#229 - Rob Willey: The CMO's Guide To Business Transformation

What's up, DTC Pod. Today we're joined by Robert Willie, who is an operating partner of Emile Capital Partners, as well as CMO of Cherbundi. So, Rob, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about Cherbundi and what you guys are building?

I appreciate blaine, thanks for having me on the show. Who is Cher Bundy? It's a really good question. It's a question that I will first ask you before talking to me. Had you ever heard of tart cherry juice?

I've heard of tart cherry. I've heard of it a little bit in the health space. So when I saw you guys, it kind of like jumped out. I drew that immediate conclusion between tart cherry and now there's a juice and a product around it. But other than that, I didn't have too much insight into what the beverage is. I hadn't seen it, that sort of thing.

You're not alone, which is, I think my job is trying to figure out how to tell people like yourself about Tart Cherries and more importantly, write about Cher Bundy. But the reason why I ask is, I had the same exact question you just asked me three years ago, which is tart cherries what's? Tart cherries chair bundy. Who? I never heard of that company at all. And so when Emile Capital asked me to join the leadership team at Know, we had to establish truthfully, our own DNA. We had to figure out why people should care around tar cherry juice. And the short answer to your question is cher Bundy is an all natural sports nutrition company, and we base all of our products off the power of tart Cherries. We call it nature's secret weapon. Now, tart cherries are scientifically proven to enhance and improve recovery, recovery in two ways.

One is they improve your sleep, and two, they reduce your inflammation. Scientifically proven to do both those things. So whether you work or work out all day, tart cherry juice really does help you recover in a number of ways. And the proving ground for that, which I discovered when I joined, which I still tell everyone about today. Right? So when I came to the company, it was nationally distributed. We had been through a pretty large Series A. It was established at the grocery retail level, which is a huge, honestly accomplishment for the previous teams. Like, to be able to reach that type of distribution often.

Direct was unheard of for so many companies at our stage. That said, most consumers hadn't heard about it. And yet, the real truth, and the thing that convinced me that tart cherry juice is for real was we had at that point 250. We now have over 400 teams who actively purchase our product every month. And when I say teams, I mean collegiate and professional sports teams. So every NFL team, every Power Five conference team, near every MLS team, every team that you see on TV, play Saturday or Sunday, purchase our products every month. And I was like, wow, this thing must work, so why don't I know about it? And that's where my journey with the company started. That's where we still are.

We thankfully have made a lot of steps in the right direction in the past three years. But that's who cherry bundy is. That's what we're set out to do, is really bring natural recovery mainstream. And I'm pretty excited about the opportunity in front of us.

Yeah, I think that's a really interesting point that you bring up in terms of the bones of the business that were in place. The fact that you guys already had this crazy retail distribution that was already set up. You had, like you said, professional sports teams already consuming the product and initial, I guess, product market fit you might call it, on the consumer end, where consumers sort of know about tart cherry. I think I heard about tart cherry probably on Huberman Lab podcast. I don't know if you listen to them, but that might be a cool forum because I think Andrew talks a lot about tarcheri and the benefits of it, but I didn't know it in its CPG drink format. So that's really exciting that you have those bones in place.

Right.

And it seems like you came in at the Series A level, and now your job is CMO. You get in there. So what are your first moves other than starting to ask the questions just like you asked me? Okay, what is tart cherry? Who owns your when you land in the brand, what's your first mission? As CMO.

Yeah, my own philosophy. So I've been fortunate, right, to come into a number of companies at mid to high growth stages, right, companies that have established brands. So I ran marketing at Method. I was the VP of Marketing at TaskRabbit. I was the CMO of Spring with a late stage fashion e commerce brand. So all of those brands had done some of the groundwork by the time I arrived. And Method had done a lot. TaskRabbit had done some Spring, very little, but was at least had, you know, a really strong user base, had revenue.

And so when I came to chair Bundy, it was a familiar sort of environment for me. There was a business in place. It wasn't great. Some of it was working, some of it wasn't. And so after kind of understanding the business and understanding the consumer, which I think any good executive needs to do, I don't care what department or what sort of team you lead, then for me, it was kind of like, okay, I actually start to try to diagnose what's wrong. Because usually those are the places where you got to stop spending first. And in my career, I'll be honest with you, people have brought me in because they need something fixed. And so that's usually the case with executives.

