Brainstorming $100M Ideas with the $1B+ King of Brands

so we have with us today the king of commerce the titan of target the big man of the brand eric ryan is here i feel like i could rule the world i know i could be what i want to from all in it like the days off on a road less traveling before the back found the inventor of products that sit on a lot of people's shelves there's some in my kitchen right now method soap ollie gum that my kids have every day well band aids and then your investor in a whole bunch more so you are here and you're kind of the magic man when it comes to reinventing consumer category so when we did our call before this we agreed to do two things i said i wanna know your playbook how do you do this how do you go into the category and figure out which product to select and how to disrupt it and you have just like forced that process or whatever you outlined to be and the other thing is we agreed that we would each bring a couple of ideas of kinda half baked ideas of brands that we think an entrepreneur could go do and we're gonna kinda pitch them back and forth which are the we didn't tell each other beforehand and so we'll see what what we came up with how's does that sound amazing that sounds great and that is way too kind of an introduction so thrilled to be here and i got way too kind thank you how big were some of these businesses just so we understand the the magnitude here they are they're both probably getting close to a billion dollar brands now but would you go in and see like even ten million of soap or vitamins sitting in a warehouse that's what always blows me away of like how many units we actually both are these products and that are sitting people's homes today and i've been looking forward to this because i remember sam used to host this conference called hustle con and he would invite founders entrepreneurs come speak i didn't know your story at all i was sitting there in the crowd and i remember you got on stage and you talked about how you started method how you started ollie how you started well and you had all these little phrases you were like i walked through the aisle and i look for and i saw just a sea of same ness and you had a picture of the soap aisle or the dish soap aisle it was like every single one was green and looked like you know green packaging and looked just like a a old school like my mom's cleaning product and then you had this like totally different shape of a bottle it was like you know blue or purple or whatever and it was and and it stood out and i remember the way you talked about it i really had never thought about how much thought goes into which category to go into how do you actually bring something fresh and new to the table and then how do you hustle to get it off the ground you had a great talk that day and so i know that was like whatever a decade ago but if we can get even close to that this will be a success from my perspective and you said it in passing just now but method is you know a probably a billion dollar brand now ollie gum is also ollie the vitamin company is is also probably half a billion to to a billion dollar brand and so that's pretty amazing and i i think like one of the other claims famous is target loves you don't they i feel like somebody told me this they go target loves that guy i i love target so it's to meet it's a mutual love affair you've liked launched brands with them like even from start right you have like a kind of a unique relationship with them is that right i do i mean what we did back in oh god two thousand t when we pitch this idea of designer commodities like no and it was at a time where no mass retail hour work with startup and so through a lot of hail mary passes and some some good luck we're able to be the first to kinda go in there and it's just it's been an amazing partnership ever since so can we do your your process before we brainstorm the ideas i wanna hear that the process you outline then i took a couple notes so i can kinda prompt you but you basically had told me these four three or four things that you do when you go go in because i was like you've done this not once not twice but three times and i was like can i nerd out with you a little bit yeah it as good to hear i'm really annoying to go to grocery store with to me it's like the super bowl of commerce so every time i'm in a mass retailer at grocery still her drugstore i'm always hunting so i came out of i've a really simple model and was built off of this idea of what i learned in advertising which is how do you take a really deep consumer insight and translate to great creative execution so my kinda thesis as an entrepreneur is to look for these you know like you said these kinda white spaces where there's a c of same mess and it just kinda smells right to go in and do different and what i do is i look for a cultural shift or a big macro trend that that that category is missed and then in between that and where the category is as the business opportunity so in the case of method there was like two big culture shifts i found one was this idea of lifestyle of the home you know the this is back in two thousand two you know you look at a dish more than you use it but nobody thought about these products as part of like the emotional connection to your home and you know making decorative basically looking good on your sink so like i keep my method open next to my my faucet so just like looking good when it's on my counter exactly which is because you look at it more than you actually use it so it's it's a pretty meaningful part of the experience of buying a dish soap at that time did you see what what else did you see where you're like oh that's new that's new but and then you you applied that to dish so what what else were people doing that you where you noticed the shift before you did it was really in personal care and so a lot of like i'm i always say like a bit of a thief too you like i don't steal from our competition but i'd try to steal from as far away as possible so in method there's two areas i still i stole from personal care so if you looked at the colors the fragrance is compared to like how home care which was these like really toxic cleaners at the time so i brought a lot of that personal care approach over to home care and i also stole from the house i would say like i go to a department store and i look at the beauty aisle and then would look at the house wears aisle up top and so we stole like all these beautiful base shapes and so we wanted these things to look like little objects of desire you know sitting on your camera okay so first thing you said was you look for a cultural shift that's happening that a category has missed so it's happening and it's maybe happening elsewhere because what do they say about the the the future the future is here it's just not evenly distributed so or love started to happen but maybe it hasn't hit in in the home care aisle yet or hasn't in only i gotta steal that from you that's great it says on an original that's bunch of vcs like to say that one alright so so that's the first thing you do and are you looking for a new category or you looking for a preexisting existing big category what do what do you like to do so like some people would say oh that's already done it's already saturated i need to go find something that doesn't exist yet and they're making bets on what doesn't exist and seems like what you did was you went into things that already existed and you weren't scared of the saturation or that it's already been done for fifty years no that's right i i think it's much easier to make money by creating an iteration office something already exist because then you'd don't have to drive all the consumer education to educate and explain something that's wildly new and i was living in the in london the nineties i was super inspired by richard branson as as many entrepreneurs are but what i liked about he he had a model and i think that's would inspired me to create a model his model is an entertainment model right so you're go in these really un sexy industries like airlines and would apply his entertainment model that he really understood well and so i was always inspired by this idea and i looked at you know if you looked at any successful serial entrepreneur they typically had a model but what i also love about richard did is he went into like really well established categories that were easy to understand and just put his twist on it and so that very much became a lot of the way i thought about how i would approach entrepreneurship and then you talked about being a thief can you can you give a couple examples there so you said i go to a big category i walked through the aisle i look for the cf of saying this i look for a culture shift oh sorry you told me one other thing that was great you go you said something you go have they made it unnecessarily over over overly complicated and you go i think they're hiding something there's an insecurity there if they've made this product category feel over complicated and that they take themselves and and another one was taking themselves too seriously can you talk about those two attributes also yeah so i think edits have a category is taking themselves too serious as you said they're they're probably hiding something right there's like an insecurity there and so a lot of my model too is going into these categories that are unnecessary complicated can i really simplify it back make it easy for the consumer and also i love categories that take themselves way too serious and so i love to bring almost like an inner child approach into the categories that are create so if you look at method it's it's kind of like what a kid would use to clean the kitchen if you looked at ollie like i got adults to take gummy vitamins you know in masses that didn't happen before with well i got adults the wear you know bandages with patterns and colors on it versus just the the nude ones that are supposed to hide away of your skin but never really do and you know what i i try to do with that the idea of a culture shift so if you look if you look at method it was both this idea of of the home but also the time you know you asked the poll when you clean or is poised to make your home healthier so there is this other big macro trend of health and wellness sustainability but to your point you know it was showing up some categories but it was yet to show up here so it's really connecting the dots on those trends and bringing into new spaces that i i find is is kinda core to my model i saw that you you said that one of your favorite ways to come up with ideas is to travel abroad we had this guy named kevin ryan on the podcast kevin has founded this thing called mongodb which is like a thirty billion dollar software business but very interestingly he he also started guilt which is you know gil group the the women's clothing thing and he was like i got the idea for guilt when i went to france and i think i saw this thing