Build the next POPPI ($1.95B exit to Pepsi)

in this episode we go through hrefs and particle to learn about how to create a cpg business that uses data and Trends I brought on Ashwin Ashwin works with some of the top brands to figure out how to create a product that people love and what are some unfair advantages to create products that millions of people are going to use we learn about SEO we learn about Trends we learn about brand and even if you're not building a cpg product a lot of these lessons could be applied to your software startup so I enjoyed myself

in this episode I think you're going to enjoy it too and let me [Music] know we got ashin on the Pod uh we don't often have people like Ashwin on the Pod and what I mean by that is Ashman ashwin's my go-to brand and physical product guy so and not many people know this but he uses a lot of tools and software to come up with ideas opportunities and ways to create unfair advantages with building any of the startups that he's built and he's built a bunch of successful ones wanted to welcome you welcome you

here and I wanted to ask you if you can just give like a one or two liner about who you are and if you can tell people what they're going to learn if they stick through this whole episode yes so thanks for having me on so um my my kind of like in one sentence what I do is I launch and grow consumer Brands and so I've you know gone through this process of going from idea to launch and growing both in the consumer space and then prior in the software space um right now I

do this through an agency that I have that's a branding and design agency we help launch a lot of kind of physical products um I have a couple brands of my own and then I just make a lot of content around branding and marketing and distribution and how people whether you're building software or whether you're building physical products should think about this and kind of reverse engineer it because now the costs to create things has have become so easy um and it is much harder to acquire customers um yeah I think today we're going to

get into some of the ways that I evaluate opportunities um how to think about it if you are building something new what some um resources is and how to like look at this data and consider opportunities so that you don't get to a place where you build something and then you're like oh how do I get customers for this thing now like is there demand for my product I'll tell you why I wanted to have you on the pond selfish selfishly okay so Ashwin is is you know you know people have their friend who's just

like always the best dressed always the best well spoken always knows like the most upcoming Trends that's we all we all have one of those friends that's that's Ashwin for me so what I want to do is get inside your head and just see how like when you say how I evaluate opportunities um and how how you know we we we've been throwing around this word taste everyone's talking about taste right taste is the ultimate Moe distribution the ultimate Moe I basically want to see how unpack how you how you think about taste and and

yeah let's let's just do a lot of screen sharing today and just and see see what what what we cook up yeah I love it okay so I'm GNA start I'm G to start in here um because I was having a conversation with uh with someone yesterday where they were talking about a product that they built again in the kind of like physical product world and they wanted to think about how they should invest their time from a digital marketing standpoint should they do Facebook marketing should they do SEO should they do Google email marketing

there's like so many channels right and I think especially for an early stage business again whether it's software physical products you're going to get most of your leverage from one channel and so it's a question of like which of these channels should I invest in first and what's kind of worthwhile um but kind of taking a step back here for for a second are you familiar with HRS I am but self- admittedly I I haven't gone deep on it okay so I I love ATS and and um the person who put me on to so

so let me give context for for what we're looking at here um let's type in like to me honestly H feels a bit overwhelming it is a little bit overwhelming but it's one of those tools where there's a few key ideas for you to understand from here and when you can understand those numbers like forget this chart right what is this insane like you know graphic down here I have no idea how to parse this um but there's like two key things that are that are helpful here so HRS is a tool where you can

it is it is a tool really used by people who are in the SEO World um but what one of its really useful kind of features is is you can type in any keyword and it will give you a general sense of what the search volume is on Google for that keyword or term or brand as well as the difficulty in ranking for that term on Google and so that's what we see up here keyword difficulty in the left and then search volume in the top right and why I bring this up is because this

is a really good way so first um it's a really good way of evaluating category demand and Trends in certain spaces so um for example here you know in the physical product World electrolytes I mean you've probably seen element and all of these Brands get super popular um you know element probably came out in 20 16 I want to say where there was there was like some demand there but it wasn't explosive but then over the years there has just been like a rising Trend in kind of demand in electrolytes so there's kind of two

