will nitze is the founder and ceo of iqbar, the brain and body nutrition brand behind plant protein bars, iqmix hydration and instant coffee, now sold in retailers like costco, target and whole foods. he joins sean to trace how iqbar went from buckets of fiber syrup in his kitchen and a half-salary deal with his old boss to a kickstarter he treated as proof, not funding. he gets into riding the keto wave on amazon, the cvs launch that went sideways, and running a 15-person "hub and spoke" company. plus his idea of "trend surface area," why being on shelf is a free facebook ad, and why you should only take advice from people who did what you want to do in the last 24 months.
In this episode of Read Receipt, Sean sits down with Will Nitze, founder and CEO of IQBAR, the brain and body nutrition brand behind plant protein bars, IQMIX hydration, and instant coffee. Will traces the build from buckets of fiber syrup in his kitchen to a Kickstarter he treated as proof of concept, riding the keto wave on Amazon, the CVS launch that went sideways, and running a lean 15-person hub-and-spoke company. He digs into his idea of trend surface area, why being on shelf is a free Facebook ad, and why you should only take advice from people who did what you want to do in the last 24 months.
Will Nitze: Like anyone who's trying to sell you a playbook is lying or wrong. It, it does not exist because what worked 10 years ago does not work today.
Sean: I am super excited to have you back for another episode of Read Receipt. It's a deep dive into the how and why of the brands we love and the creatives behind them. From blueprints to launch day, customers as community, and the detours in between. Big lessons and easy listening. Read Receipt is hosted by Antidote, the email and SMS marketing agency by people who hate boring emails.
Will Nitze: So maybe you don't know who IQBAR is, but on the front of pack it says 12 grams plant protein and one gram sugar and nine grams fiber. While low sugar and high protein and, and high fiber have an incredible brand, launched IQMIX, which is our hydration line, which checked all those boxes for us. We created the profile of the bar to be low carb, low net carb, and low sugar really for, for brain purposes, so you're cognitively you're not crashing. Cool.
Sean: So you're in Austin right now. Where are you typically based out of?
Will Nitze: I'm in Miami Beach.
Sean: What was your background before launching IQBAR?
Will Nitze: My background well, so I had one job outta college. Well, I'll reverse back to college. I studied psych and neuroscience and poli sci, kind of a random smattering of things, and I didn't really know what I wanted to do with my life in college. A lot of my friends were going into banking and consulting and tech and things like that, and I just, none of those really, like, pulled me i- in any given direction. And I worked for a Harvard Business School professor on the side who was an organizational behavior professor, and I loved the intersection of psychology and business, but I couldn't figure out how to turn that into a job. So, took a job in software sales right outta college in Boston, and I was selling ops and supply chain software to utilities and oil and gas companies, energy companies more broadly. And that was just by default. I, I just needed a job, and was not passionate about software, was not really passionate about oil and gas, and I got obsessed with nutrition at that time. This was like 2015, 2016, when paleo was getting really big, and I just basically just cut out carbs in my diet and started feeling way better. And at that same time, too, I read a book called Mission in a Bottle by the guys who started Honest Tea, and it was a really cool, first of all, just cool book. It's a graphic novel format, which is the only business book I've ever read in comic book format. But it goes through all the ups and downs of starting Honest Tea. They bought a bottling factory almo- that almost took them into bankruptcy, and they came out of that, and ultimately sold to Coke, so there was this, like, cool highlight at the end and I was like, "I wanna do that." Like, for whatever reason, that really spoke to me. I was like, "I wanna go on a journey like that." And so getting into, you know, low carb whole food eating and reading that book at the same time just sort of married up in my brain and I was like, "All right. I'm gonna start a food company." Uh, so that was, that was how.
Sean: How did you... Did anything spawn you getting interested in nutrition or did you just get interested in it- Randomly
Will Nitze: Yeah, I mean, I, I just had a terrible diet and I felt like crap every day. I, I had a standard American diet. I drank ton of coffee, ate a lot of sugar, ate a lot of simple carbs, and like most people was crashing at 3:00 PM at my desk every day. And I was also working really long hours at the time, as most folks right out of college do in their first job. I was working like, whatever, 15-hour days and it just was not sustainable. I was having headaches and felt terrible. And so yeah, really just cutting carbs out, especially simple carbs and sugar, was transformational for me, mostly cognitively, and that's why I got interested in the intersection of nutrition and cognition versus just, you know, losing weight or having more energy or whatever. Was my diet re- like, I just thought more clearly and could, like... I needed two fewer cups of coffee a day. And I also read a book called "Grain Brain" at the time, which really changed the way I thought about the intersection of food and the brain, which was basically like, look, if you eat a standard American, American diet today, you're gonna feel like crap at 3:00 PM, but if you do that same diet for 30, 40 years, your brain's gonna literally shrink. Your odds of getting Parkinson's or just ge- you know, garden variety cognitive decline are way, way higher. And so that was like a total wake-up call for me, as well as me seeing it as like, oh, this, like there's an opportunity here to create something better.
