He Walked Away From Millions... Then Built Truvani | Derek Halpern

Derek Halpern is one of my favorite living entrepreneurs, and here's why. He was at the height of his game, running the biggest podcast in the space, making millions of dollars, and then overnight he shut it down. Didn't tell anybody why, didn't do a big announcement, just decided to walk away. And the reason why he walked away is because he started a supplement company. He started selling stuff. What Derek did was walk away from a very lucrative career in order to build something that was much bigger, something that had enterprise value, something that could be scaled and one day sold. Today, that company is known worldwide and it's one of the largest supplement companies of the last 10 years. It's called Truvani. You'll find it on almost every major retail store in the country and is one of the top-selling protein powders. This is a masterclass with one of the best in the game. It's the founder of Truvani, Derek Halpern. Derek Halpern, it's good to see you, buddy.

Thanks for having me. I'm pumped to be here.

Dude, I, I don't mean to blow too much smoke up your rear end, but if there's an e-commerce Mount Rushmore, I, I think you're on it. And, and part of the reason why your story fascinates me so much is it's now been 10 years since you ran Social Triggers.

Yeah.

And what people don't understand, they, they're, most people are familiar with Truvani And they see it on store shelves all over the country. It's pretty much the, the number one natural plant-based protein powder. It sells, sells out everywhere. Like people know that about the brand, but they don't know that you were an influencer before it was cool. You had the, the biggest business podcast pretty much in the world at the time.

There wasn't that many podcasts back then in Los Angeles. Sure.

But you were still, you had half a million people on an email list.

I did.

When that was a lot of people.

Yeah, it was a lot.

So why'd you walk away from it?

That's a really tough question. I could probably break it down into a couple different compartments. The first compartment is that I built a business teaching people how to do things, and I didn't like teaching. I like doing, not teaching. As I continued to build the business, you start to realize that the way you monetize a teaching business back then, now people could build a podcast like this, sell advertising, actually make a decent amount of money in revenue from advertising on podcasts. But back then, the way you would monetize is you'd teach a bunch of stuff and then you'd sell a course, as an example. The types of people that would buy the course, 98 out of 100 people would buy the course and not even open it. They wouldn't do anything with it. And that was always kind of disheartening because then you'd have some of the other people who were the most vocal, right? I helped a lot of people. I know this 'cause they always told me I did, but the people who were most vocal were the people who would buy the course and say, oh my God, you scammed me. Like, this is not what I thought it was. I'd always give 'em a refund. All right, here, just go on your way. But that type of negative energy wasn't my favorite experience.

It weighs on you.

Yeah. And it, it also wasn't that great for me personally, 'cause I didn't like doing it in the first place. Some people are born teachers. They wanna teach, they wanna share, they wanna do all that stuff. Me, I was a teacher on accident. I got, I always call myself an accidental teacher, actually.

Yeah. You got into it because Lewis Howes pushed you into it, didn't you?

Yeah. Basically, I had just started doing consulting for a friend's company and Lewis said, oh, you're good at this. You should make a course about it. And I'm like, I don't know about all that. Like, I don't know if I'm going to make a course, but then I did it. I got built a huge email list on Soul's Triggers in the first year. And I was like, oh, let's make a course. I'll monetize it. And I made a lot of money. And it was like, oh, okay, this is good. And you know, at the time, this is 2012, I had to be like 20, what, 26 years old or something. And I was making way more money at one time than I ever thought I'd make, especially in such a short time period. You're like, oh, well, there's something here.

And when you say a lot of money, we're talking millions of dollars, right?

That first year, in 2012 was just under $1 million. I didn't spam courses. I just made one course. I think I sold it. I think I sold it for $500 and I launched in the middle of the year, some, somewhere around the middle of the year. And it made a lot of money. Like I said, it was like enough for me and I had no employee, like one employee. So there's no overhead and well, software and stuff. And it was all organic. I didn't do very much paid media back then. It was all profit and I was, I was feeling real good about it at that time.

Most people would not walk away. Like your first year you do about a million and you ended up being one of, if not the biggest business podcast in the space. I, I, I remember the last one you did, I think was with Tim Ferriss and you made an exception because you were wrapping it up.

Yeah.

And Tim wanted to be on your show and you just came out of the woodwork and did one with Tim Ferriss.

I met Tim previously. We, we were kind of like tangentially connected. So he had talked about depression on a post somewhere, and it was something that I was interested in 'cause I felt like that was something that kind of plagues everyone at some point. You know, they call it, um, I think Cameron Herold wrote a book called Double Double, and he talks about the highs and lows of CEOs. And it was really interesting to hear Tim's battle with, with this sort of feeling. And I felt like I was kind of going on the up and down at this point too, kind of doing something I didn't like to do or whatever. So that was one of the last podcasts I did. That is true.

So you end up establishing yourself as the player in the space and accidentally or against your wishes or however you describe it, still most people would not walk away from a 7-figure income stream to start a protein company. Yeah.

Well, I didn't even start a protein company. It was actually a turmeric company at first.

Really?

Yes. That's just, so I always tell people, like everyone always has this big idea of, hey, what's my next business gonna, like, what's my business gonna be? And they're like, oh, well I have to perfectly plan it. We didn't do none of that. I was at my friend, me, uh, Devin, I have two co-founders, Devin and Vonnie. I'm at Devin's lake house up in Connecticut and we're, we're, we're having a conversation and I'm just telling him how I'm getting bummed over doing this teaching thing. He was doing teaching stuff too, and he was kind of feeling out of it as well. He's like, well, I started this new Amazon thing and I'm reselling people's products on Amazon and turmeric sells a lot on Amazon.

Still does.

Still does. He goes, turmeric does really well on Amazon. Do you wanna start a turmeric company with me? I'm like, huh? What do you mean? I don't know anything about Amazon. I don't know anything about turmeric. He goes, yeah, but you're fun to work with. You know how to sell stuff. We could figure it out. And I was like, okay, let's take a step back here. First, I remember telling him, I don't know if I like the whole idea of being an Amazon brand, right? Because that, that is platform risk to me. But I don't hate the idea of building a real brand. Why don't we talk to my friend Vani, who has a, a blog about food. And see what she thinks. 'Cause we could bring her in, in, into the story here. She has the food experience. I have the marketing sales, and you could have the finance operations experience.

And this person that you're referencing is better known as Food Babe, correct?

Better known as Food Babe. Yes. Why don't we bring her in? So we get on a call. This is the end of August, August 2017, the end of the month. We decide to start a business together.

This was 2017? You've done all this since 2017?

Yeah.

That is nuts. Sorry for interrupting.

Yeah.

Please, please continue.

So we met August, end of 2017. Here's the idea. She's like, turmeric. I used to take a turmeric. My turmeric just got acquired by a big multinational corporation. They changed the ingredients on me. I need a new turmeric. Perfect timing. All right. We said, all right, we're launching a turmeric. At this point we're like, okay, well, how are we gonna launch it? We ended up pre-selling the product 'cause we didn't know what type of volume to have or, or, or what type of pre-order to do or how many bottles to make. So we're like, let's just do it as a pre-sale. And at the time, everyone told me doing a presale of a turmeric is stupid. No one's gonna buy a turmeric product. No one's gonna pre-buy it. I was like, look, we don't need it to be big. We just need to get a semblance of demand to help us figure out how many bottles to get. At the time, our first order of bottles was 5,000 bottles. When we launched it, about an hour in, I remember calling, I remember calling Devin. I was like, Devin, we have a problem. We're gonna need way more product. He's like, what do you mean? How much more product? I think we need about 35,000 bottles actually. And he's like, oh no. And at this time we have a turmeric, it's working, but right as it's starting, we're making the product, the turmeric, we're trying to take the coating off the tablet 'cause we want to get rid of all the nasty ingredients out of the product. And the tablet's not holding like in, in the bottle at the time. So we're, we're confident we're gonna figure it out. But at the time, like all this stuff is going wrong and we're overselling the product. We're like, oh man. This is big. And that was kind of how the business was born.

You started selling it to Food Babe's audience, right? That was your liftoff.

Yeah. So we partnered with Food Babe as, as, as the main face of the brand. And that was a lot of where some of the initial sales came from. Like the first year, I would say probably 7 out of 10 people that heard about us came to us through a recognition of my partner Bonnie from Foodbay.

Yeah. How important do you think that relationship was to getting the business off the ground and getting it to the first $1 to $5 million? I don't know that it has the same impact now because you're a recognizable brand independent of Foodbay, but at the beginning, how important do you think that relationship was?

When you start a business, you have to have a way to get customers. On the one hand, a relationship like that makes it pretty easy to get the first group of customers, but it also creates restrictions on how you can get customers. And what I mean by that is when you lean on an influencer as a partner, you'll get your success, early success quicker, but you're more likely to hit a plateau and then never go anywhere because you don't know how to grow past it. You're accustomed to easy.

Mm-hmm.

One of the things I will say is when we all got together, we didn't get together predominantly because she was an influencer. We got together because she had food ingredient experience. Devin had finance and operations. I had marketing and sales experience. The fact that she had this, that was part of the gig and she was gonna promote it and that helped get, get it started, obviously. But what's important to know is that we all brought a unique expertise to the table that we knew eventually we could go bigger than just one face, right? Because unless you're like Oprah, you're not— one face for one brand is actually a limiting behavior. Like, you're only gonna be able to grow so large from one face. You actually need 10,000 faces promoting your product, which is where we're kind of at now. Yeah. And like, you know, where we had the 7 out of 10 in the beginning, I think now it's something like less than 1 out of 10 people even are aware that we had a face of a brand promote the product.

Yeah.

So you have to scale.

You, you came out of the gates with this, this turmeric.

Yeah.

