BrandBusters Ep. 25: Dylan Menter, Founder of Bear Balanced Creatine Gummies
In Episode 25 of BrandBusters, James and Sean sit down with Dylan Menter, founder of Bear Balanced, the world’s first creatine gummy brand. A Marine Corps veteran, SpaceX alum, and host of the How to Entrepreneur podcast, Dylan has built Bear Balanced into a category-defining brand in the booming sports supplement space.
In this episode, we dive into:
-The surprising origin story of Bear Balanced and how a gym mishap led to an industry-first innovation
-Why gummies have become a dominant format in supplements and how they compare to traditional powders in bioavailability and effectiveness
-The biggest challenges in launching a novel CPG product, from IP protection to manufacturing hurdles
-The role of Meta and Amazon in Bear Balanced’s explosive growth, including key insights on digital advertising and demand generation
-Lessons learned from navigating TikTok Shop, influencer marketing, and finding the right content strategy for high-performing ads
-Dylan’s "oh sht"* moment—how a $100K manufacturing disaster nearly sank the brand and the critical lessons learned in vetting suppliers
Dylan brings raw, unfiltered insights into what it takes to build a successful DTC brand, scale through paid media, and survive the ups and downs of entrepreneurship. If you're growing a CPG brand or thinking about launching one, this is a must-listen!
Follow Dylan on LinkedIn and Twitter for more insights, and don’t forget to subscribe to BrandBusters on YouTube, LinkedIn, X, or wherever you get your podcasts!
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 Brandbusters. And we have an awesome guest today. We have Dylan Mentor, who is the founder of BareBalance, the world's first creatine gummy, which I know has been a hot segment recently. And he's the host of the how to entrepreneur podcast, a SpaceX alum, and a veteran having served in the Marine Corps.
We're super excited to have you on the on the show, Dylan, and, really excited to learn from you and and talk about what you've built at Fair Balance. Yeah, guys. It's quite the intro. It's like, I was just waiting for you to say where I went to high school. Yeah.
Exactly. Yeah. It's cool to be here with you guys. We we we could've dug a little deeper too. Yep.
Shame on you. Yeah. Exactly. Well well, let let's dive in. I mean, let's kinda tell the world about bare balance.
Like, what was the motivation behind founding the brand, like, the application nicely, supplements, and creatine seems to be such a hot category right now. But, like, tell us, like, what's the origin story here? Yeah. So there's there's definitely, like, a a catalyst to starting the old brand, the product, the idea behind the product. There there is that, like, almost quintessential, like, moment in time, But I've I've always kind of been in some sort of, like, entrepreneurial hustler.
Like, I've always been in that motion even since I was younger, you know, for better or worse. And and I I don't tell that side of the story, but it it does kinda lead up to me always trying to figure out some way to make some more money. You know, the lower middle lower middle, income class is is where I came from, my parents. You know, for reference, they don't have the house anymore. What weren't even able to keep it.
That's that's sort of my my upbringing. But, you know, fast forward to, I think it was 02/2017. I get out of the Marine Corps. I've got a little bit of aviation and electromechanical experience, and by the grace of God, I get hired here as a mission. And I end up forming this group of guys, workout buddies, this group of us that would go from Maine, which is what they call the primary Hawthorne SpaceX building, to the twenty four hour fitness, the world class twenty four hour fitness in in Hawthorne.
For anyone who's unfamiliar with the area, it's it's pretty close to maybe not the worst part of Compton, but maybe not the best. So, you know, going to the gym after work was always a treat. But I had a buddy, Andrew. Andrew is one of, like, five of us, and we we all take creatine. I actually solely responsible, and I will take full credit for this.
I got basically anybody that worked out at SpaceX, at Maine, near me in my lane, hooked on creatine. One, because I was jacked, and I was stronger than everyone. So they always asking me, like, diet advice and what kind of supplements am I taking, or what kind of steroids am I using? Like and, you know. So Andrew goes to strip his creatine into his shaker one day, completely misses, blasts himself in the chest with it, like, literally, you know, picturesque moment.
It it looks like a like a puff of gun smoke, like, from an old musket went off, and everyone just starts ragging on him like you would normally do if someone did something stupid like that. Lo lo and behold, he goes home. He tells his wife at the time about it, and she ends up telling him, oh, if you can't take the powders, you should just get the gummies. And he comes back to work and tells us that the next day. And we're all like, oh, yeah.
Whatever. Well, we like to keep good jokes running. So I go home that day after work, and I try to find these things online. And mind you, it's 02/2017. Like, goalie gummy have take or goalie gummy has taken off.
You know, the boom's kinda booming. And I'm on the first page of Google, and I'm like, oh, wow. I really can't find these things. And this was back before I was, like, every other, yeah, American in the sense of, like, Amazon is sort of the path of least resistance to buying stuff. At the time, I wasn't buying supplements there, but I went there and looked for the gummies, and I couldn't find them there either.
