was chronically sick doctors labeled me with chronic fatigue syndrome which is a doctor's polite way of saying I've got no idea what's wrong with you absolute exhaustion inflammation throughout my whole body pain couldn't run 50 m without being dizzy if you cut out the crap from your diet and replace it with high quality nutrition your life will change and an absolute Miracle occurred within 2 to 3 weeks I was feeling like a brand new person we started out of our apartment we brought the powders in and then we just filled them into pouches we went
from 0 to doing over $10 million bootstrapped in 3 years and then when we moved into our facility sales Skyrocket here the stories learn The Proven methods and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship welcome to the founder podcast with Nathan [Music] Chan we've got Caleb Marshall founder of trapa incredible supplements brand uh he's come down from Sydney all the way from Sydney to do this interview so Caleb thank you so much for taking the time man thanks for having me mate you're welcome so let's start off with your story you experienced chronic fatigue in
2011 and that's really what shaped this brand tell me exactly what happened yes it was a very horrible period in my life uh between 2011 and to 2014 for three and a half years I was chronically sick doctors labeled me with chronic fatigue syndrome which is a doctor's polite way of saying I've got no idea what's wrong with you and that's because it's an exclusionary illness so they go down the list of different possible issues that you could have and then they get to the bottom they say well it's not this this this and this
they get to the bottom and they say well the only thing we have left is to label you with chronic fatigue syndrome and what that looked like on a day-to-day basis was absolute exhaustion inflammation throughout my whole body uh pain I couldn't run 50 m without being dizzy with the physical pain I had emotional pain I was depressed I had Suicidal Thoughts at times and one of the worst things was a lack of Hope because doctors didn't know what was wrong with me and when I'd be healthy again and uh that led me on a
path of self-discovery of like how do I how do I heal myself and in 2014 I found a thing called functional in integrative medicine and they look at the underlying they they try to find the underlying root cause of why you're sick in the first place and they also say things like if you cut out the crap from your diet and replace it with high quality nutrition as well as doing very other very important things like focusing on great sleep stress reduction exercise drinking clean filtered water all of that stuff but for the the biggest
focus is cutting out the crap from your diet and replacing it with that high quality nutrition they say your life will change around your body has the capacity to heal itself in in the vast majority of cases and I tried everything else and I'm like yeah I'll give it ago and um yeah I did that and an absolute Miracle occurred and within 2 to 3 weeks I was feeling like a brand new person again I'd reduced that inflammatory load on my body and I was feeling and I wasn't getting those symptoms and I was starting
my body was starting to heal and my housemate at the time was going through his own health issues and high quality nutrition changed his life around as well now on a side note I learned through functional medicine the underlying root cause was long-term antibod use for my skin as a teenager that I used um that I used because I had acne and so those 5 years of antibiotics absolutely destroyed my gut and um and with that that's where your immune system is and so my immune system was massively compromised anyway through all of this journey
um as we were trying to get healthy and were getting healthy we'd go down to the health food store in 2014 and realized the only people going into a hell food store at the time were old people and hippies like no was making Health Foods cool to anyone everything was in a brown paper bag and one of the best strategies in business is finding old outdated Industries and being like how can you make this cool how can you especially in the world of social media where we realized like okay you a fashion brand or an
alcohol brand could make their products cool in 2014 but no one could make Health Foods cool and social media is there as an as an outlet for people to express their values and so we recognized that we're like let's do it on a on an absolute you know bootstrap shoestring kind of budget and barely any money in so it took us two years to find the best product development um experts to help us develop the best products um we obviously were consumers of the product so we really knew what we loved and what we wanted
to do as well and then all the other things that come with growing a a business and launching and so in 2016 we finally launched and uh we we had a z marketing budget we put all our money into buying inventory and getting the website up and running and all of that fun stuff and so we're like well what do we do how do we sell this product and so we you know stumbled across a Inc influencer marketing and it was if you send your products to people on social media which was the thing that
we're trying to Endeavor in doing anyway then um hopefully they might promote the product for free and we did that and because we were the first in the industry to one have an incredibly good product that was branded really well and the product did what it said it would do so people had a great impact from it we got so much free um publicity because of it through these um these influences back then and you know I'm going much further than what your question said but I might as well tell the the full Journey um