When did you pivot over into protein? 'Cause that's, that's my perception is that's really where you started to—

Yeah. Gain a foothold in the marketplace. So we, we launched turmeric in February of 2018. We shipped that first product February 26th. We just hit our, what is it, 8-year anniversary. Yeah. So February 26th, we shipped that first product. At this point, the, the launch went great. We're like, okay. At that point, we saw how big the pre-launch was, and now the launch went good. And like more than half the people subscribed. And I was looking at the subscriptions and I was like, okay, I'm done with Social Triggers. At that time, I was doing a daily vlog on YouTube and literally that all happened and this was going really big, really quick. I quit. A lot of my best employees from Social Triggers came over to TruVani. So they were some of the first, like my videographer, my, my designer, head of customer support. Like a lot of people came over to the new brand, which is great. That was big. I shut it down instantly because I was like, this is the future. And I was already sick of doing this, and now that I could see that this was gonna work, it, I'm doing this. So Turmeric came out, we went to Expo West, we had no idea what to do next. We had the idea to do Bone Broth next, cuz Bone Broth was big. So we made a Bone Broth powder. Bone Broth launched really well, but had really poor subscription rate. The product wasn't that good. It was a good product. The people that loved it loved it. Like I loved it. It was a savory bone broth with some ginger. It tasted really good. It was like if, if you. Use this product warm. It, it was a good product, but it wasn't a mass appeal product. We launched the protein, chocolate protein in July of 2018. And at this time it did pretty good, but we weren't sure we were a protein brand yet. We launched a collagen, marine collagen in September, which is a funny story because we have the marine collagen. It's supposed to come to our warehouse in September and it's like 2 weeks late. And I'm like, ah, shit, what's going on here? Where's the product? And I remember jokingly saying like, well, It's on a boat. There's all this talk of pirates. Like, it's white powder. Like, maybe they, they stole the boat, right? Like, the boat's missing at sea. I'm like, so I was jokingly telling every one of my friends at the time, I said, I think pirates stole our boat. That didn't happen. It was just delayed or whatever. But I always tell the story that the time I thought pirates stole our product. So we launched that in September. And here's where we got our first punch in the face. We launched in September, did college and did really well. Then our Facebook account got banned. And you know why it got banned? Because at that time, pirates.

Yeah, pirates.

They reported, no, no, we were making, um, our original formulation for protein was a pea protein, hemp seed protein, pumpkin seed protein. For some reason, having hemp seed protein was flagging illegal drug algorithms at that time. And we kept getting illegal drug references for having hemp in the product. 'Cause, you know, CBD was getting big at that point. Mm-hmm. So they kept seeing hemp and we were triggering these illegal drug algorithms, which is a mess. So that happened. We launched vanilla protein come in November, but we, we kept having more and more problems with Hemp disapproving our ads. Like Hemp was getting all our ads disapproved. We're like, what the heck's going on here? So we actually reformulated the product within the first 8 months and changed from hemp seed protein to chia seed protein because we didn't want to flag the algorithm essentially.

Notice how Derek is leveraging the 3 different parts of what I call the 7-Figure System. Now in Derek's case, it's much bigger than a 7-figure system. He's got a business— that is probably worth close to $1 billion. But he's still focused on the 3 areas of the system. He has a great product, puts so much emphasis into having a great product that really sells itself. It's got a target group of people that want to buy it over and over again. Part 2, he partnered with an audience, an audience that had exposure, high conversion, and was engaged with the influencer that was getting it off the ground. And they're putting their attention into sales channels. Yes. Shopify, and Amazon. But in this next part is where he starts talking about their performance in retail stores across the country. He's focused on these 3 areas of the 7 Figure System, and it's the system that I give to clients and mentor them through while they're getting to their first $100,000 per month. Most people are not going to build a 9-figure or a 10-figure company like Derek, but if you take these 3 pieces, it's a pretty good bet that you can build a 7-figure business. At this point, you are getting a lot of adoption all online.

Yeah.

Right.

It's all Shopify. We didn't even have an Amazon. I didn't have an Instagram. We had, uh, we were buying Facebook ads basically.

At what point did you go retail? Because the, the, the, the thing that really stood out to me is it is so rare to dominate online and then go into retail and also dominate. The playbooks are different. I experienced this when we, before I sold my company, we were in 1,000 retail stores and it was not a total disaster, but it was way different than we expected because the playbook was, I know why, totally different.

So I can share, I know why good D2C companies fail in retail. I could actually dumb it down to one, probably one paragraph. So we could talk about that, but you want to know why I went retail? At this point, we're not even sure where, what kind of company we are, right? We launched a product, we're doing well. Our first year in business, I could share this number. We were probably just under, probably just under $5 million in revenue and we launched in March essentially. So we did a really good first year.

Wow. Yeah.

And we were, we built the team up, we got everything going. And at this point, I know subscription rates on pills were better than powders. So I think we're gonna be a, a pill company. The whole next year we launched only pills.

Hmm.

Vitamin C, vitamin D, you know, uh, immune support. I did not, magnesium.

I did not know that the entire first and even part of the second year, you're just figuring out who you are.

Yeah.

I mean, I, even I who am fascinated by the Truvani story, look at this and don't know that you had all these iterations of products that don't even exist anymore. And, and so many people wanna know what the exact roadmap is gonna look like before they get started.

Yep.

Even one of the leaders in the space, Truvani, was still figuring out who the heck they were for the first year and a half. I'm so glad you shared that.

We know what we stood for. We wanted to make products that people use in their daily life without weird shit. That was the core premise of the, of the brand. So we didn't know what products to deliver yet. Whole second year was pills. And at this point, we're not sure what's next. This is now, mind you, this is 2018, second year is 2019. At the end of that year, we started to realize that, you know what, if we want to build a real omnichannel brand, a brand that, that lasts or potentially could be acquired, for example, we need to win online. And we need to win in stores. So then we started to think, how are we gonna break into stores? 2020 comes, we, I, I hire, actually 2019, I hire a VP of sales at another company that's doing $50 million plus in retail alone. And I hire them as a consultant to try to advise, uh, Devin and I on retail strategy. Like, hey, what, what do you need to know going into this? What type of margins to expect? How does doing business with these big retailers work? I knew nothing, right? 'Cause I'm, I'm an internet guy that, that bought advertising.

Yeah.

So we hired this consultant, we drilled him him with questions for months. Like we met every like week or two and I just asked him a million questions and he kind of got me up to speed. Like, you know, here's the, the 101 and 102 and 103 course on retail. I probably asked some of the dumbest questions in the world, so hopefully he doesn't have any memory of the dumb questions I asked. At that point, want to go retail. So we start going into some, we hire a VP, we hire a director of sales, we build a broker network to try to get our stuff in the stores and we have some headway. We get into like maybe 100 doors. Then we get, we sign for Expo West, we're supposed to debut in March of 2020. The day before we fly out, Expo West is canceled. Expo West canceled about a week and a half before everything canceled. Outside of the window when you can get refunds on Airbnb bookings and outside the window when you could get refunds on plane bookings and outside. So we had all this stuff that got canceled. All the team was going to Expo West. The show gets canceled. We lose all of the money. Around the event. That was a mess. At this point, we got lucky because online sales blew up. Like, the year of COVID online sales for a lot of businesses, we doubled that year just off online alone. That was a very good happenstance because it allowed us to eat some of the headaches that occurred from the retail push. But even though some brands leaned heavier online in 2020, because that's where everyone was going. Devin and I, we all just had this thought that people were going to rebound back to retail in a big way after this is done. So we thought now would be the time to double down on retail when everyone thinks online's the only way forward.

You're like, let's zag. Everybody else is going to, everybody else is going to come online and they're turning away from retail. So this is an opportunity for us to strike while everybody else is on the sidelines.

We were like, you know what, let's do that.

I feel that way about e-commerce in general. Right now with tariffs and uncertainty and, um, costs of goods are up and I see competition so low.

Yeah.

Like, I, I bought back my business that I sold in 2017. I bought it back a year and a half ago and I am just stunned at how bad the competition is. I thought being out of the market for not quite 10 years, about 7 years, I thought Everybody's matured. I'm gonna have to relearn this whole thing. And I'm like, I can't wait to pounce. And I think that's why the business has, has been growing as quickly as it has. So you had the same mentality as you see people are running away. You're like, now strike.

And we still had no success, which was rough. So at this point, we're still trying to figure out what type of brand we are, by the way. We don't even know we're a protein brand. We get into some stores and we, Devin sends me a picture. I don't remember what store it was, but there was a picture of our products on shelf on the bottom, the Bottom shelf, 2 flavors, chocolate and vanilla. And there was this other brand above us in the middle, eye line, 6 flavors. I'm like, oh, they command attention. We need more flavors. We need to productize our protein. We need more flavors. We can take up more shelf space and get a bigger brand block. This is what we told ourselves. And at this point, our manufacturer at the time, well, it was our co-packer, is, um, they said we can't make flavors 'cause we're not allowed to use natural flavors. It's very hard to flavor powders, especially plant protein powders without natural flavors like natural vanilla flavor and natural cherry flavor. All those manmade flavors that they make in labs, we were kind of stuck. So we didn't know what to do at this point. We, we didn't have any flavor options. We didn't really have some options coming forward. And at this point, like, yo, we're, we're a clean ingredient brand. So we launched a deodorant line, which is not a, not a powder. We actually, I think we're fully canceled out of deodorant, but we did, we launched a deodorant line. I remember that. We launched toothpaste, we launched lip balm. We were just making clean products that we wanted to have in the world. We launched one individual snack bar coming up in, in the next like year or two. For retail powders, we're making the push. So we furiously went to developing powders that first year, 2020. My director of sales quit on me at the end of the year because he wasn't getting any doors. You know, it's COVID, no one's accepting new product. We get a new person in charge of sales that starts the beginning year of 2021. Comes in, he goes, look, we have to build foundation first. After we build foundation, getting the ability to take orders and all this stuff, then we're gonna go, you know, we're off to the races is what he said. So he spent about 8 months doing that, building foundation. We built, at this point, we finally figured out how to make some more flavors. And then he gets us in from 100 doors to 500 doors to 1,000 doors to 2,000 doors. And, you know, we get, we landed Sprouts. At this point, Sprouts had told us no multiple times. Whole Foods has told us no multiple times, but we're starting to build it brick by brick, store by store, 10 stores here, 12 stores here, 15 stores here, 20 stores here. And then we eventually got the unlock of, uh, one of the bigger chains that took us early was, uh, Fresh Thyme. They, they're a 76-store chain in the Midwest. Great store, by the way. If you ever make it to the Midwest, you gotta check out their stores. But Fresh Thyme took us and that kind of— now Sprouts was interested. Then when Sprouts was— now Whole Foods was interested. And that kind of got the groundswell going.

