna point people out and asking you questions like a test right now. And it is very uncomfortable. But by the second meeting we have hundreds of questions. People get ready, they're used to it now. Um, I mean there's essentially, there's a lot of studies about this where they show where like you study for an exam and never take it and you, you might know a hundred percent 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, he 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 at 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 that you set the expectation that you're expecting questions.

Yeah.

And you're surprised that there are not.

Any questions if there. I always say to everyone, if anyone ever in an interview, you got 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 is impossible for you to understand what we do, what we are. And like, I cannot, 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'd 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 getting enough to call until you have questions and good questions. The interview's probably not going to go well if you don't ask questions. Also the 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, takes them three to six 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 68 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 entrepreneur.

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, I always have my mentors who give me feedback and I always ask them for feedback because I try to get better. One of us was, we were grown 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, communicating with like customer support. Not even customers. 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 them the same way I was speaking to someone when there were six of us. And maybe the person, a different person, had the same job, but there were six 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 my language as well as 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. It took me a little bit to grasp that concept.

I, I, 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. 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, I'm 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 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 director feedback. I was going to give the manager feedback. That's what the irony of this all is, is like. As you start a company, it says go do everything everywhere else and then, but as you mature, you shift from kind of 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, 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. 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 it.

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 five, ten times, one more more money. And I'm sitting there thinking, like, how's this possible? How are we have such better, so much better product. We provide value to our members where they get what, 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 Rust world is very different. But it was just like, I tried to be logical where like A plus B equals C. So revenue plus people and 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 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 it 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 get 20 no's. It hurts your ego a lot. And you're like, oh boy, of course they all have ideas. You should fail this because 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 ask people, I would start asking people, how many times did you talk to people before raise money, right? And there was people who talked to three, four 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, you're like, all right, once we get to 150 no's, then we are not doing so well, right? But it's like using more of a checkbox, right? But it has, you have kind of a guiding light that you still have a hundred. Okay, you have 30 nodes, you still got 120 left to go, and that's okay. Versus if you're just getting nodes. Without knowing 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. You're like all about 150. There was always exception. Someone did like 400. No, someone else did like one note. 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, and you know, there's like that Silicon Valley glamour of it. But I always tell my clients like, keep a spreadsheet and go out and get a hundred notes and then let's talk about it.

And that that's a key. I mean a hundred similar, you know, 1 50, 100 similar directionally. So that's a thing like. But knowing a hundreds a number, you need a number because every no is like a stab in the heart and you're like, oh, ow, ow. 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 snows, you should reconsider. Maybe there's something 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, 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, it's a hard question because there's so many. Right. It's like every other week I'm like, huh, Right.

Yeah.

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 around 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 seven people. There are seven dance. And so if you have seven dance, you think exactly the same and you do exact same thing, but you already have me. Why would I need seven of me? I need to find someone who's completely different than me. And so using the criteria to evaluate people based on your, 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, that's so many mistakes I've made in that. And you can see, for example, if you hire a salesperson versus you hire an engineer, the mind, the difference is just mind blowing. And we could 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 you, 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 of understanding the different emotional states and logical mindset of just different people. I would say this over and over, but like an end 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. Mistake we almost made, but we end 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 like, should we let her go? But then I just said, let's toss her in this other area in marketing. We push, pushed it in there, and she's just crushed it out of the park. And one of our best leaders, you know, it's the same thing as like, you know, I run, you know, I do marketing, finance. Imagine tomorrow you put me in back end mobile engineering. I'm probably gonna fail. Right? And we often just used again as criteria validating people based on certain aspects that aren't correct.

Yeah, I love that story. You know, 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.

What made you do that? That's fascinating.

Yeah, it's 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, got it.

