Colin Stuckert 00:00
If you have a good product, and you acquire customers and keep them, you know, one happy customer at a time. You grow your business that way. Just like any business before the internet, you grow one happy customer at a time, and you let word of mouth and repeat purchases and whatever. But that's not like the get rich quick overnight, which is what everybody wants. You know, I've been doing this for 10 years, and we're still acquiring customers every single day.
Andrew Maff 01:13
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the E comm show as usual. I'm your host, Andrew Maff, and today I am joined by the amazing Colin Stuckert, who is the CEO over at Wild Foods. Colin, how you doing, buddy? You ready for a good show?
Colin Stuckert 01:24
I'm great. Thanks for having me,
Andrew Maff 01:26
Beautiful. Super excited to have you on the show. I've had several people on the show in a very similar product line. You've got a very interesting approach to it. So really excited to kind of dig into this here and learn a little bit more about Wild Foods. But I was like to start these are kind of stereotypical. Give you the room. Let you kind of tell us a little bit about your background. Tell us about how you start Wild Foods. We'll take it from there
Colin Stuckert 01:49
Totally, totally, yeah, um, scratch my own itch, really. You know, I was having to cross fit way back in 2009 or so. And then I got into kind of paleo diet, primal, bulletproof coffee fasting in the morning. Then got hybrid supplements. And I'm just like, you know, read these bottles off of stuff I buy online or on Amazon or whatever. And just be like, you know, where's this come from? How's it made? There's even, to this day, there's very little there. And I was like, you know, what? If I just, like, found really good stuff and then just bought it in bulk, and really just for myself first. So I wasn't trying to build a business out of it. That first pro, that first protein, we got, that first product, really was a non denature grass hood, way from organic farms in Australia. I had to buy these huge bags of it at a time. And it was just so good. And I was just like, I keep hearing about this FBA thing at the time, you know, like, smart pass to Flynn and all those early marketing podcasts coming out, you know. And I was like, I'll just like, throw some inventory and see what happens. And like, I did that, and they sold. And I was like, Okay, this is interesting. And then the next month, I send more inventory in, and it sold again. And I was like, Okay, this is really interesting. And like, literally, that first year, starting with the protein, and then probably launching another 10 skews around that time, of, like, coffee and tea and some other stuff I was using. We did a half a million that first year. And then, you know, for the next three years, doubled in revenue, and, you know, build a business, and then the story continues on. But that was 10 years ago. Yeah, I've been in the game ever since
Andrew Maff 03:10
what? So, you know, the nutrition space, anything in the CPG space, wildly complicated, extremely com, extremely competitive, especially from a digital perspective, because then you have the issue of, you know, people typically want to try something before they buy it, and then most of the time, CPG, you're not buying, like, a single use here, you've got to sell several of them so price points are higher. Like, there's a bunch of challenges around it. What was, what was your approach to kind of differentiate and get the product moving?
Colin Stuckert 03:39
Yeah, I mean, again, 10 years ago versus today, lots changed, but also kind of like, walk you back through the history of it, because some of the principles that we identified then are still applicable now, just maybe how you execute them might be different, right? Yeah. Well, at the time it was also like, Okay, you're building a business on Amazon. A lot of people are building businesses, you know, young kids making all this money. It's exciting. But then everyone starts talking about, like, well, that guy had his account bannned. That guy had his account bannned. What if your inventory goes or your listing goes down? It's like, you lose all this money. And when he started getting very real with very real money, you know, six figures and seven figures, I was like, that was my primary concern. And so my strategy became like, how do I get off Amazon and get into the Shopify game, where I own my customer, own my list? You know, the whole thing like that right now. It's a bit like, that's, people don't talk about that as much, because I think Amazon's matured over the years, and there's probably more avenues to, like, get your account back, if, if it was wrongly banned, or whatever. But like that, how that plays into also your question about, How do you get products in people's hands? You know, they're kind of it's a dual thing. So what I did is, and I don't necessarily recommend doing this, like I used to bag every product. So let's say I got a product here actually, right? This actually, right? This is just a bag of a product we actually haven't launched yet. I would put in a poly bag, right? So that I could put an insert inside the bag and then put a label on the outside. Now, when I'm doing 100-200 units a month of a SKU, that's very doable. Now at our scale, like it's just impossible, right? Or I'm paying a free PL, like, a