Sean: Was it hard for you to, to switch your diet?
Will Nitze: No, not real- like, for whatever reason, if I like convince myself of something, that something's the right move, I'll just like throw myself in it and I'll completely transform, you know, whatever regimen, insert regimen overnight. Sa- same goes for exercise or like a work pursuit. Like, if I just decide I'm into it, it's like the next day I'm, I'm all about that
Sean: How did you, how did you start working on the idea for the brand and, and for the product initially?
Will Nitze: Yeah. Yeah. No, I had no, like, bedrock of knowledge. I didn't know anyone who had started... I, I didn't really know any entrepreneurs, honestly, at the time, and specifically didn't know any food and bev entrepreneurs. And, and then I also had zero food science knowledge, so I was starting from true zero. And what I did was I was like, "Okay, let me go work for a food and bev startup, learn on their dime, and then I'll start a company." And I was in Boston. There's not many food and bev startups in Boston, or at least there weren't at the time. But I found a couple and I interviewed, and I didn't get the job. I... Like, one of them just like couldn't afford to pay me, and then the other one, I just didn't get the job flat out 'cause I had no background in it. And so I was like, "Okay, I guess I'll just start my own." And so then I found a couple other food and bev entrepreneurs. I found a bar company startup in Boston, and I was like, "Hey, can I buy you coffee and ask you 100 questions?" And to their credit, they were like, "Yeah, sure." And I just hammered them with questions. It was like, "What should my gross margin be? Should I make this in a commissary kitchen or should I co-pack this? What's a MOQ typically per SKU?" And it's amazing. I mean, they gave me this whole, like, roadmap of how to start, and I basically just copied like 90% of what they did with, you know, my own product direction. And then on the product side, that was like brute, brute, brute iteration, just straight up, let me get all these ingredients in my literal kitchen and just start mixing them and trying them and giving them to my roommates and giving them to my girlfriend. And I was, like, calling Cargill and getting them to ship me, like, fiber syrup and things like that. And so I just had, like, buckets of fiber syrup in my kitchen. And- ... it was a chaotic setting for sure. And I, I basically did trial and error for about a year, and I thought I could do it in like two, three months, and ultimately it took a full year. And but yeah, at the end of a year... And by the way, I was working... I walked into my boss's office at the software gig one day and I was like, "I wanna do my own thing. However, I think I'm pretty valuable. You know, I think I'm hard to replace. What if you cut my salary in half and I worked half the hours? Would you be open to that?" I had no idea what the guy was gonna say, and he, he's like, "Give me a day." And then he came back the next day. He was like, "Okay. I'll give you six months." And that was, like, the best gift ever 'cause it, it removed a shot clock for me. It wasn't like, "I need to go to market in three months 'cause I'm gonna be out of money." It was like, "Okay, I can step back and-" And do this on my own time and be patient. And, and it, like anything, it took way longer than I thought. It took a full year to get to, like, actual decent prototypes. But yeah, when, when we were ready, I was like, "All right, let's go," and quit my job and launched a Kickstarter, and that was how we started.
Sean: Did you, um... How lo- how long did you end up staying at the job? Did you stay there for the full year on halftime, or did you exit- Yeah ... after the six months?
Will Nitze: No, I, I ended up, the six months became a year, so I did that for a, a full year.
Sean: What an incredible setup.
Will Nitze: Yeah.
Sean: Like,
Will Nitze: for the- I was killer because, I mean, I was probably working 60 hours a week or 80 hours a week or something crazy, but, like, on paper, I was working 40 hours a week, you know, as far as HR was concerned. And so when I was like, "Yeah, let me work half the time," I was like, I'm not gonna work, like, 80 divided by two. I'm gonna work 40 divided by two, you know? And so I was only working 20 hours a week, and when you're, like, young and you have infinite energy, and I had no kids, and, like, you can tack on an incremental 100 hours to that 20 hours. And so, yeah, it was incredible. I had enough money from, from that gig to, like, pay rent, groceries, and go to, you know, dinner on- out to dinner once a week or whatever. And then the entire rest of my schedule, I was just grinding on this.
