Rock the Virtual Room: Building a Brand Through Engaging - Storytelling Mid-Day Squares | EP. #95

We have all heard about the power of storytelling to engage and captivate businesses’ target audiences. But how can you take your brand story to the next level?

On this 95th episode, Andrew interviews Jake Karls, co-founder of Mid-Day Squares, the next biggest chocolate-snacking brand. Recognized as an EY Entrepreneur of the Year Finalist and named in the Forbes 30 Under 30 class of 2023, Jake, alongside his Mid-Day Squares team, shares how their content marketing strategy has rallied an engaged, passionate community of snackers around their brand.

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Have an e-commerce marketing question you'd like Andrew to cover in an upcoming episode? Email: hello@theecommshow.com

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Rock the Virtual Room: Building a Brand Through Engaging - Storytelling Mid-Day Squares

SPEAKER

Andrew Maff and Jake Karls

CONNECT WITH OUR HOST: AndrewMaff.com  |  Twitter: @AndrewMaff | LinkedIn: @AndrewMaff 

Jake Karls

Jake Karls is the co-founder and Chief Rainmaker at Mid-Day Squares. Building the next biggest chocolate snacking brand. As the Rainmaker, Jake focuses on achieving growth through the business of building genuine relationships – with investors, buyers, journalists, and building out the internal team. In Jake’s better-known role as Mid-Day Squares’s resident Social-Personality, he passionately inspires others to “get comfortable with the uncomfortable” and be unapologetically themselves. Though he was recognized as an EY Entrepreneur of the Year Finalist and named in the Forbes 30 Under 30 class of 2023, his self-proclaimed “greatest accomplishment” was learning how to be confident in himself.

Transcript: 

00:02

I like this brand a lot because I like what they are who they are what they do rather than I just like their product.

00:08

Hey Everyone, this is Nezaar Akeel of Max Pro, Hi I'm Linda and I'm Paul, and we're Love and Pebbles. Hi this is Lopa Van Der Merch from RASA and you're listening to and you're listening and you are

00:20

listening to The E-Comm Show Welcome to The E-Comm Show, presented by BlueTuskr, the number one place to hear the inside scoop from other e-commerce experts, where they share their secrets on how they scaled their business and are now living the dream. Now, here's your host, Andrew Maff. Hello,

00:49

everyone and welcome to another episode of The E-Comm Show. I'm your host Andrew Maff. And today I'm joined by the amazing Jake, Karls co-founder of Mid Day Squares and chief Rainmaker. And this is going to be awesome, Jake, Are you ready to do this? Man?

01:04

You look so good on that screen right now. 10 Jack, the whole nine yards. I'm fired up. Excited to be here. And I'm kind of I'm curious to know how deep we're gonna get in this conversation. And, you know, I think it's my it's my Mary weekend. I'm getting married on Sunday. So I'm kind of like nervous and antsy. It's kind of weird. I never I'm never nervous or antsy. So you got me in real time on that. So it's exciting.

01:29

So normally we discuss E-commerce stuff, but I'm eight years into my marriage. So if we want to dig if we want to turn this into, like, here's my advice. I'll give you some quick and painless advice. You're always wrong. Just accept the fact that you're always wrong. Move on with your day, and find ways to cope elsewhere, it'll be fine. Then you'll say I love it. I'm

01:48

not that I'm always wrong. I'm wrong and everything fuck in my life. It's not something new.

01:55

Alright, buddy, let's, uh, let's do a little bit of the stereotypical stuff in the beginning here. Why don't you give us a little bit of insight into yourself, your background, and how you got started with  Mid Day Squares, and we'll take it from there. Does that work for you?