lot of kiddie, fees to do that. Yeah. So I put in an insert, a booklet, a nice book with a lot of recipes, a lot of call to actions inside the booklet. And then I actually had this program called the wild minis program, where we would take individual, you know, like cocoa powder or a maca or whatever, and we put into these small, mini clear bags and then seal it, and that would be a sample inside the product with also call to action to come to the website that was able to take me from 100% Amazon business to Amazon business to, like, probably a 70% Amazon business with, like, 30% then moving to Shopify. And now, I mean, we're probably at like, a 60-40, mix. We don't do that program anymore, but we are looking to test some, like, dollar first subscription offers right now because, like, again, now we're running to the problem of, it's the same thing. It's so competitive. Everyone you know is running ads and doing all these things. How do you actually get people to make that first purchase? And we're going for more of that, like almost a venture capital playbook, where let's just lose a lot on the front end and try to get people into the network and then scale that way. So that's something we're exploring, but it's a constant issue with consumables, of like, how do I get product into people's hands? It's always something that I've told my team. And, you know, anything I can do to do that, events and seminars are good too. Like, actually going to interact with people. And having boosts, we're quite a bit, but it's not scalable. It's really time consuming, expensive and whatever, you know. So I guess everyone has to kind of figure out their strategy, their mix. Like, giveaways can work, but then people are there for free stuff. And, you know, it is a constant challenge. If you're a consumable brand like people are taking a big risk if they never tried it, you know, I'm saying,
Andrew Maff 06:29
Yeah, so are you still doing the inserts?
Colin Stuckert 06:32
We are doing booklets, not on the Amazon side, though, because my, you know, a lot of my team, they're very nervous, and they're just like, you know, Amazon, they, they can ban you and whatever. More like, I'm more like, well, let's just like, see if they, if we, if we get a flag first and then change it, you know. But we haven't been doing it right now. We're trying to figure out some solutions where, maybe, you know, the sticker on the top that you can peel off, you know, and, but there's added expense there, and getting fees. And so there's things you can do, but it just depends on, like, how much risk you want to take, really, you know?
Andrew Maff 07:02
I was going to say, like, that's, uh, that whole concept I've, I've preached that for a while, but it's one of those, like, you kind of tread lightly with it, where it's, like, you know, it's a little bit of a gray area. Like, technically, in TOS says you can't do it, but it also says, if it's, like, to your point, if it's inside a poly bag, it's part of the product, and it can't do anything about that. So like, that's always kind of an interesting way to skew it, obviously. Now, Amazon's got several different ways to, like, drive that traffic back to Amazon that they allow you to do. But even the, you know, the inserts, it works, if you're willing to just kind of know that is possible, they could do something at one point. I've never heard of anyone actually getting flagged for that, though, you?
Colin Stuckert 07:42
You know, I mean, it's good question. It's like, you see about the horror stories of completely banned account. Yeah, you know, you get warrant. You will get warnings for things like, you get, like, the product violation, where somebody complains, like, they say, Oh, the product, the seal was broken. It's like, Dude, come on. Like, seriously. Like, you'll take my whole listing down, because somebody might have gotten a product that was damaged during transit, and you just got to kind of work through that stuff. But the Amazon has become better, and they're getting more mature, and just like, not taking down your whole listing or account, you know, and getting warnings. So it's hard to say, but it's just really not one of those things you want to, like, find out for yourself. You know, it's good point. It's almost like retargeting is a better thing. It's almost like, like, let's say, use Amazon to find new customers, because they have so many customers, and you can find them whatever, but to get them off Amazon is you can retarget. There's some strategies there Amazon, DSP, and some of these other things are also getting more advanced, where, like, there's even letting you maybe market, like, off Amazon to your Amazon list. Like, there's, you know, there's like, integration with Shopify, stuff that I've been seeing and things that might be evolving, but we're moving to more of an omnichannel platform system anyways, and I think the platforms are waking up to that at the end day. If you have a good product and you acquire customers and keep them one happy customer at a time, you grow your business that way, just like any business before the internet, you grow one happy customer at a time, and you let word of mouth and repeat purchases and whatever. But that's not like the get rich quick overnight, which is what everybody wants. I've been doing this for 10 years, and we're this for 10 years, and we're still acquiring customers every single day, you know,?