called the v i think i think it was called where it was basically like flash sales for clothing and so he would he talk about that as well of going abroad when you go abroad and you like travel do you like are you are you going on trips just find ideas yeah totally it's a i i think by far for me it's where i get my best ideas for a couple reasons one i just think better when i'm in motion so you know walking retail with a cup of coffee in her hand there's ideas flow better than ever sitting at a desk two is we do these like trend trips where we also take designers with us and so our goal is not only to spot ideas but translate it immediately into a design idea that we can break back but also when you're you're in a you know a foreign country your jet lagged which means nobody's bothering you i think you see when you're when your jet lagged to you look at things a little bit more fuzz which could be a good good thing but also just opens up new your pathways where you're you're walking retail where everything is foreign and you don't understand the language and for b like trying to connect the dots between seeing what somebody's doing in one category could we apply that to another space it's so much easier to do when you're out of your home market so what's an example so where would you go and what's an example of maybe an idea you had while you're were on one of these trend trips that turned into like a a success with one of your brands yeah i mean so i think one of my most favorite wise and this was like twenty years ago so this was before collaborations became such you know mainstream part of building any brand but we got ole kylie who was really known for very expensive handbags and patterns to do a collaboration with us at target which as far as i know is the first ever designer collaboration and somebody who was known for very expensive items being able to bring those patterns into a product that's sold three dollars and was the first time of the target ever did design or collaboration like at that price point so that was out of london was a was a huge success there was a building we saw in japan that we absolutely love the way with skin we turned that into a hand wash design the shape of the building or what do you mean yeah i was like the texture of the building had this it was in tokyo and just had this incredible kinda like payload texture on the outside of it and we'd turned that as inspiration into a bottle and you're saying that like really simply like oh we we saw the texture of a building in tokyo and then it turned it into a hand wash like that doesn't even i like those dots seem really far apart can you describe your actual process so you you go to japan presumably right you're then gonna do what you just do said case he said the chapter of the building that's like when you when you're like on drugs you're like can you feel this building wouldn't be great if that was a bottle of soap okay so i try to design everything like an object because it's all about creating these like little objects of desire especially when you're doing it in a category like soap that you have to buy and you're trying to turn in something you want to buy i look at everything kind of through this idea if it's an so i looked at a building the building looks like an object and it was easy for me to think about like oh my god that pattern that shape that texture is amazing what if that little object was sitting on a shelf at a store versus in the ground as a building so it's like trying to look for those types of patterns or the original method bottle was this camping fuel bottle i found in norway and i just love the shoulders on that that that bottle this we translated that into our first our first ever product because we couldn't afford a industrial to tiger at that point so i had to find something we could just rip off of hey everyone really quick i can already tell it this is an so that you guys are gonna be taking a lot of notes on and that's kind of a pain in the butt to do while you're either watching our listening to this and so we actually made it really easy we made the entire episode in it into a downloadable pdf so you could actually download the transcript look at the notes and this way you could just sit back and enjoy the podcast right now and get the notes later so the link is in the description below click it if you want those notes now back to the episode you told me something that i loved you said my favorite question when i'm doing these trips is what if this but for that and you said something you go you know i'm trying to take one dot over here and then say what if that was connected to this dot over here and you said something cool you go the further apart those two things are the more powerful the potential idea like it's not always gonna work but like if you just look at your competitors you say oh we could do that too that that's not very powerful idea but if you take something from a whole different country or industry or like different genre and you bring it to your genre all of a sudden you have something right by the way an example of that just came mine i got a little kids in the most popular show right now on netflix is k pop demon hunters and they basically did like k pop music but then like kids cartoon american kids cartoons which like wasn't what people were doing before like you were doing coco mel like a baby singing american nursery rhymes and right now the most popular songs for like you know five to eight year olds half the lyrics are in korean but they love and it worked and they you know they connected two different dots that seemed far apart but it created a pretty powerful idea when it works yeah and first of all you make me really mess being able to watch cartoons teams and my kids because they're all older now that i love that show and it i think what you're describing is really it's about creating creative tension and the more two desperate disparate ideas are that come together the more creative tension so method was really the first to do eco chic so we brought together high design and deep sustainability those are really two opposing ideas but by bringing it together it create this this creative tension and also would you have creative tension you create a deeper experience that also drives much more loyalty and people stay within the brand so that that's exactly right so i try to look for the most two disparate ideas i could come together the other part that unpack is this idea of of of finding something that lives at intersection of familiar and novel so it's too familiar right it lacks complete differentiation if it's too novel it's incredibly foreign and it becomes harder to get somebody to try it so i look for those those ideas that bring together exactly what you just said of this creative tension but there's enough familiarity in it you can jump into it but there's enough novelty to it that it makes it a new experience and there you know it's easy to say but it's hard to find that's the art form i think of finding those intersections i'm not sure what percentage of well or method soap you would say was to just the fact that it was a different colored band aid or a different shaped bottle but if it's a high percentage it's sort of insane that's sort that's kind of a that's kind of a hard you're like this it's almost like this seems too easy a little bit right the more i tried to innovate the less successful i've been where i've moved more into that space of being too novel i think i feel more times i being too novel than being too familiar like our lot we launched the most amazing laundry detergent years ago it was ten x concentrated so it was a size shampoo bottle for fifty loads of laundry but because we're so small this was an idea i got of japan too where i saw they had bigger laundry detergent but they would use these almost like the x mouth wash where you squeeze it pre measures it but we turn it into where you just pump it a pre measured dose but it was so hard to get consumers to believe that something so small could be so effective because they've been trained forever that you know a giant jug of laundry detergent what you need to get your your clothes clean but yeah i've i've always usually over innovated when i failed and under innovated it's i i think i saw a quote with you in simon city with with his on his podcast he said if it's hard it's probably wrong and then he said i know i have a good idea when i can't believe others aren't doing it and i think that when a lot of entrepreneurs wanna grow their companies are started a new company i know i fall victims is all the time i somehow think that there's a correlation between this sounds controversial but there's a correlation between how hard i work or how hard something is and how much value a customer will get and or how valuable my business can get yeah there's a kinda this golden rule and this came out of a lot of apparel and fashion which is if you change one thing like if you do you know one iteration off of the the core you have a higher probability success the second you change two or three things on you're most likely gonna fail it's almost like an advertising used to say if you throw consumer an egg they're gonna catch it if you throw two or three eggs their chances are they're gonna drop it because you're throwing too much change at them too fast whether it's communication or a product but i also i think it's such a it's we live in such a surplus world right of like endless ideas and choices that i think it creates this pressure to really sometimes over innovate to be too different and to your point of like if it seems so obvious then i would always get tripped up of like well i just still be done this before if it's this obvious to me that's a really good insight that's a really good insight about the two you know just change one thing do you think that that applies across software companies or internet companies or is that just commerce or or fashion like things that are more consumable and that i touch and feel and wear i did applies everything whether you're launching i mean even if you're you know within a b b business arguably you're just as distracted as a consumer as you are when you're you know i think i guess a real consumer and i don't know that world as well but i would imagine again just creating simple iterations off of a successful model is way more likely to to succeed then trying to create something radically new from scratch or when something radically new from scratch to started me think about like in the social space of you know my myspace friends it was really the third that got it right but it's just kinda simple iterations off of that first model i did a call the other day with an ai company that's raised a ton of money and they have this huge valuation this closer to basically a billion dollar valuation and they initially grew because in ai ai is so hot there's so much attention that that people were willing to try a bunch of things but