well a lot of it but in uh in that time we um you know we didn't need to spend money in order to grow the business it was um it was an exceptionally great time to be kind of that first mover Advantage around um providing a product and a brand that people wanted to get behind and really enjoyed taking yeah I see so took me through like obviously working on your gut health and eating high quality foods help change your life and your housemates life um like what was the first ID iteration of the product
did you start with a hero product I know I we've got some research here you put in $60,000 to launch your business and get the first line of supplements like what talk me through the details yeah so my housemate became my co-founder I should probably mention that as well so it was a really cool story there and we ended up putting in $60,000 each over the course of that two-year period so we'd work 16 hour days um I was a tennis coach um I was getting healthy so I could work a lot and I put
all of my money over that 2-year period into um into launching the business and so the funny thing is the first thing that we wanted to do in terms of product development was kombucha before kombucha was cool I still remember like making my own kombucha back in the day um before it hit I think around 2017 it became pretty trendy so this is 2014 but we didn't have the money to start a kombucha brand yeah and uh and buy you know the mqs and things along those lines so we're like well what else do we
take well we love organic superfoods and so we decided to start an organic superfood brand and the funny thing that came out of that was we also as an afterthought just before launch were like oh we should also we take plant proteins we should create a plant protein product as well and that ended up being our hero product uh it's um it's a much bigger Niche protein powders than organic superfoods so thank God for that and we essentially became the first company uh at least in Australia one of the first in the world I didn't
know any other company that had um a plant protein that tasted great they all tasted like crap back in the day and was branded really cool and something that someone would want to show off to their friends rather than something in a brown paper bag uh so yeah that was our first products got you so you launched with a plant protein plant-based protein in the superfoods what happens with the superfoods oh they're still around okay and they're doing great so they're in major retail and we export them all around the world uh but I just
we we went to our first our first love was or we take superfoods you know greens powders immune supporting powders uh and S powder all organic so that was kind of the the we're scratching our own itch we're like we want to be able to take these products as well yes and uh that's how it kind of came about but then we're like oh we can also do a protein here and we did take proteins and we're like oh we can make this protein taste a bit better than what we're taking at the moment through
X Y and Z yep got you so when it came to the launch talk me through your first sale like was it through influencer marketing how much did it cost to to launch right you you and your co-founder putting $60,000 from what 2016 to 2018 is that right so 120,000 120,000 in total yep okay and that's just in stock sorry from 2014 to 2016 okay so 2014 to 2016 you put in 60 Grand each and that was just in stock or website the whole the whole box and dice yeah okay us wasting money trying to
do figure out what to do you know trying to answer the question of what what do we not know that we don't what do we don't know that we don't know yep okay and talk to me around first batch of orders what wasq how many products did you launch with and how did you get your first sale yeah so we started out of our apartment yep and we brought the powders in that were already completed powders and then we just fill them into um into pouches and so you don't know about how like the funny
thing is we have the highest level of product quality and food safety at the moment uh where traper is with hup was hup certified but we had none of that back in the day but we always think like like when you start out of your own apartment and your own house like your food quality and food safety when it's just the two of you is the highest it'll ever be it's like um one you live in the place but two it's the two Founders doing whatever they can can to make the product the best it
possibly can from day one so it was one of those stories where yeah we're starting out of our apartment but we're able to still produce high quality products that then we'd send to customers they didn't know that it was coming out of an apartment um all they saw was oh this is fantastic and high quality and so that's where we started uh in terms of our first sale yeah I still remember our first sale that came in uh and was through an influencer I still remember our first influencer who posted she posted around our asai
and our immunity product and uh I think I caught I met I saw her at a trade an expo like a couple years ago a few years ago and I was like did you know you helped generate our first customer so I was like a special experience yeah yeah there you go and uh was like sales booming because you were early days influencer marketing or was it like talk me through that yeah so it took us nine months to get out of our apartment so I don't know if you'd say that's booming I mean it
was booming for a company that was in an apartment yeah yeah so the trajectory of our business was we went from0 to doing over 10 million bootstrapped in 3 years so that period was booming but I remember it was just the most perfect timing when as as soon as we got out of our apartment into our first warehouse and first food facility sales Sky rocked skyrocketed that next month so it was and then when we moved into our facility the one before where we are now Sal skyrocketed so there's been some really perfect I suppose
