How to Build a Brand of the Future

0:00so authentic is the most important for life in general because you don't have to show up ever thinking about being a different person like being authentic allows you to to free headspace to not have to worry about anything but how that relates to making more money is really simple is that in your authentic state you have an intuition that nobody else has like period and when you are in that creative intuitive state that is so 100 you it's like i can almost guarantee that you will find success now here's the kicker very few people reach that level of intuitive self truth [Music]

0:51greg's hair right now is someone you have to watch this episode on youtube simply to just observe and admire greg's hair for the entirety of this thing it's it's basically like a gorgeous prancing gazelle flying through the safari um just so graceful that's all i have to say i mean that was basically the description i was going with actually it's very like boy meets world 90s showbox yeah it's joey lawrence joey lawrence vibes yeah it's got good lawrence vibe good lawrence brothers vibes i dig that what's going on today guys whatever what's on everyone's mind before we dive in here well i'm just excited to to bring nick on the show i've known

1:33nick for for many years he's uh he always brings an energy and he's uh for those who don't know he's the founder of midday squares which is probably one of the more interesting d2c companies uh in the space right now and they're and they're they're loud that's the best way to describe them their marketing is loud so i'm just excited to bring nick on and just sort of talk about um how to be loud in the d2c space and i didn't know nick until you brought up um until you brought up having him on the show and i'm embarrassed now because then once i like went down the rabbit

2:08hole and all the stuff you've been doing nick i'm like blown away and super excited to dive into it but i have to say when nick sent his head shot for this which will be on the cover art when we dropped the episode hands down like 5x as good as any other headshot that we have seen someone said you know you get the like professional headshots the kind of like blue steel magnum vibe that people try to throw at you or the little like you know that kind of cheeky smile etc nick brought a totally different level of heat with his head shot so i am

2:38personally excited to uh to see what kind of heat he brings to this episode here i'm fired up you know you got to bring the heat you get one shot in life to make magic happen no matter what you're doing so if you don't bring the heat that's on you if you're anything like me your portfolio is a mix of the usual suspects stocks bonds and mutual funds maybe you've even dabbled in some alternative assets like crypto but those investments can be incredibly unpredictable you know what typically isn't unpredictable apartment buildings rental homes industrial facilities places we go every day to work eat and live that's all private real estate and

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3:59over to fundrise.com room again that's f u n d r i s e dot com slash room to get started today today's episode is brought to you by element a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything you need and nothing you don't that means lots of salt with no sugar it contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio a thousand milligrams sodium 200 milligrams potassium and 60 milligrams of magnesium but none of the junk no sugar no coloring no artificial ingredients no gluten no fillers no bs i absolutely love it and how it's fit into my lifestyle whether you're keto low carb paleo or just want to feel better and more active element is the drink for

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5:25share element with a salty friend get yours at drinkelement.com happens this deal is only available through my link you must go to drink dot com slash happens to take advantage of this special offer try element you won't regret it oh well i think it's a good jumping off point i like that it's a it's our first framework for the day greg is gotta bring the heat it's the guy to bring the heat framework no matter what you're doing you gotta go hard at it i i actually look i mean broadly speaking i completely agree with that too right like you uh you know you have a finite amount

6:04of energy and so pick and choose the things that you really care about that you want to be working on and when you're going to work on them work really freaking hard at those things and go dive in on them with a lot of that energy so i love it man it's a good jumping off point i think honestly man i've been great like greg alluded to like we've been we've known each other i like to think of it if if it was in a music scene right like let's say we were talking about a city's music scene but we we're talking about entrepreneurship but think about it through that framework

6:35right where a lot of musicians in a scene will get together and be amongst each other and see each other as they're trying to do their thing uh greg and i since like 16 years old have been hustling entrepreneurship i'm 33 so just i agree i don't even know how old you i think you're 33 too probably yeah same age so uh we've come up together in the same city we were under uh one of the same grand masters rory olson i always love shouting him out come from montreal and just wait just pause on that under the same grand master rory olsen is that the name yep what

7:14does that mean what is a grand master i i mean i'll give you my uh take on it i think you know greg could take you another uh can give you another take on it uh rory's just a really predominant entrepreneur out of montreal um has done over three [Music] nine figure exits over three uh took a cut and and was the founder of pay safe which i think is today still the largest third largest e-wallet in the world if i'm not mistaken um i mean this guy negotiated we were just it's funny greg he he says what's up we're out for dinner two weeks ago i know you guys

7:53speak a bunch too but he was talking about he negotiated with um why am i blanking out on this gentleman's name he is uh musk's partner at um paypal peter thiel peter tl yeah he had a pretty heavy negotiation or a restaurant we were out in montreal with peter thiel in the basement so i mean long story short rory is a g um after my dad died when i was uh my dad died when i was 10 he kind of took me under his wing from like 11 to

8:2119. and just really gave me the ins and outs of the game i learned all my m a finance deal making stuff through him and so i call him a grand master because that that's what he was for my life and i know uh greg had a really intimate time with him too so it's just we we both came from the same ground master that's what i like to call it yeah i think uh so some you know similar experience that i had as a teenager i met him and he also took me under his wing and sort of showed me the ropes um so but you know it was

8:57it was also a different time back then like back then like there wasn't podcasts like this that the ropes were being shown you know so having someone like that i mean is is still today such an advantage but was back then like ten times or a hundred times even more uh because you know startups back then was completely demystified so having like someone like that who's the top of his game just sort of show you the abcs was was super valuable yeah one of the it's kind of one of the benefits i was going to say too like you guys are both from montreal or montreal as you guys as you

