BrandBusters Ep. 23: Daniel Schindler, CEO of Buoy
In Episode 23, James and Sean chat with Daniel Schindler, Founder and CEO of the hydration brand, Buoy, covering:
-Differentiating within the saturated hydration category
-Prioritizing "convenience and clean" in product development
-Growing a DTC brand efficiently versus "at all costs"
-Managing investors and communication cadence
-Leveraging celebrities such as Chris Paul to endorse the brand vs. tapping into the medical community as brand ambassadors
Daniel (and his new pup) offer a great perspective for brands that are operating lean and agile and show growth can start slowly and then scale suddenly.
Welcome to Brand Busters with your hosts, James Schwyn and Sean Lee. Together, we bust open the latest in CPG, retail media, and life, or whatever the we want. And for today's episode, we got something special cooked up for you. Extra spicy. Take it away, Sean.
Alright. Welcome back, everybody, to the latest episode of Brand Busters. And we have an excellent guest today. We have Daniel Daniel Schindler, who's the CEO of Buoy, a brand that's changing the future of hydration with liquid hydration drops. Buoy sold at d two c, on marketplaces, and in brick and mortar.
Buoy's been rapidly and profitably growing, and we're excited to have Daniel on the show today. I know I I reached out probably a few years ago, as we were looking at at potential brands that we could acquire for the Cinci brands portfolio. So that's how I first met Daniel. And I've been really impressed with his quarterly email updates that he sends to investors and potential investors, just following the progress of buoy. It's a it's a it's a pretty awesome story.
So great to have you on board, and thanks for joining us, Daniel. Excited to be here. Yeah. Thanks for the the opportunity. Yeah.
Cool. Well, to kick things off, one recurring theme with our guests is this career pivot. So it looks like you went from a software consultant, in your early days to actually founding BOOI. So talk to us about what's that transition like? What did you apply from kind of the software, background experience to building a brand?
Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. I mean, I I'm I'm thankful for that experience because it showed me exactly sort of what I didn't wanna do with my life, and and the horrors for me of of some corporate jobs. Not that it was a bad company or or I was treated poorly.
It just wasn't anything that I truly wanted to do or that I was passionate about, and it was sort of just that daily grind. And so I actually saw my older brother doing his own start up and always knew I wanted to to explore, some sort of start up, but thought it might be further down the road and, you know, get some more experience first. But then first job out of college as a software consultant, showed you know, moved me out to from I was in Michigan for for undergrad and then up to St. Louis, which was sort of my territory for for my clients and, yeah, quickly showed me that I wanted to do something different and, the idea for Buoy came to me actually while working and traveling as a consultant for that job, as I was super dehydrated, traveling, drinking coffee in the morning, beer at night. Yeah, yeah and so, in all one thing led to another and and here we are.
Yeah. That's great. How did you how did you come up with the idea for for Buoy? Obviously, their hydration's, you know, pretty saturated. There's a lot of package.
You've got liquid IV. Obviously, your take is different with the the drops, but what what led you to to kind of create it and find something in the market that you didn't think was already being served? Yeah so I was aware of at the time and this is 7 years ago like 2016, 2017 but I was aware of liquid iv and obviously Gatorade and some of the other things that were around. But the idea really came to me when I was was at a a corporate happy hour and I had sort of drank coffee in the morning and was actually drinking a beer at the time, a few beers. And I wondered, you know, what if something could be added to all these all these different types of drinks without really affecting the taste, to help them be more hydrating and just keep everybody more hydrated regardless of what you're drinking.
And, yeah. So that's how the idea popped in my head, and I was already sort of unhappy with with, with the job. I gave gave a couple of buddies a call and and talked about the idea and we just started running with it as a side project for a bit. And then I quit my job about maybe 6 months after that day and went back to school in Saint Louis to get my MBA at WashU with the sole focus of creating this purposely unflavored blend of electrolytes that could be added to any type of drink. So, and we can get into more about how we're different and and why we've sort of chosen to create the product that we and the product line that we have now.
But we were we were able to partner with a pharmaceutical expert named doctor Lian Li Li to create what's normally very bitter and salty, a super clean version electrolytes that could be added to any type of drink, and that's what got us going. That's awesome. Yeah. On that note, I mean, hydration remedies really seem to have trended up the last several years. I mean, you guys might have been not necessary I mean, a first mover or at least very early adopter of, like, kind of addressing that need.