now they're like hey how do we grow from here so they're were like hey really respect your growth ideas we wanted a growth i was like i don't know guys it's not really my you know like i don't know if i can solve your problem but cool i'll jump on a call and we get on the call and they start telling me all about this all the stuff and i just kept to asking them the same question and i was like cool so why would somebody choose to use you like why because most people today are using tool a you want them to switch the tool b and i was like awesome so like why is tool b better than tool a and then they were like oh it's way better like in all these other all these different ways i was like awesome so just like tell me the one that like is the biggest one that would immediately convince me and they were like well well there's not really like one and i was like cool okay so let's say there's three just tell me one of them first they were so focused on we're better that they forgot to say we're different like how were you better and a and like they were trying to throw four eggs and i was like none of those eggs were very convincing and they all just cracked on me right and i wish they had just thrown me one egg that said listen for this type of person here's the problem with the tools that you're currently using and we can we do it this way instead and i say i you know that would resonate that would be obviously the ideal scenario so i definitely think this applies to not just consumer products the way the get comes from is just pure ego i think a lot of entrepreneurs like their ego gets in the way and so they want the almost intentionally over complicated it to show how special the product is therefore how special they are and the best entrepreneurs i've always met other ones who take incredibly complex ideas and simplify it down and it that it's easy for consumers to get it for their teams to execute and i think that that that art form of simplification is the the biggest hack in entrepreneurship and yeah the number of pitches i sit through and like i'm like you're intentionally over complicating this to to to justify evaluation or justify your special i i think it is ego but there is something strange i think that like it's easy for you to think this because you've done it some many times but there is something strange or it's like wait so if i just change the color of the band aids it's gonna win and that's obviously you've done you you've done a lot more than that but like within my company i i run a within within within my company with my employees they'll be like we have to do with this this this or this i'm like but what if we just like don't do any of that and just make better ads or you know like you just like just do one thing but for some reason that's hard to conceptualize that like just a minor change on one thing can create a significant amount of value because you think to yourself i have to work one billion dollars worth of work or put one billion dollars worth of effort in order to have a one billion dollar idea but it's oftentimes it's it's it's not the reality well can we do an example here with you talked a little bit about method i wanna talk about ollie i babies it's because i take it every day maybe my kids take it's like very like in my life and you went into the vitamins category so let's imagine just take you back i don't know what year this was you walked to the vitamins category you're looking there and you see you know a a bunch of sort of nature made type of looking things you got maybe flint stone vitamins just still hanging on for dear life and you saw an opportunity i just wanna give you one prompt which is he said something on the pre call that was hilarious sam he goes i went into the aisle and i thought okay cool you know first thing i observed all of them around so i thought okay i guess we're gonna have a square packaging and i just thought i was literally the funniest like the funniest way of like well i guess that's that then must be spare if everybody was stronger then we would have been round like it's as simple as and there's no focus groups there was no it was like yeah okay they're all they're all round so we had no choice supposed to be square that's awesome and the other thing i remember was vitamins used to be like a a game of inference so you would it would say you know whatever vitamin d but you don't know what vitamin d does right you'd have to then know what is the purpose of vitamin d or what is the purpose of melatonin or what is the purpose of i don't know whatever the thing i put you to sleep but you guys just wrote sleep and he wrote like you know immunity right like you just wrote the benefit instead of the the feature and i was like oh that was also quite simple of a of a change to make can you talk about take us back you go you walk into that aisle or i don't know how it actually started but yeah so i we'd i'd sold method but i still involved and i i first of all like i had for the first time i like i'm pretty optimistic happy by default person but for the first time in my life i felt a little wireless because i was like i'm a notch for new and suddenly i i was did not feel like an entrepreneur entrepreneurial anymore i was working for somebody else and i was also doing a project for for target to create what we called made to matter and the and the goal was to get them to have credit for having all these natural brands and so we were looking for these brands that connected with millennial moms and we couldn't find any we couldn't find one for the vitamin category so i just went and literally walk the aisle and first thing i noticed was people stressing out trying to choose something that was healthy for them since i think i was studying the aisle people assumed maybe i knew what i was doing and so like people would just randomly asked me like you know what magnesium for did that worked there it was yeah they were just standing here spa at us just lost people in that aisle and it was a dog's breakfast it was really hard to shop the brands were super inspiring the packaging was terrible so that was a clue dig here and so the first thing i try to figure i was like alright what is you know kinda going back what is that big cultural shift this category is missing and what i figured it out was it was really millennials view health and wellness as a lifestyle pursuit and what the clue for me and kind of what you said earlier like you start seeing these trends of one area the the clue was really soul cycle in the way that soul cycle had been had reposition fitness into something that i was almost spiritual but i love the branding of soul cycle the name the whole identity and so my inspiration inspirational a little like i what would the soul cycle of vitamins look like and if we reimagine a vitamin as a lifestyle product so then it's to your point it's was like alright well it's gotta be a square pack and then i i always wanna design everything to have like a so again it it's really designed as a product not a package so i wanted to design it like a jar so something you would wanna leave out because if you left it out you most likely remember to keep taking it but also sell like it actually had like intrinsic value and then i realized okay well we have to put a giant cap on it so we might as well make the cap the logo so then the whole idea and this flowed really within a matter of probably days the idea that it would be a square jar with a white cap and that's what would make it iconic and then it just started quickly flowing from there of like well everybody else is selling like why sell bio why don't just sell beauty why sell melatonin my s cell sleep and do these really unique blends and again it was all the spirit of really making this thing easier to understand that almost you know again turning in in a vitamin it's something you have to buy and it's something you want to buy in this little like object of desire today's episode is brought to you by hubspot being a know it all used to be considered a bad thing but in business knowing it all it's everything because right now businesses are only using about twenty percent of their data unless you have hubspot that's where they take data that's buried in emails and call logs and meaning notes they become insights that i help you grow your business because when you know more you grow more you see finn don't know it all isn't so bad after all visit hubspot dot com to learn more today we didn't talk about the hustle that it takes to make them happen because there's like the artist brain that you're talking about you're like so then i took the the roof of the japanese you know hut i was staying in and that became the lid and then i did this and i did that but now you just have a product idea at that point a a box yeah but like you the cool a beautiful box though they're give me the best the best box just box people love this box so you but you know the all entrepreneurs they're they they're typically not like the best in the world at a single thing but they're like pretty damn good at a couple of unrelated so you know maybe there's better designers than you are pro product product designers than you but you also have the entrepreneurial hustle to be like i'm gonna go now stand outside of this natural grocery store and then pass out samples or i'm gonna go do a thing that's like i'm gonna keep showing up in some way that like other people would have given up five days ago but i was still here and that was the thing that gave me the break you know your top twenty percent in two different things rather than being top one percent or top point one percent in a single category i'm just assuming that is that true and are there any stories of the hustle that it took to get to get into the stores actually get the momentum yeah super true it is funny it's like i as an entrepreneur i think a lot about energy flow and when i'm working on something if it's giving me energy back that i know it's right to your earlier comment of if it's hard it's wrong that's a lot of the way and i'm working on a concept right now that i've literally been pushing water uphill it's been painful as far as trying but but last week it broke i'm like oh there it is now now it's flowing like i can't stop working on it right now because this energy giving it's flowing the narrative is like beautifully coming together each insights unlocking in the next but in that case like i had to push water uphill for like the last six months on this concept trying to get it to a place where suddenly like i can see see it now and then hopefully other people will see it but to your point of execution like at the of the day like ideas are are easy like execution is a hard part so with method i think that was where we had because we had you know we're out of hour two guys in a jury flat in san francisco with like zero nope you know zero experience on how to make or sell anything and i think where that persistence really paid off is we