9:31guys say i need to get i need to get the accent down um being from like a non-you know it's not san francisco right like it wasn't the tech hub of the world and yet there was this thriving entrepreneurial community right like we've had harley on the show amazing entrepreneur from the area there's tons of you guys it's like you know the little montreal mafia and it's like one of the benefits of being from one of these sort of off the beaten path entrepreneurial communities is it becomes tight-knit as a result of it being off the beaten path and so these people that otherwise might be

10:03inaccessible to you in a large you know thriving tech hub become these mentors and want to see that community you know growing and thriving and i'm sure you guys are now doing that for young up-and-comers from the area the same way i know harley is ah i'm die hard munch i mean i speak with greg about this all the time die hard montreal i mean one of the main reasons why we chose to build midday squares here we were looking at toronto and la is just i always i have this you know vision of bringing the energy that nike brought to oregon to montreal um and that's

10:34something that's that's one of the main reasons why we chose it to even do it here but going back to what you're saying i think a lot of people don't understand how much wealth is in montreal i mean we have um we have this ridiculous amount of concentrated wealth from very very long histories of very powerful families in in a very small city like i'm telling you it's really small you can drive the entire perimeter of the island in one hour um and so like a lot of people don't know this but uh the demarae family which is from montreal owns one-third of adidas right that means they own one-third of the

11:08easiest deal they own you know they own some serious stuff and that's a montreal family um so yeah montreal is like low-key like really powerful and um and i think to your point you're better off sometimes being a huge fish in a small pond and that's that's kind of like what i've always loved doing i know greg went out there to san francisco and really chopped his teeth out there and did a hell of a job um but i never made that jump i think there's a benefit of both right like the big fish small pond um and then you know small fish in a big pond that

11:40people always present it as like an either or and you kind of got a pick but like greg's an example i think of someone who's done it both ways and you kind of benefit from it in different ways like i think um you know for me personally my own experience like i was kind of a big fish in a small pond growing up um yeah playing baseball in a small town i thought i was like legit it probably led to me getting some really cool development opportunities as a result of um being a bigger fish in a smaller pond and then i went out to school and all of a sudden i was like a

12:07tiny fish in a massive pond and i was horse [ __ ] at the things i thought i was really good at on a grander scale and you get the like humility um you know and the the grind that you have to develop in order to actually come up the curve when you're in that environment so i think actually i mean having a combination of both it's like the um greg i've talked to you about this uh i think it's jim collins has this idea of the genius of and and it's like the counterpoint to his tyranny of the ore which is these false dichotomies that we

12:34create where you're like you have to pick one or the other and the reality is you can do both and so it's like the genius of and um in these situations which i've always loved i feel the same way about so much stuff i just i think people over analyze a lot of things like all the way down to should you fundraise should you not fundraise it just doesn't [ __ ] matter all that matters is that you have a goal in mind and you have to get there and to get there is going to have you know whether you need to raise money or not is going to require some

13:05type of capital requirement to get to where you need to do and if you don't have enough money well then you need to fundraise and if you don't then you know continue doing what you got to do like it doesn't need to be so complicated all the time i think that you know 33 year old nick versus 20 year old nick it just oversimplifies everything it's the occam's razor man you gotta find like the simplest answer is often the best one simple is beautiful i completely agree with you it's actually a great place to start too because i do want to get into this amazing business you've built and

13:34some of the principles and like get a little bit tactical on some of the learnings that we can share with people we've never really gone greg into d to c and like true consumer on the show and so i'm really excited to kind of get and we are not i wanted to preface something we are not a d2c company and so i think i think i could give you a great um a great take on what it means to be a d2c company today because we operate in the d2c space but we do not operate as a d2c company can you clarify what you mean by that

14:05yeah so i think i think there was this movement in 2000 to 2020 that was like you had to build a business around direct to consumer and i think in that time a lot of people especially depending on what channel you're in but when it comes to consumer package goods i think people miscalculated the value proposition of the supply chain partners i.e distributors and retailers and so people went out and and took those margins because it's it's like a really nice story right hey you make a product a distributor takes anywhere from 18 to 25 percent then you give it to a retailer and they take another 30 to 40 percent right

14:50that's a nice story to say we're going to take that away and we're going to pass the savings on to the consumer what i think people forgot was how trained humans are in that buying cycle and how much more money it actually costed to scale than to actually just play within the distribution channels that exist um yeah i mean that's like the um i think toby another uh another canadian uh toby from from shopify he's canadian right where is he uh is he a german born in germany and moved to canada okay um he was commenting on this earlier especially too like when you think about

15:30the early days of that movement and the idea people had which is actually a fair insight as you point out um that was during a time when you could literally like um you know put in any keyword and have pretty little competition if you were like buying ads on facebook or social or google adwords whatever it was and he was joking that like now you can rub your face into your keyboard and probably run into like 100 people bidding against you on whatever that is like jumble of letters and so that i mean the rules of the game have just fundamentally changed as a result of

16:00that yeah which is always like i think i feel like i went my whole life to come back to square one i remember when i was 16 years old i was just like brand brand brand brand brand and then i went away from that and now i've come back to that like the worst place i think you could be to build a massive business is in commodities business and so um you know brand is everything and then you look at retail partnerships and how meaningful i'm telling you guys i've been in software retail wholesale revenue is as good as software it is like clockwork every 28 days