Like, what do you feel, like, with consumers has driven that trend for hydration? Is it, like, the younger millennials and Gen z not consuming alcohol as much? Is it just stepping into, like, that corporate phase? You're probably like, if we all travel or on the road, you're not drinking a lot. You're not hydrating properly, like, on the planes, and then you got the coffees and the caffeine, which dehydrates you, can constrict your blood vessels, and then obviously the alcohol intake.
Like, what's leading to this flurry of, hydration aids in the market now? Yeah. Good good question. I think I think there's there's a few different answers. I I'd actually point to in terms of the the new brands popping up, I'd point to the success of Liquid IV, you know, now being a $1,000,000,000 brand and so much opportunity to make it better, and easy.
Right? For from a powder packet perspective, it doesn't take much money. You can improve on liquid IV formulation by yourself. You don't even you don't need a scientist or formulator to do that. And so you could turn around and create your own powder packet company, which hundreds of other brands have done now.
Yeah. It seems like it seems like there's a million of them on Amazon now. Yeah. There's a million of them. Right?
And so we spent years for that reason knowing that there's always gonna be competitors and and markets can be saturated, Creating something new and innovative that's totally different and much more effective and healthier for you, for hydration. And so our our whole perspective on hydration is totally different than the Liquid IV use case, the Gatorade use case. All of those those companies are traditionally revolving around the athletic use case of, like, I just ran a marathon and I need to rehydrate because I'm I'm very dehydrated type of thing. For us, it's about all day hydration. How do you optimize how do how do you optimize your all day hydration throughout the day?
Because the reality is when you consume all those electrolytes of liquid IV or 3 times x, you know, 3 x with element or anything else, your body's passing through most of it before you get a chance to use it. And so you really need a steady flow of electrolytes throughout the day. Just excuse me one second. I'll let my Oh, you're good. Yeah.
I think it's I think it's really interesting, just for the the audience out there is is is trying to find, like, a different niche, which I think they've done and we'll get into a little bit more with with it with it being more of a kind of a liquid that you can pour in versus the powders that, like like you said, everybody can can kinda spin up and do. I think the other thing that's that's kind of interesting too is is as a user myself is I look at, like, Gatorade or Liquid IV. A lot of like, some of the ingredients are just, you know, high sugar, like, not the type of things that I wanna be consuming all day if I wanted to stay hydrated because it's just excess calories that I'm not really looking to have. Exactly. Yeah.
So and we we wanted our our goal was to create this product that's not only super convenient because you can add it into any type of drink, but it's super clean. So that that goes to, 1, avoiding all of the nasty shit that that you'll see in most of these other products, Like, like all these different sweeteners that have different names and some some try to claim they're healthy, but especially on an everyday basis, they're probably not. And I would prefer sugar over most most other sweeteners, if I'm gonna consume anything. But then also even natural flavors. Right?
A lot has come out about, natural flavors just being a blanket term for hundreds of chemicals, that you have no idea about. And the list goes on and on, and then it goes into, well, what form of electrolytes are you using? Are you using just a a a sort of baking soda type thing, such sodium bicarbonate or or any sodium citrate, all those types of things? Or are you using a sea salt that comes straight from the earth and with those 87 trace minerals, and all the other good micronutrients that you wanna put in your body. And so we wanted to combine all of that and make something just so much better, again, both more efficient and healthier for you and convenient, compared to everything else in the market.
And I think that's why we've seen so much success as we sort of had our have have really had our coming out party over the last year and a half with some ad spend behind us. Yeah. That's great. And I mean, it's it seems like how how did you think about it in the early days? Did you raise some money?
Were you self funding? It it seems from your newsletter that you're you're very focused on on profitable growth, which I think is is incredibly smart for a CPG brand right now. Like, you saw so many that were just focused on top line and then, you know, the easy money and low interest rates dried up and, you know, the party was over. So how did you how did you get started in the early days, and how do you think about sustainably growing a brand in today's environment? Yeah.