You mentioned before that you have one paragraph about why D2C companies don't do well in retail.

Yeah.

What is the paragraph?

D2C, everything's about order value, right? If you wanna spend money to acquire customers. So what do people do to juice order value?

Add upsells.

Add upsells. And what's the best performing upsell usually?

More of the same product.

More for more. When you sell a product and you offer more for more, what you're doing is, is you're getting 6 months of product into someone's hands.

Yeah.

You just exhausted all your demand. There's no room left to buy in retail when you exhaust all your demand. When you sell more for more, you get bigger order values. So you'll do, you know, you'll get $150 order values. And if you get $1,000, you have 8 customers. Those 8 customers are already fully satisfied and spoken for. The untapped demand are the people that saw your ad and didn't buy. Not the best people. We transitioned our direct advertising away from more for more, huh, into samples. You come to our, one of our main ways that we were promoting the brand for multiple years was you come to our site and you would get a 4-pack of chocolate, vanilla, and like 4 flavors of protein, or a 6-pack or an 8-pack of all our flavors, and you would get those for free, just pay shipping. We'd have some upsells that were all for a full-size bag or whatever, but we would never sell more for more as a primary offer. So on that offer, our Average order value was like $20, right? Wow. Nothing. Our CPA was like $10 or $15 with all the COGS. We're losing money.

Yeah.

But we're breaking even in about 30, 60, 90 days. So it just depends on how we acquired the customer, how cold they were. And the reason why we positioned this is that if you do more for more as an ad buying strategy, I am confident to say, I believe you will fail in retail.

Hmm.

I think you will fail in retail unless you're doing it so much that you're like, you know, omnipresent with all the ads and everyone knows you or whatever. If you're doing more for more as an ad strategy, you will not do well in retail as a starting brand. So we transitioned from more for more to samples. And the whole goal I would reinforce to the team is more mouths. Get my product into more people's mouths.

One of my heroes, Brian Lee, he started The Honest Company with Jessica Alba. And Art of Sport with the late Kobe Bryant, and, uh, he built LegalZoom. He, he says the win for him is when the product is in the customer's home.

Yes.

Doesn't care if it comes from Amazon or a retail store. Yes. How do we get it into their home?

Correct.

That long-term, that is the win.

Yes.

So I wanna ask the inverse of your question, which is why did TruVani do so well? In retail.

So we have a really good product. We have the rising tide of people wanting cleaner ingredients, which is what we stood for. And we have this new sampling strategy where I think at the time in the first year we did over a million samples and like, like, you know, maybe just, just over a year. We have the sampling the product. Now we have groundswell. So what happens is, is that if we go and spend all my money on advertising and I drive samples, those people will either maybe come back to me. I'll text them. They'll, they'll, they'll buy from us, right? They'll, they'll buy from us on, on the web. Or they'll know they got the samples, they'll try it. Oh, I like it. But they didn't buy yet. But then they go to the store and see us on end cap. Oh, I know that brand. I have their sample in my house. Let me pick up a bag. And that's how that works. We did so well in retail because we did a really good job building demand for the product. It helped our Amazon grow. So even today, if you look at our Amazon, I know people have all these tools about how to figure out it. I don't know anything about Amazon, like 80% of our Amazon sales when I've last heard this number, were coming from brand-related search terms. Meaning I do poorly with generic search on Amazon. Meaning I'm, I don't know the Amazon game. I don't know how to make Amazon work, but people are searching for the brand, which is good. We have the same ideas. I don't care if you buy from Store, Shopify, or Amazon. What I care is that you get the product the way you want to get it. And my goal is to get more people aware of the product. And the only way to do that, I think, is sampling. Especially if you could stand behind the flavor of your product.

That's interesting because I remember you used to create a lot of content. Now you create very little, but every, every once in a while you'll update what's going on at Truvani on your Facebook page. Yeah.

Yeah.

And I remember you posting about becoming the number one protein in the space or plant protein in one store.

Yep.

And then I saw that it launched at, I think a Sprouts near me. Yeah. And I went to that Sprouts and it was outta stock. Yeah. And it was like, you gotta be kidding me. And I went to another store and I noticed that the price was very different from what it had been listed over here. And I'm like, I now I'm really fascinated by, by this and I'm watching it just sort of grow around me and be outta stock or there'd be one bag on the shelf.

Yep.

That's not normal.

You have to have demand.

But it was so different that even if I take a company like Ghost.

Yeah.

You know, Ghost, they're partially owned by Dr Pepper. They've got a lot of money to spend.

Yeah.

In order to reach mass adoption, but I don't see them running out of stock places. What do you think you did so much better than even the well-funded companies that raised a bunch of capital?

I think building demand's the most important part of the story. We built demand and people wanting the product before we were ever in the store. So when they saw this in the store, they wanted the product already. It's kind of like when you build a new email list off just content alone and you don't sell them anything for a year. That first launch, that pent-up demand's huge. Now, why would we, why were we selling out? Well, this is actually funny because we were a new brand. When people put new brands on shelf that aren't backed by big money, they don't order that many units. And it's hard to convince them to order that many units. Because you're a new brand on shelf. So we're going on, on shelf. We're getting one shelf spot with 3 units and 3 units back. We're only selling 6 units. So it really looks like we're selling out way faster in the beginning than it really was true because they're not ordering as much product from us because we're a new brand. Eventually they caught up. It took several months for them to catch up to this whole idea of like, I remember when we launched in Whole Foods, we launched in Whole Foods the first month out, blew up. At first we were, we were telling them like, guys, we're going to need more stock. They wouldn't do it. Like, you know, because we're a new brand, we don't know how you're doing in Whole Foods. Now we blow it out of the water. And then we're telling them to order more. And it's still hard to get these stores to order more because they're like, oh, well, what if it doesn't continue? Because you're a new brand. How, what are you going to do to keep driving this? And then it continues. And what we started to see was a lot of stores like corporate, this is not, I'm not going to name any names here, but corporate, they don't always order all the product., but the manager of stores have some ability to order more product. And we started to notice that we were selling so well on the shelf spots, we started earning secondary placements in stores. And a lot of store managers were giving us this secondary placement for free just so they could have more product in store so they wouldn't sell out because they didn't want to sell out because they want to move the units, obviously. So we have the pent-up demand that we're a new retail brand and The pent-up demand was good enough to sell the minimal orders that we had in the beginning. And by the way, none of this was on purpose. Like, we— pent-up demand was on purpose. The whole selling out thing was on accident. And it was on accident simply because they just weren't ordering that many products a month.

Derek keeps using this term pent-up demand. And this is, I think, one of the most overlooked strategies in marketing, especially if you're selling physical stuff. The idea of setting the precedent that you will sell out of things, that there is a limited supply, it is a very powerful marketing mechanism. With physical products, there's a catch-22 to where if you sell out and you have no inventory, you're out of business essentially. But if you can create the pent-up demand that comes from email subscribers, SMS subscribers, social media engagement, you have this baked-in leverage that makes sales so much easier. This is where a lot of entrepreneurs kind of drop the ball in their marketing. They're so focused on making the sale out of the get-go that they are missing the engagement and the opt-ins and the raving fans that make it possible to sell any product you want. It's why when we're helping a client launch a new product, we are not focused on what the copy says. We're focused on building the audience and getting them engaged and ready to buy on launch day. The first few steps of the 8-step system to a million-dollar business is that you choose your person, you collect 100 emails, and then you launch. That is pent-up demand ahead of the launch. If you want to see the full 8-step process for building a million-dollar business, just go over to Capitalism.com. Capitalism.com/100K. You'll see where you're at in the process and what steps need some attention so that you're en route for a 7-figure business. I'm noticing a bit of a trend in how you're describing this, which is from the outside, it sounds like you scaled so fast and you just hit market penetration so quickly. But I'm, I'm hearing you say this theme of we tested small and did well, and then we started to move out. Like we pre-launched the first product.

Yes.

And then we ordered more product and we had one or two flavors to start with protein before we became a protein company. And we proved ourself in this retail spot. And then we started to go to more stores.

Yeah.

And that's really interesting to me. It sounds like you obsess over proof of concept.

Yeah.

Before you really go big. And that's an important point because I think a lot of people will say, will hear this conversation and say, oh, retail is the way to go big. And so they will just go all in on retail. But even your strategy was penetrate the market a little bit.

Getting in stores and not selling off shelf is a death sentence.

Yes. And I've heard so many brands do this.