16:40if you have a product that repurchases meaning that that's the good sign right if people are coming back into their grocery habits or any of those like it's like clockwork i've never seen that so um that's what i mean by i really do see is just a component of of what we are but we are absolutely not a d2c business so we are manufacturing business that that runs a brand so in the like cpg space like who do you like what other brands are you seeing that are doing a really good job and what are you know how are you incorporating some of their stuff into midday squares if any because

17:20you know sometimes i look at what you all are doing and i'm kind of like you're just doing your own thing it feels like you're doing like a unique thing yeah but it's not even that unique greg it's fully stolen from the music industry that's what i love i love talking about this all the time is like it is um okay so let me let me really bring it down what was the initial strategy midday squares okay if you really so yes we're a manufacturer uh yes we're a cbg product but to really understand what we're doing from a marketing perspective is we're a media company and our patreon is our chocolate

17:52that is like the best way to describe what is happening and so um my partner jake really brought this idea to us is what he distilled the last 10 years of brand and like hardcore brand like stuff that really is moving the needle and i'll give you i'll give you some examples of like like i think uh figgs is doing a great job of just like being a d2c company you know i i think everybody can find their own playbook and just to clarify figs for those who don't know at uh uniforms basically for health care workers what yeah they they made they were in public too i mean they

18:32got huge lululemon vibe like brilliant brilliant play right boring uh unattended to industry of brand it was all commodity style players but there were some big players and they just brought some some style to it and really exploded i think for us was like if you really look at what was happening in fashion in the music industry and like the the convergence of those two it feels like every brand today that's successful has to be celebrity driven i don't know if you guys feel the same way but it's almost like hey if you're a celebrity you got to have a cpg product um and that's that's true to a certain extent

19:12but i think that the reverse is true too you can actually use the product if grade to celebritize yourself and then bring out an audience that's really committed to seeing your growth you can you can do it in reverse and so i think the kardashians shark tank and like elon musk's style of communication really uh resonated with jake and that's what he came like me and my wife are super introverted she's the third partner um and for everybody that's listening we make we make functional chocolate bars because we even touch on that but we manufacture them as well too um you own a factory did you like create

19:48a creative oh wow so you really own it it's fully vertically integrated got it yeah you can visit anytime you're in montreal like it's crazy that experience i'd love to even speak a little bit on on why i think manufacturing's so critical for the for the next steps of having success in brand um and there was a reason why we had to pursue it but that's a story of itself so the last piece to to the playbook was hey why is it that you know skims was able to come and really come after sarah blakely's spanx in a very very fast period of time and i think that's really because it's

20:26driven from a narrative people like to buy into stories and then the stories lead to the product but if you have that brand narrative sorry if you have a personal narrative you can convey it into a product line and so uh jake's idea was how do we create a product line that is about being in your face and bold kind of giving people permission to be themselves unapologetically and that led to this brainstorm which was like what if we conduct ourselves like a band hence sahil the picture you got before right you can you can really orchestrate how you show up in the world it's very it's very possible

21:08and uh musicians and and artists have been doing that forever and so we started conducting ourselves like a band everything the way we brand it talk about the product the way we do photo shoots like why do we do photo shoots every month just because right just because that's content to put on the gram to bring to life to show you in a light that seems larger than life that's what musicians do all the time um and and at the same time tell the story of entrepreneurship on the rise and that was like shark tank's numbers they were the num they were so high in the rating shark tank it

21:43didn't even make sense when i was seeing the data on that they were like the number one show by miles and so it was like so obvious that people wanted to watch this and we kind of just put together a mini reality television show on instagram um started really small started manufacturing in our condo and built that narrative and story and still have it today like we're trying to build super fans so get into the manufacturing piece of this because my perspective or my assumption rather generally is like when people think about creating a cpg brand they're like holy [ __ ] i don't want to touch

22:18manufacturing because that's where they go wrong yeah well and i want to get into why you think that because i think that's an interesting contrarian insight because like my instinct with when most people start one is like okay let me do this in the lightest touch way possible i'll pay a contract manufacturer um you know i'll hire an agency to handle all the ads i'll do like everything and it just your margin just keeps coming down and down in the quality because you're outsourcing to a contract manufacturer is just harder to control i imagine too and you can't iterate as quickly on things test learn etc so i'm curious for

22:49you just like what was the insight there how did you actually do it and act on creating that manufacturing side yeah so the i you know they tell you the more swings you have at entrepreneurship the better you're going to get like that is so true i've failed at so many different things and trying to bring them forward and i kind of have developed this like list of things not to do and one of the main things was to avoid china at all costs when creating products so that was uh the reason why is like i think early on you need to be able to have a competitive edge when it comes to

23:29uniqueness of a product and manufacturing if you play in that area of where things can be copied really quickly you're going to be you're going to be commoditized pretty quickly is is an insight i have on that end um and then two is i love massive markets massive massive markets that are saturated um because those are such proof points that a pond full of fish exists right so you have a [ __ ] pond full of ridiculous fish and so here's where the contrarian play comes in is the problem with saturation is that by definition saturation is an uninnovated market and to bring true innovation to market

24:11you you almost are never going to be able to show up to a co-manufacturer and have that happen regardless of what you're building so for us we went to go see 26 different co-manufacturers and again i want you to know it wasn't like there was some grand plan to go become a manufacturer it was in the event we could find a contract manufacturer we wanted to use it we absolutely wanted to use it problem is is that nobody wanted to make what we wanted to make and this is where i think especially in food food entrepreneurs go wrong because you show up to the contract manufacturer