And I was like, this is gotta be yeah. This doesn't make any sense. I've been taking creatine for, you know, since 02/2009. It's 02/2017. I'm like, why how has no one put this in the, you know, the this form factor yet?
And, that that's sort of the story behind the, you know, initial spark. I I call my dad. My dad has been, as entrepreneurial as I have, in his adult life, and he is someone who you I wouldn't ask my dad for a lot of advice or opinions on too many things as maybe I wouldn't ask him how to fix something at work or, maybe how to, you know, do calculus or help me with my calculus homework. But when it comes to these, like, novel business ideas, he's had a ton of them. I call him up.
He's like, what do you mean there's not a creatine gummy? And he's like, I just don't have it. Yeah. He he it it sounded like something that, you know, you're like, when your dad's like, what do you mean? Like, what what are you talking about?
Like, that that was literally what happened. And, it was actually his advice to because you should try to patent something or get some sort of, you know, trademarks, around the IP and and see if, you know, they'll actually hold and you can start building this thing. And that is what started the rest of my late twenties, early 30 year old life right there. That's awesome. So I you gotta you wanna hear me, like, gap in the market too, especially with gummies exploding everywhere at the time.
And James and I have both taken supplements since we're in high school. So, you know, for how many people take creatine and protein and everything else, the fact that it didn't exist, like, what a what an awesome insight at the right time. What a sign. It's just a glaring hole looking back at me, like, in the search results or, like, lack of search results. So behind, like, some of the trends, right, I feel like gummies have been, like, popping off for, like, the last several years.
I see Gully kind of catalyzed that. Just from, like, a bioavailability standpoint, like, any benefit, like, powder versus gummy, like, application, like, what do you is it also matrix, or do you think, like, what has the highest efficacy? Yeah. So there's some studies on this and, like, I when I was do like, writing our patent, I'm looking at all these, Like, Goli has a patent. Like, I've read that thing a hundred times, back to front.
And you'd start to, like, deviate from, like, the manufacturing of things and to, you know, the efficacy of your product and does it even work in a gummy? You know, you learn about the different pH levels and the acidities when you're working with pectin. You're just like, you know, I don't remember creatine tasting sour in the least bit when I you know, or at least it shouldn't. That's probably a telltale sign that you shouldn't be you should not continue use if your creatine powder is sour. But, yeah.
So I you know, you look into the efficacy of these products in in gummy form, and you start to look for these studies. And it's just as simple as going on PubMed, you know, using your quotations and, adding creatine and then digestion, efficacy. Those three terms alone will probably generate every study that's ever been done. And I think at the time when I was initially researching this, there was less than a dozen that had any substantial data markers. And creatine, you know, every supplement's gonna be different.
Every compound, molecular compound, is gonna be different when it comes to the GI tract, digestion, and uptake, and irritability, all these other things that are associated with sort of what we expect from our supplements and, like, byproducts of taking them. So there was a powder study, and it basically said that you know, they tested all these different creatines, and none of them had any more uptake in or, no, monohydrate, I think, ranked number one in in form of uptake or creatine HCL in mono. Those were the two that ranked the highest. It might have been side by side. But then they have, like, all these other esters and, methylated versions of it and things that are supposed to be, like, enhanced from a viability, perspective.
And, you know, they were just right underneath good old monohydrate. So there were those powder study, but there was no gummy studies. And this was still, like, you know, earlier in the gummy boom, I guess. The creatine gummy I wouldn't be surprised if the guys over at the, International Society of Sports Nutrition, the ISSN, are actually trying to do a study on this now or, like, trying to get the funding for it because it would be such a hot paper. Yeah.
Interesting. Where we're at. Yep. Yep. And I mean, separate of, like, creatine.
I mean, I feel like sports supplements, performance supplements, everything is, I feel like a lot of these brands, like, I look at, like, the Universal Nutritionists of the world, who I think had a very, like, you think something like the marketing position, like, very kind of extreme, like, very, like, kinda muscly guys are featured on that. But now I think there's, like, a broader use application, kinda like the average active lifestyle person. But with that, there's been a surplus of brands have sprouted up. Like, which ingredients or products do you feel like are legitimate versus what is just straight bullshit snake oil? Yeah.
No. That's a fucking excuse my language too. That's a great fucking question. And that's why it's it's awesome that companies, like, now foods are, like, sort of doing this, like, undercover boss level of reporting where they're just using Eurofins or they're other they're not using Eurofins. They're using their own testing facilities to determine what is actually on the shelf.
And I'm I'm gonna speak more to the Eurofins, like, that part of the dichotomy on the testing level or testing world. But I think what you should be doing as a consumer or even a brand owner or someone in product development, is working with branded ingredients, and there's a few reasons why. So you can get creatine from China. You can get it from CreaPure in Germany. CreaPure also has, ware warehousing here in America.