I know a lot of brands that go retail too big, too fast. For us, proof of concept is the number one guiding principle at our company. We will prove it before we double down on it. We've done it with product development. We've done it with marketing strategy, like with those sampling. When we first started the samples, we did like 5,000 samples and then we waited. We got them out there. Let's just see what happens over 4 months. Do they buy anything? Do they not buy anything? Waited a few months. I was like, oh, they are buying things. All right. 50,000, 100, you know, let's double down. Same thing with influencers and gifting. I think one of the things that we did differently in the last year and a half, I think we built the best influencer team on the internet right now. All we did was, is we had this idea of gifting influencers some free product, you know, just good, good gifts, like not cheap gifts, just product gifts to, to people. And we weren't going for big influencers, we're just going over, hey, you have 2,000 fans and like pickleball? Everyone who had 2,000 fans and liked pickleball, you're getting a gift. Everyone, oh, you're a ballet dancer with 5,000? You're getting a gift. We just started gifting segments of people.

It works like bananas.

And we, we did 200. We're like, oh, this, this This feels good. Let's do 250. This feels good. Let's do 265. This feels good still. You know what? Last year we sent out almost 50,000 gifts. Wow. In one calendar year. And the team went from zero people and a, just a consultant to, I think it's 4 or 5 full-time people now on just the gifting team. Wow. And we just did it, you know, hey, this felt good. This felt good. This, we're all in. That's the story of very basically everything we've ever done is, hey, we went from bars, we had the Snack Bar for almost, I think almost 2 years, dude, a chocolate brownie snack bar we had for 2 years. And then we're just watching the numbers, watching the margins, watching the, the business build. And we're like, you know what? Now we have 12 flavors of Snack Bar. We went from last year, we started last year with 200 doors of Snack Bars with a couple flavors. We now have 12 flavors. We have 2,000 doors now a year later. In Sprouts, we just launched all 12 flavors plus 4-packs. We have 18 SKUs of bar in Sprouts right now. The bar aisle is ours too now, which is the goal. That is wild. How do we get, how do we go from, you know, we have 14, 15,000, I think it's like 14,000 doors with protein, right? It's hard to keep track of all this 'cause you never know what's happening, but it's about, it's about 14,000. It's over 10,000 doors of, of protein. We just hit 2,000 bars. And the goal is just more and more doors. But this is kind of how it is, is like, hey, we tested a bar for almost 2 years before we made more flavors. We had 2 single flavors of protein and we didn't even like the protein business at first. We did pills for the whole next year and deodorant and lip balm and, and, and toothpaste. And then we're like, you know what? Protein's kind of working. Let's lean into the protein. And now today, 80% of the business is protein.

Yeah, that is, that is really refreshing to hear. It seems like players like Truvani and the other brands that we often admire just come out of nowhere and dominate with several of these products. Just 2 years of, I don't even know who we are yet. Yeah.

We didn't even have an Amazon at first, man. Like I remember when we first launched on Shopify, remember we started to be an Amazon idea and we didn't even have an Amazon at first. Eventually we're like, ah, let's just put it on Amazon. And then we forgot about it for like a year. And then eventually it started to make a little bit of money and we're like, oh, this has, what's going on over here?

Amazon has some volume.

Now I actually will tell you that today I would almost say that I prefer a customer to buy on Amazon than Shopify.

Why is that?

Because it's just so much of a better experience. Amazon can get the product to people faster, faster, and they're already paying for Prime. So the shipping's free. The LTVs on customers on Amazon are similar. To Shopify. It's not like the customer's worthless. You can't market them specifically, but the product markets itself. So the way we look at it today, and I don't know if this is interesting, but our most loyal customers buy on Shopify because you could buy our product at a good price and you get cool free swag. And we have basically the best swag in the business. I, I'm willing to put that out there. No one's swag is better than ours. We make tote bags that people carry. Like when I go, when we, when I go out with the wife and we're going on a boat or something, We're bringing 8 Truvani bags in total. We have this tote bag. It's real nice. Some are insulated, some aren't. They're like a, like a fashion statement almost. You buy direct, you buy product at a good price with swag. Amazon is a, usually a good price with, um, with free shipping. So it's a little bit cheaper usually because the shipping's free. And then in retail is actually where you can usually find our product at the best price.

I've noticed that.

And that's on purpose. Most people that want to go into retail, they're always asking me like, Derek,, you know, I want to go on retail, but like, how do you get people that buy your product in the store back to your website? I said, you're talking to the wrong person for that. If that's your goal, I don't think you should be in retail. Yeah. Your goal, if you get in retail, is to get more sales through retail.

Yeah.

If you're trying to siphon customers from your retail partner, they're not going to like you.

Yeah, it used to be that Amazon was the discount marketplace.

Yeah.

Now it is the convenience marketplace.

Yes.

So I agree with that. So in your case, I would go buy in retail if I want the best price.

Yes.

I'll buy on Amazon if I want the automatic delivery.

Yeah.

Which is really fascinating.

If it's a good price.

Sure.

And sometimes it's competitive price, especially with Prime Days and sales or whatever, but every day that's how we kind of structure everything.

And it used to be that Amazon had a policy that you had to have the cheapest price on Amazon. That's no longer a policy. So it has changed the incentives sort of a little bit.

It's not that Amazon's more expensive on subscription. It's cheaper, but it's a subscription. Amazon has done really interesting things where it's, it's a very good price. Like you're not getting the worst, but when you're in a retailer and you're on promo and you're on discount, you tend to be on promo a little bit more in retail. Because usually when you go on promo in retail, and that's part of the retail growth story is like the goal is get your product in store. After you get your product in store, you want to move the units off the shelf to try to earn what you call secondary placement or the ability to buy End caps. I don't like spending money on trade spend, like coupons or circulars or any of that crap. I like to buy secondary placement end caps. When you get on end cap, your end cap will do better if you attach a discount to it.

Hmm.

So get in the store, earn the ability to buy an end cap, do really well on end cap, and then try to earn permanent secondary placements. Usually you could do that through slotting by paying for it, or you could do it through Like with, with some stores you have to pay for secondary placement usually, but when you're us and you're selling so well, the store managers start to give you secondary placement just to have you in store, which is kind of what the demand begets demand at that point. And the more secondary placement you get, the more you sell. So it's kind of like this, you know, chicken and egg situation, but it all started with pent-up demand, right? You need the pent-up demand first, get in store, sell well, get secondary placement, sell better. Try to get third placements now, fourth placements. Try to get, like, we have our single serves in Whole Foods were put in different aisles as an example, just to get single serves.

Smart.

Well, funny that I wish I could take credit for this because my retail team wanted to do it and I told 'em this is stupid. No one's gonna buy a single serve of plant protein that's not packed in like a 10-pack. And then we're looking and we're selling, you know, tens of thousands of 'em. I'm like, oh man, this was the We gotta do this everywhere. I, I'm so glad I thought of it.

Right.

But no, it obviously give the, the, the team credit, but it was one of those things where we thought it was gonna fail and then it was a huge success.

Derek, how did you fund all of this growth?

Yeah.

Because you did not have a partnership with Dr Pepper. No. Uh, you, you did not raise a bunch of seed capital.

No.

My understanding is at least for the first handful of years you were bootstrapped. 30 grand. Get outta, get outta here.

Yeah. $10,000 a partner. That's what we started with.

Okay. And you bootstrapped this at least for—

we have bootstrapped. We're fully bootstrapped. Well, it's interesting because we are at a position now where to continue scaling stores, capital might be needed. One of the things we've learned with retail when you're in 10,000+ stores and could kind of talk about this. Needless to say, we're bootstrapped. We got to our first 12,000 doors fully bootstrapped, and now we're considering options.

That very rarely happens. That is incredible.

We've been talking to investors for years, even though we haven't raised any money from investors for years. Every time we would talk to them, they would say that you guys are unique in the fact that you got to where you are, the size you are, with $0 raised. And I think that's important to know because there are brands that probably grow to higher revenues faster than us. But they did it through burn, burning capital. And a lot of those brands didn't make it in the last few years. We had to grow through financial discipline. We had to grow with, with just smart decisions on how we chose to fund everything. Having D2C first was big because that's a little bit higher margin, allows you to fund that first retail. The secret to the success, and this is why I say we are bootstrapped, but we didn't do it without money. We have credit lines. And we had a, you have to find a good credit partner that allows you and understands what you're trying to do and grows with you in a way that allows you to grow. I have a lot of commentary about credit lines 'cause there's all sorts of credit lines out there these days that I think are pariahs. Hmm. Like the fixed term credit line where you borrow money and you have to borrow it for 6 months and then you pay it back, but they'll always let you borrow more money off of more money. And then all you know, Before you know it, you're like basically stacking interest on interest on interest on interest. And I know a lot of brands that fell for this trap a couple years ago and they, they went out of business because of this. That's a mess. But if you find like a good revolving credit line that lets you access, pay off, access, pay off, that becomes a very important partner to grow with. I can't say I came up with that idea. I read a Harvard Business Review article about the Chobani founder.

Oh, that's a great story.

Yep. And he did the, he basically grew off credit lines and I was like, oh, that's what we're gonna do. So we grew without raising capital because of access to credit. Now you can only really get access to credit when you're winning. You can't really get a credit line if you're not proving concept. But the benefit of doing D2C first, you kind of get the money in, you know, we were doing more for more. You can make a decent amount of money profit on first order, second order especially. When you're doing more for more, that allows you to create stable revenue. And the fact that we were a subscription business made it possible for us to get credit lines because the subscription gave predictability. People that are not in consumables, I don't envy anyone not in consumables. If I were e-commerce, I would never launch a business that isn't a consumable product because it just seems like you're, you're going to sell this one thing and then you're only going to make money if you create the next new thing that they can buy.

Yeah, it's a different game.

Yeah, it's a mess.

You said you can only give that kind of money if you're winning.

Yeah.