24:46and they will take your product and turn it into the thing that already exists on the shelf and here's why and i know that because we're a manufacturer now it's if i'm running a manufacturing line and i want to have as little turnover as possible and you want to use an ingredient that i'm not storing in my warehouse okay what is my incentive for you to use that ingredient so i'm going to come to you i'm going to say hey we can do this at the minimum order quantities you want but you can't use cocoa butter you need to use palm kernel oil by the way you know how you want

25:19your chocolate to be one and a half inches can't be so we're gonna have to do it in robe chocolate you know you want it to be square it's got to be circular edges i mean we could go here forever and it's like so you leave that thing and now you have a product that looks like everything else on the market and guess what a manufacturer that knows how to make your secret sauce who the [ __ ] wants to give away their secret sauce like i you know in software you show up i want to take you guys through this okay just because i want you to laugh

25:47with me this is how whack it is i i don't think it doesn't hit a lot of people until i say it this way so imagine you show up into an investor's office and you're like all right guys i got the greatest [ __ ] idea everybody at the table is like okay we're ready for you we're gonna build the next google okay you have my ears what are you gonna do that's different than google you give your pitch yada yada yada all right who's your cto who's the team that's going to be building this guess what here it is asset lite we're exporting everything to an agency the

26:18agency is going to build google from scratch we're just going to sit here tell them what to do they're going to ship us the uh code when it's i mean you're gonna get laughed out of the room your core competency is being outsourced to another company like what the [ __ ] has happened and i know how it's happened having been here now it's because pepsi and coca-cola [ __ ] everything up back in the 80s and we're like hey we've created these big conglomerates we want to divest all of our asset heavy um you know manufacturing plants we're going to go on franchise models we're going to create cash for

26:51shareholders and they created this false ideology of this co-manufacturing being the holy grail to asset asset like cpg businesses and and i just don't think that's the way to build the next nike you might be able to build a company in five years and flip it to kellogg's or um you know nestle but you ain't building the next nike with uh co-men's yeah i mean i think so you hit on like 100 fascinating ideas here so i want to go run back through us through some of these to double down on them um shut the [ __ ] up no no there's too much gold in

27:25there man it's like too many cool ideas so so first off one of the things you said at the very outset there that i thought was great was like when you see a pond and there's a whole shitload of you know fishing boats in one area that's probably a good indication that there's a lot of fish in that area and actually that you might want to go there and so like that's really again contrarian advice because usually people like go fish where there isn't anybody but but if you go fish where there isn't anybody there might not be any fish there and that's why there isn't anyone sitting there um so i

27:53i mean i just i love that idea and it all kind of goes to um like a common thread in what you're saying which is like this this whole concept of playing different games which is something that i think about a lot it's like what what game do you want to be playing and how do you figure out a different way to play it that just doesn't doesn't look the same as the way everyone else is assuming you should and so you know you talk about like manufacturing as an example and as a use case of that i have this friend who you might have come across actually in the

28:21consumer world his name is chaz flexman uh yeah i started this business called all day flavors um and it's like alldayflavors.com it's actually my go-to like spices for i'm not an investor i have no affiliation um for what it's worth but it's amazing like low sodium spices basically but they've done something similar which is like rather than just taking the same approach of going to like random contract manufacturers and making the product that that company knows how to make that are optimizing that contract manufacturers margins or whatever they're like line utilization which is all they care about they've taken this like data first approach to producing

28:54cpg products where they're like doing small small test runs focus groups getting initial data where they have a high degree of certainty when they launch a new product that it is going to pop because they have the data and the insights from the get-go and they're able to iterate quickly change et cetera and the spices are amazing and like they haven't had a flop of a product because they're taking this very different approach to doing it um so i just like that was just really hitting in my mind as you were talking through all of that around the manufacturer and just like doing something differently taking a

29:25different approach to something that is very commonly done and then also unders i think the biggest part that people forget is to look at the world through the lens of playing a game you said that perfectly actually sale it's like the faster you figure out the game you're playing the more you can find areas of exploitation and it exists because unlike a board game real life is full of um full of conundrums full of false positives full of double-sided swords like nobody's thought about everything perfectly in our societal structure and business structure so these pockets present themselves so for instance there's this pocket that in cpg if you own a manufacturing plant

30:18the probability of you finding another competitor willing to put chips on the table under i know because i have some two really big buyers of companies at big cpg i won't name their names that that are in m a they won't even look at reproducing a manufacturing line internally unless they have proof points of 300 million dollars of year of revenue so like like right there i'm we're we're you know we're just trying to get to 20 this year we know that these guys are they won't even entertain the idea of making a midday squares manufacturing plant then you go into the internal uh smaller co-manufacturer

31:05i know when we were going through it people were willing to listen to how we would want to make it and they would say to us hey are you in billing are you willing to invest 3 million in our plan and your minimum water quantity has to be a million dollars so there's these pockets and that's why it's like four years now that midday squares has yet to see a competitor on the shelves i think it's coming eventually but it it creates a ridiculous moat because yeah it's a real mode in internal politics of where people just don't want to [ __ ] with investing that type of money yeah it's

31:35the narrative too right like the narrative around manufacturing is like oh [ __ ] sounds like a lot of headaches and i got to deal with this and that and i don't understand i got to hire people to deal with it and it's like it's this whole narrative that you build in your mind but sahil that's when i get i get excited when that gets presented to me that's actually my driving force in life that's part of my algorithm for decision making is is this something that most people say is a bad idea i saw this on your um so first off that's like a keith roboy thing that