So, you know, there's a there's a tons of way tons of ways to get different creatines. And the things that I would consider quality or up to standard for me personally, someone who is paying and expecting benefits, paying a premium price point for for products because we want that experience. Right? Yeah. And the product's gotta be branded.
Like, the ingredients, they have to be branded. The active ingredients, like, nine out of 10 times. Unless it's something like maybe a vitamin c, like, you know, something that's been around for a hundred years and you can find it in just about anything, and there doesn't need to be, like, some premium level of, uptake or efficiency from supplementation. Like, sports nutrition, especially 100% of the time, branded ingredients, those are the only things that I would trust. And like I mentioned, you can get your creatine from China.
And I've I've had it tested. I've had creatine from China because we used to get our creatine from China when I first started making cuttings in house. And, we had it tested, and I was just like, well, there's some stuff in here that I didn't necessarily expect to be in here. And, you know, that was partially because I was just younger and, you know, manufacturing and sourcing and and just naive in that sense. But there were also, like, levels of certain things that were just a lot higher than they should have been.
And I'm not talking about the creatine. So you've got quality of ingredients. You've got the dosing. Like, I think that some these have failed these Now Foods test. It's not because they're not buying the right amount of ingredients and putting them in their product and, you know, with an overage that's gonna avoid any sort of degradation, you know, lowering.
But it's just that the manufacturing of the the raw ingredient isn't as pure as it could or should be. And Now Foods is you know, it's the last time I'm gonna say Now Foods because it's starting to sound like they've sponsored me. But they I love NOW Foods because they do test at their own facilities, and they're they've got, like, you know, it's almost a a non biased approach to all of this. There could be who knows? Maybe they're gonna come out with a creatine gummy sometime too, and then it's you know, they do another report.
But, you know, I really do think that some of the companies that are testing at other facilities like Eurofins, for instance, they're taking benchtop samples, not samples from the manufacturing run. They're sent they're they're overdosing the heck out of them. They're sending them in. They're getting these lab reports that say they've got, you know, their 15 or 12% overage, and that's what they post on their websites. That's what they share, you know, in public forum.
And it's just I know it's not true because I I know for a fact this does happen happening behind the scenes. And it's it's not because companies wanna do that. It's because they have to do that. Like, they they've got their sourcing. They've got they've got this whole, you know, they've got this whole flow built out with the product dev, and it just sometimes it comes up short on from the line, especially when you're making things like, like food products or food grade products.
You're just you're working with a lot of heat, a lot of liquid. You know, it's just like cooking a vegetable. You're just nuking nutrients out of it. Whether you know, you're you're getting some, if not most, but it's never gonna be like eating something raw. Yeah.
What so so once you you had this idea. You saw that there was a gap in the market for creatine gummy. What was your next step? How did you go from, like, hey. This is a good idea.
This is a gap to finding a a contract manufacturer and and getting prototypes created and and actually start selling for paying customers? Yeah. I wish it was, like, some ephemeral, like, story. Like, oh, I just, you know, I just called the manufacturer, and I got it made. But it was actually, like, the quintessential like, this is the, like, the most difficult why like, difficult story, pushing the rock uphill sort of, like, perfect Netflix movie, so, pushing the rock uphill sort of, like, perfect Netflix movie scenario that could have happened.
And I know this is gonna resonate with a lot of other entrepreneurs that don't come from, like, a maybe an entrepreneurial background or, like, a a financially advantageous background. Like, sometimes you can pay to learn. You can pay for you can pay to get the shortcuts, or you can pay through all the mistakes and, just the setbacks from trying to learn things on your own with what's available online or, Twitter. It's yeah. So I took my dad's advice.
I'm a go I'm a glutton for punishment. I I I feel like I only learned through making my own mistakes and then never doing that again. Yeah. No. I mean, this is a, you know, serendipitous story, but, it was just a lot of me spending every waking moment alive outside of work trying to figure out, you know, how to write a patent because I couldn't necessarily afford to pay for it.
Trademarking things because I knew it was just a matter of time before someone else jumped in the space. And if at least when you have some IP around it, even if it's not the strongest, you can usually keep someone from running ads somewhere or posting something online or Shopify DMCA has gotten pretty good now with just, like, taking things down. So, you know, I it was less of a aggressive mood move to, like, own the market or try to monopolize it, but I really just wanted to protect this first mover that I knew I had at the time. And once I sort of learned my way around the IP processes that we could use because, you know, we it's very hard to get certain things on the, primary register, trademark wise and some things you just can't patent. So, like, it literally I spent, like, a year learning this stuff.
And, god, I don't know how it's possible, but no one else had gotten the market still within this year. I was able to get all this stuff, you know, signed, sealed, delivered, and that's when I made I almost feel like it was the next big mistake. Like, learning the patent process and the trademarks and writing them all and getting them through the USPTO was the biggest headache and pain in the ass. But then I went ahead and I I cracked open confectionery cookbooks for for gummies and, yeah, for working with pectin particularly. And granted, these things are not one to one when it comes to working with, you know, nutritional sports supplements, and and how, like, I I had no idea how creatine was gonna affect the pectin setting up in the actual confectionery process.