And that seems to be a bit of a theme. Whatever you go into, you win. You launch a podcast, you win. You launch a, I don't wanna, a protein, you win. Yeah. There's something in this mentality where you just seem to go for it. What drives that?

I actually did a video about this a long time ago, but when I was a kid, I have to credit my dad with this. Because even though I grew up a little bit different than most people, and I say that because my mom was on like welfare for a lot of my life, for early parts of my life, and dad was in jail my whole life. But my dad taught me something very interesting when I was a kid, and he would get outta jail, we'd play chess, and he never played chess for nothing. You have to play chess and you have to wager something. But I'm like, you know, I'm like 9, I don't need money, so I can't bet him. So we'd wager pushups. And he would just demolish me. One, I'm, I'm owing him, I'm owing him 100 pushups and he would just sit there. He goes, if you're gonna bet it, you're gonna pay it. Now gimme my money. And he would just watch me do pushups. And let me tell you, at that point I really liked the idea of winning because losing sucked. And then, you know, he went away for a little bit, came back, and at that point I went to the library and I read every chess book that I could find. Hmm. And when he came back and I just tromped him, I just destroyed him. 'Cause I was practicing. I actually found this one chess hustler. I used to go to a comic store and this guy Angel, he was a chess hustler in Washington Square Park and he would go to this comic store and he knew I liked chess. He goes, oh man, you're 9, you like chess. And at that time, you know, this was early '90s, Searching for Bobby Fischer was a really popular movie.

Yeah.

So everyone liked the kid that liked chess, right? So he's like, oh, I'mma teach you chess. I got you. So he taught me to play chess. And I was reading the books and he, he would always tell me not to, to follow the book because chess hustlers play different than book players. But I always liked the idea of the book because I feel like chess was proven. He came back, I beat him, and I'm like, all right, I like winning. That's it. It's, it's because I didn't wanna lose. And that kind of created my desire to win in everything. And one of the things I will say is that, 'cause I've, I've been asked that question before, 'cause I have succeeded a lot of different areas, and I think one of the things that sets me apart personally is I feel like I can win at everything except probably basketball, 'cause I'm, you know, not tall enough to ever play a sport like that. But other than that, I feel like I can win at almost anything. And the reason why is because I don't view anything that you pursue as something that can't be done, right? You can win. It's just a matter of will you win and will you do the work needed to win? And most people will go, they'll try something new, they'll fail, and they'll give up. Whereas you ever see that graph where it's like, you know, most people think entrepreneurship is here and it's straight to the top, but in reality it's like all over the place and then you eventually get there. That was kind of my thought on everything. No one's gonna win without failure. It's just a question of how many times are you gonna fail until you finally win. Most people don't get past the first failure. The next group of people will get past that first failure and then make the same mistakes over and over again. And wonder why they're not winning. With me, I knew that winning is eventual. It will happen if you put the work in. If you fail, you need to learn from failure. Most people don't learn from failure. Most people don't even wanna talk about it. One of the things I told you is I wanted to get into retail. I knew nothing about it, so I hired a consultant and I peppered him with all the dumbest questions in the world until I learned retail. And I got into retail and I still failed, right? I still like made mistakes. We could talk about that too on some of the, the headaches we've had with pricing or whatever, but You learn it, you figure it out. With me, I fail, I'll go read 5 books on the topic or hire someone or talk to someone else to try to figure out what I did wrong. And I think that's one of the things that set me apart is knowing that winning is eventual if you're willing to believe that you're a winner. If you fail, what input are you going to put into the failure to figure out how to do better? Most people just fail and say, oh, I'm done. Like, you could actually do this. I don't know if this video is still up, but if you do Derek Halpern Affiliate Summit 2011, you'll see my first ever speaking engagement. Dude, you've seen me speak. I spoke at your event. I'm a pretty good speaker these days. That event, my neck is red. I'm monotonous. I'm boring. I'm sitting there scratching myself. I'm literally white knuckling the podium, just scared to talk in front of people. And then literally a year later, I built, I was like, oh, I'm a speaker now. Right? But that first ever time, you could see it. The video was on the internet. It's the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen. I've wanted to delete it. But it really, it, it, it's a good story to show that you can win in everything. But after that happened, I white-knuckled podium. I knew how to build an email list. I met a guy named Michael Port from Book Yourself Solid. If you ever heard of that book.

Yeah.

He's a great speaker. He saw me, he goes, oh, you, you're, you're new at speaking. He goes, you look like you've got some chops here. You wanna show me how to build an email list and I'll teach you some speaking stuff. He was the input to help me learn to be a better speaker in the beginning. I told him I'd build an email list. I actually spoke to another person along the way who's another famous speaker, uh, Sally Hogshead.

Yeah.

She, I remember at that point, How the World Sees You.

Great book.

What a great book. And she's a great person too. And one of the things is, is that I, at that point, I never wanted to give the same presentation twice. I always made a new presentation every speech. And she comes up to me, she goes, hey, I've seen you do this before, but you always change your presentation. Why? I was like, oh, I don't wanna say the same thing. She goes, and she's like, well, You know, it's not your job to feel that you're not delivering the same message. It's your job to deliver the best presentation you can, and you can't do that if you keep making new presentations. And I looked at her, I was like, okay, you're right. And she's like, look, you should make one presentation that you develop and hone over time, and you can deliver a better talk. And I remember when she told me this and I looked at her, I was like, that makes a lot of sense to me. And I then started to just take the same presentation to retool it for the audience. So it's never the same., but that kind of pushed it ahead. But again, same thing. Winning is eventual at all things. When you're not doing as well as you want to do, you need an input of some kind to try to get you on the right track. You have to accept the input and then you have to keep going and then probably fail again and again and again and again. But eventually you're gonna win if you keep going.

Winning is eventual. Yes.

That's a quote, right? Is it?

That's, I mean, just, that's just, that's That's something worth getting tattooed.

Yeah.

I'm curious though, how you decide if something is worth winning. You decided not to win at deodorant. Yeah. You decided not to win at turmeric, but you decided to win in protein. You decided to win in chess. You decided to win in podcasting.

Yeah.

What do you use to determine if something's worth winning versus, you know what, it was a good effort and this gives us more data for the direction we're gonna go?

In the beginning, I used to think small and winning could be something as small as getting my first 1,000 subscribers as an example. But over time, my gauge of what makes something worth it is governed by a couple of things. One of my friends, Craig Clements, he wrote an article, something about like 10 ways to get richer. So some, some like, it was a real cheesy article, but like the article's main point was you should go after something bigger, right? You, you better to have 1% of a huge market than 80% of a small market. And that idea that he presented made sense to me. That was one of the reasons why I wanted to do products is 'cause winning in products is so much bigger than winning on information.

Yes.

'Cause you wanna make sure the thing you're going for has big opportunity. If you start with something that has small opportunity, the likelihood of you winning is smaller because there's not as much opportunity there. So first you start with big opportunity. Second is, is when you're going after that big opportunity, are you delivering something that is unique, better, different than what everyone else is delivering? The truth with the deodorant was, is that the deodorant was a good product. My wife is upset that we're, we're getting out of deodorant. She loves our deodorant and uses it all the time. I hated the deodorant because as a man with hair under his arms and no weird product in it to make it smooth. When you'd use it, it'd like rip hair out as you're using the deodorant. And I, and I remember using it, just thinking to myself, you know what, I'm not using deodorant anymore. I became a no deodorant guy, right? I was selling deodorant as a no deodorant guy. Guess what? It wasn't working, right? 'Cause I wasn't using it anymore. That all happened where it's like I had a big idea, deodorant's big, but we weren't delivering a unique, amazing experience. The reviews, the experience of other people around me were telling me that we weren't doing it. It wasn't that they weren't understanding, it's that we weren't delivering on what I wanted to deliver. Same with the bone broth, which can— we got canceled. I love the bone broth product that we had, but the problem was only 1 out of like 20 people loved the bone product. The other 19 would buy it and get pissed off, right? So it's like, this is not delivering a good experience. So big opportunity matched with a product that fits. That big opportunity for the masses. And then proof of concept is making the opportunity work financially. If the cogs are too high, you can't do it. If the cost of acquisition's too high, you can't do it. If people don't understand the product, you can't do it. You have to like figure out the, the actual math behind making this work. That's kind of where we leaned into, like with deodorant, margins are real bad, can't actually grow the business. With protein, plant protein, actually margins are pretty bad and in plant protein too, but it still worked a little bit better because of just how big the market could be. But yeah, so big opportunity, good product, and then making sure the numbers work. That was kind of how I look at opportunity today.

Does that apply to something like chess where you've got, I mean, in this, in this case, the big opportunity was I wanna beat my dad.

Yeah. I want to not do 100 pushups.

Yeah.

And by the way, when you're like 9 doing 100, that sucks.

Yeah.

I wanted to never do that again.

So it's, it's impactful to you. It was, it was the biggest thing in the world to me. Biggest opportunity you could see.

Yes.

And you had to learn a different way of playing. So you studied the books, but then the hustlers are teaching you how to combine this and this gives you the unique way to be able to play. So there's this big opportunity to you and you find your unique way of doing that.

We did that in retail, by the way. So, you know, retail, I'm a D2C guy. I spent my whole life as a direct response copywriter, basically. I'm a copywriter. That's how I would identify myself. Not, not these days. I'm not really copywriting anymore, but I would identify as a direct response guy. When you sell online, a free with purchase is a very good offer. Like, oh, buy this, get this free swag item. Get this shaker cup, get this tote bag. That works really well for generating sales. And I was like, why can't we do that in stores? Well, stores, it's like, oh yeah, just put a thing on there, go let them claim it on the website. I'm like, I don't wanna do that. If they, if they, if they get a thing to go to the website, then I have to ship it to them. I have to lose money shipping it. Like this, this is a mess. I want you to put it on the shelf next to my product. And they're like, I don't wanna give you shelf space. I was like, well, if you're letting me buy an end cap, can I put anything on the end cap?