02:06

Yeah, so. So I was, I was always the class clown. Growing up, I was always the one that wanted attention. And when I was a young kid, I was actually being really authentic to myself, I you know, I was always out there being you know, pranking people having so much fun, being authentic, and I did horrible in school because of that. And academically, I was so poor that I almost didn't graduate from high school, and my grades were so low. And my parents were called in the principal's office, I'll never forget and, and they said, You're not going to graduate and everyone else would at that moment, I kind of said, Holy shit, I gotta, I gotta go to I got to follow society's playbook here and kind of get with the picture and, and do well academically, because that's what you have to do in life could do well, through school, get a job, have a family. And that's all. And so I changed my whole personality. I focused on school, I try to do well academically, I went to college, and I tried to study to be an actuary. And something was always weird inside me, something always felt uncomfortable. And I always felt not happy, to be honest with you. And my third year in university, I was trying to be an actress failing miserably was so hard. And I was trying to prove to everyone that I could be an actuary. I was watching Shark Tank, and I watched this guy on the screen, pitch his dream, and he was talking about, you know, his business with such passion, energy, momentum. But yet he had two mortgages on his house, he had three kids, he had so much responsibility, and I'm sitting on my parents' couch at the time crying and miserable, that I can't get a job or that I'm failing in school, no responsibilities. And that was the moment I said, entrepreneurship is my game. And I need to join that whatever that guy has, I need, I need that energy because I'm obviously doing something wrong. And it's not for everybody. But at that moment, I decided that I'm going to launch a business and I launched a fitness business first and very well financially with it. And I did that for three years. And I lost passion for fitness after and I kind of set clothes that I didn't know where and I was like, I don't care how much money I'm making. I don't enjoy it. It became a chore every day to wake up and do it. And what is a chore you don't have fun with, right? And what's the point of doing things that are not having fun? And then the last thing I did is I launched a second business, and it was a party business. I was throwing parties across college campuses in Canada. And I was trying to sell them clothing like T-shirts with logos to make money because I'm such a bad operator, and this is what I learned over my decade of entrepreneurship I'm not good at management. I'm not good at operations. You know, the business failed, I went bankrupt, I lost $86,000 in that business, or 82,000. I was I remember the exact number. And then my sister my brother-in-law approached me they're like, Hey, you are one of the greatest storytellers and brand builders. That's what I was doing in the past a fitness business and another business I was very good at it. Like what if you came in and helped us build this chocolate bar company that we just have this amazing dark chocolate bar that's, you know, healthy, clean, functional? We need you to blow it up and I looked at them and I said this is an interesting challenge because you guys are good operators. If you guys do the operations, I don't have to focus on that I can actually play to my strength, which is building a brand hype energy cheerleader rainmaking like my title is and that was it. I decided to join Monday squares. We launched it in August 2018. And the idea was built the next Next Hershey's, let's call it is better for you space. And do it while making a brand really relevant to consumers. In the sense of, yes, I liked this brand a lot, because I liked what they are, who they are what they do, rather than I just like their product.

05:14

Yeah. So you already mentioned to you're kind of in the better-for-you space, because it's not your traditional chocolate bar, right? It's not like Hershey's, there are actually health benefits behind it. Right? So what is it behind there? Is it? Do you equate it to kind of a protein bar in a small way, shape, or form like what's the, what's your differentiator,

05:33

so we call it a functional chocolate bar. So imagine taking a dark, delicious chocolate bar and indulgence like, like a lint bar, let's call it, and have a baby with a cleaner protein bar. So we make the baby and we get rid of all the junk that's in front of the artificial flavors, the additives, the sugars, and we make it a chocolate bar that has protein and fiber, and it's your 2 pm snack every single day, that gets you to your lunchtime keeps you full, it gives you some energy and doesn't bloat you or make you feel like shit, which a lot of bars do because they use that artificial junk, right? And so yeah, it's your typical afternoon Chocolate Snack. And I think that that's where we've seen success is the simplicity of that. And why we call them Mid Day Squares because it's your midday snack, and it's square format so it just makes it as easy as possible for the customer. Well, we call them fans, our fans to have a good experience and easy experience and give them what it's made for.

06:25

Gotcha. So we're just a little over five minutes into this interview. And I can already tell like, you're not the average person that I interview, when we have a show like this, right? Like, this isn't usually it's the conversation is like, Okay, here's what we're doing for advertising. Here's what our operations are like, you know, this is kind of how we manage stuff, blah, blah. But you truly have this genuine cheerleader passion for it. The one thing though, that is interesting, I know that I've I have spoken to a good amount of, you know, entrepreneurs, especially in the E-commerce side that are like just big fans of their brand. They think it's the best thing that ever happened, but it never really takes off. And yet here you are in the CPG space in the chocolate space, let alone which is a bitch in itself. Yeah, you're clear and eight figures a year after a business that's only been around for what do we have five years now? You said 2018? How did you get it to scale to where it is in this space? Three things you know what that's I'm gonna leave that question at that.