The first steps are always the hardest. You have no idea what you're doing. Your your spend is probably 95% inefficient, and you're just sort of running around, but you just have to have that strong, resilient mindset to just keep pushing no matter what and follow that 5 or 10% of success that can keep sort of, avalanching into something more. From the fundraising perspective, we knew we needed a bit of money just to get off the ground, and I'm very, jealous or or I admire the brands that really don't need any outside funding. We we we got a little bit.
So we did bootstrap it between the 3 of us early on and then we did we were lucky enough to have a a strong friends and family network to to raise a few 100,000. That also helped with some connections that I had through, Washington University and just being a little bit tied into the startup space. I think that first little bit is really important. So you're not playing that daily cash flow game, which is tough. Yeah.
Very tough and it's distracting from from growth, especially early on. Especially when you're investing in inventory and minimum order quantities, like you can sink your cash flow pretty quickly. Yeah. And so I'm I'm a big believer in in in raising some money early on to get things going, focus on the right things. We ended up just having a rolling convertible note over the 1st few years and just slowly increasing the valuation as we had more traction.
And then we had we felt like we had enough traction a couple years ago to kick off our our really only main fundraising round which is our seed round which we ended up raising, 2 and a half 1000000. So we've raised a few million to date and that was that was amongst just different angels and angel groups. We we had, Chris Paul also come in, the the NBA player, which has been awesome as he, got just loved the product and and we connected with his agent. But we're we're careful not to take early money from any sort of venture capital or bigger groups. I think that oftentimes is a mistake.
And then from the profitable growth standpoint, we're for us, we're we're able to create such a profitable business model that once we kicked off and and started to really spend on on marketing, we were able to create a system that works profitably from day 1. Yeah. And so, it's interesting that, you know, we went it it took 6 5, 6 years to go from, you know, 0 to 1, 0 Yeah. Dollars to 1,000,000 in revenue, and then 1 year, it took it went we went from 1 to 20. Yeah.
So Overnight success. Yeah. Yeah. Not not not quite overnight, but, that's that that's how it goes. You know, spending the time, to to to build everything right and and and be confident in what you have before you spend the money to truly get it out there.
I think that's I think that's super important, what you just said too, and and especially in consumer goods. I mean, there's a time and place for venture capital, but I think if you take that way too early, especially where a lot of venture capital firms are used to investing in Fintech or SaaS. They're gonna push you to spend a lot of money and to grow as quickly as possible. Like, that's how they're gonna get paid out. So if you would have taken a ton of VC funding really early on, you might not have had 6 years to get to, you know, to slowly grow to a million and then hit that inflection point to get to 20.
They probably would have pushed you to, you know, spend, spend, spend, and make some early mistakes that might not allow you there. Yeah. Totally. And and and I think the transition you've seen over the last few years, it it all starts at the top from, like, acquirers. So acquirers are are looking at different companies.
They're getting if they get burned by companies they they acquire, such as a lot of the ones that have grown at all costs Yeah. Or ones that don't get acquired at all, but they make it to that top line goal that they thought would get them acquired, but then acquirers are like, no. Where's the profitability? We can't we're gonna get burned on this one. So we've learned a lot from that.
I've talked to a lot of different investment bankers and just learning more starting from the end of what's the end goal. Where are we trying to go and realizing we need to we need to focus on profitability, not just top line growth if if we wanna have a goal of of ever exiting. Yeah. I think that's incredibly, incredibly smart. How do you think about, like, as you're thinking about keeping people, whether it's your friends and family, your seed round, investors, even like I made it onto your newsletter, I think you do a wonderful job of kind of articulating what your focus is for the quarter and then where your end goals are.
I think you you you mentioned a 100,000,000 in in revenue and growing getting there profitably. What led you to kind of that approach? Because I think from a lot of founders that I've talked to, you're probably one of the best of kind of building a a distribution list and sending out that quarterly update on a consistent basis, which is great. Like, I I read them even if I don't respond or say anything. I think it's it's really cool what you've done.
But how do you think about managing your investors, and how did that that quarterly newsletter come to be? Oh, I appreciate the kind words. It it means a lot, and, obviously, a lot of lot of effort goes into that. And, yeah, I was I was I had a good coach as as my older brother. He said, you know, it's so important to to grow your network and keep people, in the loop whether you're doing well or not.