Hmm.

No one wanted to listen to this, by the way. Eventually we got another one of the forefronts here. I think it was Fresh Thyme was one of the first bigger stores that said yes to this. I think it was Fresh Thyme. They let us put our protein on end cap with our shaker cups. Buy a protein, take a free shaker cup. Shaker cup's like a $20 value and they were giving 'em out for free in line. And then we saw the numbers. We had a velocity as if the product was on sale at full price. And now we see those numbers, remember tested it. Now we go to the other stores, hey, I want you to do this, I want you to do this, I want you to do it. And we all of a sudden we have this everywhere now. One of our main promotions every year is give away a free, a free big item on shelf in-store experience. And when we did that, people kept coming up to me like, you know, how'd you do this? No one ever does this in retail. I was like, yeah, retail didn't even want to do this in retail until we literally harassed them until they said yes. And that's kind of how that is. But same thing is like you talk about combining multiple worlds. I think that's what allows people to win is when you have an experience over here or experience over there and you combine everything and make it work. You know, they don't want to give you the shelf space, but I'm already buying the shelf space. And if I'm trying to sell the units, what does it matter what I put on the shelf if it sells the units? Most people put like comboxes, and we do too sometimes, like, you know, uh, comboxes, like, uh, signage on the end cap. I'd rather just put a shaker cup there of a free item that they could take with purchase. This is obviously way easier to say than it is to execute, but we did pull it off.

Yeah, you found some way to be just different enough to where it stood out. In a really big opportunity backed by a good product. And then you use your marketing chops to bring new things to the table. I actually, we pulled some of the quotes that you shared when you keynoted the Capitalism Conference a few years ago.

Only two people know what I said there. You and God, because I don't remember.

The internet remembers everything. So two of them that stand out to me were things about how you see marketing.

Yeah.

That I want to know if, if you still agree with these statements today or if anything has changed. So one of them is we don't do content. We just buy ads and send them straight to sales pages.

Yes. Still do that. We buy ads, send them to sales pages. No content. Some of our ads are content, like there's a recipe or something, and some of the influencer stuff that's being done, they're making content, but still the primary way that we drive value is by offering our product to people. And if they want to buy it, they buy it. And sometimes we'll do a free with purchase offer. Sometimes we'll do a story. Sometimes there'll be a recipe or use case. But generally, I went from being a content guy where I was publishing podcasts, YouTube. I think I, I think I have over 100,000 subs on YouTube as an example. Like I was making a lot of content and now we do zero content. And we're, we're going to keep it that way.

Another quote, we don't do remarketing. In fact, I hate remarketing.

Yeah. So we have—

Remarketing meaning like retargeting ads, follow-ups.

So we don't do remarketing as a big part of the spend. I want my ads to hit people that are new customers. One of the internal metrics we look for is I like my, if I'm buying an ad, I want the person that I'm acquiring from those ads to be about 90% net new customers. The repeat customers kind of figure themselves out, right? Because if they like the product, they're going to find a way to buy it. I can't track if they buy it in store. I can't track if they buy it on Amazon. I don't really focus on remarketing that way.

That's really interesting. You let the product do the selling for itself. Yes.

The product's good enough. You will come back. Can we improve in this area?

Sure.

Of course we can. We do some like retargeting email lists and stuff like that. Like, hey, You're a buyer. We know you bought from us. We'll try to send you emails, obviously. I guess an email, an SMS, that is remarketing. It's just not buying advertising. But we don't put our ad spend to reach out.

You don't put dry powder towards people who have already converted. Yeah, we let the email and SMS and all that other stuff figure it out.

That's interesting.

Uh, the final quote that I wrote down is, people don't buy because they like your product. They buy because they believe what you believe.

Yes.

We've talked a lot about product. So, How does that match with what you're saying in this quote?

One thing I feel like I've missed so far up until this point, we're having this great conversation and I'm talking about product, I'm talking about business opportunity, but what I didn't tell you and what I didn't really focus on is the mission of the brand. The mission of the brand is that we want to create products that people use in their daily life without weird ingredients in them. That's it. That's the mission. When we first started that mission, this was driven a lot, a lot of that vision was driven by one of my co-founders, you know, 'cause she was known as the Food Babe. She was, very big into that mission. That was the main mission and people latch onto that mission. As that mission became more and more mainstream, we are now the default option for that mission because we owned that mission, that identity, that unique selling proposition, that thing that makes us different. You could read books like Positioning by Al Ries or Culture Code or Donald Miller, I think is the guy, StoryBrand. Yeah, that's a great book on this too. So like you can kind of lean into this idea of mission and we didn't do it to be some like marketing gimmick. It's who we are. Right? Like, I believe in this stuff. I remember when I was having my kid, and this is, remember, I, my wife was pre— we were trying to have a kid. We eventually had the kid in 2018. So the first year in business, I had my first kid, which is interesting.

But it was the same thing for me, by the way. What a driving force for growth.

Yeah. But also like stressful.

Oh yeah.

Especially because I just killed my income stream and I have a new income stream. So like the whole thing is like wild. I remember when we were going through all this stuff, my wife started changing all the products that she was using. She started not buy the regular shampoo anymore, and she wanted the one without the chemicals in it and all this stuff. 'Cause we was, we were trying to have a kid. And then I remember when my kid eventually got sick, when we had the kid, she got sick and they told me to get like some, some brand of product, some like, uh, electrolyte product. And I'm looking at it, it's got like artificial colors in it. I'm like, why am I, I don't even think the kid could see color yet. Right? Like, I, I don't, I think they're technically colorblind for like a few months. Right? So like, why, why are they putting all these artificial colors in this kid's drink? And I was like, this is stupid. So like, it stands with Mission, right? Mission is take all this weird stuff out of product. You can sit here and argue about is it safe, is it not safe, is it safe, the dose makes the poison. I don't care about any of that. The bottom line is I don't want artificial food dye in my product that I'm eating. It doesn't need to be there, right? I don't eat it for the color. Put the color in there for the marketing. So like, we stand for this and we were neurotic about it. We actually are probably more neurotic about our ingredients than we even tell people about. Like, we don't have gums in our, in our protein powder or flow agents. And I remember when we first tried to convince a manufacturer to make a protein powder without a flow agent, they're like, oh, can't be done. I'm like, what do you mean can't be done? Just don't put it in there. Just take it out. Like, don't put it in the product. They said, oh yeah, but how is it going to run through the machine? Like, we make product for people, not machines. I don't care about how it runs in your machine. I think, well, how are we going to package it? And he's like, it's going to get caught in the spout. I was like, oh, it gets caught in the— just hit it. Just hit the spout. It'll come down. So the first, like, year, dude, no joke, we were actually— we had people in our co-packer hand-filling bags of protein with scoops, hand-filling it. Now, mind you, they already had a process to hand-fill. The reason why I know this is because they use a machine, fill it through the spout, get in there, they weigh it. If it doesn't match the weight, they put a little more in there. I was like, just do that. Skip everything else. Did that. Eventually they put like a vibrating ring on the spout and it just shakes the powder down. It's great. But we wanted to take everything out of the product that didn't need to be there, that didn't have any sort of direct benefit or reason. I do that now where my business partner Vonnie is way more strict about this than I am. I try to take a little bit more of a normalized approach where we're just not gonna have this type of stuff in the house. But if I'm going out to dinner, I'm not gonna be that friend that says, oh, I can't, I can't eat anything here. This is weird. It's not organic, right? But I try, like, in the house, we'll, we'll, we'll try to buy the best stuff we can. But I try not to let that impact a daily life, which is, some people might say, um, off-brand, I guess. But the same token, not everyone has caught up. Today, it's way more caught up than what it was back then, like.

Yeah, I wanted to ask you if the approach has had to shift at all now that the market has kind of caught up to you. I mean, you had your big enemy, which was big food.

Yeah.

And you ran against that. But now with the maha movement and organic kind of being almost mainstream, has your marketing had to shift to keep up with where we are in, in the cycle? Or has that been a, a tailwind for the growth of Trevani?

So we started by leaning into good ingredients first. The problem is back then people didn't care.

Mm-hmm.

Today, even with how much press it's getting, the unfortunate reality is most people still don't care. Now we want to make them care because we believe that this is the future and we make our products, they cost more money to make like this. Like we're suffering because of this. But the unfortunate truth is not everyone cares. We have seen this in advertising where if you lead with some of these messages, it's like, sure, they might get some good reach, but it's not scale. For every one person that cares about artificial colors or artificial sweeteners, there's probably 20 people that don't.

As I'm drinking a diet Dr Pepper.

Listen, I'm not judging you about a diet Dr Pepper.

That's good. 'Cause there's basically like an IV of sucralose into my veins right now.

Yeah.

Still buy Trevani, but yeah, you know, I drink a lot of zero sugar Coke and Dr Pepper.

I totally get it.

Sorry for shitting on your marketing campaign right in the middle.

So, so the point is that like you could stand for it. And by the way, I, I like Diet Coke too. I just try not to drink it all the time.

Sinner.

The point is, is that there's a lot more people that care about something tasting good. So what we found is in our marketing, we lean in sampling, but our messaging is always what we call a delectable treat. Protein that tastes like ice cream as an example, or protein that tastes like a brownie, or, or this is a chocolate brownie. And if you look at our snack bar line, the first few bars are traditional snack bar flavors. Our next line, the stuff that tastes really good is like chocolate cherry. Sugar cookie, snickerdoodle, chocolate chip banana bread, and they all taste like this. And we go for the delectable treat option. We market the protein with delectable treats as well, because at the end of the day, what people really want these days, I think the mass appeal, like if I'm trying to sell to a very small, build a very small business, you would do an activism-based brand to only activists, or you could be an activist brand that convinces regular people to use your product. We find that it's easier to convince them to treat themselves than it is to care about every little thing that they're eating. So we rather get you in like with the Trojan horse of, hey, make a healthy brownie.