But I literally started download like, almost illegally, I think, downloading these confectionery cookbooks. Again, I'm searching for PDFs for things that aren't even in English and trying to transcribe them and, you know, shout out to those cookbooks because I saved a ton of money and I learned so much about that process that I'm not just like, I'm not the creatine gummy guy in my head. I'm a I'm a gummy guy. Like, I know gummies. I know the gummy world.
I know the products. I know what's probably not gonna hold up, on the shelves, and I and I know what potential, products there are to go after in the market once something starts trending. Like, it's very easy for me to look at something that's, you know, hot on TikTok and say, that would work in a gummy for this reason. You would need these sweeteners, flavors, natural ingredients, this sort if it's gonna be bitter, all these things. So it really set me up to to just work with gummies long term, and I think that's kind of where my feet are rooted at the moment.
But I learned how to make this gummy at home on my fucking counter like an asshole, and it took me, like, eight months to do it. I spent so much money on shit creatine, good creatine, trying to figure out, is it the creatine? Why is this not working? Is it the peck you know, there's a hundred different types of creatine out there, a hundred different, you know, brands you can buy from on Amazon. There's different types of pectin, and then there's diff like, different subtypes of pectin.
And Yeah. It's, like, even sugar and sugar free ingredient completely different. And, so that's just, like, literally eight maybe eight or twelve months of me trying to get these gummies to set up, taste good. We wanted to use a natural blue, which was another big mistake because blue is like the blue doesn't exist out there in nature. Like, if you can tell me where you see blue growing out of the ground, tell me.
Because it won't be after I'm done with it. But yeah. So there was that whole, like, do it at home, DIY, every single bit of the process, and I'm looking forward. But, you know, there's been other people that have cut that time to market down by two years just by throwing a bunch of money at it. And, yeah.
It was it wasn't easy. And then, you know, it just gets all the way up into so we've got the IP, we've got the product development, and then we've got you know, you've gotta get to market. And by getting to market, I mean, you you've gotta get online in in retailers and at the at February, like, '17, '19, that's really when, like, I feel like the expos of the world, like, Expo West and all these other, like, big intro opportunities for brands kind of started to just get a little weaker and, like, you needed to make a lot more noise online. Like and COVID definitely kinda like, it didn't kill the expos, but I don't think they'll ever be what they were. And that's coming from someone who, you know, did a show at the expos, the fitness expo here in LA, Expo West.
Yep. I think it was 02/2020. And people were like, oh my god. We just don't know what happened. And, you know, I'm expecting a bunch of retailers to pop up and you've got the world first creatine gummy.
It's got this badass packaging and this awesome, you know, custom mold. And it was just wasn't like that. We scored, like, two or three retailers off our first Expo West. It's a $10,000 show. I don't got $10,000 at the time, but we do it anyways.
And yeah. So it's just getting online and, like, learning me Which me and my fiancees. Yeah. No. It it's just a different landscape now.
We yeah. I'm on the board of a company that recently got into Walmart, and and I'm involved with the distributor that has some clients. Like, they'll basically wanna look at your Shopify sales data and your Amazon sales data and use that as, like, a predictor of whether or not it'll be successful. So I feel like gone are the days of, like, you know, showing up to Expo West or some of the shows and a buyer just walking by and being like, this looks interesting. Like, they wanna see your your actual sales data, your by ZIP code sales data, and and see if it's gonna be a fit for their store.
Yeah. That that, like, a traditional paradigm, that, that's almost like I I feel like that's not our generation. Like, that truly wasn't my generation. When we started the company, like, it was just it's a different subcategory of Yeah. Like, manufacturers and ingredient providers that really prosper prosper from being at those shows as opposed to, like, the brands.
Unless you're there to just make content, then you can go there and spend $40,000 on an awesome setup and, you know, have a effing party, with your product. And I I think that's where maybe the majority of the value lies with those things now. But yeah. Because you're right. Anyone that is going there to look at your brand, they they've seen your TikTok TikTok shop sales.
They know your Amazon sales. They're they're not even spy tools. There's just tools now that kind of pull back the iron curtain on everybody. But yeah. So my fiance and I, we did all the branding for everything, built a website, did all the custom coding.
We've got a, you know, developer now we work with, and we have some more complicated stuff. But, you know, we just we learned a lot, went to the the whole school our school of hard knocks with sort of, like, digital advertising. And to this day, like, I still am capable of running Google, Amazon, and Facebook, but it's not necessarily something I I'd wanna do at the scale we're at anymore. But, you know, we we've just done it all ourselves, and it's it's been fun. Kind of going on, like, channel mix, like, how's it evolved from, like, launching to today?