things here there's good search volume but there's also this like seasonal Trend around it right where June and July there seems to be these like huge pops for electrolytes so just right off the bat there kind of like tells you two things all right if I'm launching an electrolyte brand sure there's probably going to be some seasonality here but the second thing that you see here is that the keyword difficulty is is ranked super hard right it's ranked 88 so this is a scale from 0 to 100 and what this tells you is if you

wanted to go on Google and like really play the game of SEO and rank in the first three slots for electrolytes on the first page it's going to be a near impossible Endeavor for you it is going to take an exorbitant amount of time money effort and like SEO expertise for you to get up there probably like a 24mon effort and like a ton a ton of money um so it's you kind of just look at this and you're like okay even not knowing anything else about the brands that are out there say I only

know that element exists or um liquid IV exists this this like categorically should just tell you there's a lot of competition in here there's a lot of people vying for this keyword so this is the um this is the the kind of like first place that I look for something um I will say one thing though yeah which is interesting so when I look at the global search volume us 45% UK 19% Canada 6% Australia 4% that's um what is that 74% is basically us UK Canada Australia what does that tell me that this is

really big in English-speaking Western countries but electrolyt seems to not be a thing in other places so there's probably an opportunity to build like an element for Germany for example 100% quick break in the pause to tell you a little bit about startup Empire so startup Empire is my private membership where it's a bunch of people like me like you who want to build out their startup ideas now they're looking for content to help accelerate that they're looking for potential co-founders they're looking for uh tutorials from people like me to come in and tell them

how do you do email marketing how do you build an audience how do you go viral on Twitter all these different things that's exactly what startup Empire is and it's for people who want to start a startup but are looking for ideas or it's for people who have a startup but just they're not seeing the traction uh that they need so you can check out the link to Startup empire.co in the description you know yeah you have 3% India Philippines go build like if you're you know watching over there it's like okay how do we

how do we build this in these countries and and there tends to be these um you know the these like patterns of diffusion of how long things take to spread to the to to other cultures um and I remember there's this like famous like German Tech startup uh that basically like raised a ton of money and their whole kind of shtick is like what are the big US tech companies okay like GrubHub got super big great we're just going to do that in like Germany and EU more broadly um and I think it's smart because

you've a proven business model and you're like okay this is probably going to be big here in the next five years or so um so so I think that's a uh that's a good call out um but how to um how else I I I kind of use this or or I'll kind of tell you why I I became so interested in this is um I have a a buddy let me type it in here um I have a buddy who was really good at SEO um and so he he had a company that was

like built off of SEO he sold it it was very successful and then he was like Hey I want to buy kind of undervalued web properties and I'm going to see where there is existing demand for that like search term or that kind of asset so he was looking in astrology for a while he was looking in religion and he would go to all of the um he'd say okay if they have a search volume of more than one month one mill million monthly visitors I'm going to go find like the fourth and fifth result

on Google try to buy their website and then know that I can pump them to number one and it's basically like he's like the SEO like home renovation guy you know um where he'll like come in and get this like undervalued asset so he did um he saw there was a lot of opportunity in Solitaire because you have 8.5 million monthly searches here and if you were the first result on Google especially for a highly targeted key term you're probably going to get 40% of the clicks there right so um so he tried to buy

like every solitire site that was already up there and no one wanted to sell because they were just like cash cows right they make all of this money just running Google AdSense and so he's like damn I'm just gonna like build my own from scratch and out SEO these guys so he built his own from scratch and out SEO everyone for 24 months he just like invested like a dog into it and now he ranks like number one or two depending on what you search and that business I like I won't share the numbers but

like you you you probably know like some of the figures just like looking at this he makes a Preposterous amount um doing that so um there's there's there's really good ways to use a tool like this for if you're thinking about an app idea say like hey I want to build um you know tax for uh for vets or like T you know uh software for vets or like accounting software for vets like there's you should I would first use this tool because a lot of people start with an idea and they're like oh I