had to sell it in so these you know local san francisco grocery stores where the manager made the decision so we would just show up at six am and like the you know we grumpy manager and you got you know quickly you've got literally three minutes like picture idea for this new premium cleaning cleaning brand and i realized a lot of ways selling was just really this transfer of emotion like i don't think he ever believe in the product that we're selling but you gotta get them to believe in you and in in some cases believe that you're gonna keep showing up until he that's yes the that persistence but it's it's really that emotion that energy that's contagious and is finding it first than what you're building that you love so then you could share that with other people and have the energy to keep going when things get hard which of course they will do you look at a company like a project like this is my art project and i'm gonna jump from thing to thing to thing do you acknowledge it like oh or are you more of a are you more operational i i both i i'm a project guy at heart i love the start middle and finish of creating something but also to build great companies the operating side of it is is so in important the kinda of my kind of core philosophy of building companies is this idea of artisan operators so i wanna build companies that have incredible imagination creativity that can innovate but also run a really good predictable business with great supply chain finance controls in doing both like if you think about it there's so few companies in the world apple nike that do both really really well at scale and so i try to build teams and cultures that have this idea of being great artists operators but i do you know at the heart of it i do love you know like i heard tim k who who's on my board say once he referred to yahoo as a project you know which he started as employee number six the ceo scaled it through an ipo and beyond and when he referred to yahoo as a project i thought that was pretty cool do you have like an open an open check from unilever or target and they're just like whatever you got going on get after it and come see us in two or three years and we'll look at the tracks and we'll just buy your company i wish if is that he but gel said great in his chair with a cat on his on his arm right i mean we've had a lot of success we've had a lot of failures as well it always like every every one of them is hard and and hard in their own way i do so i'm moving over i joined great craft and we're launching a new great craft consumer brands fun so i'm moving into the the vc space and kind of what you're talking about too it's i realize i my superpower of working with entrepreneurs is to to to help infuse them in energy because you know i i've upset in the shoes so many times understand how hard it is and so i i love now not being the the quarterback on the field always during in the past is but actually being the coach on the sidelines and like coaching these these young founders and it's it's just a a thrill to do that now you told me something kind of amazing he said that you win on your trend trips let's say to tokyo wherever you're going and you took some people from target with you during this kinda like brainstorming phase but did you you had this this system that was kinda like gonna wow them can you tell this story about how you the twenty four hour cycle that you had that would like wow them yeah i mean a lot of people you know trend trips are quite common within consumer especially about retailers the problem is you come back with all these amazing photos and then your buried in your inbox and meetings you've missed and usually it goes nowhere so the process that we'd found work really well is we'd kick off every trench trip with like okay here are you know ground ourselves these are the big macro and then we'd hire somebody on the ground where for asia europe and we would go to all of like the most influential retail that was occurring in that market but everybody had almost like a scavenger hunt you had an assignment by the time we got to that pub at five o'clock to sit down for for a happy hour everybody had to have multiple ideas that they were excited about while being in the field and then we would talk about it we would pick a couple and then as we're going to dinner i would call it into our creative team who's sitting in san francisco where it's morning and then they would have all day to work on the brief that we just gave them they would send it at the end of their day we would wake up and then at breakfast we had present like what look like polished products ideas to target and so by top out there plane to go home we actually had sold in new products that's like how south park makes an episode if you guys see matt where like matt and trey will like right all day and then they'll like send it to the korean editor editing team and then the next morning they like oh cool thanks and they're like around with it i saw the podcast version of this sam so we we do a thing we're whenever we have a guest on like especially when we do them in person we will bring a gift and because i was just like oh you know like this person took time another day there did this like i want this to feel like a great experience like what makes a great experience when you when you have when you when you are with somebody i think given a gift is a nice thing right steve bartlett who's another podcast he he was on jimmy fallon the other day and jimmy was talking about he's his experience on the show he because you guys do this incredible thing i did the podcast with you and when we got up and the episode was done somebody from your team came and handed me this book and it's a photo book of printed photos from the podcast that they were just doing like moments earlier and he was like i've never seen anything like this and this has been doing tv production with hollywood stars for for years but like the creating like going the little bit extra to create a wow and in that case it's the speed of the turnaround similar to what you were saying with your the speed of the turnaround i'm sure a lot of people will come up with mock ups or product ideas two weeks later at a follow up meeting but the emotions gone and the and the wow factors gone at that point doing it in the twenty four hour cycle is is that little extra that entrepreneurial juice that like i think most people wouldn't wouldn't even think to go wouldn't they would think that's in that's there's an invisible fence that you can't do that well was living there state of make and also i love that line by steve jobs of i trust people just not in groups and so it allows you to keep really small team that's agile that isn't overthinking things and just living in that state of make and that's that's where magic and i'm i'm such a huge student of snl and how started it live their entire creative process any any of the former actors on it that's written in an auto i've listened to you i like i think i know it by heart now of like what they do tuesday morning through but there is something so powerful about being in that stay to make and now that we have between ai and digital tools work could build and make things in such real time i think it's even more powerful and it's also where you see real talent versus people who who don't know how to actually do anything they don't how to manage and so it's a place where like builders and dealers really thrive and managers kinda just get in away i don't i don't i know if we should do it right now which maybe have a a part too but it would actually be awesome i never realized for like you know sean has a an e com brand and for all the people who are in the in the more physical space it would be really fun to see how you use ai to id that that would be really interesting i've never thought about about you know folks making physical products being able or not being able to use it oh i'm use i'm so bad with right now like last night just i used it as a whole creative team and partner i thought it's it's absolutely amazing what you can do now i wanna get to the brainstorm so we did that we did promise i basically said outline your method and then let's use the method to try to come up with some ideas which i think is fun living in the state of make on the podcast too right because how many podcasts would actually try that okay so you just to outline your your process was find a big category ideally an already big category so you don't have to educate the consumer about something new they i haven't thought about buying you wanna find a sea of same where everybody's kinda doing the same thing you wanna look if there's a cultural shift elsewhere that hasn't applied to this category ideally it's something that's overly complicated they're taking themselves too seriously then to come up with your idea you'd be a thief you find unrelated things you say what if we did that over here and you're trying to come up with a single stroke that cuts through the noise that might be your packaging or your your colors you're positioning whatever it might be this the square bottle when everybody else is round and then you got a house get the momentum going alright so i came up with a couple of hap i'm calling these half baked ideas i don't think i think one might be good but the others are are are pretty tough did you have a chance to come up with some and if so let's we'll go back and forth yes yep i got a couple okay i'm gonna pitch you one and then i want you to to you know give me the the the thumbs up the thumbs down feel free to be brutally harsh it makes for better content alright alright i think this this first idea i think is genuinely good the other ones i don't really have a lot of faith then but this one i generally believe it alright so i think about products that my mom takes that i'm gonna take because humans are not if like the world you know it feels like it's changing really fast but biologically we're not changing that fast right and so when i see my parents i'm seeing a future window into what i might look like or things that they prioritize i don't really think about today and my mom was just over at my house and one thing my mom takes religiously is fiber she drinks fiber every single day and i've you know i'm in a world where i hear about gut health and microbiome and fancy stuff but she's like i need to take this to poop okay so that's what i'm gonna do and i need to take this to you got that i'm like yeah that's simple enough and so then i looked i looked at the brands that she's using and i walk through the aisle so preparing for this podcast i went to the grocery store and i walked through and i see meta mu which to me sounds like a disease i see ben fiber which sounds like an obamacare you know spin off and i just thought the brand the leading brands in the fiber category i think are completely outdated but i do think that there's something familiar about fiber so like i get pitched a lot of