Divine timing and everything which has been very special yeah and look there's a lot of supplement Brands superfood Brands out there for anyone watching what advice would you give to compete in this market today you really need to come up with something that's Innovative and when I say Innovative what I mean is that every week I see a new company in the health and wellness space come up and it's the same thing and it's like do not realize like what you're up against like company there are so many companies doing what we do they have
the budgets that can just out compete you with CPA cpms they have the knowhow they have the brand reputation and loyalty and following to crush you like it is so so hard when it's a saturated Market the blessing with this Market is it's a low barrier to entry so we were able to get in in the early days back in 2016 but the issue with a low to entry is every man and his dogs trying to create a protein and superfood company at the moment so I'll give you some good examples of how to do
it there's a guy on I can't remember his name but there's a guy on Instagram and he was like the first to bring out seamos uh and there was no seamos like three years ago and he's doing a great job and it's Innovative he's using his audience to promote a product that isn't saturated he's bringing a really high quality product to Market and that's awesome to see whereas whereas if you don't have that point of difference you're just going to get uh flooded and saturated uh from competition so always trying to think okay what's different
about this why would a customer want to purchase off me as opposed to someone else and then also being aware that first mover is great but also first mover on on the flip side is really tough and an example of that is we are first movers in a Thing Called Beauty custard which is is the world's first Beauty powder it's you you mix it in with cold water and milk and it's you can have a delicious dessert in one minute and the issue with that is there's no other Beauty custard on the planet so it
takes a whole lot of Education which costs a lot of money in order to teach people one why they should take buy this product and why they should use it in the first place so although I say okay you got to come up with something Innovative you've also got to balance that off with what are your capabilities of educating an audience that one you don't have because you're a new company to one purchase the product know that it's better to purchase off you than going and purchasing another health food product and then on top of
that how to actually use it in the first place so what would you say to somebody that's thinking of uh Drop Shipping something like [Laughter] chillit well is there a business in that well Drop Shipping is extremely hard I've never done Drop Shipping but I've listened to enough people who I look up to who have said like Drop Shipping is tough and I mean I can see the value in Drop Shipping to test a market and I can also see okay sheit is trending really hard on Tik Tok and it's a great quality product especially
if you get the tar so that thing's legit I was taking she legit four years ago it before anyone even knew about it yeah but I mean it's been used for thousands of years so I'm not really that much of first M there yeah okay but um yeah it's it's a legit product it's a great product but I could name a few companies already dominating that space I was just at an expo a couple weeks ago and there was sheer legit companies uh so yeah again going up against competition so if you want us if
if anyone's watching listening or reading this and they want to create an incredible health and wellness brand in the supplement space you need to create a brand right and like what what has been key to trapa in terms of brand building like you started with a great product you've got a great story right that's a story people remember that's a story people resonate with it's a it's an amazing origin story and it really shows the strength of your products but what else do people need from your perspective to create a brand that stands out in
this market well brand is really just the rep reputation you hold and you can hold reputation through a number of ways we hold reputation by the fact that we have over 20,000 fstar reviews we hold reputation over the fact that you can put the product anywhere on your shelf at home or even cafes do this and show it off as a statement piece we hold brand through the fact that people want to tell others about our products and one of our biggest acquisition channels is word of mouth so brand is everything brand is what separates
you from your competition but brand is not a thing unless you build something foundational behind the brand in order to give brand what it's meant to give you can have a bad brand and you can have a good brand and so the components of a good brand is all of those things that I just said what about Association do you guys have any sponsored ambassadors like I know that's a big thing oh I can't remember that company but they there was that guy he was a bit funny looking but he was a real musly kind
of dude and and he had an all ambassador program for his line of I guess powders and stuff I forget now he's come and gone but yeah like do do you have an ambassador program or do you do anything like that yeah we have I mean we had we still do have influencers and ambassadors uh we were very very dominant in the influencer marketing space uh between 2016 and 2020 up until Co and then everyone came in with dumb money especially corporations and started throwing massive amounts at influencers and then also the the level of