And so two things happen in that test. 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 you 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 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 530 days you should be able to get you know like 35 a day, right. And a month would go by and they 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 going to fail. So before we used to hire people based on conversations unfortunately and conversation only get you so far 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 were not the one doing it. It's always hard to distinguish are you the one doing or you're just there when someone else is doing it. And so this person promised me they were amazing all these things they've done. And we used to call it airtable just some runner some of our databases. And the first day they couldn't figure out how to do filter in an airtable for three hours. And I'm thinking how are you going to run operations for us? You can't figure out filter and airtable like it's just not going to work. This is something where like our custom 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 didn't take you six months just to learn how to use basic technology that we already have. As assumed that you know how to use as I'm 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 in 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. 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 two you should be here. Month one should be here, but week two should be here. We give them KPIs where they should be onboarding and simple hidden 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, 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 in your team, here's what's going to happen. 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 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 his if you bring 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 burning other people on who are not bringing value. And the likelihood of you succeeding goes down. You made a promise to eight players that we're going to 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 team's going to be like, what are you doing? I don't want this kicker. We want to win. Remember, this is like, we want to 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 make a contract. We're going to bring the best people and we're going to have a great environment. And as defined by all the 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, it's very powerful. Dan's very powerful philosophy. I guess I'm curious, how have you managed your own personal growth as the company's gotten bigger and if you, as you've encountered things you haven't seen before?

Yeah, I mean, that's the, you know, that's the working crazy hours part. Right. I think I've consistently made a conscious effort to reach out to mentors 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. And I realized, guess what? I don't know anything about HR recruiting. And so what I would do is I would go sometimes find expert consultants who can maybe give us, you know, five, ten hours a week. 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 a startup. Sounds expensive. Sounds very expensive. Like, 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. Like we have right now, this woman, she's an expert. We bring her in and she spends maybe three, four hours a week with us. And we just come in and we just unload questions on her. Here's 35 things we're thinking about. And she's just 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 a. Teach us constantly this topics. And in some ways, even though it's more expense per hour, you see hundreds of thousands of dollars later. Yeah, 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 burn. I'm like, here's the three 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 didn't even know that existed. Because you don't know, we 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 of more questions. What do you wish you had known earlier on your journey?

One I think is specifically, I mean, you know, I keep going back to this, but it's the hiring and people. I thought it'd be the raising money that's most important or like the cool tech. But it's the hiring in people. It's just, it's. I didn't realize it would be this difficult and this strenuous where sometimes. I know, joke. 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 a thousand five hundred 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. You see us in corporations all the time. Like you have like sales teams. It's easier to do when you have quantified numbers. When you see like in corporate world you have salespeople and you see one guy selling 10 million a year right off selling 500k a year, they all have the same job, they all get paid the same. And so that to me never made sense outside of sales. But now that in other areas you see as 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 three times the output at the same time. 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 a 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. Custom sport agents versus director 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 in 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 get paid well. Or option two, they go start their own thing. So they're going to start their own thing. Like why 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. 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 realized 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, breaking through walls. And it's finding those people, understanding that. And so when we hire, actually this philosophy where we hire two categories of people, job specific, and the other group called really smart people, and oftentimes we interviews people, they're like, what's the job? And I'm like, I don't have a job description for you. I'm gonna find out what you're good at. And we just ask what they're good at. And then 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 smart people. And people make jokes about it too. Like they're. Because they're like, oh, I'm the really grouping. And they put quotation around. But like, yeah, that group works pretty well for us. Right? You always 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 leadership?

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 couple leaders like I mentioned that I'm friends with. They said 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 it 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. That's number one. And number two is also remember your stirrup journey in stages, both around like six areas. There's different. You can classify six, four. We look at people, process governance, technology, data. We have one more piece but around people. But thinking about like now with this is our future. Right. As I mentioned, in 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. And so think about that. What stage do you want when a 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 just like run policies and procedures. Do we have, you know, we used to just when we started, we 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 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 change. 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. In some ways I do it.

Finally you can do finance.

Yeah, exactly.

Three 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 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 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 Grown Up. If you like what you heard, give it a review on Apple Podcast 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 alyssacon.com.