Sean: So for the year that you were working on the, the product and, and formula, were you... What was the blueprint that the bar company that you went to coffee with gave you? Like how did they, how did they end up launching and what did you take from it? What was like the most helpful aspect? The
Will Nitze: most helpful thing was they linked me up with their co-packer, which was a little co-packer in Spokane Valley, Washington called Bumble Bar. I think they're, they have a different name now. But there's just a guy named Glenn and his wife Liz that ran it, and he's like, "I'll connect you with Glenn." And I talked to Glenn and I was like... Of course, at the time, it, it's like you have to sell yourself before you are, even are someone or even have a product, and it's like, 'cause it's not worth it for the co-packer to work with you if they think you're gonna go under in three months or whatever, or six months. And so you have to be like, "Here's why you should bet on me and do a trial with me and run our product. Here's why we're gonna last, you know, in, in, in, in the marketplace." But I would've not known to like talk, you know, give this guy a call had the, that bar company not been manufacturing with them and connected me with them and vouched for me. So that was huge. And then there's just so many ticky-tacky things. I, like I didn't know what Shopify was at the time and, and there were other platforms. There was like BigCommerce and, or you could, you know, have a WordPress site. You could... There's Wix, there's Squarespace. Like, and these guys were like, "Don't look at anything else. Use Shopify." And I was like, "Okay, I'll use Shopify." Then I was like, "Wait, how do you do payroll?" Like, they're like, "Just use Gusto. Like, here's the, you know, here's our referral link or whatever." And so I was just like, cool. Like I'm, I'm just cutting out all this like decision fatigue by just like, I'll just use your platform you use for website and payroll and like email marketing, da, da, da, da, da.
Sean: Are you still, are you still friends with, with this company?
Will Nitze: Man, I haven't talked to them in a while. I mean, this was like nine plus years ago, and that company went under sadly. But they're, and they're still... Went off and are doing great things. But no, I haven't, I haven't caught, caught up with them in years. But yeah, we were, we were chatting pretty heavily there in the first free- few years. I mean, it's a, such a cool thing about food and bev, it's so collegial, and people... It's not like cutthroat at all. You know, people are, at least at the startup level, people are s- like super open to sharing learnings and like helping you. E- even direct competitors, like which you would never... I would've never guessed that. But for whatever reason, in food and bev, it's, it's a very like collaborative thing. 'Cause it, you're not even really competing for the most part. Like your, your, your guys' shared competition is Coke and Pepsi and, you know, whatever, Mondelez and Hershey. And, um, so everyone's like, "Yeah, let me help you." And then there's a totally like pay it forward thing too, 'cause because they helped me, I've helped, I don't know, 100, 200 startups who are like, "Hey, can I get a half hour of your time?" And I always do it 'cause- That was done for me.
Sean: Yeah, that's awesome. When you, when you ended up leaving the company and you launched the Kickstarter, was that the, the only money that you planned on raising? Like, what was your short and long-term plans at that point?
Will Nitze: I mean, this is like a, a kind of a misconception about Kickstarter is that you can, like, raise... First of all, it's not even like raising money, it's pre-sales. And then there's this sort of misconception of like, oh cool, now you have the money to go run the business. It's like, no, that is how you prove the concept because your margin's terrible out the gate, and because you're only making like, you know, 20,000 units when to get any economies of scale you need to be making at least 200,000 units. Ideally, you know, a million plus units. And so you just have a terrible gross margin and you, you just make so many mistakes too, right? Like, you like ship with the wrong carriers 'cause you don't know that you can negotiate with FedEx to get lower than UPS or USPS or is cheaper than both of them or whatever. There's all this stuff that you're just paying like the, the dumbness premium 'cause you're just like, I, I just don't know where to squeeze cost out of this cost structure. And so yeah, we, we, we crushed it, you know, re- on a relative basis for, for a food item on Kickstarter. We sold roughly $75,000 and then had another 15,000 on Indiegogo, which was kind of a spillover campaign. So we sold basically $90,000 of product in the first two months, but then like all of that just goes away 'cause you then make the product and months later fulfill all those parcels and you're like, "Well, there's not much left," 'cause, and Kickstarter takes their 5%. So it really is a validator of an idea that then allows you to go raise money for your company, or at least that's how we treated it, versus like, oh, I now have fundraising from Kickstarter.
Sean: And, and did you, you ended up going out and raising money after the proof of concept?
Will Nitze: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we c- like bars are... It's not, we're not in perfume, you know, we're not in supplements. Your gross margin is not 70, 85, you know, 85% out the gate. It's like, you know, not, you know, 10% or something like laughably low, you know, right out the gate. Unless you price really high, but we learned pretty quickly that we wanted to be sharply priced because we just, we d- A, B, C, D tested like a bunch of price points and we found that, you know, 24.99 for a 12-pack like way outsold 29.99. And so we're like, okay, like we're gonna need money. We're gonna need to bridge the gap before we hit economies of scale. And so we raised 625K, I think was the figure, from angel investors in that first year. And then a year after that we raised a million bucks, and then 18 months after that raised 2.775 million, and then 18 months after that raised 5 million. So all told, we raised like nine and a half, 9.75, something like that, over the course of six years. And then we flipped profitable and we'll never raise again. But we definitely needed all nine and a half million, for sure.