products that i don't really know if they'll work or not but if somebody said hey this increases the fiber in your diet i would personally have pretty high conviction that that's like good for me i just don't wanna take a grandma product right because that's not really that wouldn't i would feel unhealthy taking the product so i want a fiber brand that i feel like i'm in the same way when i take you know protein or amino acids or to picking something that's like yeah i'm at i'm trying to be peak performance right now and so i wanna reinvent the fiber category that's the point of view and i have an idea for how to do that which is to to get out of this kind of grandma product category and do a fresh take on fiber shark right where do where does that land with you well let's start with this space because it's if it's the wrong category then there's it's pointless to go any further i i think you found great white space like i agree fiber is a new protein as protein gets more and more saturated in the record you know we're we're seeing huge growth across all all areas of higher fiber if you the place i would look because if you walk costco and what fiber products are available there and you're right the legacy brands so nobody's really put a fresh spin on it you could do it like where would you steal from i would steal from juice bars of like that wellness appetite appeal like a green g like what does a green juice a modern green juice look like as a fiber product and then you can innovate on flavors around it and the other thing is it's a really great margin category right we i have this friend do you guys know what ke exercises are for men i don't know how to do it you're supposed to like squeeze something inside but it's so like wave have web women anyone the few women who listen to this they know what that is but for men or of you listening there's parts for you yeah for for the men people apparently do key exercises so don't like premature ejaculate basically during sex i i think that's the main thing but they're but i have a i've got a buddy who who made a that's commitment by the way well i've got yeah yeah i like you must you really need it and i have a friend who created a k exercise app for men and he was like promoting this and i was like man i see why young or any man wants this that's great it sounds like you're doing great for the world but my honor costs too much i don't wanna be a an influencer or a promoter for this and i wonder if there's like a little bit with fiber where it's like i don't know if i wanna talk about like you know poop more so i did think about this and i have two two possible angles we either lean in or we sw out okay lean in here's the lean and pat the lean in path is gonna be look poop is yeah poops poops poop it's it's kind of could be funny and so i actually pitch this to our friend who came on the podcast hudson min hush i said listen i got a product for you because i was like this guy is so funny that like his ad creative would be like would perform better than anybody else's ad creative and it's almost like you know any celebrity h a product there's a little bit of sellout out nature and so it's almost funny to sell out for something that's like so like so clearly silly and in that way that it might actually work for him like he's gets a license to like promote the product because it's kind of a a silly product so one i one ways is to lean in and actually have a comedian who you kind of have as a face of the brand that actually leans into the front of it you could be the dude the dude wipes well secured leaned into that to the use case alright so then there's the sw out path which was you're right maybe it's not about maybe it's not about maybe the framing is a little more on metabolism or digestion like you you may can you work can you use a different word because i don't know if anybody that metabolism yeah like cleaner system and i've never heard really of that many products that like talk about like this this improves your metabolism right and so you get away from the sort of like the the lower intestine area and you you sort of like you move up towards more like the stomach and and you get a little away from the gross stuff and you talk about metabolism so those are my two ideas i love it and i what i would do if i were you and i would then create two very different concepts around that so i would do like like like dude white pot approach that just un claims that that function and then your point then i would go to a really elevated almost like beauty like a approach and then what would you do would you test those in some way or you just look at it and feel which one feels right like what would you do once you come up with the two very disparate concepts so i i like to solve the work in the creative and so i'd take those two concepts i'd work with with a designer creative team really bring him to life and then first i'd be like what one am i most excited about back to that idea of energy like which one am like personally excited i would share with friends and family because if they don't like it why would anybody else and then if i was really torn i do consumer audition not for the consumer to like choose a versus b but just so i can hear feedback from consumers that get a qualitative focus group to help kinda guide my decision of which direction i wanna go and then i would also put in front of retailers i don't ask the buyers i think most people go into buyers with the attendant of like i'm going to sell to you i'm here to prove myself versus i'm here to improve myself and when i sit down buyers i was trying to go in and improve and and really invite their feedback into the process that's interesting consumer audition i never heard that that sounds good i like that that sounds way cooler than focus groups alright rookie what do you what do you got a pitch eric let's hear okay so i would a pitch arguably what are the most important institutions in america and arguably won of the loss institutions of america and that is the american diner at one point these beautiful you know silver and it was really the you know the first third place before starbucks and in a world where more and more i think we'll see a backlash to ai of understanding what is real and what is not we're gonna want these places of human connection and just deep authenticity and there's also no better place than to really start your day so my pitch is i'm gonna go back to soul cycle again i would create the soul cycle of the diner it would only be open from morning through launch so it's one shift so it's a really good economic model but when you walk into it it feels incredibly vibrant so i would do probably like the other thing would feel almost like a modern barn of like white b board with yellow accents i would have a stand grab and go juice bar coffee bar but the rest of the restaurant would be how a diner is set up where it's all stool bar seating but i would have it so it moves throughout you know so the counter there's no separate tables the counter kind of flows so you can get everybody around the counter for that communal but also so it's really efficient for the staff too to move through it and then when you pop it at seven am like it's popping like it's got great great energy it's just a place you would wanna start every morning right with that level of options so the seating is kinda like those sushi bars where you where you where they wrap around like the the you know this conveyor belt sushi bars you're sort of stealing from that but applying that to the american diner yes there's that out i've forgot the name of it that parisian restaurant that where the entire restaurant is built like a counter but the counter kinda of mean so you a full view of the kitchen and there it's very communal in and out you don't to seed anybody and it's all also about creating this amazing energy so what i would wanna do is take on denny's and ihop hop with that model that's awesome i have a since we're gonna create a brainstorm here i gotta what if for you i gotta i gotta how might we for you you know what i mean i feel like i need i feel like i need the hack sack or something creative with me here okay so in mobile gaming i tried to make a a mobile game once and so before i even made the game i went and talk to a couple guys who made really popular mobile games and i sat down and i showed them a prototype and they go oh dude you have a t t problem and i was like i don't know if that's a std i don't know what you're talking about but i i don't wanna problem but i'm sure i'm absolutely certain i have one based on the way you just he was like disgusted with or you're like oh thanks like i work really hard so like you know do i have too much or too little what's the which way do i go so he was basically saying the most important metric in a mobile game success is t t time to fun so basically from the moment i click the button to open the app how long does it take for me to have some fun because i was like cool open the app registration screen sign up give me your email address how about your phone number would you like push notifications you like me to remind you it's like you haven't even tried the app yet right you're like like what you're like what's my t like never the funny other it was no fun and he was showing me like you know if you open up like mario is one of the the classic examples of this like if you start mario first level there's no tutorial there's no nothing that like mario starts and a small goo starts walking towards you and the easiest enemy to defeat and you jump on his head you get a satisfying like yeah i squash that bug and then the next thing you do is there's a brick above your head you jump up you punch it and you get a coin you jump and punch the next one you think it's a good coin no a mushroom comes out you're like oh my god do you want this and you go get it and you grow and so in the first fifteen seconds of mario you have learned all the controls you've defeated an enemy you've gotten money and you grew bigger and stronger it's like the greatest fifth first fifteen seconds of your life so i have an idea for you because i went to a diner this weekend we're hold on can we use like a time time to fund like that's a new metric i'm gonna use for everything now whether you're like it ends like getting a restaurant airline my marriage like thought time of fun is off right now exactly but it's like yeah removing all the friction to get to that experience time to fucking front load a little bit of the fun right i'm not gonna get you all of it but can i get a piece of it here now because i need to you know hook and so i thought i went to a diner this weekend and from the time we got there and we're were all excited to get there and and my kids wanted pancakes and all this good stuff to the time we actually had anything fun like any food or drink on the table was like twenty two minutes and i get they were totally busy but i wonder if there's some way