And everyone has can come in with with different things that can be helpful, which which, happens time and time again as we're asking for different retail connections or investor connections. There's always something that can help the business. And so it just yeah. I I just formed this habit of of making sure to to always keep people in the loop from from really very early on. I forget the exact time frame that we started it, but now that we have a ton of investors in the cap table and a huge network it feels like almost an obligation which is good.
It keeps keeps me honest and and I wanna make sure everyone's updated. And it's great, especially now how much success we've seen, to be able to share share this journey with everybody and really feel like a cohesive group. And kinda going off of that with network, you're based in San Diego now. Ironically, a lot of the kind of clients, brands, and partners that, I work with and interact with, it seems like San Diego is kind of this hub for d two c or brands and ecommerce. Like, what have been the network benefits for you, like, being in San Diego?
And I guess, like, talk about your experience there because it's like it this is a recurring theme with individuals I'm talking to in your space, over the last 12, 18 months. Yeah. I mean, I think, I I think it's the best city in the world. I love it. I've been out here for about 5 years now, and I love to surf.
I love the ocean. Buoy's Buoy's also from the ocean, and just I have like a special connection with the ocean. So I think for me, I've met some really cool founders out here and, have have a solid network, but I think even more important than that has just been having this city that I love that can I can really like connect with and keep me spiritually grounded and and have tons of different things that I can do outside of work? So that's why San Diego has real truly been so special for me. Yeah.
I mean, if you're gonna pour your heart and soul into it and put it in a ton of hours, you might as well do it in a place that has great weather and sunshine 247. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Sorry.
My dog is barking again. That's good. For for our listeners, Daniel has a, I think a new puppy addition to the family. So Yes. He does.
Usually usually, he keeps me grounded, but sometimes it's tough to, it's tough to manage him on calls. No. That's great. And, it it seems like you you guys obviously have a a website direct to consumer presence, a presence on Amazon and marketplaces and have expanded into retail. How have you thought about your omnichannel approach?
Obviously, each of those 3 channels kind of have their own challenges and kind of own cost structures. But how have you thought about that and in particular, your brick and mortar strategy as you you're growing the brand towards a 100,000,000? Yeah. It it's that's probably changed the most, I think, since we started. We initially got, an opportunity to to partner up with with, with c with c, CVS about 4 or 5 years ago.
We're probably the earliest stage brand ever being CVS, and we just it was a connection through WashU that I had and, we we couldn't turn it down even though we knew that drug probably isn't the best place for buoy. And so we did that, and actually saw some some decent success early on and and got some good awareness even though no one had ever heard of buoy at that point. But it gave us a good flavor of, like, the challenges in retail. And it also is a good traction point to help us raise money for like, we weren't a 100% sold that brick and mortar was, like, gonna be the dominant channel for us and it's not. Like, our 90 8% of our growth right now is is d to c and Amazon.
But it gave us enough traction and experience to understand the retail space in a little bit more detail and understand what we need to do moving forward to, to make that channel work for us. And so we we got a opportunity with Walgreens as well, but since with both of them are are actually transitioning out into a different retail strategy. And so Yep. We wanna scale our goal right now is to scale to a 100,000,000 top line primarily still from from ecom. D to c is about 4 to 1 compared to Amazon for us right now and we wanna keep it that way.
But we we've gotten lots of feedback that to to grow to grow at a certain point, you'll always hit some sort of plateau in ecommerce. You see that with athletic greens and and and a bunch rate tax just will go up. And the only way to counter that is to just keep AOV and CLTV continuing to rise as well. So we we're we're working on a a a launch with Wegmans, next year. Yes.
And and we really wanna do retail right this time with a real launch strategy and money behind it and now have the awareness going into it, from from a brand perspective. So it's not people's first time seeing buoy on the shelf. Yeah. So, yeah, our strategy is to prove to to actually go slowly. We we could we potentially could have tried target first or one of the bigger guys, but we wanted to be strategic about who we worked with and, and then continue to step and and build that channel over time until we exit and prove and use it more of a sales story and proof of concept rather than scaling it all on our own because retail is really the toughest channel to Yeah.