07:24

Everything's great. It's a great question. And you're right, a lot of people toot their horns and all that stuff. And that's fine. You know, you as an entrepreneur, you need to be a cheerleader to a certain extent, because you need to really believe and close your Bubble to be so confident that you have this vision that can be built, you know, so big, but a lot of times people don't know when to put the bat down to write. That's the problem. But so for us MIDI scores, there are three things that are our success can you know, I could garner, you know, I could say that is responsible for somewhat of our success. Number one product market fit. When we launched this product, we knew what the market wanted and the reason why we knew is we had data that showed that dark chocolate was growing. So real chocolate is growing very fast year over year within this massively saturated market of chocolate. And so that means you don't need education on it. And the second thing was is vegan plant-based proteins were also on a tear. And my sister was making this as a hobby snack before so just a baby of these two massive growth categories. So we knew, once people tried it, it would naturally fit into their lifestyle. That's number one. Number two is we chose to do our own manufacturing controlling the supply chain. And the actual manufacturing process allowed us to do the innovation we want to do the way we want to do it and the pricing structure we want. So that has allowed us to play the game in food and beverage, most companies typically do a co manufacture with third parties, they don't want to deal with them only factoring. The last thing that I think is the most relevant thing to today, especially on E-commerce is storytelling. When we start this company, our whole idea was we are a media company as well. And what that meant was, we took our cameras on day one and started filming and documenting everything, showing our consumers, the good, the bad, the ugly of how we build this business literally showing you milestones, successes, failures, how we fire people, how we hire people, how we raise money, legal battles, you know, when a machine breaks down, here's what happens. So you saw it in real-time, what was going on and what was happening to build this company to hopefully over $100 million. And what that did was it created this idea that you were on the journey with us. So when you went to the grocery store, you truly felt like you were buying the product from a family member or a friend, or a neighbor. That's the feeling you had when you bought Mid Day Squares because there are 40,000 products in a store. Think about that. You have to separate yourself if you don't have the budget or money to open up the space and get more real estate in the store. You need to win by creating a fandom before coming to the store. So our whole thesis was make friends and then do business. And what that meant was to build the fandom by telling great stories that emotionally connect and relate. Instead of throwing down people's throats. Hey, we're a very good chocolate bar that's vegan, gluten-free, soy-free, non GMO, hunters organic, all that jazz that no one really cares about until they're buying the Short product in the store to look at the label. But you could do that once they're there. So to get them to want your stuff, make them feel something very deeply. And that's what we did very well. And I like to say that, you know, today we built our company very differently in terms of our marketing, it's just a media company, its editors, videographers, TV producers, rather than traditional marketers.

10:19

So what was your approach to getting that started, right? Because that's, that is something that is consistently preached from some of the top entrepreneurs of the world, you know, you have like, especially like the Gary V's of the world that is like, just, you know, content, content, content, that kind of stuff, obviously makes a lot of sense. But the bandwidth and then the capital it takes to have that kind of staff in place to be able to put that content out. That's the really challenging part. So how do you actually how did you justify, hey, we need all these people to help us create a video, when, as a marketer, you know, you can't really tie a direct ROI to that. So yeah, there's

10:53

no direct ROI. The only ROI that we're seeing is that our sales are going up at retail at a level that, you know, we're not doing anything else to push it. So it has to be organic content that we're garnering. We're gathering 40 million views organically a year, that's through our internal team, that's just the content they're creating, right? So think if we close 10% of that, it's 4 million customers almost, it's a lot. So the reason why we knew this was gonna be successful is two things. When, when I came in as the third founder, my partners were graded off, they had the product ready, but they just didn't know how to launch it. And I showed them the TV ratings from Shark Tank, and I showed him that you bring some keeping up the Kardashians, and I showed them Elon Musk's social media following growing. And what I said was, what if we were to make a baby of these three things? And what I meant by the baby was keeping up with the Kardashians was popular because people liked family drama. So if you can make the family drama, then we were a family business, and we could do that potentially. We don't have the posh life that they have. But we have the drama. The second thing was Shark Tank is all about entrepreneurs. So what if we just showed people more about the entrepreneur, the behind-the-scenes of what goes on actually, not just here's how we raise money, the surface level stuff, we take it 10 steps further. And the third thing was is people love or hate Elon Musk because he's unapologetically himself. So you, you being unapologetically yourself, have a big chance of building a true fan base that respects and loves that. So I said to my partners, we're all three different characters, why don't we just start to be unapologetically ourselves every day? And each one of us starts to build bases that eventually come back to the mid-day scores family. So we knew when we did this, that there was actually not just a guessing check model like, okay, something's going to work here. It's a reality show and entrepreneurship, we're going to show everything, we're gonna take our cameras out, and it's unfiltered. So we start posting this content, it was just us filming. And then we realized it was so hard to film like arguments and stuff like that, because he takes you off your game, that we ended up hiring a videographer, a showrunner, as our first hire ever, and it was like a month in to then take that content and edit it and get it out there. And we start to see the ROI happen when people start buying more product, and then retailers start coming to us. And then investors started coming to us. So then we invest in an entire team that's like, basically like a newsroom. And I think that that's the way to look at it as if you're going to be in CPG or consumer products, you better start acting like a TV producer, think like a TV producer, because they understand how to emotionally connect with people to get people to talk about what they're talking about, and to get people emotionally involved with your brand. So that's how we think about things. That's how we process it all.