where right when you walk in there's something because right after the diner we went to costco and right when we walked in there was like a costco sample person and my kids got something and they were like hey what does this place we like this place because they instantly got like a cracker when they walked in and so i just wonder if with the diner you could do one thing which is like eliminate the way and bring that t t down which is what we want we want low t i love that okay so what i think is like you know like dunkin and donuts and munch skins we do like a really great like gourmet cinnamon munch skin so when you walk in like it's almost like a sample you grab a munch skin as you walk in to go sit down so you get that first like little taste do they have smell too because that would be nice double to get to get two senses you but you could do a smoothie shot next so it's a tray of smoothie shots and munch so so it gives you that little and also takes the edge off your customers while they're waiting rise well so the wait time will never feels like two i love culinary steals maybe okay one other steel we could do five guys they have the barrel of peanuts which i think is kinda what you're talking about right you go in and there's just free peanuts you could scoop again i i love that who doesn't love that these great peter right my first business was a sushi restaurant and in a sushi ran a traditional sushi restaurant when you walk through the door the entire kitchen staff they don't turn to you but they hear the door chimes go and they go you're shake like the whole crap like the whole crew is like what's up it's basically like the japanese what's up and it basically means like a customer is here like hey like pay attention or whatever or welcome i don't even know what your it means but like that's what they all say i think you could also like kind of if you talk about soul cycle i think there's a way to make the experience of the customer interesting when you walk in like i just wonder what ritual we could have when somebody walks through the door that would be welcoming and unique and interesting as well we're just such neat we're we're we're we're so neat we're we're ne falls like you know we're gonna talk about like aristotle on the philosophy philosophy of life and all this stuff and it turns out you just gotta throw a bunch of nuts at my face when i walk in to get a burger like yeah you gotta love a good high five yeah you just gonna say what's up in japanese said like i'm good i mean you could picture the playlist in this place right of like the best morning music and there's something of like they hit something and like a good morning good morning comes over as people walk as each time somebody walks in the door right i love that time i'm so fascinated with time to fund out i think about like vacations like going skiing time to fun could be really low shopping to get to the socks yeah but everything now i'm gonna measure in t like you know you you arrive in hawaii and to give you the lay right when you get out the door right like a hotel check in process right so that normally you the fun is when you get to maybe your room in hawaii soon as you get out the door lay blue drink fun instant dude just yeah sean do you just have like a notepad like all load like do you have a ranking of low pieces travel so it just you know what i mean creative the arrival there's my boyfriend i say there's nothing better than arrival drinks yeah like gets the best moment of a vacation would you ever get in to a non i mean you've done the same category forever would you ever get into a a restaurant business or something that's not what you've done well i just tried building a retail business and was i i think what we built was amazing and i was super proud of it and it was working with the consumer it was just impossible to fund in this in this current capital cycle so what i tried to do is reinvent the american jewelry restore and my theory was i always wanna to do retail record you know geek out on every expression from a playlist to the sense which we did and even the way you're greeted and i i'm a huge you know student of like danny meyer the way he thinks about it at each restaurant like fifteen seconds right to be created in even the service man where does a salt and pepper go and how do you think every every detail through but he walk into a jewelry store i found it to be like the most intimidating experience like you never felt like he'd be long there you had to like ask for the world's smallest price tag to be turned over and then you have to give a reaction to sell that you thought was five thousand but it's actually fifty thousand in the insight there was women self purchasing is driving growth and fine jewelry but nobody was really creating a experience for them so we created this brand called cast we opened up three stores in the bay area and i wanted like you know willy won a pure imagination to play in a consumer's head when they walked in and and feel like a kid in a candy store again but again get being able to sign leases build out stores omni channel we had a incredible partnership with nordstrom who put capital in the business but it was so capital intensive that like a path to profitability and then raising capital this market was just incredibly incredibly difficult so that's where those when of those situations you're like alright i'm sitting at the wrong tony hs would say sometimes you gotta move poker tables and just i'm at the wrong table and you know gold pricing was spiking diamond pricing was crashing you couldn't sign a lease in these a class because l should eat up so much of the these these leases so i realize like it was just back to like if it's hard it's wrong it was a work on until you were like alright it's it's it's dead i worked on it from launch two it's dead yeah three three to four years oh a lot a lot yeah now we were we worked we worked out hard at it it was a fun business like designing jewelry and our tea you know incredible culture chart team easter ray was part of it and we're on the white you know wait lotus season two the cast was we're in our product we had a you know we had a profound mark in the industry in a very short amount of time but it just was a business that nobody wants to put capital into unfortunately and there's have not a great the easiest pitch at the moment like okay so how are you in an ai company yeah i mean it's not like appealing and you know who he has like great phrases he had one on on this when he's telling about the jewelry shop he goes it was like a plain made of gold like i look like it was a great idea but it was like a plane made a gold couldn't it couldn't get lift off couldn't get off the ground as stupid been a how fancy he went down the runway like it just could not get air airborne and but if you look at it its cast jewelry our store i mean i was super probably built but i picked i picked the wrong space to try to innovate in alright let's take a quick break because i gotta tell you a story let me tell you about the first time i tried to run payroll for my team i was using a traditional bank and you know the type it's got a junky interface it's built like a two thousand and two tax form and it was open only during business hours and i hit send in froze they flagged the transaction they locked my account they put me on hold for forty five minutes and then they told me i gotta visit my local branch and that was the day i started looking for a new banking solution after asking a few founders what they were using i found out about mercury and so now my payroll is two clicks i can wire money i can pay invoices i can reimburse the team all from one clean dashboard that's why i use it for all of my companies and so do two hundred thousand other startup founders and so if you're looking at to level of banking head to mercury dot com and apply in minutes mercury is a financial technology company not a bank bank the services are provided through choice financial group call them m a and evolve bank trust members fdic do you wanna tell more of your horrible ideas or yeah okay i got it i got another one here you think you think i had one bad idea a volume guy no your first one is a great idea i would invest thank you thank you alright so now here's it's about to fall off a cliff here okay so i walked through the grocery store looking for that sea of same this and honestly like you know shout out to the grocery store there's there wasn't a whole lot of categories that i saw one that stood out to me i'm looking for everyday products i'm looking for repeat purchase i'm looking for everybody buys this but i'm looking for something where there's not a brand i don't have a favorite brand i don't have even like i don't even couldn't even tell you the name of four of the brands in the category that's kind of what i was looking for so i'd like you like to introduce you to my company white label chicken llc and white label chicken llc is getting into the chicken game and what we're gonna do is we're gonna white label someone else's chicken so we're gonna take chicken from somebody else we're not gonna get into farming but we're gonna put our own brand on it because they're like sam what's your top three favorite chicken brands i don't know don't know eric you got a favorite chicken rent where's our about packaged chicken packaged grocery star you're gonna go buy like breast meat or whatever it's like nine bucks for the the little mini tray yeah that's a real that's a weird inspiring name well we're not the front facing brand is not white label chicken it's a it's a working title and so we're white label chicken llc and so then i i don't even know the angle yet i all i knew was i can't believe there's no like like there's no oat leaf for chicken no what i mean like there's there's no there's no i can't believe there's just not a fate like not like distinct chicken brands that stand for something and mean something like whether it's whether it's about the flavor or it's pre season whether it's about like this is man's chicken and like you're gonna get your protein from this meal like this is what we do we we give you a little extra i don't know what it is but i just kinda saw that white space and i wanted to open the floor to you gentlemen to help me kinda workshop this point this is where it goes like familiar and novel so this is very familiar so how do you add novelty it's interesting you're right as soon as it gets like put in a dinosaur shape and bread crumbs around it it becomes you know dino like right it becomes darren nuggets becomes incredibly well branded or it gets served at a restaurant as a a sandwich chick but the the the chicken itself i mean there's fought like foster farms did a pretty good job of this i'm ke out of california but it was really not the product it's just their advertising was so good right that could be did years ago okay so i think you gotta go back i would sell i would turn it into an origin