think that would be great like I know four vet clinics and they all say they have an issue with like their accounting software I want to go build it then they build it and then they're like oh damn was their demand for it or was it too crowded already and so I love first just like gut checking with a tool like this hey what does the search volume for this category look like can I organically capture some demand here um and then also just shows you the competitors that are kind of in the space so

that's my my my hre's kind of walk through and and and what I love here I think the mistake a lot of people make when they're playing with HFS is they just look at the data and they don't ask why basically they're not acting like analysts yeah so so and this is like a future business idea like someone should go and create an agent that basically is that re you know research agent that says you know oh I've noticed that there's an opportunity uh in Korea for CBD you know yes I mean let's look at

this right so we have CBD that had was explosive in 2019 and then it's kind of like declined steadily ever since and you say okay well why was it explosive in 2019 it was explosive in 2019 because the 2018 farm bill passed and that basically allowed like the manufacturer and sale of hemp based products so you have everyone in the industry kind of pumping it up and talking about it okay so there was this like Peak when people were were super interested in it there was this like secondary Peak okay I have to figure out

what happened there but it's been declining and then why has it been declining and if you look at that and you cross cross that with uh this thing called Delta 9 which is basically like legal THC right kind of like gets you high because it's derived from hemp um well that's been growing since 2020 and that's kind of like been explosive so it's kind of the um D9 took the place of like what people were looking for from CBD because it's like oh I can get it legally and I still have this you know experience

from taking it you still kind of have to know how to prompt it though right you kind still have to have some you know Market information to know you know from for example I know I didn't know anything about Delta 9 you know yes yes um yeah so I think to your point if someone can package like it's always SEO agencies that interpret this data for you and they know what to do here um but yeah if someone can make something like agentic here that like parses some of the data category Trends and gives you

some insight I think Super useful cool what other uh what other tools do you use so I use and then again this is in the physical product space um I use this tool called particle particle basically allows you to type in a brand type in any e-commerce brand um so I was looking at today I was looking at vital proteins unless you just type in a e-commerce brand uh this data isn't public typically because these aren't public companies um and it allows you to see not just their sales over time so this is like vital

protein sales just from their Ecom website over the past four weeks but it shows you the categories of which they have products in and what their bestselling products are so a couple of ways that I like to use this um is I like to see number one what are the numbers that competitors are doing in my space um but then even more importantly what are their best selling skews so often times people think hey if I'm launching a brand you know I need to have I'm going to grow by expanding the set of skews or

flavors or options that I have and then you come in and you look at some of the sales data and it's like hey 90% of this company's Revenue comes from like these top four SKS and they actually come from these two flavors so if I'm a product in this category making flavored supplements for example let me not go make a you know uh whatever like crazy concoction flavor um because let me look at like the biggest a few of the biggest players here and okay if I look at four of them and they're all selling

chocolate and vanilla it's like all right I should probably just make a chocolate and vanilla one so kind of enables you to like drisk some of the product decisions that you make um but this is a this is a super cool tool um because you can be intentional about searching certain brands but you can also just look at um they have their own kind of like Trend Explorer um uh Trend Explorer and insights here um there's certain like products and categories of products you can take a look at um and see how they're kind of

trending up and down so I kind of like to look at both things on particle as well as HRS and just like get a position of of of where things are in the market I know you're you're a big Tik Tok guy you know how much do you think about Tik Tok shop and looking at how much revenue people are doing on Tik Tok shop and stuff like that I'm guessing particle does incorporate that particle does not incorporate that but um particle does not incorporate that but browsing on Tik Tock shop they show you all

the sales figures um I mean even Amazon shows you some sales figures um where it used to be how many they sold in the last month but now what do they show you yeah 100K bought in the last month so I like to look in certain categories um okay this like this you know magnesium is super hot right now um so this brand is selling a ton of a ton of this but you know let's look over here this brand is probably okay this brand is selling 40,000 but then that kind of goes all the