Like, do you see bulk of sales? Like, you're kinda speaking to the the importance of digital recently, but, like, do you still see good traffic, be it brick and mortar, or you guys have heavily indexed, digitally in, like, which marketplaces? Yeah. Great question. Especially for, like, anyone that isn't just thinking about maybe one, like, siloing one channel for growth, from the get go, which personally, I you know, I'm I'm glad that we kinda did, but I think we may have picked the wrong channel to start off.
We are very Google heavy at first, and, you know, it really helps with, like, online search presence, obviously. But back then, Meta was so much of a gold mine. I don't think we could have kept up with it at scale, but it would have pushed the company a lot further along a lot sooner. But nowadays, my primary focus is Meta. I think probably two thirds or three quarters of all of our rising spend monthly goes towards that.
And when some people have seen this sort of climb in acquisition cost, we've actually seen the exact opposite. And I just it's hard to pinpoint sort of what's going on and why. And but it's, you know, kind of designated that part of the channel mix just prop or the cream and roast to the top because, like, it yes, it started off expensive, but it's only gotten cheaper for us, and I think we've just gotten better running ads. There's been more and more changes in the health and wellness space as far as meta, nowadays, especially, like, more recent as of, like, December, January, February. I think, there's been a lot of auction kind of avail or made available because some of these companies just aren't allowed to advertise like they were, and maybe they'll, you know, circumvent it or find a way around it, or Meta will put something in place that kind of brings things back to where they were in terms of competitiveness in the auctions.
But, yeah, I would say two thirds, three quarters is there every month. And then the vast majority of what's left, maybe, like, let's say up to 90% is Amazon PPC, which Sounds it could be could be a lot more. I I know this for a fact. I I don't spend as much time in in Amazon, and we don't have someone in place running it in house or, or an agency, for instance, yet. But I'm I'm hoping to change that this year because I think that we've we've left a lot on the table, but we're still in a great place from a p and l point.
So I'm I'm not yeah. It's something that should have more focus, but it doesn't. And then Google Ads, you know, it's it's kinda it's kind of a shit show. Like, I don't even think people are using Google to search anymore. They're using, like, chat g p t.
And it's just I think Google's business model is gonna dramatically have to change. Right? Because especially for consumer goods products because I just saw a a stat that it's like 90% of people go to Amazon to search first if they're looking for a consumer good product. They're not even going to Google anymore. And then Yep.
Likewise with with Meta being as targeted as it is, like, what you're doing is very similar to every other brand that we've had on here. I would say it's either majority Amazon and then Meta or majority Meta and then Amazon and then kinda all all other is a smaller Yeah. So we get away from TikTok, or I'm currently just distancing ourselves from it. This this year, we're gonna take a new approach. But last year, we did, I think, what every brand kind of thought to be just, like, best, best practice, and that was to send a shit ton of product out, get some organic content in.
You know, this is all TikTok shop, creators. And what we saw as a result of sending out, like, a hundred free bags a month was almost zero sales, no viral content. And this was, like there were, like, three months out of last year where we did this. Because and and it's it it was kinda because of an inventory thing. Also, just we felt like it could be refined, and we we kept trying to reshape it as we were, you know, weren't seeing, like, these high levels of success, like brands like, like Brez or, just like these other new to market or new to TikTok shop companies that sort of blew up.
And I I know now sort of how they did it. But in hindsight, you know, it doesn't help me. It doesn't help me last year. Yeah. So this year, we're gonna we're gonna take a pretty aggressive approach.
What do you think the the main reason is for because I I've dabbled in TikTok shop. I know a ton of people that that are very interested in it. But what do you think the main reason for, you know, sending out a hundred kind of free bags a a month and not getting great content was attributed to just selecting the wrong people, or are they just people that are taking the free samples and not actually producing anything? Like, what what do you think is the big driver? I there may it may be many drivers, but I'm just curious if you have any thoughts on it.
No. Strong mix of both of those things. Also, like, you've gotta have some organic clout on the platform as well. Like, it doesn't hurt the like, so the brands that I know that successfully sort of, like, kicked ass last year, and, you know, they saw these huge surges is from they're garnering their own creator community or they're utilizing, like, discords full of creators. And if you're just relying on the platform, you're gonna get a bunch of low performing, sort of low quality.
And, you know, that's all native to the platform, but it's just not what sells, the best. There are communities full of creators that actually sell the best, and they're they're all accessible for these, like, backdoor deals that you've gotta do with them. Like, the great the creators that have, you know, hundreds of thousands in GMV, they're they're not even gonna respond to your freaking, you know, here's my free product. Please make a video request. Yeah.
There there's some yeah. They're getting paid behind the scenes. They've almost got, you know, like, a salary in place, so to speak. But there's that and then I think that's a huge insight for people trying to break into it and who might be struggling because I've I've heard that multiple times now. Yeah.