32:07i've seen him say a lot is like his um barometer for uh his investing as a vc is like do half of my vc friends laugh at the investment that i'm making um i've always loved that like i thought it was just a good idea in terms of as an entrepreneur as an investor etc but i read this when i was doing my research for this episode and one of your like it was a blog post you were interviewed in where you said something like going after hard concepts is actually an easier way to succeed um and i thought that was really really well said i've had inheritedly the easiest time

32:40fundraising with this business my enjoyment level every day has been so much happier because it's attracting talents easier when you're going after really hard things raising money is easier when you're going after really hard things um it just makes everything so much easier it's like this epiphany i had it's like from now on going forward whether midday squares is successful or not everything i will touch must be in this realm of hardness complexity and magnitude because it has made my life 10x easier than the the the nickel and diming of that i used to do and when i talk about nickel and diming i'm going after

33:19businesses that could hit you know only 20 30 million a year of revenue i will say the one one piece you are missing um is i think authenticity because when i look at midday squares i see like it's not it's not just that you're doing hard things you're doing hard and authentic things to you jake and leslie the co-founders so for example like you know i saw a video of jake um who's this like highly energetic guy basically pumping up like i think it was like an air canada or some like company doing like dancing to the ymca and you just see him like going completely

33:59like bonkers and and if you know jake that's jake and if you know leslie that's leslie if you know nick that's that's nick so i think it's a good framework um to start thinking about is like do hard and do authentic yeah and and do so authentic is the most important for life in general because you don't have to show up ever thinking about being a different person like being authentic allows you to to free headspace to not have to worry about anything but how that relates to making more money is really simple is that in your authentic state you have an intuition that nobody else has like

34:39period and when you are in that creative intuitive state that is so 100 you it's like i can almost guarantee that you will find success now here's the kicker very few people reach that level of intuitive self truth and that's what i'm out there pitching which is you know go deep figure out what that thing is that makes you you and then triple quadruple down on that and that's it today's episode is brought to you by element a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything you need and nothing you don't that means lots of salt with no sugar it contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio 1000mg sodium 200

35:23milligrams potassium and 60 milligrams of magnesium but none of the junk no sugar no coloring no artificial ingredients no gluten no fillers no bs i absolutely love it and how it's fit into my lifestyle whether you're keto low carb paleo or just want to feel better and more active element is the drink for you i drink it after an intense workout to replenish my electrolytes i also drink it after a few too many whiskeys late at night it totally helps with the hangovers when you sweat the primary electrolyte lost is sodium athletes can lose up to seven grams per day when sodium is not replaced it's common to

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37:33real estate portfolio tailored to meet your goals it's a great way to benefit from real estate's many perks while adding some much needed diversification to your portfolio so join over 250 000 other investors building a better portfolio with private real estate signing up is easy just head over to fundrise.com room again that's f u n d r i s e dot com slash room to get started today you also hit on this idea of like kind of complexity and like i always think of the um i think it's charlie songhurst the famous investor has this matrix that he draws of uh like complex on one vector and

38:20boringness like or sexiness on the other one and he talks about the fact that you want to be building businesses that are in this in the quadrant that is like complex and boring because complex and sexy you know that's like spacex or something and there's so much competition when you're building complex sexy things that everyone wants to build and so like when you talk about manufacturing i'm like holy [ __ ] that's boring you know that's like the boring stuff and it's super complicated to do and so you're building in this rarefied air where people don't want to be building there because it's not sexy and

38:49it is complicated and so now all of a sudden what's your competition look like you're building in a big space with less competition to your point five years people haven't been replicating it or doing it because it sits in that in that sector oh man oh man that is like it's it's number one in finding pockets of uh exploit what i will say is greg asked me to come up with some ideas for the show today and i thought about it and i have ideas but i i i i want to leave for sure an anecdote on this podcast which is i've gone after things just for money

39:27and have made money doing them and i know in for sure with 100 truth that the success lies in the thing that you want to do no matter what and usually if you do something for instance there's a huge keyword spread right now on hrefs right for plumbers local plumbers there's a huge opportunity to build a monster aggregator for plumbing the plumbing industry it's so clear how to make money in that industry would i do it tomorrow no even if i see it because i when the going gets tough in a business which it ultimately always will you want to quit and this is the first time ever because

40:14i'm excited about what we're doing i love chocolate i think literally in my graduation when i was in grade six i said char um a willy wonka in the charlie factory was my dream to to be one day i never want to quit i'm addicted to it and so you i don't ever discount that part and sometimes when you're doing unsexy things like for midday squares as unsexy it is in manufacturing is very sexy from a brand standpoint like people love wanting to build brands people love what comes with that aspect and i have and i'm um and i'm i i could tell you i've been

40:49chasing this since i'm 17. i've wanted to build nike since i'm 17 and i veered away from that for many years and now that i'm back i realize why i'm addicted to it and why did you veer away is it because you were chasing the chasing the money yeah i was chasing the money there was there's a million easier ways to make money than to build a brand it's it's i there really is i i don't care what anybody says like you know if you if you're trying to become a millionaire building a brand is not the fastest way to do it if if anything it's actually

41:23the least probabilistic way to do it the truth is yeah the truth is it's it's enormously difficult to build a brand and it's enormously difficult to build a startup like if you want to make a lot of money you know honestly just go work at facebook and google and get some stock and you'll probably make a lot of money like people who go into startups especially like cpg um or even hard things like consumer social like don't it's just not your odds are so low like you need to go in because like you want to make you know 16 year old nick proud basically yeah it's it's like iron man no i'm