way down to supplement selling you know 50 units a month um so you kind of get a sense of how competitive a space can be um but so so I do a similar thing on Tik Tok shop in like physical product category too of uh hey there's a lot of people talking about this one supplement or this product category it's selling a lot and again they make that sales data public so it's it's uh helpful to see and can you can you make the case for why someone listening to this should start a physical product

business I mean one interesting piece of that could be the same tools or similar tools that we're using for coming up with you know AI startups you know rappers that sort of thing you could use to create physical products and a lot of there's just a lot of competition right now in software but I'm curious your perspective like what is the case for why someone should go uh and create a physical product business when it it feels like a bit it just feels harder in terms of like yeah supply chain and and stuff like that

it's uh I think it's like one of the hardest business models to like bring like to to act on um because there's so many of these pieces that you have to be really good at and and you probably seen people who are you know in the many millions of dollars going trying to go from like seven figureure brand to an eight figureure brand where they're like hey at this point it's like not even really about the product and like even the marketing it's about like having a really good supply chain and being maniacal about the

finances of the business right so you end up learning a lot more about like your cash conversion cycle and like the margins that you need to operate well and like inventory forecasting and all of these other things so let me say this building a physical product business is very hard and like by most people probably just shouldn't be done on a whim but if you can do it in a somewhat low stakes way or lowrisk way where you're not like throwing a ton of cash into it or like betting your entire career on it I

think it is a phenomenal way to get really good at marketing because like the bleeding edge of marketing is happening in the consumer product world because it is so hard to get people's attention to get a single person each time to part with dollars to buy something it is much easier to go to a company give them software and say hey can you buy this for 500 bucks a seat per month and it like saves you guys you know 30 minutes a month and they're like yeah sure like so can we talk about that so

you know now we we understand two tools around Trends and and and what to to what products we should create but can you talk about okay great I want to create this magnesium G ginate product yeah um but how do I get people to actually buy it yeah so if we look at so here here's here's a kind of I I think this is a good example magnesium is becoming very popular in the world of people who care about performance and recovery and productivity and I think it's probably like there's probably like a huberman lab

episode or like a petera episode on magnesium glycinate and like now it's this thing right so you have all of these Brands creating magnesium supplements um like Tri magnesium supplements now just because there is category demand and it is a popular thing does not necessarily make it easy to like go into and it's it's actually somewhat easy to create a supplement but it's very hard to stand out so the first place that I kind of look is okay we'll go on Amazon we'll type this in like magnesium glycinate and we'll take a look at these

Brands and a lot of these Brands just kind of as I'm scanning here okay these look like these look fairly medical these look kind of generic um maybe like Nature Made is a brand I recognize from like being at CVS and Walgreens and it's like distinctive right it stands out with it's like Yellow Cap and and yellow coloring here um everything kind of looks like they're all kind of like stock white bottles they all look a little medical they look look like a little bit like generic and weird and like not terribly appealing um so

I look at this and I'm like okay there could be an opportunity to stand to stand out here and like do something different and so then you come across a brand like I was just gonna say that's what I this is the product I have yeah so you Moon Juice and it's like they're probably they're probably sourcing their powder from the same place as like 600 of these other brands you know know but it's like they have this Amber jar they have like they're building a different kind of like brand around it but just like

visually it's striking and it stands out relative to things here so there's one place in which you can differentiate and that's on the on the look and feel of the brand and there's um there's this brand this is like Courtney Kardashians brand that I really like from how they've differentiated so they're a supplement they make gummy supplements and what they did is they invested in kind of like this custom bottling so it's this kind of like hard plastic feels like glass kind of bottle with these cool ridges they have these cool custom caps the whole

thing is this like purple they are very much positioning to women here and making it like much more fun and much more like accessible right take a look at the lemi products versus pure encapsulations which is like that is straight from like the compounding pharmacist right there is no branding on that so um so lemy is is kind of coming in and saying hey we're going to differentiate on look and feel and the language that we use but we are also going to differentiate on the positioning of the brand and the audience that we're going