Andrew Maff 09:04
Yeah, yeah, that, um, that thing you're referring to. So that's, I actually did an event with them a couple weeks ago, buy with prime. So if you have buy a prime now, that now lets you do driving traffic. DSP, back to the website for CBG brands. I think it's awesome, and I agree. I think that's a lot safer than doing the inserts. How big is the product line now?
Colin Stuckert 09:31
So this is kind of like something that I harp on now, even with somebody with a multi skew line of, I would say probably 30 to 30 to 40 SKUs. At one point we probably had 150 but we've been continually just whittling, whittling, whittling, and getting down to those core skews, and then only launching very strategically, even small tests, if possible. But I think the future you're going to see more and more so is going to be like single hero skew brands, you know, the mud waters, the Vital Proteins. I mean, even the. Like, on it was Alpha Brain, mostly, and all the other stuff they sold probably was like a loss. It was just like a brand play, you know. But, and it's because, like, you have limited capital, a little limited time, limited attention, even if you have a big team, like, what do they focus on? They focus on five products this week, or one, you know, I'm saying, like, it's hard enough to get one funnel to scale and really work, and have your whole creative system of testing 100 ads a week or whatever it's like now do that with, like, five skews, or 10 or 50, it's like, just literally impossible, you know? So I think, like, you're gonna always have the multi skew brands, the garden of lifes of the world. But like, I feel like it's, it's gonna, you're gonna haul out the middle, you're gonna be like a single SKU hero brand, like the mud waters of the world, or you're gonna be like the Garden of Life with, it's like, you have capital and you're going for more of a brand play. But I mean, that's the thing we've struggled with, of just having so many SKUs of what to focus on. You know, one way we're actually solving that is, like, having sub brands. So like, for example, our wild pets brand line, like, it's a wild foods product, but like, we're not really promoting it that way. It's going to be kind of its own funnel, maybe even its own website, its own content, its own email flows. Everything's going to be unique and separate. And if we do that, apply that same logic to, like, a wild woman or like wild kids. And because, you know, because it's like, it's hard to get somebody to come into a brand. And when you have 100 options, who are you, what? What are you known for? You know, I'm saying, like, yeah, it's really tough to scale a brand that way. You can grow a brand over time, but it's hard to scale, yeah, you know?
Andrew Maff 11:18
So, so you're almost referring to, like, building out a brand, like, almost per product or per like product category, almost like so to your point, like, like women line or the or the kids line, because, you know, to your point, especially in the nutritional space, I've seen this be a common problem where, like, it's really hard if you lean in on like you mentioned, your backgrounds CrossFit, right? So if you really lean in on CrossFit, maybe you really lean in on like the MMA side, something like that, you're completely alienating a huge group of an audience that would absolutely still benefit from the product line. But because of the branding, it doesn't work. So your logic is just brand the products differently, and that way your messaging can align with that customer.
Colin Stuckert 12:01
You want the brand and the product to be as closely aligned to one customer as possible, like, that's it, right? One product, one customer, and then your funnel, your marketing, your content, your ads, your creative, every single thing is as congruent to that as possible, you know? And I think we're gonna see that more and more, because it's, it's just really hard to compete in today with everything that's going on when, like, you're trying to think of good analysis, like, you can only put a little bit of tension in a bunch of things versus a lot of attention in one thing. What? Like, obviously, what's going to do better? It's going to be the thing you give the most attention to, you know? And if anybody, your audience follows Hermozi all he's been harping on, that's like, month is like, focus, you know, I'm saying every time I see one was post about focus, I'm like, damn it. He's right. He's like, How can I implement that more in my business? You know? So, yeah, I just think it's gonna get harder and harder to just like, launch products and just like, let them be there. You know, it's gonna be like, you have to launch a product and you have to give it your intense focus for like, 90 days until you can get something to click, and then, you know, yeah,
Andrew Maff 13:04
it's interesting, huh? Yeah. And so is your thought that also that that all lives under one website and, like, kind of like a parent brand, or are you actually thinking, like, no, no, these should be just all separate sites, like, just treat them completely differently.