trust that influen has once held is has been degrading for quite some time but we focus a lot still on areas where trust is still relatively high like micros and Nanos and the those with smaller audiences and we do both in-house and work with an external agency there as well in order to to do that but just one piece of our puzzle our our main focus is Performance Marketing these days but we try and C we try and encourage our customers to be our influencers so again like acquisition uh word of mouth is one of
our greatest acquisition channels so the question is how can we as a business help people tell other people about our products and you know there's a range of strategies from what everyone now does but it was Innovative back in the day many years ago which is you know give some sort of incentive for people posting on their account on social media for their next order and um yeah there's different programs that you can use like Shopify collabs and whatnot that allow you to have a system in place to help people and create as little friction
as possible to be an ambassador for your your company yeah so if you were to start a brand today would you start with performance or you'd start with influencer or what would you do to get traction assuming the product is great I would start with performance pay to play absolutely I mean organic is so tough um even for influencers like there's just a growing amount of a growing amount of competition across content and it's going to exponentially scale in the next year and two years off the back of AI even Mark Zuckerberg came out a
couple weeks ago and showed his video version of AI um video content that people will have access to next year AI is going to create scale that will be mindboggling and so the only way that you can guarantee getting eyeballs is through pay to playay which is Performance Marketing and I'm completely happy as a company figuring out okay what do I need to do in order to produce great creative that I can then send to millions of people in order to convince them to purchase my product that does not mean that you shouldn't look at
a whole bunch of different strategies including influencer marketing and ambassadors and you should have an ambassador program for your existing customers but it's not the Glory Days of influencer marketing anymore and hasn't been for a long time okay so even with the emergence of Tik Tok Tik Tok shop you don't see you you know do you got you guys would ship internationally you guys on Tik Tok shop so no we're not so that's a great point and I was funny enough I should have spoke said this earlier like treat what I say as well with
a grain of salt things change so quickly right and so I don't I don't hold firmly to any beliefs like it's what is it October 21st 2024 you could ask me this in December and my opinion could completely change and that's what's so important that you stay up ahead with the trends and know what you're doing so at the moment Tik Tok shop isn't available to Australians but I'm going to be the first on Tik Tok shop when it's available and yeah utilizing creators to incentivize and provide a commission is a great idea I mean
we do that already through Shopify collabs and it has success and also take what I say as a grain of salt because like our business is structured in a certain way like I could be saying all of this stuff and I could just suck it influencer marketing these days I could try Tik Tok shops and tell you that it's not good and I could just suck at it I see plenty of accounts that say hey I made $100,000 last month on Tik Tok shops now are they telling the truth Maybe not maybe they are and
I think the only way for you to get a definitive answer as a Founder is you need to dig deep into things test and see if it works for your business that's the other thing everyone sells different products so you need to have an answer that applies to your company not someone else's company including mine yeah no I agree um one of my mentors once said to me this thing around situational stage advice right like he was early days founder and uh I was like oh man like um do you think I should just be
responding to every comment on Instagram because like that's what Gary ve does that's what Gary ve says to do right and he's like Nathan you got millions of followers on Instagram for founder Gary ve has millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars in salary that he can afford to pay people so he has the time to do that he's like you don't right and that's where you have to be really really careful when you listen to a podcast like this cuz people can just take something it's like that's the gospel that's the truth
that's how it works at the end of the day every single Channel works it just depends on your execution do you agree with that so true so true and and who are your employees within your business and what are they what are their strengths right that's the question you need to be asking yourself if you do have employees and you're not just a a Founder by yourself like I've got to be asking myself every day okay is our front office marketing department and the agencies that we work with are set up to effectively execute on
this channel or that channel what's our type of what our creators and our create in-house creative team like what kind of creative are they really good at are they really good at video are they really good at Pinterest images you know should we be on Pinterest and spending money on Pinterest because everyone wants to talk about Tik Tok and everyone wants to talk about meta well I can guarantee there's companies out there killing it on Pinterest 100% I know one yeah right we're not killing it on Pinterest doesn't mean that Pinterest isn't great right so