To scale as an early stage brand. Yeah. It it really is. And I think I think we've seen that a lot. I think we've talked to a ton of people that have went into to drugs.
So CVS and Walgreens, which I think is a tough channel as a new brand with with minimal awareness just given the people are going there usually for a very specific reason, not necessarily in discovery mode. And we've seen a lot of other brands have success with with regional grocers like Wegmans, HEB, Meijer, people like that. And then obviously there's the the Targets and Walmarts that are a different beast. But, not trying to tackle them all at the same time, I think is a super smart strategy of doing one for a year, getting that down, making sure you're kind of hitting your units per store per week, and you can drive enough awareness, then adding a second, kind of like how you've you've built the brand over time and and not rushing it. Otherwise, you get upside down pretty quickly with all the inventory requirements and, you know, if you get discontinued, it would be pretty tough.
Mistake for most brands to, like, depend on on retail, especially because you can only really afford 1 retail retailer and you've know they can cut you at any time. You just have no control over it and, it's really a beast and and you don't have enough money to to truly launch there, until you're, I would say, at least, like, close to to the size that we're at now. And so it for us, I wouldn't change anything. It was a good like, it worked for us as a track as a as a proof point, as traction, and and helped us raise a bit more money, and and legitimize the business a bit more. But from a business model perspective, it's it's tough even if you have amazing margins.
So one one thing we see and so Sean and I were at Amazon Agency once upon a time and then kind of in my current capacity, kind of meeting consulting with brands, on their omnichannel strategy. But a lot of times, you know, we get in the conversation of assortment. And when you're think you're talking about d to c versus Amazon split, but how do you think about assortment? A lot of times we see the Pareto principle at play. So I see, like, 80% of sales coming from 20% of your catalog.
Do you tend to see, like, hey. Our hero ASINs continue to drive growth across, like, all channels, or are there certain products for you that are performing better that surprised you, in retail versus online? Yeah. We are our hero, ACE, and we only had sort of one main product for a while, our our hydration drops. And every other product has what the hydration drops, include with additional functional ingredients on top.
So it was only till, like, this year that we truly put a emphasis on expanding our product line and, seeing how the other products would do. And we're actually amazed by how much, we the hydration drops are still our our hero SKU, but much less dominant than they than they were or we anticipated them to be compared to other products like digestion drops and brain health drops, rescue drops, specifically, more on the chronic illness side. So yeah, we we've always just wanted to be very purposeful with with new products that we create, creating stuff that's not really out there right now and or that we can innovate on to to be cleaner and more convenient for our customers. Got it. You you just mentioned chronic illness.
I think that's something going through your site. Again, we look at a number of brands each week, and I think there's always especially, like, the health and wellness space, there's kind of the, aesthetic versus efficacy, and you guys seem to have, like, the efficacy piece now, but also, like, the brand aesthetic. Right? Like, it's not just like, it's not just buzz. I think you're actually you know, you've got a great product, great efficacy, but, also, like, there's a missional component of it as well.
Is that push on supporting, like, chronic illness, is that tied to, you know, anything from your personal experience, or is that just something like you and the team are passionate about kind of supporting through the growth of buoy? Yeah. I'd say it's a bit of both. My cofounder Eddie was hospitalized 27 times if yours in the 2nd grade and and, has always had that stick with him, from like a a health perspective. Not living with a chronic illness now, but, aware of of of some of the sort of trials and tribulations that come with it.
But it really came to us when we launched buoy. We just want to create this super clean, effective, convenient product. And it happened to just resonate the most with, chronic illness customers. And so like one of our first customers was a was a mom with a daughter who had thoughts and other, other chronic conditions. And she was taking 6 liters of of smart water to school every day to try to stay hydrated.
And she was able to replace that with one bottle of buoy. That's awesome. And just feel more normal and seen. And so we we ended up just connecting with so many different people with chronic illnesses that have amazing stories. And that really became the heartbeat, and sort of the lifeblood of our company and and giving back to those communities as well.
And trying to donate as many bottles as we can to support them and make them feel heard. We did a our first marketing campaign as well. The to be seen campaign where we just featured different people with chronic illnesses and shared their stories. And it was just amazing to connect with them. And that's something I'm as a CEO, I wanna get more back into, connecting with customers because that's been part of my part favorite, one of the one of my favorites part of the job.