Sean: How did you, how did you initially grow the brand? Was it through direct to consumer or, or retail?
Will Nitze: It was mostly Amazon, so it was e-com, but our D2C... We started on D2C, layered on Amazon, and Amazon just very quickly was, like, four or five X what D2C was, and I think that's very category specific. You know, Amazon just, whether anyone likes it or not, is, is where people shop for, like, everything and, and bars in particular is just an Amazon category. And so, like, the... What I-- When people are like, "Oh, why not, you know, push D2C harder?" What I always say back is, like, "When's the last time you bought a, a bag of chips on the chip company's website?" And it's always like, never. Like, no one's ever done that. It's not a thing people do. You buy it in stores or you buy it on Amazon, and it's kind of the same thing for bars. You know, we have a great D2C business to this day, but it's just like Amazon is so, such a Goliath that all our early growth really came from Amazon. And we got lucky. We created the profile of the bar to be low carb, low net carb, and low sugar really for, for brain purposes, so you're cognitively are not crashing. But it just so happened that keto became, like, this explosion at the same time. This was like 2019, 2020, and we were one of, like, three bars that were keto compliant, and so we just skyrocketed on Amazon 'cause people would just type in keto snack and it's like, there's like three things or four things and-
Sean: Crazy
Will Nitze: so we got kind of a lucky break there. We totally rode that trend. We had keto in huge lettering on the front of our packaging for years and years there, and then keto died and r- and a lot of the brands that were, like, all in on keto died, and we just sort of pivoted into low sugar, low net carb, and just kept growing throughout
Sean: It's so crazy that the, the timing and the trends of the different diets and everything hit
Will Nitze: And now it's GLP-1, right? Like, you know, within a couple years here, my guess is half of America's on GLP-1s. Like, it's just, the writing seems to be on the wall, especially when it is in pill format and is cost-effective. Like, everyone's gonna be on these things. So what does that mean? You know, that means protein and fiber front and center, smaller format, like more poppable items. There, there's a whole, like, laundry list of ways to play that trend and feed into that trend. But yeah, it's always something, you know? It was paleo, then it was keto, and then, you know, now it's GLP-1, and it'll be something else.
Sean: Is that, is that like a natural skill of yours to notice, notice the trends and be able to pivot the product into those moments?
Will Nitze: Yeah, for sure. I would say so. I mean, something that's cool about bars is there are many vectors within a bar. There's like... Or, or, or possible vectors. Like a protein, or like a tortilla chip, right? There's not that many vectors to that. It's like, are the ingredients clean, and like, does it taste good, and price. But with a bar, it's like there's like 10 vectors. It's like you can be clean label or not clean label. You can be low fiber or high fiber. You can be low protein or high protein. You can, you know, there, the price point's there, too. There are almost endless flavor profiles. You can be PB&J, you can be chocolate, you can be a cookies and cream, you can, you know, whatever. Like, there's just a lot of vectors there. The more vectors there are, the broader you can create a favorable trend surface area, which is this concept I'll talk about sometimes, which is basically like- Can you... Like, don't try to predict trends, but can you create a product such that almost no matter what the trend is, you can reposition and rebrand and shuffle your call-out hierarchy such that you are trend forward or aligned with trends? And so, like, for instance, we always had net carbs on our packaging when keto was a big thing, 'cause keto people care about net carbs. Keto then kind of died, and then it... Now we're shifting to pivoting into fiber. We were always low net carb and high fiber. It's just not that, you know, far fewer people cared about fiber in 2019, and now more people care about fiber. So that now makes its way as a, you know, on front of pack. So it's just shifting how you position the product, not actually changing the product. It's more so like, can you upfront create a high trend surface area product and then, like, listen to the market very closely and make micro adjustments each year or every 18 months or every 24 months?