you need to know your product but also you need to know your team and you also need to know the type of product that you're selling even within an industry to really make an informed decision hey guys I really hope you're feeling inspired from today's interview now the truth is all successful e-commerce Founders started from zero with a spark of an idea and a whole lot of determination but let's be real building or growing an e-commerce business is no walk in the park and that's where founder plus comes in which I'm really excited to share
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you can accelerate your business goals visit founder. comom for/ start dollar trial or click the link in the description to claim your trial all right now let's jump back in the show so talk me through trap's growth uh what can you share with us around any numbers around you started this company what almost a decade ago now um well yeah you started you started in 2016 2016 yeah you started in 2016 so almost a decade now um you know can you talk us through what you can share around you've gone from zero bootstrap the business
still uh you know 0 to 10 million in 3 years where you guys are at now what can you share around either valuation Topline Revenue um any major Financial Milestones that you'd like to share just to give people understanding of scale yeah so I mean we don't disclose our numbers I don't even know what our valuation is um but we're an 8 figure a year business we're growing which is great growing across retail e-commerce and exports and yeah still 100% owned by Blake my co-founder and I and uh bootstrapped and loving it yeah awesome um
so talk me through I guess the early stages that first couple of years of getting the business up and going talk me about the hard times were there any times you felt like giving up any times you thought this ain't going to work yeah so Blake and I we've never felt like giving up but we've certainly had plenty of occasions where we know things would aren't working and won't work and we've learned a lot through our mistakes one of the biggest dangers in business is not knowing what you don't know and so I think so
much of what you're trying to figure out in those first couple years but even now is like what do I not know that I need to ask someone to tell me what my blind spots are that's where mentors are so great but mentors don't have to be anything official right so from how to send Freight domestically and internationally when we we first started uh we're standing Freight internationally after like eight or n months how to set up operations how to create a facility that's able to scale with the systems around it to ensure we maintain
food quality and food safety how to become certified organic how to have the correct inventory system because we're manufacturers how to be great at HR all of these were massive challenges that you know that we had no idea how to do it so I ask a heap load of questions and that has been one of the the best ways to expediate success finding people who are smarter than you and being like what do I do here and one of the the great places to do that as well is like find a provider and then ask
them heaps of questions because it's in their economic incentive if they're providing a service to tell you about their service plus the other peripheral things of which there are many around their chosen topic so for instance we have Consultants around inventory systems and so I asked the question okay what else would they know or that they would know potentially operations systems and operations frighten operations um connecting different systems within a company from the website to the inventory system to the shipping system and so these experts they'll provide you with one service but then you can
ask those questions because you've engaged them to learn more about the service and suddenly you get free mentorship while also paying them to do a service yeah look I think uh Consultants agencies always great to learn find out what they're doing with other clients but then at the same time over time where you can you want to bring that internally it depends though once again situational stage but yeah I agree that's a great way to learn uh especially when you're paying for a service and they have experience in exposure to other markets and other Industries
to find out what's working absolutely so can you give us an example I guess if we go a little deeper Caleb I just like to go a little deeper like in those first two years you know um you started with influencer marketing was there anything there that where it was just like wow this is not working right or or was it just like fully like Smooth Sailing the funny thing is I have an incredible ability to forget things that were painful yeah I think that's true and I think I think you need that as an
entrepreneur yeah I can't remember like I have a really good memory but even my fiance is like man you like forget things about like traumatic events in business business like from 2 weeks ago and it needs to be water off a duck's back so I mean I look back at some of the things that were really traumatic that still I get like some PTSD from and that's like moving warehouses while being bootstrapped it's not like you have all this cash flow to then put into building and constructing a new facility and then uh not being
able to have any downtime and moving it all across and the costs involved in that and the legalities around cdc's and OC's and you've got hup and you've got ACO certified organic and USDA certified organic to keep happy and all that so they were a couple of my most challenging moments in my life that really I wouldn't wish on my enemies but besides that look we we started from absolute Rock Bottom like no money and then during the times when I was sick I was riding around on an old push bike that I had to
