Hey everyone. We're super excited to announce the launch of our slack community for D2C pod. This is a space exclusively for D2C founders and operators to connect, share ideas, ask questions and support each other. You'll be able to engage with the best minds and operators and consumer and currently we're on a waitlist and it will open up the community Once we reach 150 members. So apply using the link in the description and we hope to see you on Slack. So before we kick off today's recording, I've got one more for you. Keeping up your momentum this year starts with the right selling tools and if you're looking to increase revenue, grow faster, build more pipeline and close more deals, check out the all new sales hub from HubSpot. You'll be able to manage your whole sales process plus my favorite part, the reporting.

It's super intuitive, powerful and customizable. Plus the whole thing is powered by AI so your teams can spend less time on tedious time consuming stuff and more time on developing relationships. Also, no one likes a clunky platform that takes months to onboard onto. But getting set up on SalesHub is really quick and easy. It's free to get started. The pricing will scale with your business and with more than 1300 integrations and add ons you can tune it to your exact needs. Visit HubSpot.com sales to start selling with salesh. What is going on DTC pod today we have the pleasure of speaking with Ismael Salhi who is the co founder and CEO of Wildgrain.

So Ismail, I'll let you kick us off. You guys have a really, really interesting business, business model, product that you're selling and way that you've scaled really fast over the last couple of years. So yeah, why don't, why don't you kick us off, tell us a little bit about yourself, your background and wild grain.

Yeah, no problem. Thanks for having me. So I'm a computer scientist by training. Started my previous business when I was in Paris. Long story short, spent six years, a lot of blood, sweat and tears building it up. Hardware business pretty hard. Raised a bunch of money from VCs here in Boston. Long story short, pandemic killed it.

After that my wife and I, who was the co founder of my previous business as well, wanted to keep working together and going at it again. We had this idea of launching a subscription box. We didn't know exactly which what should be that box. And one time she was in Germany baking. She's German baking bread with a friend Sent me a picture of the bread, and I was like, this is it. We should do a subscription box for bread because it's a commodity that people eat very often, so it's prime for a subscription. But also the bread you find in the U.S. no offense, compared to Europe, is not as good.

And so we, we thought, oh, this could be a good idea. Started working on it in 2019 as a side hustle. And then when our previous company failed, we went to a VC here in Boston and we pitched them and we brought some bread and pastries to the pitch meeting. And they liked it. And a few meetings later, they invested $700,000 in the company. And we were super pumped to keep working together. Started designing the business, built a website, started shipping a few boxes to friends and family, improved the product, and then decided to go at it. The whole thing was, okay, we're not going to spend another six years trying to make this work.

So we're just going to spend as little money as possible on Facebook ads and influencer campaigns, get boxes in people's hands and get feedback and improve the product until we're ready. And that's what we did in 2020. We had our first son. So we had a newborn, a new company and some money in the bank, and we went out and started selling the products. And, um, now we're 10 people doing eight figures, selling to more than 80,000 subscribers in the country.

Wow. So super exciting. Congrats on all the growth. Um, it's. It's a crazy story, but why don't you walk us through a little bit about, like, that brand inception, Right? You said your first thing you want to do was, like, create a solid product. Walk us through that. What did that look like? Right, like you identified something in the market in the US you said, okay, the bread here sucks. Let's fix it.

Let's go direct. We've got a product that people want. But what were the first things? Were you guys baking the bread or like, how are you thinking about? Yeah, how are you going to do it?