Sean: Do, do you think that's more about the category or the specific makeup of the product? Bars seem like they're almost like utility that's always solving for multiple desires, I guess, that change
Will Nitze: Yeah, it's def- it's definitely the category. I mean, like bars are a functional item. People look for functionality. Like otherwise, why would you eat a bar, right? It's like, just eat anything else. They go to it because it's... I mean, bar is more or less conflated with protein bar. Like that was, I guess Clif was early on, like energy bar, quote unquote, but really how things have shifted now is like, you gotta have protein. And then it's like, okay, what kind of protein? Am I a plant protein consumer? Am I a whey protein consumer? And then do you have, are you fortified with fiber? 'Cause, you know, now I'm being told by my doctor I need more fiber. And, and so th- there's like the, the pro cells of like you have things in it, and then there's like the, the, the anti cell, which is like, and we don't have bad things in it, right? So a lot of people shop on the anti side 'cause they're like, "Oh, I want something, but it can't have gluten in it, it can't have sucralose, and I wanna be able to pronounce the ingredients and da, da, da." And so you got- you have to like win on both ends of that spectrum. You have to have the things people want and then not, you know, exclude the things they don't want. And but yeah, it's, it's, it is a category where people expect a certain level of functionality, and it's gotten harder and harder 'cause it's like people expect perfection. They're like, "You gotta taste really good and sweet, but I don't want a lot of sugar. And b- by the way, I also want it to be clean label, and by the way, I also need it to be really cost-effective." It's, it's gotten... Like consumer expectations have gotten like fairly absurdly high.
Sean: Yeah. I feel like also with the number of options that people have, it's like the expectations are naturally just continuously rising, and more information that they have
Will Nitze: Yeah, and like a lot of misinformation too. I mean, now everyone's a journalist, right? Like, because of TikTok and Instagram and social media writ large, like everyone's a journalist. And so you'll have insert random influencer being like, sort of like fear-mongering around something that's like total pseudoscience, but it doesn't matter because millions of people listen to that and they're like, "Oh, maybe I shouldn't be eating that," or, "Maybe I should be eating this." And it's like you look at that as someone who's like obsesses over nutrition and whatnot, and you're like, you just put your like face in your palms and you're like, "Ugh." Like but so like perception is reality and yeah, you have to... Like right now, like avocado oil, there's-- I don't know if you've seen like it's all over socials of, there was a UC Davis, I think it was, study where they tested all these avocado oil products, you know, chips cooked in avocado oil or just avocado oil in, in, in a bottle, and like all of them failed for being pure avocado oil. They were all cut with sunflower oil or canola oil, oil or whatever. And so now everyone who has avocado oil like on their label is in crisis mode 'cause all their consumers are sending them emails like, "Hey, like show me test results that prove that you only use pure avocado oil." You know, it's like there's always something like that, like a hysteria around XYZ ingredient. And then on the flip side, there's hysteria on the positive side around protein and be like, "Why isn't there protein in my chip?" And it's like, well, 'cause chips- ... don't have pro- like that's not a thing. And they're like, "Well, yeah, but I want it," you know? And it's like you gotta like tune out some of the noise. Like at some point you have to stick your, your flag in the sand and just say like, "Here's who we are, like take it or leave it." But it's a balance.
Sean: How big did you guys grow the brand before expanding into other product categories and also into retail?
Will Nitze: Yeah, I mean, retail, we, we actually moved into retail pretty quickly, and that was a bit of a misadventure. Our first retailer was CVS, and we just did not know what we were doing. But we connected with the buyer and they liked it, and it was crazy. We went into 3,000 CVS's, like six months after selling our first bar. And so we were in, like, every city in America, and that wa- we learned some hard lessons. We were in, like, the back corner of the store. We were in kind of a random set. Our packaging was not great. So that was painful, 'cause a bunch of product expired on shelf. We weren't even in the bar set in CVS, so someone... Even if they were walking in looking for us, it was, like, hard to find us. It, it was tough. And then we, you know, took those lessons and did better and picked, like, better fit retailers for us and made sure our branding was on point and calling out the ri- right things. But, so we, we went omni-channel pretty early and, like, we were definitely majority e-com revenue-wise for the most, actually most of the company's life cycle. We're now flipped. We're now retail, I think 70/30 retail to e-com. But yeah, I don't know. We were a few million bucks before we... Maybe, like, 5 million before we were really pushed heavily into retail
Sean: And, and in terms of the product categories, how early did you guys start with-
Will Nitze: Yeah. So product categories, similar timeframe actually. And I mean, it, this is like a, a fork in the road that CPG founders have to think through of like, am I just a bar company or am I, am I, am a r- am I a brain and body nutrition company, bars of which is our hero, but like we have license to play in other categories? And I took the latter approach. Like, there's no right answer. You know, there are great companies that have... only sell one thing and, and by the way, that's like, that is ideal if you can pull that off 'cause it's just operationally easier. Um, but for us we were like, "Hey, how do we pull in new people to the brand who just aren't bar people, for instance, or who are bar people, but we could sell them a hydration stick pack as well 'cause that solves a new occasion, a new need throughout their day?" And so we looked at a bunch of categories. We looked at like sleep, hydration, caffeination, you know, fi- you know, fi- you know, gut health, fiber as a separate item outside of bars. And we had a long checklist and we're like, "All right. Let's test some other categories, but it has to satisfy A, B, C, D, E, F." And those things are like long shelf life, e-com, it can work in e-com, so ship friendly, like good gross margin out the gate, you know, coherent with the brain and body nutrition value proposition. Like, does it make sense when sitting next to our bars? Uh, so on and so forth. So, um, yeah, launched IQMIX, which is our hydration line, which checked all those boxes for us. And now, like you look at it now and there's like a zillion of these hydration powders. At the time it was not that many, you know, it was probably five, but now there's like 500. And then same with coffee. We're like, like hydration is so relevant to cognition and, you know, you gotta be well-hydrated to think properly and, and caffeination is obviously like a stimulant for your brain. Most people wake up and they drink coffee, like turns your brain on, and so that was kind of a natural fit for us, too. But we like to circumscribe hydration and coffee from a go-to-market standpoint. So we're totally omni-channel bars. We sell bars everywhere, everywhere online, everywhere in brick and mortar. And hydration and coffee we only sell online. Because it's just too much for, to... It's a totally different part of a grocery store. It's a different buyer, it's a different consumer often. You sell on different value propositions. It's, it would be completely too much at this point in our life cycle to go full, full bore on all three categories.