Turnover happens particularly at the CMO level, because something's not going right, and usually that's something's really expensive. Marketing costs money, right? And we talk a lot about it. But the thing I try to diagnose early on is there's a saying, it says marketing is the tax you pay for being unremarkable. And as a marketer, early in my career, I found that sort of offensive. One of the executives at TaskRabbit said that to me, and at first it kind of, like, sort of hurt my feelings. I was like, wow, is that really how marketing is perceived? But then as I started thinking about it, it's true, the less remarkable you are as a company, as a brand, as a product, the more expensive it is to convince people to use it. And so usually that's where I'm like, okay, why are we so expensive? What are we not very remarkable about? Is it the product? Is it the brand? Is it we don't have the right audience? Is our messaging not right? Maybe our media plan is just misdirected. And so that's where I start.

And usually the goal is to get all of that noise to be as quiet as possible, so you then can say, okay, but what's right? And finding what's wrong, you usually find something that's right too. And so then you sort of shift to say, okay, now that I've got some of the wrong to be less expensive or less loud or less problematic, I can focus on the right things, because those are the things we now need to grow. And those are the things that take longer. Those are the things that are harder, and those are the things that you generally want to use as your strengths. And so that's a little bit of my philosophy is coming into these companies. Now. You do that through building relationships with your team, collaborating across the organization to diagnose those things. So I think having a little bit of a learner's mentality, being curious around those sort of areas are super key in terms of your bedside manner.

But that is my general approach.

No, that makes a ton of sense. And I think just putting that executive hat on and really understanding the business, the market, and then coming in and doing the diligence and figuring out, okay, what are we getting wrong? Because it's always easy to come in and look at a situation and be like, oh, I would do this, I would do this, I would do this. But also, like you said, being able to say, okay, these are the things that we're doing really well, so let's lean into those. So when you got started with Cherry Bundy, what were the things like, I think you had mentioned it in terms of they had relationships with teams. There was kind of like this big tailwind in market about health and fitness and nutrition products. Maybe you saw some upside in the whole concept of tart cherry, the fact that people are using it. Maybe it doesn't quite have that mass consumer appeal. So maybe that's like a nice market tailwind that we're going to see and be able to ride into.

But what were the things that were wrong that you were like, we need to quiet these down, right when you stepped into your role?

Yeah, I mean, one of the things that we were working really hard on, actually, which I know is part of every good startup's playbook is Paid Social. Paid Social. Every good young startup does a couple of things well if they want to be successful. Paid Social is one of them. Generally. PR is one of the other ones. Right? Search marketing is part of that. And then ultimately you have to drive email or retention.

And if you can get those systems in place early on, you usually at least have some revenue. You have some retention, you have some LTV, right? Your LTV CAC ratio starts to at least look a little healthy and you got something to go on. And the funny thing is, when I got to chair Bundy, one of the things we immediately realized is that Paid Social was not working. It was not working, and it was not working for a variety of reasons, but it was expensive and it wasn't working. We're like, okay, let's quiet that down. It's driving traffic, but none of that traffic is really converting. So what else is wrong? Our D to C business was wrong. We didn't have the right products, the interface, the design.

The UI wasn't right. We looked like a brochure site for a juice company that was trying to then sell products. And none of that from a user experience, obviously was panning out. So we said, okay, if we want to have a legitimate website, we need to then diagnose how to build a real storefront. And that goes everything from like right homepage and PDP design all the way through supply chain and fulfillment to make sure that we have the right product assortment and that kind of stuff. But that was two of the areas I was like, whoa, this isn't working. It's not supporting our offline business whatsoever because grocery lives in the aisle in the store. So it's actually not going to hurt distribution and it's not going to actually dramatically impact sales.

So let's quiet that stuff down and figure out what we should be doing. Now, I will say this, the two things I discovered immediately in doing that right was, okay, we're going to have to make some investments in those things. Those are longer lead development programs. We are committed to a D to C business. Let's do that. But let's be patient. Two things I discovered while then seeing, okay, a little bit, having more visibility was like, one, we have a very strong community. So we had a great AOV.

We had high retention even though our website was absolute trash. And I'm like, these people love our product, love our product. So let's engage them. And on the heels of that, we're like, let's start an email program. We didn't even have an email program. Like, let's start email. Email is like retention 101. So we're like, okay, so that was great.