Colin Stuckert 13:19
I think, separate, right? Because it's the power of focus, you know, now, like, maybe the, maybe the domains the same. Like, we have this wild man funnel we've been toying with, where you have, like, the wild man product page, and it's like, on the shop, and they can go there, and people can find it, but we're not going to drive traffic to that. We actually have, like, a really solid, long form landing page. It's like, there's no header there's like, you don't even really see the wild branch, just like wild man, it's kind of almost a different design. Even it's very masculine, it's dark and, you know, primal and jungly, right? And it looks a lot different from the website, right? I think what you'll see is you have both. I think, like the new funnel strategy is going to be more along, like, even the email, the SMS, your follow ups, you're retargeting everything, like even the social accounts connected. Like, maybe you run your Instagram ads to like a wild man account, instead of like the wild foods account, it has to be more targeted to one customer. They're going to see you in different places. And so the more you can get all those places cohesive, and you get the you know, the you know, the seven touch points they say you have to, have to like, sell somebody, or whatever, the more that's targeted to one customer, the stronger your conversions, right? I think that is the future. Now, whether it's under one brand of the same website or not, that's all just like, mostly tech considerations that you can figure out.
Andrew Maff 14:31
Yeah, so that would be kind of like one of those things. You get a lot of people that say stuff like, you know, it's one thing to talk to your customer. It's another thing to really know them. You could talk to whoever you want. So, so, like, what's, what is that kind of, what the thought process is there? Tell me a little bit about that.
Colin Stuckert 14:49
Yeah, yeah. It's, you know, everyone says, like, obsess over the customer. Like, who does it? Yeah. And listen, I'm guilty of this more than anybody. Like, you have an E commerce brand customer service tickets are, like, this thing you don't want to deal with. Yeah, but the reality is, if you actually embraced it, and you even, like, had a book, a call the CEO link, which, like, no CEOs do. I mean, honestly, I don't have a lead at this, but like, I have my team. I defer to my team. And like, you guys go do 10 calls with wild man customers. They did it. The data we got was invaluable, right? If, if you don't truly know your customer, like, really know them, have conversations with them, have conversations with them, interact with them like, and this is where events come in. A lot You learn so much when you're interacting with people at events where they're like, Yeah, I've been buying proximity for five years. I'm like, I'm like, holy crap. Talk to me right now. Like, everything I can learn about you, you know, say, Where do you live? Do you have kids? Do you not like, what are your hobbies? Like, how much money? You know, it's like, that's the stuff that you think a survey is gonna get for you, or, like, some metadata is gonna be, no, it doesn't, you know, I'm saying, right? It's like, it's just a proc, it's like fake data, right? When you get that real, true understanding of your customer, and this is also why a lot of these brands that like solve an itch, they can do that because they're the first customer. They know what they care about and what they want. If they build a brand around that, they at least know that they got to find like, a million versions of themselves, and there's probably, like a million people that are approximately that version, right? But if you really, truly expand beyond that, and you interview your customers, you have calls with them, you apply to tickets, you know, you do the whole examples thing where you, like, have long conversations with them, rather than just trying to mark them off. You know, I'm saying, like, stuff like that. I think that's another one of those ways that's going to coincide with this, like, core focus of just like one customer, building my product, my brand, everything around towards them, and just serving them completely at the expense of everyone else you know. And a good example of this is, I think primal queen is her brand. She's doing a million a month with a beef organ complex targeted at women, and it's like almost all D2C, and it's even like, sorry guys, not for you. Like, like, she's even leaning into it with that kind of stuff. Kind of stuff, you know, and I think we're gonna see more and more of that.