after we're going after like a genen z woman and it like makes sense you know with like Courtney being behind the brand um you know seed is differentiating in the category both from how they speak to Consumers how they look um that this kind of like audience that they that they go after and I think both in again physical products as well as software you have to especially in the early stages figure out what Niche you're kind of positioning to and how you're speaking to them and go hyper targeted to them and then get to

a certain scale and then you start to expand that Niche more and more I was just the aha moment I had is while you're talking and seeing some of this is there's a lot of really it seems like in products for for women it's getting more more popular to have just like welld designed well branded products um I don't think that's ubiquitous yet like you know what I mean so I feel like there's [Music] um maybe there's more opportunity in in creating products for not women um which is highly branded seed style or lemi style

like I I think this branding is is really beautiful just curious what your thoughts are on there on that so so if I kind of recap that you're saying there's a lot of products that are kind of geared and branded towards women and there's no my my point is like so seed is a is it's a Well actually it says it's it's probiotic for women and men right yeah but it's like in all their influencer marketing it's like really for women because like women are the buyers of these products and I guess my point is

I think that there's probably a lot of opportunity in in doing this style branding for older adults not young females yes and there's probably an opport to do it for well older adults let's just say that's one C that's the one that first came to mind is the older adult you know the 65 or or older male or female you know just because they're older does it mean that they don't want great beautiful products that make them feel make them feel good or or excited about it right they they're they're just like us yes yeah

yeah okay yes this is a extremely important idea and a problem that like everything that is in the consumer packaged world runs into this this kind of like issue right where it's we had this like era of like mil Millennial Blanding with consumer products which is like everything kind of looks the same you can kind of think of like Harry's or Casper and their design sensibilities trickled into like every product set and category right like our pans our cookware like our rugs our furniture everything kind of looks the same and now we have the same

thing happening in for Gen Z because there it's like they're the next generation of buyer so like let's make everything super bright and vibrant and saturated and look like a brand called um I I'll just show you like a good example of this um uh like starface right and all of this is a byproduct of the people who are building these Brands tend to be mostly like Coastal people between the ages of 22 and 35 so they just make stuff that they and their friends want to buy but it turns out when everyone's doing that

it gets like extremely crowded and hard to compete or stand out so I always say like hey when you're thinking about a category or building a brand in the space yeah sure maybe your like friends need the product but like I don't know do let's look at starface do older men and older women have pimples do they like could they like benefit from these patches okay is there a way to just like take this concept and apply it to a totally different demographic that is not really targeted with the current product category and especially when

you go older like they have more disposable income they like you know consume information from these different channels that are not super saturated with advertising dollars and Brands and products and influencer seating so it can kind of make your life a little bit easier finding these opportunities elsewhere okay so say say I'm a listener to to you know I'm listening to this and I'm like you know what I want to create this star phase for older adults and you've got like a good Vision in your head for you know the positioning the marketing and the

actual physical product in boxing and stuff like that is the only way to actually go and create the website create the Shopify create the product going to an agency to do it is there like a bootstrap way to to to start like sketching out your idea and putting something out there before like investing half a million dollars or whatever in an agency yes 100% And I think there is so there's two things I think like you know if you look at a if you look at a brand like Mighty patch for example that's pretty like

straightforward there isn't this like incredibly fancy design with it it's like nicely done seems like kind of clinical seems effective but it's really just like communicating the information you could probably figure out how to make that in canva right um whereas starface like okay probably like bring in a graphic designer to like make this whole like brand and World feel good um there are there are categories where design matters more than less so um a good example of this is uh in the in the spirits business right in like wine alcohol beer uh you can't

really say hey I want to make a new wine brand that like tries to position to this audience and I'm G to like really like bootstrap the design and like try to get some traction for it because that's one of these categories where like you're building a kind of Lifestyle brand and the most important cues for the success of those Brands comes down to intentional design choices that's reflected on the packaging as well as the overarching brand so there's some categories where it's just kind of like a non-starter you either have to be like a