That's great. That's great. Yeah. I was gonna ask, so given that your your primary strategy is d two c at Amazon, you said that d two c is about 4 to 1 of Amazon right now. What are some of the marketing channels that that are performing the best for you?
Obviously, there's there's Google and Meta that are kind of the tried and true. Are you seeing any emerging channels like TikTok or TikTok shops or any influencer strategies that have really been working for you? Yeah. I'd say so what what really drove our growth and one sec. Oh, what what drove our growth was through Meta initially.
So it was finding that, and I think that is typical for for most startups that they just have such a good algorithm and platform, where you can focus on conversion. Yeah. It's it's really the best best targeting for conversion. I think a lot of other channels are great when you can get more into, like, the into the awareness game where you're, where you're you're basing your decisions more on CPM than you are CPA or or CAC. So, yeah, we for for the most part, what got what drove this huge growth has just been through meta traditional ads, and we started to throw in the mix.
Some TikTok, Google, little bit influencer spend as well, but meta continues to be the best one for us so far. That's great. Anything that you're doing on Amazon that that's kind of enabled your growth there be beyond just kind of the normal strategy of, you know, finding the right search terms and and and ranking and and maybe a little bit of DSP? Most of the most of our Amazon growth has just been a a a an effect of the the meta spend. So we we do we direct our customers to b to c, but plenty of them just end up going to Amazon.
But we are strategic about that, the split between we only offer, like, our our core SKU right now on Amazon. We're gonna expand it a little bit soon, but for the we want most people to stay through d two c and incentivize them with better pricing through subscriptions and Yeah. Be able to only access most of our products at this point on d two c. That's great. Yeah.
I think one of the trends, especially a lot of brands, I think there's 2 emerging themes right now. It's like incrementality and attribution. I think, for challenger brands, in kind of more of a niche category, one of the things that we're you know, everyone's focused on new to brand customer acquisition, and Amazon's that great channel where it's a little bit more frictionless. Right? Like, the meta is amazing for the awareness play, but if they already have the Amazon account, they have to input their credit card information.
It's like, you know what? My first purchase I wanna do here, I have a phenomenal experience, with that product. I'm gonna then jump to d two c and trial your other products. So higher purchase frequency on Amazon, higher AOV on d two c, and they can both neither have to cannibalize each other. They can work harmoniously together.
So I think I love kind of the approach. Your approach really models, I think, the theme that we've seen where we're seeing people push awareness. I see what the the sale on d two c is typically more valuable to you than, on marketplace. However, marketplace serves as a great, channel to drive faster time to conversion. If they get that new to brand purchase, they can jump into subscribe and save.
And now you have all of a sudden this, like, healthier revenue stream, and foundation to build off of. So, again, just more or less a kudos. I feel like you're running that playbook well because that's something that all not all brands are doing. Thanks. Yeah.
No. I think it's super crucial to to have that strategy mapped out before you launch and and get after it because yeah. I I we were I would always be hesitant to have more than 20, 30% of our revenue coming from Amazon because like retail and like any other channel besides d to c, you don't have full control and there can be stuff that comes up and and you're off. And so I think it's it's it's very important to, it's very important to, to have that healthy mix and and know how it how it plays with one another. And like you said, not cannibalized, but but flow from from one to the other more systematically.
Mhmm. Yeah. That's great. Tell us tell us a little bit more about the Chris Paul story. How'd you find out that he was he was ordering the product, and how did you get him involved, and how are you using him today?
Yeah. So we, we actually connected with his with his agent through one of our board members a couple years ago. And so we were we we sent him the product initially from tryout and, one of his one of the first times he tried it was actually our our our energy drops. He replaced one of his sort of pregame espresso and, ended up having like a career high three pointers that which we Oh, nice. We wanna claim.
It's it's all buoyed. But, it's amazing. Yeah. He really liked it. He has a huge emphasis on clean ingredients.
And, so we, we just kept talking with him and and he ended up meet meeting with him and he he became an investor and advisor for us. And then we did a cool campaign with him where we launched his own sort of CP 3 secondret stuff drops. That's cool. I've got a bottle. So it's sort of modeled after, like, the Michael MJ secret stuff from Space Jam.