42:05actually really i'm really open to sharing the why the why is i like doing things that and i know so even greg you both feel this way one i'm an ex-athlete greg we've been doing this since we're young i like knowing that i'm doing something that a very small percentage of the world is capable of doing that's that's what that's what that's what drives me it's it's my competitive force against myself i always have when i was playing hockey it wasn't about what was going on around i was like okay how far up the stats could i get myself how good of a goalie could i become and it's the same thing here is

42:39i love the idea that i don't know five two people in a hundred years three people in a hundred years get to make nike i don't know if we'll do it but that's the dream and that's why you know i if you hear me talk about this all the time is i'm always like we're doing this for 25 35 years again everybody i meet trying to build businesses for five years and flipping it do you think that we would have ever built a manufacturing plant if we had a five year business plan absolutely not you could not make the returns work and so again like a competitive

43:13advantage people think competitive advantage comes down to intelligence all the time how much experience you have in something sometimes it's as simple as saying hey i'm not going to play the game that the world wants to play i don't want to do this for just five years 30 years you're gonna you're gonna interact with your decision making like on a whole different level i saw a great tweet about that um exact point that you just made on like exp people think that experience and intelligence is um is like the most important thing around this um i think it was jack altman you know jack um greg he's the

43:48founder of lattice i think his brother is sam altman the one of the yc guys um jack tweeted one of the most surprising things in business is the degree to which an inexperienced person with the right mindset will outperform a highly experienced person without it um i thought that was so well said i was like the whole thing of experience is just like i just think it's overrated so overrated what it what it what it's not overrated on is um giving you the lay of the land that's it after that get get the [ __ ] out of the way like when it comes to experienced

44:25people they actually do more damage in their square-ness even like myself i will be that person when i'm 70 going back to a 20 year old i will be more destructive than i am positive to that person because i will have created all these false stop and goes when why or zed roads present itself simply because of timing luck my own skill sets right but what they are really good at is if we give the analogy of a formula one track they can tell you on turn two there's gonna be a pothole avoid that at all like they're really good at that and then after you've just

45:04you've distilled that like get them the [ __ ] out of the way they've gone through the um the idea maze like they've kind of been through it at least in some form in some way shape or form i do think that like sometimes you know those people have this like flawed map of the reality because it doesn't apply anymore and so they're like hey you're going to screw this up you know nick your manufacturing is going to be broken because of this this or this and like that was 10 years ago and things have fundamentally changed and there's some reason or new insight that you know they don't

45:34understand or fully fully appreciate but i agree with you i mean far from it like i i have i have an incredible board okay and i've spoken about this so i'm not throwing them under the bus at all this is really just a good example of it we were going through we just transitioned the whole business from a two square business to a one square business we needed to make these decision quick costs were rising we wanted to do a price increase we had data from the customer that they want to buy one square at a time not two squares so we said you know what let's do a one dollar

46:04price increase but to offset the feeling to the customer we're going to drop it to one square so now instead of selling two squares of 399 we're selling one square 249 okay that's the premise of it we presented to the board saying we're rolling this thing out and then everybody's like whoa whoa whoa like could we do a test market first and this i'm just looking at everybody i'm like what do you think this is [ __ ] l'oreal test market we we're barely surviving the water's filling up every day we have two people in qa we could barely scan the boxes in we could barely manage three flavors now

46:39you want me to manage three flavors and two skews which create which creates six different skew possibilities it's like no we have a gut feeling we're rolling with it this is where it's at and i get in ten years when we're a different company that we can be more calculated in our approach but sometimes you're just too far from it and you forget what it's like to be on the uh the army lines first of all i love that you're just like absolutely like absolutely not like i feel like a lot of i know a lot of founders who have conversations like this with their board and

47:14it's easy to you know it's your board and ultimately you're the ceo and you kind of work for the board um it's easy to be like all right fine let's go test it and sort of delay it but you know it was or was that hard was it hard to to speak to the board and basically be like i'm sorry we're go this is the direction we're going no and this is a piece that i think a lot of investors are going to hate me for saying on on this podcast is just i i m our board trusts us okay so that's one that's one piece i

47:50want to make sure that that nobody gets false representation of of what i'm saying what i'm about to say what i'm about to say is that you have to earn trust in life and how you earn trust is by delivering that being said founders need to start taking back not control but conviction that we are the people that are on the front lines doing the stuff we are the scarce ones monies of abundance investors are of abundance boards are of abundance that is not to be saying that you should show up like an arrogant prick because i think if you called my my my board they would say you know what

48:29he's he's reasonable he's very reasonable in the conversations but at the end of the day you get paid to make the convicted shots and you have to can you have to show up with that confidence to to lead you're leading them through war not them leading you through war and that's the piece we gotta flip because there's a huge there's this huge idea of like founders are just glorified employees and that is the furthest thing from the truth what's a really big decision that you made or you and and you know your co-founders made at midday squares where you it was a gut decision and you went with it

49:13um but deep down you're like oh my god i don't know if this is actually gonna work because i'm sure there's you know i'm sure you have some of those could i tell you honestly it's happening right now it is the one square decision and here's why i'm going to explain to you why i don't even have the answer yet we're actually right now in this part of the movie where the plane goes off the radar and nobody knows if it blew up or not and that's kind of where we are right now so here's why this was such a big deal if every customer right we were we were

49:44on fire in the u.s we beat perfect bar in the last 24 weeks as the number one bar in the u.s okay so that's like do not [ __ ] with anything right like don't [ __ ] with anything now the board was like guys if we're selling two squares for every customer and we now bring it down to one square package what's to say that every customer is going to continue to buy two squares we might actually go cut our revenue in half that is a factual statement and this is where gut overrode it it was i hear you loud and clear but if you