get repaired I was flat broke chronically sick so anything any sale was better than what I had that doesn't mean that every day wasn't like working my ass off 16 hours a day across tennis coaching and this new company to get it into a space where we could actually start paying ourselves it was close to a full year before I stopped being a tennis coach entirely about yeah about 10 11 months so the irony with it is you're working 16 hour days doing something very unhealthy and stressful while running a health food company trying to
preach to be healthy but that's the sacrifice you have to make our Central mission in our company is to positively impact millions of people in their health I know how much it sucks to be unhealthy and I want to do whatever I can to make millions of people healthy and by blessing so many people and my team has that same vision we're able to to you know have ourselves blessed at the same time when you impact so many people I remember when I was early days founder man I didn't sleep some nights I was having
so much fun did that happen to you 16 hour days that's pretty long man it is I was doing 80 hour weeks above 80 90 hour weeks yeah well 16 hour days Monday to Friday and then I drop back to about 8 hour days on the weekend yeah but yeah I love what I do like I still to this day I had the same passion it's like I can see someone watching Netflix next to me and I have no interest I want to work I love building stuff I'm I have entrepreneur the entrepreneurial Spirit running
through my veins and it's fueled by a lot of pain in my health back in the day and how powerful it was my life turning around so that I could not only not be practically bed ridden at some time but now being able to live a life full of energy and full of purpose and passion I'm so incredibly grateful have you ever experienced burnout not during trapa you could call chronic fatigue syndrome when I was sick burnout but I'm so proactive on looking after my health and so proactive on recovery and I know what I
need to do to look after my body and I put myself through the fire so often mentally that I reject all thought of burnout and I think and I I truly believe that if people aren't looking after five key fundamentals of their health which is cut out the crap from your diet and replace it with high quality nutrition drink clean filtered water get great sleep I get great sleep every day or I aim to um stress reduction and finding ways to to meditate or reduce stress and um exercise uh I truly I know that they're
the foundational elements of great health and that so many cases of burnout are because people aren't focusing on all five of those things and that's something that I do every single day and uh I'll I need to continue to do that and be very disciplined around it yeah look I um I was going through each of your five things cuz I've went through burnout and I wouldn't wish it like same as you I wouldn't wish it on my not I have any enemies but like I wouldn't wish it upon anyone like I remember thinking I
could have all the money the success all these things that we you know inherently strive for like you know the greatest business in the world uh but you don't have anything if you don't have your mental health and I went through a period where I'm sure same as you guys Co just absolutely boomed and uh it did for us it found her and I was like you know what like I'm like I just and you couldn't do anything but work and I worked worked work work work and then when things started to come back early
2021 I was just like I didn't even want to go to work it was really really really tough and I I look back on those five things that you shared and I wasn't really doing any of them and then it's it's no wonder that happened and like up until that point I had no off switch and I loved work and there's a part of me man that perhaps I haven't like fully ever got back to that ever since then and it's it's really really tough like so with your chronic fatigue um that that came obviously
from the food and nutrition but were you working super hard as well and and did you live a very stressful life or I wasn't working very hard uh pre 2011 I was at University yeah I had stress in my life but the main thing was the long-term anybody cures I should also say by the way I know my limits like I'm not working 16 hour days now yeah I mean occasionally I might get up to 15 hours but on a day-to-day basis I'm working Monday to Friday 12 hours y actually no working more than that
13 hours maybe 14 hours and then I'm also going out and reducing stress throughout the day like I live on the beach I'm able to go ground in the sun exercise be by myself mentally refresh have deep breaths um and do the things that I need to do in order to look after my health and put myself first because I can't be a great leader without putting myself first and so it's really important to know your limits if my limit hits and I can only and I recognize that and suddenly I can only work 8
hours a day then I'll work 8 hours a day I won't go and work 12-hour days because that's what I'm meant to do I'm just very grateful and very blessed that my body is capable looking after those five foundational elements of great health my body allows me to work 13 hours a day Monday to Friday and then on the weekend I might do eight hours a day six hours one day maybe yeah got you thanks for Shar man and look when it comes to expansion you said you guys are in over 70 countries right can