very welle equipped designer or be able to tap in a design Talent or an agency to like find success there um but in these other categories that are maybe a little bit more problem solution oriented think like the starface or Mighty patch or or any of these Brands um um there is a way to kind of like get it done more on a budget kind of independently you can hire independent freelance designers you can look at things like Fiverr and upwork and like look through their cataloges of work and hire these people and be like

hey I just need like some simple packaging design done and like hey I need a simple landing page set up for this and you know what maybe you spend 500 bucks on that or a thousand bucks on that and then you say okay well I'm going to now go run Facebook ads and see if I can drive some leads for this and like see if I can gauge some gauge some demand here um so there so there are ways to do it um I think you just have to be kind of like resourceful around pulling

together the right people so it looks halfway decent incredible yeah I wonder I wonder if some of the AI tools like v0 Manis could help with some of the design yeah um I don't know like uh but I will say that there's probably a hundred million doll startup idea in the I want to create vzer for cpg like that in itself I think is a huge opportunity for someone to run with as a startup idea yeah I mean I'll I'll give you good so number one yes I agree with that um number two I was

talking to a guy who's building a um he's building a whey protein like a a protein brand that is geared uh geared more towards like a South Asian audience from like a flavor profile standpoint he has a pretty good um audience on Instagram and so he was talking to me about his like branding and packaging and he was showing me some some revisions and he was like hey what do you think about this what would you change uh and they he showed me three options and they looked like pretty good like if I saw that

on a shelf I'd be like yeah that's like that's like nice I would I would I would buy that and he was saying he used like a blend of mid journey and something else to generate the V1 of it and then hired a designer on fivr and was basically like I want you to recreate this kind of thing in a vector and then like change a couple of the elements and he spent $250 with the designer doing that so you can kind of like piece these things to these things together um and yeah there there

will be you can always find people to to work with you on that stuff the cool thing about that is it allows you to really clarify your vision so I think the mistake a lot of people make is they go straight to an agency without really understanding what it is they want to build so sometimes what just doing the hard work around like okay what what does a mood board look like and you know how how should the positioning look like what should the copy look like you know what is my strong point of view

as a first version getting that getting that out is is super helpful yeah 100 per. yeah so so I'll kind of share um share something so I kind of mentioned wine uh because we recently worked on a wine brand project from the agency and something about developing a point of view so I always tell if you're building whether you're building software You're Building consumer products you have to be like a Relentless researcher of the category and the competition so from the agency side for this non-alcoholic wine brand they came to us and they said hey

we're building an non-alcoholic wine brand we think this is our position but like what do you think and so before we ever touch design we say hey well we don't know anything about the na wine category so we're going to like read everything that we can then we're going to look at every brand in this space right so we'll kind of canvas all of these Brands and we'll say okay here's this brand here's like this brand this one looks a little bit more like elegant and sophisticated whereas this one looks a little bit more like

a daily casual drink um let's take a look at their website okay like very minimalist very clean here this leans into like Lux it feels like far more feminine in their like visuals and their language um this one is this like German brand I don't know it's not communicating a whole lot to me and we kind of like go kind of brand by brand and do our like what is our takeaway what's our one- sentence takeaway from this brand and what it's communicating and who they're speaking to um we'll go into things like you you'll

go into stores and you'll talk to the store owner and be like hey what's selling here what's not selling what are people looking for what are they interested in and this is such a you get an insane amount of insight doing this where you become so much more confident in the direction that you want to take your brand and it's it's just it's free to do it's free to do it's free to like go into stores or like go to like just doing research and so this is like how I do it from the physical

product standpoint but if I were to do this from the software standpoint okay if I want to build like a better CRM for for vets right or better crms for like dentists um okay well like let me look at the software that exists out there today and let me look at what the reviews are on that software and let me look at the onear and two star reviews and what are people complaining about there okay let me contact three denst office in my neighborhood or like let me go into them and like talk to the