50:22just read the requests from the customers they want one square so badly at a fair price and there was no data in the world that could have made this presentation look like this was the right decision to make other than anecdotal evidence and so our bet is that no matter how much carnage it reeks on the p l that in the long term we will actually end up selling more squares per customer and we think that because now we're giving the customers what we want and that's what we have 100 conviction on is that they want the one square so even though it might hurt the company

51:05financially in the short term uh we we bet the farm on it in the long term and and and and that's where you know in september if we were wrong on this we put ourselves into a position of where we can potentially smash into a wall and have to raise uh you know way earlier than expected with revenues not hitting where they need to hit potentially creating a down round scenario if that all does come to fruition and that's where like that's where i love thinking about entrepreneurship like being a formula one driver sometimes you can't think you just have to act and um and what will be will be you know you

51:46live and die by the decisions you make and so we made a really we we made a really hard gut decision on this one there was no data to suggest that we should have done this i love that because it's just an example of a bold decision that you just you had to make and it's also the benefit of being a private company right like a public company the reason i think most public companies end up stalling out at some point you know in the long run and getting you know chipped away at by uh by innovators and by um you know new entrants to a

52:15market is for this reason right like a public company can't make that decision um because it's just like oh my god we can't shoot the golden goose like we can't give up revenue in order to go after the thing that might be correct in the long term because we have quarterly earnings reports and we have to read them out to investors and we told analysts what we were going to hit and we have to hit that or we have to be in the band whatever and so i mean it's also it applies to like when you think about the public companies that have really thrived like in the tech world

52:42especially the ones that have the founders still leading them still make those bold decisions because they aren't just some like executor that's come in to like operate for their 10-year stewardship and then move on and retire with their 30 million pay package they still care about it like it's their baby and so like you know and evan spiegel at snapchat or mark zuckerberg at facebook you know criticize them as much as you want but they're still making decisions as though it is their baby and it is they care about it so much over the long term because it's so much of their legacy is tied to it

53:17why i'm so bullish on so uh two other contrarian things well actually just one on that end but is we fundraise at lower valuations every single round to control the board and have uh complete voting control so we've taken 10 50 million dollar cuts from the valuation in order to have those provisions in the term sheets this is stuff that people need to continue to do now why am i so bullish on control and board people always ask this question is like why are you an egomaniac or no it goes back to your answer in software all of the top companies i think people just got excited by

54:00software yes they're great business models but in cpg there's not one founder-led top 10 company in the publicly traded ranks it's all like you know the guy who founded hershey's was a g back in the day that guy is dead now and it's you know like what happens when a founding team in cpg goes the distance doesn't sell the company retains ridiculous voting control at like the super voting rights of the zuckerbergs and is able to continue to make crazy bold decisions while bringing in a billion dollars of revenue what does that world look like that's what i think we're excited about and why we fight so

54:39hard for control i mean fight [ __ ] tooth and nail in the negotiations for that it's the classic uh name your price and i'll give you the terms something like right the the saying it's not about the price that you get um it's about the terms that are often way more important and that's actually how we start the fundraisers so what a trick that i've learned that i really like is we create the term sheet and i think other founders could use this too so you you go out you pay you pay a law firm to create an outline term sheet so you get you get rid of all the people that are

55:12going to waste your time and you show up and you're like here is the framework of the term sheet you no price just the framework of the voting control and all that if you are willing to do this deal you name your price knowing these provisions if not walk now and you could still bring your own term sheet i'm not saying you have to use our term sheet this is the outline so this way in 24 hours you scare away all the players that don't want to play nick you're on this podcast right now because literally no one talks like you at all in silicon valley or whatever like

55:51not only are you saying things that no one i know is doing you're telling other people about it in a public saying you're not afraid to tell and and that's why you're here like that's why i love you um and i love that about you is because you're not afraid to do your own thing and just kind of hey this is how other people are doing it this is how i think it's is reasonable let's go but because it comes down to my when my dad died my dad's out of ten my family really all mourned it separately so we all became alone for a very long period of time you know we

56:33were in a house together and i think that period of time of my life has really it really shaped me to to to having first principles thinking and unique thoughts and and because i was just so alone for so long even though i was amongst people that you start to really lean in and trust yourself when you are trying to figure out death it it creates this really amazing energy in you to have to figure out life fast quick who you are how you're going to react to it and that's why like i always say like the best thing that ever happened to me is my dad my dad passed away and i don't

57:14mean that and i wish that he passed away is that it really just shaped everything for me because it taught me to be a unique thinker because there was nobody to mourn with and the more i leaned into myself the more happy i was getting and that kind of translated into life outside of the morning uh part and then i just started to realize wow you know you i this is going to sound bleak but i don't mean it in this way you're born alone and you die alone and conduct yourself accordingly doesn't mean you're going to have a great journey on the planet but but really think for yourself

57:50so in our last couple minutes i just have like a prompt for you kind of i guess like pretty pretty open-ended prompt like say you were dropped um into a you know new place you have nothing on you you got you know no money um no connections you don't have your network any of that stuff um what would you do how would you because you strike me as the type of person that would figure out a way like i would go check on you in 10 years and you'd somehow be successful and have figured something out and you would have made friends and done stuff like what would