Hmm.

But you're actually gonna get a really cool thing that's, you know, pretty good for you.

That's interesting. And so in doing so, you're meeting the customer where they're at. Yeah.

Collier, right? You wanna enter the conversation that's going on in people. So that's a, you heard the Blue Letter Book, or maybe you heard about the book or whatever. One of his famous quotes is you wanna enter the conversation that goes on in people's heads.

So you're meeting them there.

Yeah.

But as the the movement or the demand grows, you're, you're ready for it. So you have, you have tailwinds as the market kind of comes your way.

Yeah. And even for our brand, man, like a protein powder is not a female-forward product. Now you have plant protein is very female-forward, but if you look at protein powder 10, 15 years ago, it was fitness enthusiasts.

Yeah.

Bros. Bros. You look a little bit later, you have women who are now fitness enthusiasts that are also trying to up their protein. You have the protein, the macros, people and all this people trying to get more protein. We've found that our customer, we, we've surveyed about 40% of the people that bought our product during this survey that they did with a couple thousand respondents. Uh, they said they'd never taken a protein before. We're bringing new people in the mix.

Wow.

By the way, retailers love this 'cause the incrementality in the aisle is demonstrable. When we come into the aisle, the aisle grows. So this gives us a lot of street cred, but they've never tried a protein before. This is big because our customer are what I call healthy enough people, people that aren't going to the gym 7 days a week. They're going to the workout class once or twice a week, mm-hmm, or once every other 2 weeks or whatever. They're getting their kids ready for to go to school and they're looking for a healthy snack on the way to school and they want a snack bar or, or, or a smoothie. These are people that care about what they're eating, but they're not neurotic about what they're eating. That's our core customer, which really is the biggest group of people too. Mm-hmm. 'Cause most people wanna be healthy, they wanna feel good, but they're not necessarily gonna be fitness enthusiasts. Now, the younger generation is a little bit different. I think the younger generation is a little bit more into fitness these days than— I think that's probably driven by TikTok, Instagram, and the visual nature of everything today. But I think most people just wanna be healthy enough, healthy enough to not have any pain.

Really? Yeah.

And that's kind of, kind of our market. And those people, they want a brownie. They're not trying to not eat sugar for 4 weeks. You know, maybe they'll, they'll do a cleanse or something, but they're not super crazy about it.

But your, your positioning has been mass market enough that you're, you're in most Walmarts, right?

And Walmart's a funny story, but yeah, Walmart, we, we launched in 4,200 Walmarts, which wasn't the plan, to be honest with you. They came to our booth in Expo, said, hey, we see your numbers are great. We'd love to launch you. Eventually they were gonna launch us in 2,000 doors and then like a month before we launched, like, you know what, let's put you in 4,200 doors.

Wow. So you had to call an audible there.

Oh, that was a mess. Yeah. That was a mess.

But that, but you had, you, you're mass market enough to where you're in 4,000 Walmarts.

Yeah.

That's, it's such an interesting balance where you have your core super fans.

Yeah.

But yet those core super fans have brought it to the rest of the market enough to where now it's a mass market idea.

Yes.

Has, has that forced you to shift the way that you communicate about the brand or your customers?

Most of the shift came from leaning against ingredients, even though we do all the right things with ingredients, still we lean into delectable treats, which helps us for mass market. Got it. I mean, one of the numbers I've shared before is people want to launch a brand and build a business, but for us, we're, we're, we're just at a different scale these days. I used to think brand marketing was stupid. Stupid. It's not stupid. I understand it now. I didn't understand it then. I understand it now because you need awareness and demand for all the stores you're in. But like last July, right as we're launching in Walmart and we're doing all this other stuff, we actually launched in Walmart, Kroger, like 800 or so Kroger doors, and then, and launched all these new products and whatever. It's a crazy summer. In one month we shipped out, I think it was about 450,000 units of product.

Jeez.

In a month. Is wild to me, right? Like, I remember when we started this thing, you know, we were happy with a pallet of product. Now we have warehouses of product. It's like, how many warehouses do we have of stuff?

You had 5,000 units as your first term, right?

And now we're shipping out in a month. I remember when I was doing Social Triggers and I had a half million people on the email list and I'm thinking, I'm the biggest thing in the world. Half million people is a huge email list, right? We shipped 450,000 units of product in a month. That's crazy. That's multiple 18-wheelers just busting stuff around, right? Every week, if you think about it. I just remember when we first did our first half truck, and now we're filling multiple trucks. That's crazy to think about.

What is it like having a product that recognized all over retail? How does that versus being the number one on Amazon or crushing it with ads, does it change the business or the way people perceive the business?

When we were doing well on Amazon, no one reached out to us. When we started to blow up in retail, all those reports get syndicated through like Nielsen and Spins. And then we start coming up to the top of those reports. All of a sudden, we have some of the world's biggest private equity companies reaching out to us to try to like get a piece, right? Like, this is one of those things, success begets success. We never wanted to raise money. So we always fielded conversations just in case, so we kept up relationships or whatever. But that was kind of the story. We got in retail, became number one, and people start seeing you everywhere. And now everyone starts reaching out from private equity people to, to hiring for positions became easier because people want to work at your company. Like at any given moment, I'm getting emails from people saying, hey, I'd love to work at your brand. Right? That didn't happen when you're an Amazon company. Another thing that happens when you're a retail-focused brand is you just get seen by more people. All the time. When you're an online brand, people see you if you buy ads. When you're an in-store brand, they see you when they walk down the aisle, when you're on end cap. So people are getting exposed to you all the time. That's really big. So recruiting's easier. Uh, customers start to see you everywhere, and then when they see your ads, they're like, oh, I saw you in retail. Sometimes they buy you in retail 'cause they saw you in ads. But, but same thing, it just, it creates this omnichannel thing. And what's more important is, is that if you're trying to build a brand that has book value and actual growth, These days people aren't acquiring. I'm not saying I'm trying to sell my company. I'm, what I'm trying to say is that I might do something in the future, right? And I know that having an omnichannel brand that shows longevity and success in all channels is worth way more than an Amazon brand.

I want to close by running a few words or phrases by you, and I just want to get your hot take. Okay. So we're going to call this Hot Takes with Derek.

Okay. Uh oh.

I'm gonna pull out a word from the space and, or, or related to right now. And I just want to get Derek's hot take, whatever comes to mind. You ready to play Hot Takes with Derek?

I'm worried because I have a lot of hot takes and they're not, they're not always the nicest.

Well, here we go.

All right.

Number 1, discounts.

I used to be anti-discounts. Now I think they're great. The reason why is when I first got into this business, I thought that discount, oh, you're discounting your customer, you're discounting your, what a mess. You're gonna devalue the brand. Wrong. Now, especially with consumables, when you discount your product and you offer an easier way for people to try your product, you're giving them an opportunity to try your product. They still have to buy your product afterwards. If you're a consumable brand, discounts are your best way to drive trial, and you should absolutely lean into it. I did no discounts for a long time. I don't do discounts that often. I like free with purchase offers better, cuz it, that's an implied discount. You get a free item as well, but Discounts are a very important way to get people to use your product once.

Next, Walmart.

I had a lot of misconceptions about Walmart when I first got into business. I read a book called Walmart Effect. This book made me believe working with Walmart is one of, is a disaster for brands because the demand, they push you on margins, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff happens. What I've come to learn today. Is I think Walmart is a great partner actually. I think Walmart is just upfront about their expectations.

Hmm.

There are some retailers that are not upfront about their expectations and they nickel and dime you after the fact, and they surprise you with these things. Walmart just lets you know what's going on. Mm-hmm. Upfront. It was actually, you know, they, they say big box retail. Is not a great way to do business. I think big box retail is a great way to do business because you just know what you're getting into and they're great partners. I think small box retail, like some of the mom and pops that kind of got us, I love those people too because they're out there sharing the message. They're super users. They're not as faceless as a big box retail person, but they're, they're out there pushing the product. And then the last thing I'll share is as an activism brand that cares about ingredients, A lot of people reached out to me and said, hey, you know, we, we're actually launching in Target soon. I don't know when this is gonna air or whatever, but we're, we're in Target and we're all also in Walmart. And people are like, well, you know, how do you care that your product's so clean in a store like, let's say Walmart, that doesn't always have all clean products? And I said, look, it's not up to me to decide where people want to buy a clean product. Walmart has reach, and I take great pride in knowing that they were willing to give our clean brand a shot in their store. And if that gets more people access to cleaner products, I'm happier for it.

Beautifully said. Tariffs.

