How To Get To $1,000,000 FASTER | Road To $1M

Several times a month I make myself available to the members of the 1% to help them on their road to 1 million. And sometimes I invite my friends or some of our previous success stories to have them give their intel and their insight into some of the brands that are on the rise inside the 1%. One of those people is Josh Hahn who has become a friend and an ally. And he's also done some mentoring for other people inside the 1%. Josh started a business that hit a million dollar run rate after just a few months and I was asking him how he did it, what his strategy was and then we opened up the line for Q and A. What you're about to hear is a conversation between myself, Josh and one of our members who is at the early phase of her journey. But she's got some interested parties that might want to give her money. So in this clip we dive into how she should structure things in order to protect herself, protect her decision making power, but also give her the fuel to be able to build a multimillion dollar business. This clip is a little bit detailed and I'm here to tell you that if you come through the 1% or the capitalism incubator, these are the kinds of conversations that you're going to have. Within a few months. There will be people who want to fund your business. There will be influencers who want to take part in what it is that you're doing. There will be mentors and advisors who have built multimillion dollar companies that want to be a part of what you're doing. Because we know what to do and we've seen, seen what works. And if you want to follow in both of these individuals footsteps, come apply for a spot inside the 1%@capitalism.com 1.

Hi Ryan. Hi Josh.

Hi. Good to see you. I heard you had big news this week.

Yeah, we had a lot of news. I've experienced the real, the real Capcom crash, but it was good.

Well, tell, tell, update everybody with what's going on because I've heard you had some good news.

Sure, yeah. So left Capcon. My goal was to take a sale. We took 53 pre sales was really kind of flying high.

Congratulations.

Thank you. And then I was practicing my pitch deck with some of my family and friends and I actually was offered not equity investment. I was just offered money to help get the vision going. So pretty substantial amount. So Josh, like this is so perfectly timed and I really appreciate you sharing your story. So I went from that to having. Now I've had three people offer me Investment at this point, I've only taken one so far because I need to process through it. And this was like exactly why I'm having some trepidation. And then I get an email from our CO man that my low sugar, high protein snack has more sugar in it than a Coca Cola. And I was like, flip it out. So she had my spec sheet. She had everything. She said she was prioritizing the protein content and in doing so, I think she was trying to mask the taste. Anyway, I went. It was a whole week. Greg's amazing. Greg Johnson, shout out to you for being awesome. But ended up working with somebody that has a mutual contact from the 1% and from the incubator. And I got a new co man and a new. Within like four days, a new co man and a new food scientist. So just signed my contract with her yesterday, did a lot of research. She's in every grocery store across the country. So it was the right thing. Right? It just was a little bit of growing pain. So I feel you on the, on the post Cap Pond crash for sure.

So you've, you've. But you've had 53 pre sales, you've gotten funding and you've secured a new CO man. That's a, that's. If you're doing that during a Capcom crash, you're doing just fine.

Emotionally it feels different, but that's good.

I get it, I get it. Where are you based by the way?

I'm in West Palm Beach.

Okay, cool. All right. What, what can we help you with?

Yeah, perfect. So I appreciate it now that you have the backstory on like where I am with the funding piece and kind of the understanding. What I'd like to ask you, Josh and Love Ryan's two cents as well, is like, how would you have structured this differently if you were going to redo Shroom Junkie? I understand you're going to take that knowledge and go crush whatever next thing you do, but I am curious, like if you had the chance to do it again, would you change the ad strategy and kind of keep the same and also have a board or would you have done it a little differently? I'd love to know.

Good question.

Well, I would say at the beginning, like just taking on money, you don't want to really necessarily have people that have voting rights right out of the gate. So. So what I would say is do like a convertible note or something like that. Just because that kind of makes the most sense. And once if you start growing and getting to a certain size, you can Change that over into shares and all.

That kind of stuff.

But, like, that's how I would deal with, like, just getting random investment dollars. And that's probably, like, you could even do, like, a safe, which actually kind of protects you even more. But, like. And it's not necessarily as great for the investors, but. But it's another option. I take a look into it. But what I would say around what I would do differently is, like, if. If you take a look at milk, we have really good margins in milk, but there's not a lot of dollar value in there. So if ingredient prices go up, if really there's like a shift in the tides a little bit, I. I'm gonna have to weather that storm. So when I start taking a look at, like, how to make money with a milk product, people. People already have, like, a preconceived notion of how much I can charge. If I charge above that, then they're like, what is this? Like, this is ridiculously expensive. So my thought process is I'm gonna go after the premium market. Especially if, like, the market goes in weird directions over the next year. People that have money will still have money, so they're willing to pay a premium for products that help promote health and wellness. Like, that. They just will. So I. I see that as, like, kind of where I would head just as a business.

You would.

Yeah, exactly.

So from the investment standpoint, you would do more of.

Convertible note so that there wasn't as much voting power. Yeah. And then. And then you would. On the. On the customer side, you would go after a premium customer.

Yes. What I would. What I would do from your standpoint of where you're at today, it sounds like you have high protein, low sugar snack or whatever it is. Hopefully it's really light and not heavy like milk.