Andrew Maff 16:45
Yeah I mean, it, you know, it's, it's, it really is kind of digging in, not only very, like, to your point, very deep into knowing the customer and actually knowing who you're speaking to, but like, when you really become, like, extremely loyal to a customer base, and you are speaking directly to them. While it does theoretically alienate a larger market, it also allows you to connect with that market so much harder. So to your point about focus, it's like, you know, and it's, it's basically, if you go too broad, you're not really talking to anyone, you're just talking to everyone and no one's listening, whereas, if you're speaking directly to an individual person, they're going to feel more like they connect with the brand. They're going to become more of like an evangelist, more so than they do just a customer.
Colin Stuckert 17:30
And every strong brand on Earth is defined by who it's not for, yeah, you know, I'm saying Apple, like, yeah, luxury brands, the Ferraris, oh, there's limited. You can't get them, you know, I'm saying, like everything. It's literally defined by the fact that you're not for everyone, that's what defines a brand. You know?
Andrew Maff 17:48
One of the things I definitely wanted to ask you so everyone, for those of you who don't know, podcast magic, sometimes we ask people on the show to fill out a form and tell us about if there's something they want to talk about. Okay, you mentioned something in yours. And I was like, I'm not even gonna segue this. I'm just gonna bring this up. Okay, your note was you made a huge mistake early in your career that cost you almost ten million yeah. And so I was like, Oh, we're telling that story, sure. So go for it. How the hell did that happen
Colin Stuckert 18:20
So the summarized story of wild is, grew like crazy, ran out of cash to support growth, okay, yeah, which is very common, right? So go looking for like, investors, or maybe sell the whole thing, or whatever. Found private equity group did a deal. They got the extra 1% in the business. I lost control of the finances, paying for inventory, all this whatever, that whole group blew up, basically. And there was some like, larceny and some shit that happened, you know, whatever. And I'm just kind of like watching, as it happens, our sales dropped by about 90% Oh, right, the lowest they've been since I started the business, right? I was patient. To my credit. I didn't mouth off to some people I wanted to. I wanted to, I was like, No, I'm gonna play the I'm gonna be strategic here. Because, like, my thought was, if they showed the PnL to other investors, because, you know, they're trying to liquidate their portfolio, so maybe another buyer, a buyer could have came in. I was like, no buyers gonna look at this thing that they just been, like, taking all these shared services out of there, basically just they were, they were bleeding dry the business on the PnL, routing it to their other brands, I knew that it's going to be hard to sell it to an investor when it's like losing 50k a month, or whatever the number was at the time. Yeah. So what basically happened is they brought somebody in, clean the whole mess up, and they sold the business back to me for I mean, literally, I almost didn't even have to come out of pocket. I bought the whole business back. I had to obviously refund growth. I quadrupled the business in a year and a half because I knew what to do. I just did the basics, like I bought inventory, you know, I'm saying, quadrupled the business back, got it back to not where it was, but like, I would say, about 80% of where it used to be, on the path up. Then I finally sold the whole thing, you know, and then I got off for CEO position and some equity. And so now I'm running it again, and we actually had the best month. Month last month in the history of the company 10 years. But like it was when I say roller coaster, you have no idea, you know, but the way I lost the 10 mil was on our run up, one of our best selling products was on its path to become the first page of Amazon. Now this is in one of the biggest supplement categories on Earth, the product right if you're on the first page of Amazon, you're probably doing a million dollars a month minimum, maybe even more. If you're in, like, the top five, like, it's just a massive, massive thing, yeah, the reason what happened is, I got to put a new po in. It's a $50,000 deposit. I didn't have terms. You know? It's like you're learning you don't even have terms. And it's hard to get terms, in general, with with suppliers, you know. So they want a $50,000 in cash, just to start the order. So I was like, Oh, I don't have $50,000 in cash. So what happened is I stocked out. Just from the stock out, I probably lost a quarter million over the course of 90 days, maybe more, you know. But had I not stocked out, I believe it would have been the path to the front page of Amazon. It would have put the valuation of that business at minimum 10 million, probably more. So when I actually sold the business, I sold it for a fraction of that number, right? And then I bought it back, and I sold again, like it was a fraction, but it would have been