That and then TikTok won't push a shop unless you you know, you've got, like, 55 star reviews. And, like, you can, like, you can gamify it. You can game TikTok shop. I'm just kinda like, here's a little bit of sauce for anyone who, like, hasn't been able to crack it. Like, I know for a fact there's people out there that are pretty much buying their own product and sending it to creators in return for these, you know, five star reviews.
Like, it's all it's all set up on the back, like, you know, in the background, obviously. But that's a good way to get your shop, get your shop the traction it needs to position itself for, you know, the actual traffic that you're expecting from sending out or, like, sending out product. People will wanna work with you if you've got those 55 stars. Yeah. I think, so agency I'm at, we have a TikTok shop arm.
I think, social influencers complete foreign territory to me. I know marketplaces very well. That's been kind of the learning curve. But I think the amount of brands that try to go, about, like, sourcing and vetting, the right, like, nano influencers is to your point. Like, the major ones with all the GMV, like, aren't gonna they're not gonna partake.
So how do you source properly and also develop, like, affiliate briefs? So, actually, turning one piece of UGC into, like, 10, because I think that's the other missed opportunity a lot of brands are just hoping and relying on the the creator. While their creator should come up with stuff, you have to make it as turnkey and frictionless for them as possible and understand, like, what's resonating based on your data and also, like, what you're seeing from competitors and draft that because that's gonna turn you know, increase the likelihood of virality or other impressions going on. So, again, based on what Dylan said, equipping the influencers or the affiliates, like, that's what you do your best your best shot. Yeah.
That can't stress how important the actual scripts are. Is Mhmm. Like, that that's kind of like, some people, they hire script writers. Like, once they've got the money or, like, say they go out and get funding. Like, one of their first hires will be a legitimate script writer because controlling and controlling and creating your narrative digitally is probably the most important thing, especially if you've ever plan on doing a TV commercial.
Like, you're not gonna like, I'm not gonna sit down and write the script no matter how much I know creatine and fitness and wellness. Like, I'm just you know, you just you really need to nail it. I think an interesting insight there on script writing is, like, even early on is the founder. If you're writing a script for influencers, like, write the script so you can you know it because you know the product the best better than anybody else out there. Like, one of the things I I founded a brand called Xevo in the insect space back in 02/2017 in Procter and Gamble venture capital wing.
And we, like, basically I I actually hired a guy who was really good in this, but we we collaborated and we wrote a two minute, late night TV infomercial script and, like Oh, yeah. Actually got it produced and, like, ran it. But, like, that two minute script that we refined and, like, were able to, like, prove out that people would actually call in to the number or, like, go to the website and buy it. Like Yeah. Figure out we pretty much nailed the entire narrative.
So we could take that two minutes, and we could, you know, pick the things that really resonated and turn it into our digital ads. We could cut it down and give it talking points to our influencers. Like but we spent a ton of time really trying to to nail that that pitch and that script, and that was the basis for why I think we were successful because we were super crisp on, you know, what the problem was, how we helped solve the problem, and and kind of the reasons to believe why you would why our product solves the problem. Yeah. So were you guys using it as, like, performance creative too, or was it just, like, the top of funnel stuff that okay.
Cool. Yeah. We were using his performance too. We were we had we hired a whole that whole world was so foreign to me, but we hired, we basically buy, like, late night remnants. So we'd be on, like, Fox business or, like, it's basically where, like, the MyPillow guy would be.
Oh, he's in there. You buy these you buy these TV spots for, like, $5 because they they didn't sell sell them, so they would take whatever money you were willing to pay for it. And then we would basically have phone numbers in different, like, URLs for each of the spots that we could manage or basically manage whether or not people were buying, how much they're buying, doing all that. So it was an early, like, performance indicator for us. Later on, it became a top of funnel thing, but it helped us kinda prove out the thesis early on.
It was something I was not very familiar with, but was really How much did you guys did you guys spend, like, 200 k on it? Yeah. No. Like, I think the first run we did, we spent, like, 25 or 40 k. Okay.
And it lasted the test of time? Yeah. And it it it worked. And then was it? Later on later on, we kinda kept that.
We may we might have modified the ad a little bit, but we started to run still take that same approach. It was less about, like, direct response and more just buying the remnants for top of funnel with, like, the really good pitch in addition to all the other stuff we were doing on on Meta and and and other channels. But it was it was it was pretty interesting. But I think getting the getting the script right is is huge, especially as the founder. You know the product better than anybody else.
So I always try to, like, push founders to, like, at least participate in that or guide that versus trying to outsource it to a creative or an agency that might be like a 22 year old trying to write a script for your product. Yeah. %. Now talking about I think Yeah. I I think there's very, very yeah.