Sean: How have you built the team out? What's the shape of your team like today?
Will Nitze: Yeah. This is one where we're kind of different, and I would say maybe contrarian. We have a tiny team, only 15 people. Relative to the size of our business, that's like shockingly low. And that's a function of a few things. Like number one, I just didn't really get into startups to build a huge team. Like, I like a flat org structure. Like everyone is the CEO of their thing, and that self-selects for a certain person who likes accountability and, like I don't micromanage, or I try not to at least. And so we hire basically as few people as we can get away with hiring, and it's just like i- i- everyone knows everyone. Like, you get on the team call, the all-hands call, and you can see all the faces on one screen. Like, it's just easier to manage. And then that's our hub, and then we have all these spokes going out to third parties, so we have a ton of third parties. We have an email marketing agency, we have an Amazon agency, we have a Costco broker, we have a Target broker, we have a Whole Foods broker. So it's what I call the hub and spoke model. And there, again, this is one where there's no right answer. Like, there are many people who have created, who have in-housed everything and created these huge teams, and then there are a few that have done it our way. I prefer our way for a variety of reasons. I mean, the other, the other thing too is like some people love hiring and team building, and they're really good at it, and I just don't, and I'm not good at it. Like, we hire people we know and trust, and my... Our head of e-com is my wife. Our creative director is my wife's best childhood friend. Our head of sales is our first angel investor. Like, it's all very in the family, so to speak.
Sean: Oh, that's awesome. Where, where do you spend most of your time day to day?
Will Nitze: All over, man. Uh, honestly, op- operations is how I spend most of my time. I mean, there, there's just so many moving pieces. Like, when you're an omni-channel business, it's... there's so many moving pieces. And five things break every day. Like, whether or not we are fully buttoned up, like, they're gonna break anyway 'cause they just do. You know? Like a truck tips over on the highway. There's some new law out of California that says you have to change the way you print your best by date, you know, from expires on to best if used by. It's just, like, random stuff that you're like, "I didn't think I was gonna wake up and think for three hours about how to get with all our co-packers to change our date codes," but that happened, and now that's how I'm spending my morning. Like, so much of it, it's ad hoc stuff and just, like, playing defense. So yeah, a lot of it is ops. And then I spend a good bit on, on sales, too, mostly on the brick-and-mortar side. Like, e-com is fairly self-contained and, like, fairly predictable and fairly linear, and then brick-and-mortar is just total rollercoaster, in a good way. It's really fun 'cause you, you know... It's just fun to sell into new accounts. It just is. But operationally, it is a nightmare 'cause every retailer has different specs and SOPs, and usually they want a different pack-out style and price po- you know, pack architecture and it's just... It mushrooms massively over time.
Sean: How do you... What do you think some of the biggest factors have been to getting the word out about the brand and growing the awareness of the brand? Do you feel like the trends that you guys have, have attached to have really helped? Or, like, what, what sort of marketing have you guys leaned into most heavily?