minimum 10 million, maybe more, because if I could have kept it going. But the reason that was a mistake was I launched too many products, because every time I launched one of these SKUs, these fancy SKUs, I love, love launching SKUs. It's a minimum $10,000 investment. I give the supplier $10,000 of my money that I could have used to operate, and I could have funneled into my best sellers, but I went too wide. And that's a lot of what I now teach in harp on is like focus, focus, focus, build your cash reserves. Never run out of stock. Obviously, anybody that's growing on Amazon knows that like stocking out is the worst. Out is the worst thing, death wish. You know I've done. I've literally stocked out probably 50 times in this business career. You know, I'm saying where, like, if I would just kept, oh, man, painful, but it's like from a valuation perspective of what I could have sold for and from the cash flow I would have earned by just taking advantage of the growth, minimum 10 million loss
Andrew Maff 22:00
Yeah, that's crazy. You know, what's the weirdest thing that's happening to me right now is I have never heard of someone either selling the business completely, or even selling a majority of it, and then getting into a situation where they can actually buy it back for either the same or, you know, pennies on the dollar, in some case, literally, just last week. It hasn't aired yet. But obviously, by the time this episode airs, it would have aired. I interviewed the CEO of battle box, and he had that exact same thing where, and I was like that, I'd never heard that. I'd never known that happens. And here I am number two, that's crazy. That's just it seems like, it seems subtly serendipitous to a certain extent that you're able to, like, just get it back and kind of turn it around and refocus.
Colin Stuckert 22:49
Yeah, and it actually happens a lot in private equity, but you don't hear about the deals as much, yeah, you know, because the nature of private equity, whatever, like, venture slightly different. But a lot of times, these private equity guys have all the money and they got to spend it. And I think we're going to be seeing a lot of these, especially out of these, especially out of the 2020 run up. Of all the free, cheap money flowing around, they were just buying shit left and right, you know, I'm saying, and like, it's really hard. Like, business is very hard. Growing a business is very hard, and just not dying as a business is very hard. So when you just, like, buying a bunch of shit, like, I'm not surprised. This doesn't happen all the time, and the founder always knows the business better than anyone. Anyways, you know, so like, when I say pays for the dollar from what they paid me, it was like, not even probably, like, 2% of their purchase price that I got about, like, maybe 1% like, like, I like, literally, like, like, Oh my God. And then I got to, I negotiated strong some of that, what I owed them was going to be a note on the business that I could pay off from the business cash flow. So when I when, I mean, I actually only came out of pocket, like, a low five figures to buy back, and then I just used those growing sales that I knew how to get to pay them. I mean, like, inventory and everything. Like, it was actually amazing deal, but it was stressful, shit curse here. But, like, it was very stressful. I wouldn't recommend it, but it's like, you know, it's that type of shit that really turns you into battle tested. And then you like, you understand how deals work. You understand human psychology. Like, you know, like, the value my mind is probably worth 10 million over the course of my career, because this is I just learned so much, but I would rather just had the 10 mil to be honest.
Andrew Maff 24:18
Yeah. Me too. Colin, this is awesome. I really appreciate all your time. I know you're super busy. I would love to give the opportunity to hear let everyone know they can find out more about you, and, of course, more about Wild Foods
Colin Stuckert 24:30
Totally, totally, yeah, Wildfoods.co. We're also on Amazon. I've been doing that for 10 years. I'm doing Rize on the side. We're helping some brands grow and doing some coaching stuff there. Yeah, I'm gonna be in this E comm game forever. I kind of realized that when I bought a company back and then when I even sold again, I was like, maybe I'll do something else, but it's just like, why? Like, why do something else when this is my skill set and the systems and the team, and now, even with AI and all the cool stuff you can do, like, it's like, fun. It's like, every day there's, like, some new, cool thing I can, like, implement with the team. You know?
Andrew Maff 25:00
Yeah, awesome. Colin, thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks for having me silly everyone who tuned in, thank you as well. Please make sure you do the usual thing, rate, review, subscribe all that fun stuff on whichever podcast platform you prefer, or head over to the ecommshow.com to check out all of our previous episodes. But as usual, thank you all for joining us, and we'll see you all next time.
Narrator 25:20
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