13:14

How do you budget for a thing like that? Like, because by that logic, right, your logic being, the more eyes we can get, the more fans we can build. That's what's bringing in sales if that is the logic, and you're not tying a direct ROI to what's stopping you from renting a massive warehouse and just doing ridiculous content all the time. And being like the Rob Dyrdek of, you know, chocolate, like what? What would? How do you budget for creating that kind of content without it getting out of hand? Yeah, so

13:43

I think that the content we create, the strategy we take, what's most important is that the content means something to us. So that when we watch it, my partner's nine, our media team, it actually makes an emotional connection that if it does not add value, whether through emotion or through education and entertainment, then the content is not worth going up. And the reason is if I don't want to watch my own company's content, what's the point of it? You know, if it doesn't interest me, then why is going to somebody else? So the content we take, that's the commentary that goes up, the content we take is everything. Everything gets put on the 35 terabytes of content that is out there. Sorry, that's on our Google Drive 35 terabytes. So we have every moment that has happened in this business. Now, organizing is a whole different story. But when we want to create a docu-series, potentially one day when we've reached a certain status, maybe a billion-dollar unicorn status, and we want to show you exactly how that happened. We can show you in real-time without reenactment what happened. And that's something that we haven't seen yet in the world, because no one actually has the day-to-day content, because they don't take it they usually reenact here's the story of what happened. Or they go back and memory time and have someone interviewed and talk about it. But they don't have the real B roll or they have select B roll of certain moments. They don't have every moment. So for us, that's what we're trying to accomplish is create that base that we have everything So one day could tell a docu-series story because that will just even be an even bigger marketing gig for us as well.

15:07

Very interesting. So you mentioned obviously, you know, potentially one day, that goal being you become a unicorn, you hit that billion dollar, you know, revenue side, what are the steps to get there? Do you think chocolate is going to be the only thing to get you there and just kind of expand on the line like what's next for Mid Day Squares?

15:23

So I definitely think chocolate will take us there. So chocolates $140 billion annually, globally, every single year of snacking, it's one of the largest snacking sets. So I think for us how we get there is we have four products right now we'll go up to six, that will get us to about 100 100 50 million in revenue. And then what we'll do is we'll create potentially, you know, we'll go to more countries. So we're actually now merged in Canada, the United States, but we'll eventually maybe go to Mexico, the UK, Europe, you know, Asia, there's so much market for chocolate, that we can build this to, hopefully, half a million dollars, half a billion dollars in revenue. And once you're at that rate, you're a unicorn company. Because in the CPG world, if you have a brand revenue and distribution, and a good margin, your valuations are, are really high. And that's our model, but we might acquire businesses or we might sell the company, you know, right now, we don't want to sell the company at all. But you never know if the offer comes in. It makes sense. And we're tired, then yeah, we'll sell it. But otherwise, maybe we take this company public IPO, we've raised more capital to keep growing to acquire businesses to dominate that fresh snacking set. And because we're refrigerated items that were fresh, that's a big thing for us. If we could be that that dominant player there, then we will have won, you know, in terms of what we believe winning is.

16:30

So let's pull it back a second here. So obviously we talked a lot about the content side and all that stuff that it's creating. What else are you doing to help grow the site? Or is there a focus on the influencer? Side? Is it social media marketing, retention, marketing, or any kind of paid advertising? What else are you doing outside of just content creation?