So I would. I would focus on trying to find the best shipping rates that you can and minimizing that cost as much as possible. And then I would also focus on creating the bundles of, like, to get it to where you could break even on, like, how much it costs to acquire customers the same as it would to sell that customer. So what. Whatever that is. Because if you have a great product, lifetime value is no problem. So that's why I would really focus hard on figuring out how to minimize your cost as much as possible so that you can actually acquire a customer for how much they purchase in the first order.

Caitlin. The actual only thing that I would change is I probably would raise more money. I would raise more money than I thought. I Needed because the goal is to create the biggest pie possible, not to control as much of the pie as possible. And in those early stages, like I like to say, I turned $600 into 16 million, so I should have put more in than $600. So at the early stages when you're getting off the ground, I would raise more than I thought I needed and until I got to profitability and then I would have a property proper rate. Josh, you look like you want to butt in.

Oh yeah, that's 100. Like if you heard like the backstory for me, we raised a million dollars and didn't think we were gonna have to raise a single dollar.

You're a bit of an anomaly, right? Like a million dollars. I raised 600, you know, at the beginning of my business. Like it all can work, but let's.

Just say more varying scales though the idea behind it is that yes, definitely early on when you don't know a lot of these things like co main issues or whatever, or there's so many things that can happen. We had a great example where.

In the middle of our first production run, the piece that never breaks broke and they don't have a replacement piece to that. And the only place in the world that had it was like France or something. And the problem was is that we are, we have our product in a tank and it has a certain time limit until we have to dispose of it. So we had to get a first class ticket for that part, put it on an airplane, fly it, install it and just hope it worked. And it. Luckily it did and we were able to save it. But the point being is that you don't know when stuff like that's going to happen.

So.

And if we did that, we'd probably be out of about 100 grand if we didn't solve that issue. So the whole point is, like Ryan said, take more money than you think.

Okay, quick follow up question to that. And I realize this is a bit of a novice question, so I'll preface, I'll preface that. So when I considering taking investment, one of the trepidations I have is like where I'm going to put that money. Is that money going like inevitably? Yes. In the larger scheme, it's all going to go to make more money because it's going to make the project run and to acquire customers. But when I think about like where it gets allocated and so that's the problem.

I just. Because the reason I'm interrupting here is because when you're thinking about if I've Got money. Where is it going to go away? That's a problem. You see what I'm saying? I'm going to raise money. Where am I going to spend this? You don't. Okay. You don't spend all of it. You keep a six month Runway and you keep money there for higher inventory runs and you still treat the business as if you've got nothing. Nothing. Right. You still be protective of those dollars. But now you have Runway so that when you, you can have six months to test your ad creative and lose money in those six months and break even on ad spend and just, and lose as little as possible until you scale up. Like those are the things that, the money, it's there to give you a click cushion for you to make good decisions, not for you to just go.

Yeah, I've set up a rule in place. I won't spend it for 90 days because I wanted to make sure I go through a thing. But I still, I didn't realize that was like the heuristic to have a six month run rate. Okay, that was helpful. Thank you.

Yeah. Or three like it just having a cushion. Right. Giving you a cushion to be able to make appropriate decisions for the long term growth of the business.

Yeah. So you don't have to make the short sighted decisions that will hurt the business growth later on.

Last question. Because I want to give others a chance. You mentioned testing out your ads and stuff. Is that something you were operating yourself or did you have like a partner that you worked with, like a specialist and then you, you know, you just manage it?

I didn't want to kill myself and do everything in the business. So I did hire an agency to help with the ad creative. I had another agency that helped with email marketing. I had another agency that. Well actually same agency did Amazon. So anyways, there's, there's agencies that I lean on to be able to get quick support and to push the buttons. But I, I make sure that I have an understanding of those things and how they work. Or I lean on a friend or somebody that I know that's really good at that and say, hey, does this make sense? Like they're telling me this but this is happening. Doesn't. Does this make sense? And then I can go back and make them better at their own job.

Thank you guys. Josh, I wish you the best. Can't wait to see what you do.

Give a quick plug for your product.

Okay, sure. So snacks by nature. Mighty morsels just closed pre sale. We are high protein, low sugar made by nature for you to go. Take your kids out and enjoy. Enjoy getting back to nature. Connecting. You can find us on snacksbynature.com and you can check out our parenting podcast at Parenting on purpose on YouTube.

Good work. All right, we'll see you later. Thanks for being here. If you're on the road to 1 million or you want to be, the fastest way to uplevel is get around people who ask you questions that make you uncomfortable, who bring up topics that you don't know the answer to. Because when we start talking about launch plans or million dollar run rates or raising capital, these are all things that are new to most entrepreneurs. And and it's also the things that will take you to a multimillion dollar business. We are here to support you and we have a plan to get you four products at 25 sales a day at a $30 price point. So you've got $1 million business after 12 to 18 months. Let's start you on the road to 1 million. Come join us at capitalism.com/one, fill out the form and we'll see if it's a fit to help you build your multimillion dollar brand. I'm Ryan Daniel Moran with capitalism.com I'll see you guys next time.