staff about them and it's like these things that seem kind of hard to do but you can just go in and if people are like more often than not willing to talk to you and like give you some perspective and it allows you to just like develop a much more robust point of view than just saying hey I'm G to do this and I'm just gonna like hypothesize everything that I should build um meaning it's like I'm just going off hunches that this is the right direction yeah you don't want to do that you don't

want to do that um can I show you something real quick please so let me share my screen I thought it would be fun to prompt Manis uh can you design a cpg product I'm looking for boxing in the actual product the idea is a starface comp edor pimple patch but for older adults amazing and I wanted to see what it would come up with um and so it's researching competitors in the pimple patch market so it's it's kind of doing a little bit of like what that figma was I would hope um you know

it's starting that research you can see here we're watching it live uh just going through the starface website oh you can see here on the right hand sidecar star incredible right research starface product details analyze competitors in the pimple patch market research skincare needs for specific to older adults like insane right insane insane holy H have you played with this with at all so I have not played with Manis but I probably run like three or four deep research queries a day okay um so I spend a lot of time with that but this is

this seems amazing yeah look at this it's going through Credence research which I never heard of but it's some sort of research company here are the best ones we tried 17 P you know pimple patches Battle of the pimple patches so I think that a lot of people could you know your unfair Advantage might just be using something like Manis 100% it it it I was having this conversation with someone yesterday like it boggles my mind how few people are using like we're in this bubble on Twitter where everyone's like talking about like the latest

bleeding edge stuff in AI but 99% of people like they open up chat gbt and it's like oh flights from New York City to San Francisco and it's like no no no no no there's like so much more that you can get from this and uh so yes this is exactly this is like an unfair Advantage I mean maybe a year or two from now everyone's going to be doing this kind of like de facto before building things um but right now there is no excuse to not there is no excuse to go into a

space and be like oh man I was like ill equipped like I don't have enough like I didn't do enough research on the category because it can all just be done for you right now look at this how to care for your skin in your 60s and 70s so good so good I'm addicted to it how long do you think this will take like 30 minutes I think it'll take 10 no not even I think it'll take 12 minutes wow yeah so we'll have a a full-on prototype in 12 minutes yeah and you know what's

so crazy is that like they're probably putting together a report that neiel would have charge like 20 grand for yeah for sure so that's uh it's a crazy time all right um Ashwin this has been cool what uh what do you want to leave our audience with I think it no matter what you're building um whether software or physical products you have to start by working backwards from distribution and thinking about the channels that you're going to acquire customers and the channels that you're going to win in and then build the product and it's not

vice versa and it's like there's this adage that you probably known and felt personally uh which is like first time Founders focus on product second time Founders focus on distribution um and I don't think there's anything more true like you see a lot of like subpar products in both the software world in the physical product world that are just like worse products but they crush it because of like incredible like distribution and operational excellence I like it I uh I learned about you by the way through your Tik Tok account you just kept popping on

my feed and you were breaking down Brands like Star you know uh like uh starface is that what it's called yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah you were breaking down these Brands and just um kind of auditing them and and just learning about your taste you're one of those people that I followed you not I liked you so much that I Then followed you on Instagram because I was like I need more of this guy in my life Wow thank you I love it I'm gonna we're gonna include in the show notes links to your socials

so that people could follow you uh even if you're not building a CBG product I think that um it's going to help just inspire people to create better software products too and yeah I just want to want to thank you for coming on and giving I want to have you back on so I want people to to like this episode I want to just let us know if you like this sort of thing because I would love to have you back on for round two and yeah let let us know in the comments what types

of things we could go deeper on because I think we covered a lot of things here where we could just probably spend a whole episode we could probably take that Manis thing and like turn that into a full exercise um building building like a new software business on a call let's see if we can piece together like AI tools to like build the thing build the landing page test a man I don't know um anyway let us know in the comments but but thank you for having me on Greg all right my man I'll catch

you later see y see you [Music]