story i went sell the chicken i would sell the farm and i would that sounds great this smart right this farm is sounds cool i wish as if don draper war hoodies yeah don't sell the chicken sell the farm baby i might say that to my wife later today in any context eric do you have like a pack of six that you could light it up right now because it's very light pull up if you took out a figure right now you would be the coolest man i've ever had my life put your that line put your feet up as smoke a sick it it tell me about sell the farm not the chicken because the because we don't wanna think about the chicken because we murdered it right we wanna take that the chicken had a good life on this farm before it was killed right that's gonna make us feel good about the quality of the chicken it's gonna make us feel good about the chicken short life and so i would build the whole brand around this heaven this heavenly farm for chickens what if we create a instagram account we actually pour all our energy into the instagram account incredibly aesthetic farm and it's like truman show it's just totally a set because again we're white label chicken llc so i'm starting with ina authenticity here but like i'm just thinking what if we what if you started with the the social are you just made everybody's favorite farm and then from there you're like of course if you're gonna buy chicken you'd buy it from your favorite farm dude i have a i've got a friend that exited a a multi billing dollar consumer brand and i was i yeah he so he's he's he's he you're his best friend but he's just a friend yeah he might cute he might use the way a word a acquaintance and and i use you know close friend yeah close friend yeah we're a little bit different but we he was like telling me this idea for his new business and presumably he's very smart because of his previous success but he was like do you know what free range means like free range chicken and i was like i guess that means they're they're running around a farm and he was like no the definition is like they've got like a cage the size of like five by five it i i forget the exact definition but it was like shockingly small and he's working on this thing where he's putting r is it called r tags is that what's called yes the the is that what is who's putting them yes in cows and in chickens and as they are scanned so the whole farm has like the the technology to see how far away the running and as they go to the kill you know the kill bin or wherever they gotta go to their their r thing is scanned and so it could consumer can on his chickens and this is the real thing that he's he already built kit you can see how like what radius they were running around but this is his old premise is that people which it kind of that could maybe that that actually might be interesting but you can actually see it's just truly free range chicken or were they just like in a small pen where they were just in their own feces like you know like because there's like a a correlation between now how how like healthy the farm was and how they actually filed the rules yeah i think to build an area two i always say the framework like you gotta find the intersection of alt and nurses so the case of method you bought it for very narcissist reasons you love the fragrance you love the design of it but the alt it's good for me good for the planet brought you coming back and if you can deliver on both i think is real power which i do that in all of our brands so in the case of our chicken farm here we need to sell the nurses on that this is the most organic good for you great tasting chicken but the alt is on that you can feel good that just chicken while they had a short life it had a really good life and i think right it was a great six weeks yeah you know it's almost like you you you steal from children's books so you you you do the whole branding like it's a children's book of this magical farm and even like you make the farmers who work there kind of you know part of the overall like eye icon the brand and you make them heroes in it as well old mcdonald had to farm it's called bingo is old mcdonald's available old mcdonald's would be great old mcdonald if that's available does anybody own that i think is mcdonald's you'd have to be like old you know mcdonald's you have to like do something weird with the spelling do you guys ever buy these eggs yeah all the time yes so like yeah they're in my fridge right now this morning this is like what you're talking about of like the sea of famous or like the commodities that they made like look the bottom here medium brown egg is literally the name of the product it's like a transparent medical packaging like sterile packaging and you just see these eggs and then this vital farms thing on top because they literally draw like flowers and like you know hey or whatever on the thing i'm like oh farm good arm to table i'm doing good now that he says see a save i'm like oh i do this all the time like the other day i bought yogurt the other day because instead of greek yogurt this yogurt was icelandic right like like i don't know like do know what that means but i'm in yeah yeah i was like for some reason it's all greek and this is from iceland and do you have a theory on naming because like you've named your products extremely well yeah how how do you come up with names so the holy grail of naming is one word for letters if you could do it that'll really really hard naming a brand is the most difficult part of a startup because everything is taken do you use like an agency do you just sit there and think it's all different i'm not good at naming but i'm good at spotting a name so method was adam is literally my c cofounder founder we were literally brushing her teeth at the same time and he's like what about method i was like that's it lawyers like he never get method it's like way too generic then i asked my lawyer while he wasn't working over so it's like if if he's thought this name was really points to your success what would you do he's like hey i'd go for it like worse because lawyers never wanna be wrong but they don't need to be bright ali came from i was working with alan die who is helping me who's great director at apple and we came up with ollie slate like ollie for friendly i wanted i wanted the name with each case i come up with a jumping off word so per method i wanted to represent technique right so you're bringing the gym you use good technique to get force because this was gonna clean without force so i was like we want something that represents technique and he's like how about meth is it's like that's it with ali everything in the category with pseudo science like oak syndrome or was very folks like nature's garden or bounty so i wanted an name that just sounded friendly so he came up with ollie slate and then we realized ollie would just we were able to get it on its own so we didn't need the slate part of it you're like looking through the story and it's like insight inside insight and like you you you make it you you have what i call the knowledge like the curse of knowledge which is you think that this is you're like oh yeah i just did this and then i just did that like i don't think even tell us that and that was so interesting and what if you had asked question we wouldn't have known that like how many more of those you got because it's like you're like well i just do this of course as one does you pick a jump off word and then you i was like oh i don't do anything like that i just would like you know someone's a mask when they when they're fluid they're fluid with this and and and and it's incredibly clear when you describe the simplest things that you are jumping off word for for willy so for willy was i wanted something about health care and so we actually came up at night and gale so night and nightingale because of the idea of like night and nightingale is like she is like this icon and it's all about caring for you and anthony duty and person spade came up with well i know i was like you're like it done most every time i've never every name like cast we came up with for jewelry four again each time we i i saw the name it was like no debate it was like that is it and then it's all hands on how do we secure this name amazing do you have a another idea one of my favorite foods and i wash my kids go through it is packaged cheese so the craft singles mozzarella sticks i have never seen anybody do anything really so there's this big delta in cheese too you go to like the cheese counter right it is it's art for and we have this place we live on schultz island summer and this guy andrew runs the cheese wagon it's literally a wagon and my wife and i will go there every few days just because we'll sit there and taste the cheese with them and it's like wine he just romance it so the the gap is if you look at all the categories that have have taken a more art teaching approach and then you go shop package cheese it's the same thing as cheddar like mozzarella it has not changed and i love my favorite packaging form in the world that are the most baby bells right in the wax like little pac bands say you split apart well so my idea is i wanna create a line of gourmet cheeses in the in the you know in the prep package in those baby bell wax forms but do really like take what they've started and go super gourmet with different flavor profiles in it and make that that packaging form make it slightly bigger two different colors but i would i would build a whole line of gourmet cheeses around it and if va wants to do this please reach out to me sorry this is this for you say it's four kids or it's not for kids you're just saying i wanna do the gourmet cheeses but in the in the in the this new packaging and in that aisle yes like my my boys love the baby bills i wanna do that for adults again taking something that's a kid product but then elevate it as an adult product and there's just something so fun about opening up that little wax it's very i'm we're a man child where does this land with you dude i had three of these so i do what i do what i call redneck fitness food so last night i just have three baby bells for dinner and i wrapped it in salami and just piled them in my mouth i call it balls of fun and so funds really fast how telling this name too yeah what's that you sam's mouth surprise i don't know if we're still topic it i'd about sure you but you could even square a little mustard at this at this ball but yeah this is great i love those cheeses and i think they only make good and like the normal one what is it about that packaging does it actually because it's kinda softer inside right is it is that because of the type of cheese or does does the packaging do that i think it's already like that but you could just like grab it it's like i'll grab them and i'll literally put it by pocket and like as i'm walking grab and go cheese okay gotcha and it's a single serve it's a single serve so like it's like super easy but yeah it's