That's all secret. Yeah. So it's cool to just just vibe with him and meet him. He's he's an amazing guy and, has a very big emphasis on health and wellness and is always trying to find the sort of cutting edge technology, and different products that he can he can use for both himself and spread across his whole massive network. Yeah.
That's awesome. Any advice that you have for people that are listening that that may want to work with a celebrity or or kind of get a celebrity involved as an an influencer or an investor? I think just make sure it's authentic. There's so many, especially nowadays that people will just sort of see through as a as a paid play like a paid influencer celebrity play. And that's not that effective for your business.
Your money can be spent elsewhere, or better elsewhere for the most part, typically. So, yeah, I'd say just with everything you do, but specifically that, if you're gonna if you're gonna have some any sort of partnership like that, make sure whoever it is actually loves your product and what you're doing and, is in it is in it for the right reasons. The other community you seem to be tapping into is medical professionals. What's it like navigating that network? What's their reach been like?
I see influencers and affiliates are a massive focus across all brands right now, but I think that's a unique angle that, Bui and you are also, you know, supporting as well. Yeah. We we got into that pretty early because well, so my mom mom's a doctor, and so she's the first medical professional giving out buoy to her patients, very early on. But we as we started to connect with other medical professionals, especially any sort of sort of holistic health practitioner, they they they're the first ones that are in our, in our target market. Our target market is really, label readers and natural eaters, right?
The people that know what they're putting in their body, they're looking at the ingredients on the back of a label. And so as we connected with more more health care practitioners, we realized they're they're the bread and butter for us and they're the ones that are gonna recommend a lot of things to their their clients, who truly need buoy a lot of times. And they're using other products that aren't great for them or they're not using other products because they know they're not there there's something in there that's not good for them. And so, yeah, it's been it's been awesome. And so our our chief medical officer is, the director of perioperative care at UPMC.
And, he came he came in a few years ago with just seeing a huge opportunity because either there's so many dehydration is the number one cause of complications after a surgery, both going into the surgery and after people are just dehydrated. And, and so he he wanted to actually help us clinically prove the efficacy of buoy compared to other products. And we ended up just doing that, and our 1st clinical trial came back proving that Buoy's 64% more effective than water alone and 49%, more effective than a leading competitor. We we that study was geared against, Nuun, the the the tablets. But it it was all showing that it's much more effective to get your electrolytes throughout the day versus these single servings.
And these single servings, as I mentioned earlier, they they have, different ingredients in them that aren't just unhealthy for you, but they're a lot of them are diuretics. So sucralose, stevia, those actually offset a a a portion of the hydrating components of electrolytes. And so it's kind of counterintuitive that you're, you know, when you're consuming an electrolyte product that has, let's say, stevia in it because that's that's partially offsetting the high hydration from it. Yeah. I believe it.
I mean, I can't I can't really take a lot of the artificial sweeteners. They they just kinda, like, make my stomach feel wrecked or or I just feel like I'm not absorbing things well. Sean needs some dude wipes. He needs some dude wipes. Right.
We'll have to get we'll have to get him we'll have to get him on after all this after all this stevia. Yeah. I will say from, I take a fair amount of supplements, and I know, like, the bioavailability. Like, it's so interesting. Like, oh, I'm getting, like, this this great dose by the end of the day.
Like, depending what's actually in there, I think people don't realize that, hey. You're actually getting 50% of what's actually featured from, the serving size just from what your body can actually metabolize versus what it can. Exactly. Yeah. There there's so many I'm I could I could go on and on about several different, leading competitors, and how I don't believe that like, I think a lot of times their products might be causing more harm than good.
There's don't get me wrong. There's specific use cases for for most of these products that can be very helpful, especially for athletes and for people that are just sweating a ton and just need a very quick massive dose of electrolytes. But when people start using them in in the mainstream and they're just sitting on their couch trying to stay hydrated or they're doing a little mini workout going or whatever they're doing, but which which isn't running a marathon, that's when it's like, do you really need to to consume 50% daily value of salt, at one time? I don't think so. No.