Will Nitze: I mean, honestly, being everywhere that people buy bars and hydration and coffee is the best marketing. Like, I always say being on shelf is a free Facebook ad. Like, 2,000 people will walk by your carton of bars on that shelf every day, like 365 days a year. And so the more omni-channel we've gotten, there's just more touch points. We do a ton on now top of the funnel marketing, so we do a lot of podcasts, we do streaming TV and connected TV, we do radio, and then we do a lot of direct response marketing. So, you know, bidding on search terms on Amazon. We spend quite a bit on Meta. Like, we, we do kind of the standard blocking and tackling of marketing, direct response marketing. But honestly, it's like something like Costco, being in Costco, it's just there's so much visibility you get from having a pallet. I mean, that's like a billboard, you know? It's a huge thing that thousands and thousands of people per location are walking by across 600 locations every day. I mean, that just drives incredible household penetration. And a lot of it's just time, time and market. Like, we've been around for eight and a half years. That's just kind of a long time. Like... Um, but with all of that said, we're in like the low single digits in cer- in, in household penetration, which just goes to show just how many humans there are, like, and households there are. It's like we're just getting started. This is why... You know, there's a reason Oreos is so just like gargantuanly large. They've been around for decades and decades and decades.
Sean: How do you think about launching successfully in a retailer like Costco and driving, driving purchase rate and demand?
Will Nitze: Yeah. I mean, we've always found that we need to win with the consumer who hasn't heard of us, and so there's a couple, like, ways to do that. Number one is bra- like, flat out branding. Like, does this just look good and appealing? Flavor appeal is a huge one. Huge. Like, people buy with their stomach. Like, if they, if they get a, a hunger pang and they see your thing and it looks good, like even if they don't know who you are, you will convert people that way. Price point, be approachable on price points. Even if I don't know who you are, but you're an incredible deal, like I'll give... I'll take a flyer on you Value propositions. So I always say, like, protein has a better brand than Nike. Protein has a better brand than Nike. So leverage the brand that the value proposition has more than your brand. So maybe you don't know who IQBAR is, but on the front of pack it says 12 grams plant protein and one gram sugar and nine grams fiber. Well, low sugar and high protein and, and high fiber have an incredible brand, and so I'm gonna put that in my cart because you just sold me on the brand of the value props even though I don't know the brand of IQBAR. And so ca- like call-out hierarchy and, like, proper functionality and being on trend is, in our experience, just as important if not more important than the brand itself. And then like, you know, being in the right set is incredibly important. There are a variety of other things, but those are the big ones. And so a lot of people will focus on like, oh, I, you know, geo-fenced advertising and got people... Drove traffic into stores. That's all good and well, but in our experience, that pales in comparison to everything else I just said. Like, you need people who already walked in that door who don't know who you are to buy you. And then once they buy you, you have to deliver of course, right? Like, so that'll convert the first purchase. How do you get them to come back? At that point, you have to hang your hat on quality. So speaking... This is obvious, but your, your product has to be good
Sean: How do you test for the brand flavor appeal and the, the messaging hierarchy that you mentioned? Do you-- Are you guys always testing those things?
Will Nitze: Yeah. I mean, e-com, having a big e-com business and, and, you know, doing things like post-purchase surveys and looking at keyword volume, and the beauty of e-com is that y- you get clued into what people care about and want and what are they searching for and, and then reviews too, like, "Oh, this is good, but why doesn't it have more protein?" Like, you can pretty quickly triangulate what people care about and iterate accordingly. And this is why speed is so important. It's one thing to understand that and, and do it six months later, and it's another thing to do it, like, two months later. And so we're just very fast at reacting. Like the fiber thing, like fiber became huge and we, like, very quickly made, like shi- shifted our fiber call-outs. So, like shortly fiber will be on the front of all of our packs. So a lot of it is, is just like digital learnings. Retailers too, if you're tight with the retailers, they will tell you, "Hey, we're seeing a huge uptick in consumer shopping X." Like banana, I'll give you an example. Banana is, like, having a moment. No one really knows why, it just is, and banana-flavored everything is, like, huge right now. And our retail partners told us that. They're like, "Hey, just so you know, like, our bestselling items are banana items." And so,
Sean: yeah,
Will Nitze: y- you wanna be pulling in, like, data on the retail side and, and the digital side, and then... It's not to say that you just pivot all your stuff into now you're, everything's banana. It's like take in the info, decide if it makes sense to do something about it, and then if it does make sense, move very, very fast. W-
Sean: what's your take on, on, uh, CPG in general right now? Where do you see the biggest opportunities in categories outside of the ones that you guys play in, or even if you were gonna launch something different?