16:49

So we're doing a lot of physical stuff, we treat this like a political campaign. And that's another strategy similar like think like a TV producer, but treat it like a political political campaign as if you're running for president's presidency. And here's why you need to gain voters, you need to build voters because voters use their heart to vote, same thing goes with buying a product. So what we do is we actually physically go give conferences, we go as if we're an artist, or president and rally people. And it gives this physical touch to it where we build fans on the ground level too. So I'll go do you know, typically a speaking gig once a week with a crowd physically and I'll give rockstar points, I'll dance I'll put on music, I'll make it an experience. Because it's not so much what I say it's how I make them feel and how I make them feel makes them like the brand. And another thing we're doing other than the physical stuff. So my partners and I eventually want to go on tour, all three of us doing it consistently, every week, all together, just out there. And every college, every office, every conference, you know, you know, schools, whatever it is. The second thing that we're doing that's helping is influencer work as well. So we're working with some amazing influencers that are authentic that authentically love Mid Day Squares, and they're following, or they're the people that you know, are fans of theirs would like a product like ours. So we're finding those people and then doing that as well.

18:02

Gotcha. How large is the team right now?

18:06

Because we manufacture we're about 62.

18:09

Makes sense? Okay. So you're manufacturing, you're also I assume shipping out of your own warehouse. And you mentioned your refrigerated right? So how are you dealing with that?

18:19

So we're shipping, express shipping. So once it leaves it's like one to two day Max in the shipment in the transition and the cherry transport. And it's insulated with reusable insulation and a reusable ice pack.

18:32

Gotcha.

18:32

Is it hard for us to see? So that's why we were 30% DTC business and 70% Actual retail.

18:39

That was my next question. Thank you for that. Okay, gotcha. So the D to C side. Is there? Is it just a? Is it the option of a bulk that you're purchasing from? Is it a subscription option? Like what have you seen that has worked the best at least so far for you guys?

18:56

Honestly, we have acid, I'm not gonna lie to you, we haven't had the time to put it because we have to build our manufacturing and sales and distribution out on this on the retail level. Our data, CSV can it's just a pause on any efforts and energy which eventually will go back into my business partner, Nick came from that world prior so he once he's available and he's not doing ops on the manufacturing side, he's gonna go into that aspect and start, you know, building that I think we could really even build up you know, we do about, you know, 500 $600,000 on EECOM every month, I think we can even bring that up to maybe a million bucks easily. Just with more effort, time energy strategy with none of that's there. There's nothing it's literally the most basic I think we had seen websites for the last half years, didn't really change anything.

19:40

It's interesting because if you're doing so much content from a digital perspective, I would expect the DTC side to be a bit of a stronger approach but I also know that not only is CPG complicated from a DTC side regardless, but so is anything that's refrigerated so I guess that does kind of make a lot of sense. Are you selling anywhere else besides just the website? And obviously besides retail like any market places

20:01

like Lufa Farms that there's an ICA EECOM site that we have that are partners of ours, their roots there. We call them retailers, though. But other than that, no, and like I'm telling you like, as soon as we put the time and effort into it, I think we'll blow it up. But for us all our digital marketing or performance marketing, we're actually focused on pushing them at retail. So they go in, and they support our retailers and tell their consumers and their fans to go shop at the retailer rather than online. Because online, we have to ship two boxes at a time. So you gotta buy two packs of 12. In retail, you could buy one bar at a time. So there's a lot more potential for you to get you to go to your like local Target or your local Walmart or Whole Foods and get the product there, you know, so that's the game that we're playing.

20:42

Gotcha. Jake, really appreciate your time here. I know you're super slim, so I don't want to take up any more of it. But I'd love to give you an opportunity to let everyone know where they can find out more about you and obviously more about Mid-Day Squares.

20:53

Andrew, appreciate you giving us a voice, and thank you for this beautiful interview. Find Mid Day Squares on our web at www.middaysquares.com You can check our store locator page to find a store next year or you can buy on our website. We're always in the refrigerator in the store and to find us follow us on social media Mid Day Squares on Tik Tok and Instagrams we're really a lot of the action is and then add me on LinkedIn. Jake Karls J A K E K A R L S is always happy to chat and connect.

21:18

Love it. Jake. Thank you so much. Obviously, everyone tuned in. Thank you for tuning in. Please make sure you do the usual rate review, subscribe, all that fun stuff or head over to theecommshow.com to check out all of our previous episodes and make sure to tune in on August 30 for our live episode. And as usual, thank you all for joining us and we will see you all next time.

21:38

Thank you for tuning in to The E-Comm Show head over to ecommshow.com to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or on the BlueTuskr YouTube channel. The E-Comm Show is brought to you by BlueTuskr, a full-service digital marketing company specifically for e-commerce sellers looking to accelerate their growth. Go to bluetuskr.com Now for more information. Make sure to tune in next week for another amazing episode of The E-Comm Show.