As I say, so for emerging brands, Dylan, Isley, CAC is something that everyone's, like, monitoring. How do you think about, like, actually leveraging meta or relying Amazon's a great conversion channel. It's not a great, like, top of funnel. It's an expensive kind of CAC channel initially, but how do you think about keeping that in check? And, obviously, it's not gonna be always high into perpetuity, but, like, how can brands who need to get traction, right, you know, sooner than later think about that kind of equilibrium of, like, CAC LTV?
Yeah. It's definitely a a generation demand game. Right? So our that's why we focus so much on Meta because even though we're not you know, we don't have these $2,025,000, 2 hundred thousand dollar top of funnel commercials that we can slice and dice, we can we can take, you know, pieces of content that cost near to nothing to make in house, and we can do hundreds of them, you know, monthly. And we can test, test, test, test, test.
Like, right now, I think we've got, like, 11 or 1,200 ads running for our company if you look at our Facebook ad library. And Meta in its demand generation, the ability there I know people are thinking of, you know, no one under the age of, like, forties on Facebook anymore, and Instagram's got this, like, huge slice of the pie that was taken by TikTok. True. True and true. Like, I I'm I'm rarely on Facebook looking at, you know, friends from high school, and I'm, you know, I'm very conscious of what TikTok has done to sort of the the meta, ethosphere, but you've gotta just rely on a channel whether it's metal meta or not to generate as much as demand as you can for the cheapest amount of money possible to get the greatest amount of money out of that machine.
And there's definitely levels to this. Like, I think that for brands going from zero to 10,000,000, that was the answer for us. Like, just make a shit ton of Facebook ads. You know, try to try to get as much as much creative as you can and diversified creative as you can in the meta because you're gonna reach the broadest, you know, end audience possible. But you'll see your your Google CAC, you know, your search term, quantity is gonna go up.
People are gonna start looking for you everywhere. Your Amazon sales go up because some people only buy on Amazon, but they'll see you on Facebook. So I bet Facebook is still the best opportunity and sort of the gold standard when it comes to demand generation for brands under 10,000,000. It's a different conversation to have. How important you talked about running a a a ton of ad content and creative.
Like, how important has creative volume been for you guys? Like, it seems like as everybody else is complaining about cost of acquisition going up on Facebook, has creative volume helped you guys find the sweet spot to drive down your costs, do you think? Yeah. So, I mean, our my experience is probably gonna be a bit asymmetrical from the next creatine gummy company. But in the beginning, we you know, we're we're based out of LA.
We've got some some friends in the, you know, the sort of media space and, like, especially, like, digital, digital assets. Like, we were able to get these really nice dope videos. Like, you know, we could have ran these things anywhere, and you would have thought Procter and Gamble was behind it. So we, like, we did what, you know, you guys did with your stuff. We repurposed it.
We created stills. You know, the videos performed like shit, on Meta. Like, they just, like, didn't get any fucking spend. And the, like, the the images that we did repurpose, the like, in our product images, which were which were pretty nice at the time, they didn't start performing well until we started to learn how to properly overlay sort of the right signals to meta, like, you know, some of our best performing earlier ads with this high quality chopped up video stills that just said, like, Priapure on it. Or, like Yep.
We we we've got an active ingredient, profile of huperzine a b twelve and a couple other things, and, like, we'd list that alongside it and, like, yeah. It did good. Actually, we fucking crushed. Like, the first month we launched, like, we went from zero to 250,000 in the first month. And, like, I don't think I've ever I've never even told anybody this.
I don't think. But, like, we just we were kinda That's a massive yeah. That's a massive launch. Yeah. It was huge.
And that was when we rebranded and got these videos done and chopped up these stills. But, you know, the CAC then, at that scale back when there was, like, no competition in the auction was great Yeah. But we're doing even better now. We're doing even better, you know, two or three three years later. That's awesome.
Fast forward. The only difference is we're just focusing on volume, but we also know how to signal meta a little bit better. And this is something that I think everyone needs to really remember when they're either working with performance based creative agencies that are giving them stuff that they think is gonna work, or they're making it in house, or they're, you know, they're paying for it upfront, is that you have sculpted your meta audience from a conversion perspective from day one. The ads that you make will constantly send meta in in a single direction, whether it's, like, hyper focused or it's a little laxed. You're constantly sculpting your avatar out.
So when things start to work, you know, lean into them. Maybe be conscious of leaning into it too much because you might silo a customer that doesn't necessarily scale the business in the way you want, at the CAC you need. So there's definitely demographics that you wanna scale into, and there's those that you wanna stay away from on Meta that are completely different from TikTok and the other platforms. I think that's great advice. I would say as we I mean, there's been a lot of just, like, great valuable now gets in here.
So I hope, you're doing a real service where I think of the founders of the emerging brands in this space. We're just trying to navigate customer acquisition. But, I always love to close with a good, like, oh, shit moment. So, I see on the entrepreneurial journey, you get one major oh, shit moment, maybe 10, depending on on the day or the month. But, but, I I guess any anytime during the journey where you felt like your back was against the ropes, so, like, how did you rebound, after the fact?