Will Nitze: I would have a really boring answer to that, which is I like just big competitive categories. I think there's a way to be different within big ca- Like, you can either take the Airbnb approach or you could take our approach. The Airbnb approach is unknown demand, but if there's demand, it's gonna be mega. So like, this could be a zero, but if people are cool with you staying in the, in, you know, their home, well now you have a mon- monopoly and you're gonna be a $100 billion company. But also there, there might be zero demand on the other side there, and now you're left wondering what to do. And the flip side is there's mega demand 'cause this is a big category and millions of people are shopping it, and now you just need to out execute, and I actually prefer that. And so I see opportunity just where it's actually kind of obvious. So things like protein, like, like... And how do we just do it better? And not trying to manufacture demand, but service demand better. Like, I just have always found that swimming against the current is, is a tough proposition. Like we've, in certain cases, tried to get kind of cute with flavor profiles and things like that, and then we just see that, wait, chocolate and peanut butter just move five times faster. Like, why'd we try and swim against the current there? Give the people what they want, just do it better. Like be a better operator within a demand locus. I
Sean: mean, it makes total sense. You might as well make it easier or at least like more predictable in the ways that you can. What's, what's been the biggest... What's been surprising for you after reading that graphic novel and now you're on your own path? Does anything stick from that?
Will Nitze: I'm glad I didn't do beverage. I'm glad we don't self-manufacture, which they did for a while. I don't... Yeah, like that's- Was
Sean: that book really helpful?
Will Nitze: I was helpful in the sense that it fired me up and, like, motivated me and got me into the space. But no, I mean, there is no playbook. I mean, TikTok Shop, like, that didn't exist and now there are 25-year-olds have, have built $100 million business on just on TikTok Shop. Like, someone who had some great exit 10 years ago doesn't know the next thing about TikTok Shop. So it's like the space just moves too quickly for there to be a playbook. You have to have your ear to the ground always and then react really quickly. So it's, it's just like use people's playbooks if they help j- like, for motivational purposes, but you have to chart your own path. By the way, don't ever take advice from someone unless they're literally in your category and did what you wanna do, what you aspire to do within the trailing, like, 24 months. Anything beyond that is obsolete information
Sean: Hard to remember in the moment. How do, do you-- are you naturally gifted at keeping a good circle of people that you're constantly checking in with for, like, any outside counsel that you need? I guess through the-
Will Nitze: Yeah. I mean, I think where most people go on this is, like, they look for mentorship, vertical mentorship, meaning like, kinda like what I said. Someone did this thing 10 years ago or five years ago, and I want them to be my mentor, and how did they do it, and can I, like, take learnings from that? And I think it's totally the wrong move. I think the, a far better move is horizontal mentorship. So other people who are in the trenches right now, and I can learn... Like, you wanna have, like, a guy or gal who's, like, the TikTok shop guy or gal, or the Amazon guy or gal, or the club channel and brick-and-mortar guy or gal. Or like, y- you, you assemble this sort of like, team of horizontal mentors. By the way, you're the fill-in-the-blank thing you're good at for them, so it's a totally, like, bidirectional thing. And you just now have this roster of like, "Huh, those people do that really well. Let me just call John and ask him how he did it." And you get to answers so quickly that way. It goes back to the earlier conversation around paying it forward and collegiality and helping people and... Like, I don't think this is necessarily happening in, like, SaaS software startups. It's more cutthroat. But for whatever reason, in CPG, food and bev, or just CPG more broadly, this is, that's a thing. Like- Hmm ... people have these, like, networks of horizontal mentors.
Sean: I know we're over time, so let me know if you have to go.
Will Nitze: I, I got another minute or two.
Sean: What's, what's, like, your view on the overall arc of the, the journey that you're on? Are you guys building the brand to, to sell one day? What's, like, your, your view on that?
Will Nitze: Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people get kind of, like, weird and skittish around this of, like, I don't know, they're like, "Well, no, I'm gonna build this forever," even though they don't really mean that. The reality is when you take investment dollars, you are built to exit. Like, you have told that investor you're going to get them a return, otherwise why would they give you their money? So it's like, yeah, when you take investment dollars, like, okay, we are building for an eventual exit. Like, we all agree on that. Now, the timeframe is gonna be totally different w- than what you think. You think you'll do it in five years, in actuality it takes 10 years, like, so on and so forth. But that is the goal. So yeah, I mean, we're building towards that and is it this year? Is it next year? W- we'll see. But we're definitely, like, saleable at this point. Like, we're, we've achieved the scale and the profitability m- you know, profile and, and so on. So at some point, yeah, I'm, I'm sure we will partner up with someone bigger, but you gotta also build something that's default alive. Like, never, never force your s- yourself into a corner. For now we're just focused on how do we go grab 10,000 more points of distribution and double our e-com business and, and all of that.
Sean: That's awesome. Well, congrats on everything so far, and thank you for taking the time to hang out.
Will Nitze: Yeah. Thanks for having me. That was fun.
Sean: Super fun to talk and also inspiring to, to hear the arc of everything.