definitely a convenience thing not necessarily it's better tasting thing but i think there's was something very primal to about opening it so it feels natural relieving back the wax like opening an orange like you feel like a little monkey just getting into your right snack and so it's in a time to fun on that is three seconds yeah it's oddly it's oddly satisfying whenever peel back that wax and then when you peel back the wax on if you ever don't ever done it the two things open up and like the top part does it fall off the bottom part of the wrapper yeah you ever seen moisture have you yeah it's like a oyster have you guys seen those new coke bottles where you twist the cap off and then it peels back if the cat like stays on the model oh no haven't seen that oh man it's kinda like that i love that just is as he can fully recycle the bottle then because the caps usually don't get recycled now we might be breaking the laws of physics here but one of the most satisfying food experiences in the world is cracking the the top of a coke can the sound and the like literally it's like like an iconic sound of of the tab i wonder if there's a way to like create some sound or satisfying crack here but but i i think i'm i think i'm making a good idea bad here you've over innovated it yeah one one yeah it just blue bell or baby bell whatever it's called but fancy cheese i also had exactly idea so great minds think like i also had a cheese idea yours is better but i'm just gonna say mine out loud in case there's something you wanna steal out of the car of this idea that i'm about to give you this is like a dying idea ahead but so my mother came over and she's great but you know she's got mother a little bit where she's like well i know the answers to the test and you're still trying to figure out the answer to that so like let me just tell you what to do and so for example it would be like oh he'll love this rice kids love rice she'll say these generic things like kids love rice so your kid's gonna love rice like no he doesn't eat rice doesn't like rice love blah blah or you know milk like one of our kids wasn't really drinking like milk from like a milk like a gallon of milk or whatever and she was like all kids love milk your kids gonna love milk and we're like you can try be my guest but like this kid doesn't drink milk and i was waiting for like the satisfaction of being right and then five minutes later she's like oh he loves it and i'm like no way and i go over and basically what she did was she would pour the milk into the top of the cap and give him like he got to have a tiny mini cup and he was into that and so he was like oh like taking shots of milk like a like a you know like a spring break basically and i couldn't believe it and she was like change of presentation and so now this phrase change of presentation has become a big deal so anytime there's a food my kid doesn't eat it's not a question do they like it or not it's what is the change of presentation we need to do to get them to eat so for example bread was another didn't want bread my wife takes a cookie cutter like a like the star shape or whatever and he gets to stamp out the bread and now he likes that and we're like oh my god change of presentation so like she's you know and now your mother law's is the man of the house was i think she already was and i just denial for a period of time but i too have now bent the knee like the tech ceos like sucking up the donald the trump basically like that's me an hour i'm like mother love mother can we get more gold in this room love it you know so so basically my cheese idea is basically instead of just slices of cheese you include a stamp and the stamp is like shapes that they can stamp the cheese into so they can play like play doh stealing from play and you basically get the play doh shaped cutters but you apply it to cheese and you sell it together as a little pack basically i think my kids would love that i don't know how scalable that is got it yeah what's the problem i don't know how you're gonna put another did that come through was the audio bid on that when when when slash when we sell ten million versions of this i i don't know if we i could afford the operations that's i agree with the insight of change your presentation i don't know if i agree with the application of it there trying to get into a toy so like giving them a little thing that they can do to the food i like that idea that i like as well again it's like eat it could be a durable it's your point of like how do you make it a consumable so it's an annuity so people keep buying it see he's in the cheese but he's a competitor now so he doesn't like this idea because he's like all about his like artisan cheese this is i'm gonna do this baby bella cow he's his cheese comes with a little stamp he's like yeah the haters said it wasn't scalable to y'all just pitched craft singles that come with a cookie cutter exactly i think he complicated it i think the story is key to the understanding of the idea in fact the label is gonna include the entire story that i said in your verbatim and size eight font and instead of buying the chicken to support the chicken you know or like the good a good farm we're gonna be supporting sean stick it to his mother yeah what happened to the safe space where there's no bad ideas you're like watch what i do if you bring a weak wimp idea in here let me give it a wed so i wanna leave you with a big picture question you've you've obviously done it you've proven yourself so that's good you've made money doing what you you you're financially you know secure free eating and all that what is like the end of the story for you like what are you trying to do do you have somebody in mind like hero you're like i wanna be like them do you think like thirty years down the road like i wanna have done x y z do you not think about that at all like how do you think about your life because like you could just keep doing this sounds fun is there a big picture yeah no i'm i'm a planner so there definitely is a big a big picture for me i at the heart of it i love building and creating and if i wasn't doing that i think i'd be really miserable but what i don't wanna do anymore is it'll be a ceo were you the ceo before i've been ceo of my previous companies yes and i love like being in it with a team and building it every day in an trenches with your team and helping steer the ship like i i absolutely love that as well but i'm at the stage of my career that you know the pressures are raising capital and being able to answer to that capital i wanna be able to work you know going back to projects work across more things so i'm splitting my time between know continue to inc innovate new ideas but then i hire ceo and team and i work alongside that team and then moving over to joining great craft to launch this consumer brands fund i'm really now being able to you know be more of the coach and and help work with entrepreneurs we we've had a bunch of people come on here with that the the the the dream the have cake can eat to it's like i wanna be part of the idea and like the start but then like the grind for ten years like i really want an operator to do that part and some people have come on here and told us how they do that well so people like i don't know how to i can't inc my idea and my energy into somebody else that's a really hard transfer to to do do you have like a talent threat like how do you in how do you get the ceo to then like run your thing do you have a strategy around that or is it it's part and this what i've been doing i've been doing more of an incubator model my last few startups where i've not been the ceo running it but actually you know create the team so really what i'd love doing is like create the concept pulled together the team and the capital but the part of that that has been really hard is actually finding those leaders and you know the reality of being an entrepreneur it's iterative right you try something it were it works or it doesn't work you you're constantly iterating your way to success in those early years which means you're running up against roadblocks and things that worked and with day work and what i found is there's a certain personality that can live in that uncertainty of a startup up and stay committed to it so when something doesn't work instead of panicking they quickly start taking the clues figuring out making adjustments keeping the team confident bringing along with them that that's the art of entrepreneurship that is really really tough to hire for because the ones who are good at it wanna create they probably have their own idea that they're working on and what i found is i would hire very accomplished people but their entire life had been fairly linear in their careers where like i you know i get good grades it unlocks getting in as good college i do really well at school it unlocks getting the right into like each thing unlocks the next step for them and that's always work because they're incredibly smart talented of people but that's not the reality in entrepreneurship and so what i saw pattern like i would hire these incredibly accomplished ceos and then as soon as things would start going wrong which they always do in a startup they would really struggle to the mental games of that that's the hardest part of this model you're amazing you know every once a while we have episodes that we're like we have to have a part two and sometimes a part three and a part four and hopefully that will be the case with you no let's do it i would love to and i feel the same i'm walking away a i'm monday morning here with more energy okay so i really appreciate this been such a fun conversation and if anybody loves our ideas out there and wants to pursue it please please reach out where the eric ryan dot com and then there's like a contact button is that right yeah you could go to jobs dot dot com gop o b s t o p dot com it's for this idea that i try to build these ever last go stopper and brands that continue to be able to refresh themselves and stay on trend and like you try to bake that into the into the center when you crave something new oh you're a ridiculous human being you're awesome like you have like silly crazy ideas and yet you've been able to make potentially hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars off it i mean that's the dream so thank you so much you're the best you guys are great thanks for a a lovely conversation i feel like i could rule to word i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a road travel never looking back this episode is brought you by hubspot media they have a cool new podcast that's for ai called the next wave it's by matt wolf and nathan lands they're basically talking about all the do tools that are coming out how the landscape is changing what's going on with ai tech so if you wanna be up to date on ai tech it's a cool podcast you could check out listen to the next wave wherever you get your podcast