Okay. So a lot of people are talking about tariffs today, but tariffs were a problem for me last year before today. One of my key ingredients is pea protein. Pea protein's made when people make noodles, right? They make pea noodles or whatever, and then there's pea protein is one of the byproducts. A lot of peas are, let's say, grown in the US and Canada and often sent to, let's say, a place like China or, or a place like India or a place that eat noodles to process, make the noodles, and then the pea protein, something that you could acquire. So last year there were a lot of tariffs that were implemented on pea protein. And at the time, you know, we were getting so big that you have to get pea protein from wherever you can get it, and it has to be the right quality. We always say that we're not loyal to the country in which a product comes from. We're loyal to the test results of how the product tests. Is it a good quality product and does it taste good? There were tariffs implemented from China specifically that were hundreds of percent. Oh, we had to get better at knowing how to, to manage this. So we had to kind of retool our sourcing and retool where we get our product from. And maybe we didn't change formulation, but we kind of had to really harden our supply chain to make sure we can continue making product. And that wasn't the easiest. Remember I said we launched in Kroger, we were supposed to be in 2,000 Walmarts, now we're in 4,000 Walmarts. And now we're like, well, where's the product going to come from? We're in the process of retooling supply chain, da da da. And we actually stocked out of product for almost a month. It may have been a little bit longer than that, to be honest with you. But like we had, we had some problems with stockouts. People weren't, you know, they were ordering product and we say that this is what was happening or whatever. So there was a headache. That said, today we have a different conversation around tariffs. It's hard to talk about tariffs from the perspective of whether it's good or bad without making it political in any way., but one thing I will say is I'm not for tariffs and I'm not against tariffs. I just view this as just another roadblock or obstacle that a good business person needs to overcome today. And that is not dissimilar to any other obstacle that you might encounter. You'll notice I quote a lot of books. I'm, I'm obviously a reader. Black Swan by Nassim Taleb. They talk about the black swan event always happens, and it's not whether it will happen. It's when it will happen. Every year there's a black swan event that makes everything a disaster for you. It's how you respond to the black swan event that makes you a better person. Remember, winning is eventual. You're gonna have these black swan events that throw wrenches in everything you're doing. It's how you respond to them. iOS 14, remember when that people were complaining about iOS 14? That was a huge black swan event that put people out of business. Tariffs are gonna do the same thing. All these things happen. Every single year, multiple times a year. Happened last year with the pea protein stuff. It's happening now. It's up to you to take what's happening and figure out how to solve that problem. Most people see a bad thing happen and, whoa, is me, my life is over, there's nothing I can do, and they run around with, in circles, just being stupid. It's like, well, look, this is not any worse than iOS 14 was. iOS 14 ruined people's businesses overnight. So that's kind of my viewpoint on Yeah, look, do I want to have a new thing that punches me in the face today? No, of course not. Right? It doesn't matter where you get your product from when you're a food company and you're sourcing lemons from Italy as an example, and I'm sourcing monk fruit from China because that's where it grows. And I'm sourcing peas from Canada because that's where peas grow. Like, I'm obviously getting the stuff, the best product I can from the country that it comes from. Tariffs are not great, but I understand that it's just another black swan event that I have to adjust for.

Influencers.

Yeah, I hated influencers for a really long time and I hated them because I remember that one thing that went viral. Oh, I don't get outta bed for 10 unless I get $10,000, right? And they kind of got this bad rap. Or if you look at some of the influencers that go to hotels, well, I'll give you publicity, you know, if you just gimme this for free. And that there's some bad raps there, but like all things, there are bad eggs that spoil the bunch or bad apples that spoil the bunch. And then there are a lot of great people. A lot of these influencers are hardworking, genuinely great people. And now that we've built an influencer division where we're gifting people, making ambassador events and doing all this cool stuff, I've become a little bit more open to the idea that not all influencers are bad and some are really just cool people that just happen to share what they do on the internet. I mean, I used to be one, I guess, right? So I, but I guess I hated myself enough to stop doing it. So that's why I asked, you know what I mean? So it's like, it's, it's kind of like this double-edged sword, but I think the wrong influencers are really bad and the right ones are really good.

Capitalism.com.

I am a bleeding heart business person and I always will be. I remember one of the first books I ever read was a book called, um, Winning by Jack Welch. I remember reading that book and I was like, oh, this guy, he's saying some really cool stuff. Then I read this other book called, um, Jack Straight from the Gut. I think that was the one written by a speechwriter. And I was telling myself at the time, like, I gotta go be CEO of a Fortune 100 company, right? I always loved business. I love creating businesses. I love creating products, solving problems. I love everything about it. I also think that capitalism is the great change of the world. You look at people, I've done a lot of reading on like the, the great monopolists of the 1800s and they, people look on 'em, call them robber barons. Yeah.

As an example.

I don't view them so unilaterally. I don't know what book this was, but someone said that business people, they're not a, they, they're not immoral and they're not moral. They're amoral. They usually have a problem that they're trying to solve. They'll do everything to make that happen. And I think that's really, really cool, right? We wouldn't have anything that we have today if it wasn't for capitalism in the 1800s and the Industrial Revolution and all these things that occur as a direct result of capitalism. I'm always gonna be pro-business in every sense of the word. And I think we have to prop business owners, entrepreneurs, and all these people up to create these things. And I wish they would do it to make it easier. Like, you wanna talk about tariffs today? Like, one of the things I keep saying is like, you know, We're putting tariffs in place today because we want to incentivize US manufacturing. Great. I love the concept. Uh, if, if that's a goal for you, offer a tax credit to people to build a manufacturing plant in the US. I mean, there's tax credits they give people who make movies. Movies are one-time productions that will produce and then be gone. At least if you give a tax credit to people building a manufacturing facility, and they do some, like there was one for, I think, semiconductors in 2022, but you want to manufacture food here. Hey, give a tax credit, we'll build a manufacturing plant and those will last for decades. Not a one-time like movie tax credit, right? I'm all for incentivizing business owners to do the right thing. And I think that's where I guess capitalism comes in is I'm pro-money, pro-business, but how do you mesh that with also being, what's that word? I don't know who coined this, but like conscious capitalism I think is the right way to think about it.

John Mackey, founder of Whole Foods. John Mackey.

Yeah. So I, I like that a lot.

My last question for you is, do you ever miss the limelight and would you do it all over again?

This is one of those things where I'll probably eat my words because I did the limelight, I did speaking and it was fun for a little bit and then I hated it. And now in the last several years, I probably have done 3 speaking engagements and you, yours was one of them, but I will say I really like seeing some of the relationships that came out of the meeting of people at your events. One guy I met at Expo West again, I think I met him at your event. He has a company called Happy Curves? Happy— Happy Nuts?

Happy—

Do you know this brand? I think it's Happy Nuts or Happy—

They have done a phenomenal job.

Yes. So I met him at your event and then we reconnected recently.

He was doing like, he was doing like $30K a month.

Yeah.

You know, on Amazon and now they have a multi-eight-figure company.

They're great.

They've just done a phenomenal job.

So I met him at your event and I reconnect with him. So I, do I miss the limelight for the limelight's sake? No. I miss meeting cool people. And when you're on stage, it's way easier to meet cool people. That's one thing that changed actually. When I was internet famous for being a business marketing person, a lot more people wanted to be friends with me. Because they're like, oh, what could you do for me? Right? I can relate to this. Now it's, I don't have anyone trying to be my friend. I have to like try to make friends.

Oh, you mean it in a positive way where it was easier to meet people.

Way easier to meet people.

But people also want things from you too.

They way easier to meet people and they want something, which is, by the way, a lot of those people that I made friends with back then, I'm not really friends with today because I have nothing to offer them. But these days I find myself wanting to connect with cool people. And so maybe I might, I keep saying maybe I'll do a podcast. I don't think I'm gonna do a podcast, but maybe I will. Or maybe I'll do, like, there's always people that say, oh, do you wanna be an advisor? And I was like, eh, I'm kind of busy. I don't really, you know, I have my kids, I have my company. I don't know if I can do it, but I was like, maybe I'll be an advisor. And I keep tossing around this idea, and this is going on, by the way, for 4 years. So it's not like, and I haven't done anything with it, so clearly I don't care enough to do it. But will I do it again? Maybe. And I do know that whatever my next act will be, I'll probably be CPG for the rest of my life.

Mm-hmm.

Because I love CPG. I could see myself moving more into an advisor role or private equity role in the future that tries to incubate brands to certain levels and kind of lean into that just because I really like it. I haven't really done like, hey, I'm gonna do that this year. You know what I mean? That's just kind of me kicking around ideas.

Well, whenever you do it, you'll have the full support of Capitalism.com.

That's good to hear.

Derek, I'm fascinated by the story. I'm a fan of Truvani. I can't wait to see what you do next. Thanks for hanging out with us.

Thanks for having me. I could say that you were one of my first speaking engagements as a Truvani person, and I think this might be my second ever interview as a Truvani person. You somehow managed to get me outta my hole multiple times and In all fairness, I didn't even know you when I agreed to— like, I knew of you obviously, but I didn't know who you were or what you stood for. That's a testament to you and what you're building, because you're building something that's interesting enough for making me want to leave the house.

Thank you. Well, I appreciate the exception. I'm a fan, my friend. Good to see you.

And nice to see you too.

One of the reasons I'm so inspired by Derek is because he walked away from cash flow to build enterprise value. Enterprise value is what can make someone rich the fastest. We obsess over cash flow as entrepreneurs. What is the money left over at the end of the month? But the faster you can shift over to thinking about enterprise value, building a really valuable company, that is when you can pull all kinds of levers to create a dramatic amount of wealth. And the fact that he walked away from cash flow to build enterprise value, walked away from millions of dollars of cash flow to build something that was starting from zero and is probably worth a billion dollars. Today just shows you what is possible when you go all in on enterprise value. If you're at the beginning of your journey, you wanna follow in the footsteps of people like Derek and our clients and all the entrepreneurial success stories that have gotten to 7 figures and beyond, the best place that you can start is at Capitalism.com/100K. This is our playbook, our best resources, and our AI tool to help you follow the 8-step plan to a million-dollar business. If you're building a 7-figure brand and you need some mentorship, I would be honored to support you on your journey. Just subscribe to the channel. My name is Ryan Daniel. I help entrepreneurs build 7-figure brands to have multimillion-dollar exits, and it's a pleasure to be a part of your 7-figure journey. Thank you for watching, and I'll see you on the next episode.