you talk us through kind of of Partnerships and the retail side of that that's allowed you to rapidly grow and and what you've had to do there because I think iOS 14 you talk about Performance Marketing postco boom then iOS 14 a lot of e-commerce brands or strong Performance Marketing Le companies really took a big hit right massively massively cuz it's only natural right you have one channel you just keep doubling down right and so I found that out of my successful founder friends the ones that you know particularly we'll talk in the context of
Ecom the ones that were just really focused just on performance versus had to Performance and Retail they were able to work their way through it now Facebook ads is back better than ever and it works really well still not as easy as it what it was but it you can make it work again it was really tough there for one some period of time unless you had a really good aov and just like yeah like you you had a solid brand but now that the the brands that really stood the tested time that didn't take
too much of a hit were on the they had a strong retail arm so you guys were one of those no so one of our we we do now one of our biggest mistakes in business was not going into retail early enough we had the majors in Australia all of them U from 2018 saying hey we want you stocked and we chose not to off off the back of a little bit of stupidity just saying look our brand is premium and there's not a place for that in a major Supermarket or a major retailer and
also we dominating online why go into retail and the margin are good sorry margins aren't as good yeah exactly right um but also like cannibalization and product sales and things along those lines we were thinking about but that was a dumb decision and it was a dumb decision because history shows us that Co came and and again every man and his dog wanted to come in start a health food company during that time and all the major corporations and all these just companies even outside of your industry that are competing with you in the meta
auction came in and Rose drove up cpms and CPAs and so we really struggled after the first 6 to n months of Co it was really really tough big competition and so we're like oh crap we better do something about this and it was diversification that was so so key and so the last 3 years we've been driving heavily into retail and Export markets and now meta's back and now our company's doing great with e-commerce again which is awesome um but more importantly we have diversification around around retail and Export and it's like those Black
Swan events I think the phrase is called where it's those events that come from nowhere that you can never like Co um that disrupt your business and unless you are Diversified you're you're very vulnerable and so I'm very proud of our team the last two two two and a half years we've dug ourself out of that hole and our company's stronger than ever now you talk about performance and meta when did you find things starting to work again and you start to like it's really working when did you find that I'm just curious yeah probably
probably around this time last year yeah yeah going going into Black Friday again yeah started when they started bringing that performance Max yeah I think so um I don't touch the day-to-day anymore I used to run our accounts back in the day yeah and I haven't for a number of years we also went through some experience of working with bad agencies as well that kind of set us back a little bit but yeah at the moment our job is creative and producing great creative and then working with an agency who's able to do the magic
after that and uh and you know my marketing team has a focus on that as well with them these days it's creative game more than ever right can you talk to your experience there yeah absolutely so I mean creative is the new targeting and so having a really good understanding of the core pillars that your company creatively should be based around and knowing what pillars attract customers in kind of with each and benefit that your products are situated around is really important so what what do I mean by that like at trapa we have a
range of different products and it's a very different customer for all of them we have everything from a greens powder to a collagen powder to a bundle for menopause right and so different different genders different age groups different interests different periods of their life and different um problems that we're trying to provide a solution for so that requires completely different core pillars of content for you to create creative around we have a range of it from you founder Le stuffff US versus them um sale creative that's one that you've got a nail as well during
key key periods in the calendar year static based video based uh expert base because we do work with health professionals as well so figuring out and producing enough creative and knowing what creative and foundational pillars are working best in your bus and then figuring out okay well how can we produce more of that is really important so could you share like you guys like what you guys uh monthly spend is could you share that like is it multiple six seven figures a month it's it's in the the six figures yeah yep okay so uh how
much creative would you guys produce and run and test every single month I'd guess around 40 40 different variants 40 note will produce variant of each bit of creative yep so 40 original pieces yeah but remember a lot static as well okay so we're not doing 40 videos yeah so we might pump through a few videos a week y on a good week five yep and then different Hawks and variants on that yep but we have the capacity to scale cre uh static creative as well and uh when it comes to I guess uh the