You don't. And that actually can can be more can can cause some harm, depending on who you are and, what your sensitivity is to a lot of salt. Yep. No. I that makes a ton of sense.
So, obviously, like, with the focus on growing profitably and and kind of doing it over the time period that you have, how do you think about building a rock star team and and keeping your team lean? Like, when do you when do you know is the right time to add somebody and and how have you thought about building the the team out at Bowie? Yeah. For the most part, it's been we've been we've we've had much more focus on contractors because especially early on when you're pivoting all the time, it's much easier to be flexible with contractors. The only people we have a a very lean team even now.
We it's it's the 3 of us cofounders and, 3 other people full time, one of which was just onboarded and then a bunch of awesome contractors that have been with us for for years. The only people that we consider to onboard full time are ones that are just so crucial to our business, and we need we we know we need them for the long term and they're just superstars. And so we the way that we go about building our team and even considering anyone that, for a full time position, you have to work in a sort of part time or trial capacity for with us for at least 3 months to prove that it it can work and everybody vibe as well before we'll then have a conversation of can this make sense full time. Yeah. And so, yeah, we're our our, and my perspective on it is to just stay as lean as possible when it comes to full time, people for, for a lot of reasons.
And it really only, only add the people that we just can't true we just need them, and we know we need them for a long time. Yeah. It's great. It it's, kind of one kind of undercurrent of this conversation, kind of emphasizing, like, people and relationships, and network, whether it be, like, ecosystem of, like, San Diego or certain connections at Washoe, your mom being kind of, like, the first, like, medical, you know, supporter to the board member connection, to Chris Paul. I mean, Sean and I have some history in terms of, like, he was a we both went to University of Cincinnati.
He was kind of a mentor, graduated a couple years ahead of me, helped set me up with my first co op, and then we got to work together again 10 years after the fact. Like, what would you encourage to people there maybe earlier in their career about, like, hey, making best use of their time? I used to say there's a lot of maybe negative press around college specifically or in a remote first environment post COVID. Like, how can they maximize building their network and being really intentional about that if they feel like, I think just some good advice around that because I've seen that play out in my career being a benefit you clearly have with building a brand, but definitely wanna get some encouragement to the listeners on that. Yeah.
You know what? I think it for me, it all started with doing something that I'm passionate with and and having that energy, and that mindset. And so starting out, it was really crucial for me to to develop that that mind that resilient mindset, that do whatever it takes mindset, but also having that focus on something that I was passionate about and would provide this positive energy around me. And I think people can pick up on that. And so I think when it, the first thing in terms of building your network and, and even thinking about your career and, and where you want to be in 5 or 10 years and what you want to do, it's first.
Yeah. Pick pick what you wanna do. Pick something that you you're actually passionate about and take what might seem like a risk, and do it strategically. Right? Don't just quit your job that you hate.
That's not what I did. I I I was doing this part time for a while and then went to business school and continue to to to, to create it for for years before we even launched the product. But that's all what led to me building an amazing network and having amazing conversations with amazing individuals, because the energy is vibing and and and people can tell, and you can tell with other people when they're passionate about what they do. And so I'd say, yeah, I'd say start there and then and then just be super open with, who you're who you're talking to and, try to get past those initial feelings of of nervousness to just connect with people and, try to, yeah, just try to try to really build a healthy community. That's great.
Well, I think we're probably about at our typical time, so we just hit hit 40 minutes. And, I guess, been an awesome conversation. For everybody listening, go, check Buoy out. Follow, Daniel. Send him a request on LinkedIn.
Follow him on on on Twitter or x if he's there. Always, welcome to follow James and I. Send us a request. We're we're pretty open. I think all 3 of us here are pretty big about building networks.
So if you heard anything that you liked, don't hesitate to reach out. And if you found this conversation helpful, please share it with your friends, family, colleagues, and, let them know they can find Brandbusters wherever they get their podcasts. So Spotify, Apple, Amazon, and and YouTube. So thanks again, Daniel. We really appreciate really appreciate you joining today, and I learned a ton.
I'm sure James learned a ton. I know our audience must have learned a ton. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. And, anyone listening that wants to get in touch, yeah, feel free to reach out on LinkedIn or or shoot me an email, and, we'd love to connect.
Great. Thank you.