Yep. So there's a few that are, like, dire. Like, we're dire consequentially. So almost like my personal bankruptcy or shutting down the business. So I will pick just, like, one in particular that I think is gonna have the most, like, learning, maybe pull from it, and that's, the manufacturers that we tried to work with earlier on.
You know, when you've got a novel product, like, creating gummies were at the time, and like I mentioned, you know, I was in the confectionery cookbooks for a year thing. I didn't know that these manufacturers had no fucking clue what they were doing either. And you and when you're just a you know, you're just Joe Schmo and you're like, I'm gonna just go from making them in house to getting them manufactured, and I'm gonna get rich. Like, you you expect these manufacturers to kind of be your North Star and, like, guide you in the right direction. But, you know, same with, like, supplements.
Like, you just don't know what's behind the label, and you if you take it for face value, you can definitely get fucked out of what you're buying. And that's exactly what happened to us. We paid a hundred thousand dollars upfront for some creatine gummies. Didn't get shit. They lied they lied to us.
They were, you know, hand pouring these things and sending us pictures and, like, oh, we we're making them. We're gonna be doing the the main run-in a week. A week didn't turn into a week turned into a month. It and then it turned into, like, six months. And we're kinda like, okay.
Where's the fucking product, guys? Like, you're like, our partners are wanting to pull out because of us with all these false promises. And we've I ended up having to fly to one of the manufacturing facilities, which is maybe something you should do before they start to try to make the product so you can sort of bet them out. But then again, you know, money was tight. We got a little bit of funding, put it into it, started building in the background.
But just the oh, shit moment was was definitely when I went there, and they showed me exactly what they had made. And I had planned to stay in town for a week or two while they made the rest. Like, the the big run was finally happened after, like, the twentieth time of telling us that. And about halfway into the trip, like, I started, like, diagnosing sort of what I was seeing in the facility. And I was like, how are you drying them like this with all this humidity in the room when creatine is susceptible to degradation under these, like, these exact conditions?
Like, how is the how is this product even holding up? And, you know, those guys really couldn't answer the questions. And after about a week, I was like, you just need to start making what you can now because we've got preorders that gotta go out. And they started making product, and it just, like, magically kinda got pulled out of their ass. And I was like, so this isn't the same product you showed me in the drying room.
Like, where did this come from? And they were like, oh, well, we've been we've been hand pouring your product, you know, why you've been here because our production lines backed up. And I was like, well, I thought we were scheduled for these exact dates. What are you fucking talking about? And, yeah.
It just turned it to be into one big line, fucked best shit show. And, you know, we got what was left of our ingredients back, and I can you know, it wasn't a hundred thousand dollars worth of product and ingredients that we got back, but I had to personally get a buddy to bring a truck, like, a a big ass U Haul truck to the facility, and we had to put our own shit in our truck and take it from them. Because they they honestly they would not for whatever reason, like, we paid for it, but they would not let us have it. They it was just the biggest oh shit moment. And, you know, biggest learning experience, kind of all this.
Don't trust anyone, don't expect anyone can do what they say they're gonna do. And ironclad contracts have kinda been my recourse since then, and that's how we've been able to sort of stay on the I think we're on the like, in the manufacturers' black books, like, when they when they look at our names, they know we don't fuck around. Just I've made more alterations to contracts and pretty much write your own, you know, when you're doing these sort of revisions when they send you their master servicing. Oh, yeah. Agreements.
So just be be careful out there, kids. Man. Well, I I mean, I I love the rawness because I think this is the stuff that you've got the scar tissue, like and you're you're still here to you're still growing it. The the brand is still around. It's thriving.
I mean, these are the type of stories I think founders and other brands, like, need to hear. Otherwise, they're just supposed to sleepwalk their way into it. So, hopefully, you know, you sharing this is helping. Hopefully, someone heeds your warning, when kinda navigating, like, manufacturer selection on that. So thanks for being raw on that.
Great. Awesome. Dylan, it's been an absolute pleasure. I I think we learned a ton. I think our audience is gonna learn a ton.
I love how you kinda got Honestly, I talk to someone, like, once a week, and they're in yeah. That's great, man. Cool. Well, thanks again. If for anybody that's interested, Dylan, I imagine you're you're on social media.
Or do you have a a Twitter account or a LinkedIn account that people could follow you at if they want to? We might have lost. We might have lost our Yeah. If anybody wants, like, any, like, gummy manufacturing consulting done, just a general advice, a quick phone call, or they're looking for a manufacturer, hit me up. Cool.
Yeah. Give give Dylan a follow-up. Again if you want. Yeah. Give Dylan a follow.
Reach out to him if you need to. And then, as always, if you found this conversation helpful, please share it with your your friends, your colleagues, anybody you think would get value out of it, and give us a follow on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube at the Brandbusters podcast. Thanks again, and we will see you guys next time.