postp purchasing sequence and you know you guys have a great product and it's a consumable product are you guys focusing on repeat purchases you getting into the subscription side of things and really driving that what's your plans there absolutely so I mean we're a fast moving consumable good so having a really strong backend repeat customer flow is crucial having just strong email marketing campaigns SMS campaigns and then also tying that to subscrip subcriptions so having different flows for subscription based uh customers and the incentives around that loyalty is another one that we rely heavily on
and we've built out very very well over the years so we have a very good repeat customer rate for that reason and we're always looking to really get more out of the most profitable type of customer which is your existing customer and getting them involved in all different areas as well so how can we get someone who got a subscription onto loyalty or how can we get someone who joined our loyalty program onto a subscription how can we get them onto our SMS list how can we interact more with them in a variety of different
ways and build a deep and meaningful relationship is something that we really care about yeah so we have to work towards wrapping up Caleb uh what's your goals and plans for the future of peer we're really excited about expanding internationally so we're working on a US 3pl Y and we'll have that sorted in the next few months the US is our second biggest market and it's still a crappy experience even eight years on that's another you know mistake that we've made where we haven't moved into a 3pl soon enough and so we Shi from Sydney
for our us and international customers so getting product on the ground will be really powerful for us in order to scale into 2025 and just our Central Mission it's again to positively impact millions of people in their health and so when you impact millions of people you will naturally be blessed as a company and that is something that I want to continually harp on about with my employees so they know okay why we do what we do there strong purpose and meaning behind what we're trying to achieve so that's what I'm excited about it's what
makes me passionate and I'm grateful that my my co-founder and I and my team we have a strong purpose and we can truly make an impact yeah no that's incredible like I said you have an amazing story and it's so cool that from that adversity that you experience with your own health you've been able to build this incredible brand this incredible product so congratulations on all of your success thus far I look forward to uh following the journey uh just one last question was there anything that you wanted me to ask you that I didn't
or any final words of wisdom that you'd like to share with our community early stage startup Founders either just about to launch something just working on something or recently hit product Market fit it's a great question I think one thing that I really love to tell other companies in our industry and that's a little bit of a it's not applicable to everyone but you can take the the general concept I think business is there to do do good and I don't see that I don't see my competitors as competitors within my industry I see my
competitors as a junk food industry that's creating the most highly addictive salty sugar fat based products that don't satiate you and make you addicted to those things and contribute to the chronic disease burden that we have my competitors who produce great quality products they bring people into an industry that costs more than buying junk food and so if they're producing great quality products they're able to get people in to try maybe health foods for the first time and have a great experience and that's amazing because once you're in an industry like this and you're you're
then healthy and you're looking after your your health you'll try products from all different brands but if you're a company that is producing crap products and health washing like greenwashing pretending it health you're leaving a very bad experience for a person who's coming into your into our industry for the first time and they'll be like why am I going to try this like I'm going to go back to junk food and I think that same principle should really apply to a lot of Founders going out into the world so many young Founders they want to
just make a shitload of money it's like well no like what impact are you making on the world like why are you doing this because as you talked about like when the hard times hit when burnout hits like what's your why and if it's just to make some money like what are you doing you know like make a genuine difference in this world because we live in a world where we got this ridiculous thing called e-commerce and it allows this incredible low barrier to entry to be able to start a company when you like 200
years ago like God knows the complexity of starting a company back then so we're incredibly blessed to live in this time where you can be entrepreneurial you can go out there and take risks and uh and then go again even if you fail so go and take some risk creating products that genuinely make a difference and that leave a lasting impact on the world yeah I couldn't agree more man thank you so much for sharing and sharing your story and your passion I love it dude well look uh thank you so much for taking the
time to come down this was an awesome interview and like I said congratulations on all of your success and you're welcome back anytime thank you mate I appreciate it hey guys if you love this episode you've got to check out my interview with Davey foggy on how he finds Trends in under capitalized markets and turns them into multi-million dollar businesses I'm generally looking for Trends globally we find trends that haven't been kind of capitalized in certain markets or in certain marketing channels and then we also obviously add our flare to it you need to differentiate
your product