58:26be your moves like what would you go do if you were dropped into a new place and needed to you know needed to find your way i would i would really do do i get do i get to bring the skill sets that i have where am i of course no no no no you get all your skill sets all your knowledge in your brain whatever you guys and you know you have your baseline level of like you don't need to be stealing food at the outset to survive yeah i would find baseline family businesses um and go become the right hand person to the right person because that is a

59:02launch pad that like i mean putting yourself secondary to someone is always the best way how did i make my network in montreal it was uh i was at like this like thing where i had john biggs who was the editor of techcrunch and we were just eating dinner and i just was like a servant to him it was not about me and uh you know two months after that he hits me up he's like you want to host techcrunch in montreal and then i made somebody else the face of it lp maurice not me i just got to put my name with it and was a steward to him

59:43and he got to put his name on that and that changed my whole life just that one just that one little thing right is is be a steward to others and and uh it it's it's the hack so i i say it all the time you have no idea how many people come through midday squares and piss away their opportunity to be the right hand person to the next nike like they can't see it right and i'm always like why would that person want me to have a negative opinion of them like if they were smart and they were to make a bet even if it's

1:00:18unlikely but if we do succeed in our vision it's going to be pretty big wouldn't you want me to have a good opinion of you and these are the things that i think about it myself so i would i would be a steward uh to somebody that needs to and make sure that i i make them a boatload of cash or a boatload of notoriety or a boatload of fame and whatever the hell it is and my life would work out it's like the era of apprenticeship is not dead and if you can find a way to go be someone's apprentice and hustle your ass off to do it well and to learn and be a

1:00:51sponge when you're around that person and go improve upon it like that's kind of an old-fashioned way of making sure that you succeed and win in the long run oh my it's it's that i think that is the thing that will never change you know bezos always talks about what are the things that are never going to change that's one of them like being a steward to somebody will never change that's one of my favorite frameworks by the way the uh you know what will stay the same framework it's like bezos talked about how um you know for anyone that doesn't know this one like he talks

1:01:23about how it's really hard to predict the future like it's so hard so uncertain and so if you're trying to say like what's going to be different 15 years and let me try to plan around that to position us well it's really really hard to do sometimes people do it well but it's very difficult versus the flip side if you invert the problem and think about what's going to be the same in 15 years what do i know is not going to change and let me make sure i'm building for that so it's like customers are going to want things fast and they're going to want things

1:01:47seamlessly and check out easily like that is never going to change people always want less friction and so how do i build around less friction that's why we chose chocolate i mean 142 billion traded globally every country knows what chocolate is nobody requires education for it if i give you a piece of chocolate in a country where we don't speak the same language you will immediately know what i'm doing i'm showing you gratitude i'm giving you a little piece of good vibes um these frameworks are so powerful so that doesn't mean that they're going to be easy once you do them but that what is not going to change is a great place to

1:02:25start 100 100 greg any um any closing thoughts here as we uh as we hit the end of our time i feel like we hit on so much interesting stuff here how much nick how much are you sleeping like would you say you sleep a lot a little and i ask because a lot i ask cause especially with this bit this change from two squares to one square it must be like in your brain right now and uh yeah just curious your sleep habits and and how you're feeling just i'm you know mentally right now mentally i need always a week every so okay i'm plugging the podcast midday square's

1:03:04uncensored guys come come listen to it because it's jake les and i we talk about our journey and what we're going through so it's not it's not an interview show it's really about us like you get to be a fly on the wall as we just distill what we're going through um that's why that that brought it up but right now i'm a bit beat up but i've went all in with my life on this and so i really don't have much of a personal life and i mean that greg like i haven't seen any of my friends in three years um my family knows that i'm going to be

1:03:35very unpresent les and i who are married this is all we do and so the reason why i'm sleeping well is because i've eliminated everything from my life except midday squares um and so when i get home it's just home sleep back at it and every three months i need one full week off to sleep and that's how because because it's it's so hard manufacturing we just to give you guys uh a scope of the scale august 2018 we had max capacity per day of 60 000 bars and today we produced 46 000 bars a day uh fully automated and we're looking to double that and that that

1:04:16that i've had a teammate die on us at a company retreat i've had mold in the walls while investors were visiting i've i mean it's just been one thing after another there's no reason why we should still be alive and i attribute sleep to a big part of the success is that i'm sleeping really really well which allows me to be decently emotionally stable to deal with you know the onsets of depression that come on while you're going through it um which is you know something i've struggled with my whole life i mean we can get into that another time but yes it's been crazy hard but i prioritize sleep like

1:04:51crazy that's but again 30 year old nick versus 20 year old nick prioritize sleep i love it you uh you i feel like you opened my eyes to a bunch of new stuff here i'm gonna need to do like uh greg we're gonna need to do like a debrief um and uh and takeaways and stuff as like a follow-up post script to this when we uh when we released the episode because there was so much gold in it that um that i feel like i'm gonna need to go back and re-listen to it again to uh to uncover all of it so thank you nick for

1:05:21uh for taking the time to join us man this was awesome uh where can people find you uh and and your uh and your business yeah so um instagram midday squares um nick salto on twitter i love just you know dropping tidbits as i'm not not tidbits and necessarily how we're doing stuff but just what i'm going through so twitter nick salto instagram uh midday squares tick tock mid-day squares i'm gonna go buy some now too um i'm excited to give them a shot this is gonna be awesome please do please do thanks i will i will let you know thank you so much for joining man this was

1:05:56awesome thanks so much for listening to today's episode if you have any questions that you want featured in a future episode email us at hi trwih.com leave us a review at apple or spotify to help us grow the reach of this podcast until next time we will see you soon [Music] never let the world