They started open rates, click rates, site traffic. It was the lowest hanging fruit. We're like, good, let's just continue building a system of emails retention emails, of course, winback emails, cart, all that stuff. Email systems and those sounds easy. It's a grind. Email marketing is a grind. It's worth every dime you spend in it, but it is a grind. Putting in the right tool.

We use clavio, putting in Clavio. So we're like, okay. The other thing I realized, I was like, we have an Amazon business, a legit Amazon business that is getting no financial support whatsoever. Somehow it was at that point hundreds of thousands of dollars in Amazon sales with no Amazon spend. I'm like, this is a pay for play game. I know know. We need to allocate basically take the paid social money, put it in Amazon. And then we saw Amazon turn the lights on and just on fire sales.

It was like no one had ever discovered paid media at the company. And then they all sudden turned it on. It was like the light bulb just it was incredible. So we're like, wow, great retention, high loyalty within our existing community. And then we actually can use Amazon to drive a lot of revenue right now. That it was completely unrealized. And so that's the exchange right? That's the diagnosis that we started to unpack very, very early on in my tenure at Chair Bundy. Now, the other thing was, like I mentioned, was Sports, right? We had these huge teams.

And so I was fortunate just by way of timing, right, I was spending half my time in Portland and half my time in New York, and our sports team just luckily was based in Portland. I inherited them. Their names are Dan and Tod. They are the most amazing two guys. They've been with the company for ten plus years. They have, like, been through it all. They've built this from one team to now nearly 400. And so these guys had tons of background for me.

I'm like, why are we selling this and how did that product get made? And who put that system in place? And they just gave me a lot of guidance. And like I said, the cross functioning of teams and learning and being curious helped me quickly be fast friends with those guys. And like I said, they still run the business today. And nonetheless, I was like, what do you guys spend your time on? And they're like, processing orders. And I'm like, don't want you doing that. I want you taking orders. They're like, yeah, we also have to track orders. I'm like, you don't need why? They're like, because we got to tell our teams.

And I'm like, Wait, what do you mean tell the teams? And they're like, well, we email our teams, we call our teams. I'm like, oh, my God, they have tools for these things. And so I'm like, we need to build you a sales portal because you need to be outselling. On average, when I got here, on average over the past, the previous, whatever, seven years, they were averaging about 30 plus teams a year. 30 new teams a year. So every year they would add 30 new teams. And so we sat down and said, if we take all of this administrative work out and we let you guys just sell, let's add 50 teams, and you can use the bandwidth to go out and acquire new teams. Now, keep in mind, like, COVID's throwing everyone's life in chaos.

So they're like, have you noticed that the world's not playing sports? And I'm like yep. Yep. Yep. We're going to use that time to build this portal. We call it the pro shop. So we built them a login only sports dedicated storefront for teams to go in and log in themselves, get their team pricing and order the products directly, and then fast forward. By the way, they've already surpassed 50 teams, like, a long time ago. That was the easiest goal we've ever set in place, and they made it sound like it was, like, going to take a miracle.

Anyway, that's turning up the volume on Sports, turning on Amazon. Those are the things that we started with. Yeah.

And what I really like about this is just kind of your perspective is coming in as an executive. And I think this gives like a really good sort of example for other operators who are thinking about it. They're growing from the seed stage, the a stage. And it's like, why is that executive hire so important? And it's because they can kind of come in, see things from the perspective that you're seeing them, and understand where there's opportunity to tap into in the business, understand what's working well, what's not working well, where there's processes. That can be automated, which processes aren't worth continuing to invest in, which can be scaled with technology and how to just round everything together. Because like you said, you came in, you were touching everything from product development to supply chain, from marketing messaging to email capture to Amazon business, a little bit of everything, right? And I think a lot of time marketers, they just think of it in terms of performance. But really, like you said, I love that the tax you pay for reaching your audience or however you called it. But I think that's really important for just people to understand what the role of an executive is, is when they come in, there's going to be a business.

A business is already there, it's existing, you have different parts of it running. But the question is how do you quickly decide what's working, what's not working, what can be optimized, what can be automated? And it seems like you were able to do that very cross functionally and very quickly.

Yeah, I think in working with founders right. At any stage of the company, which I've been fortunate to work with, some of the you know, I worked with Eric Ryan at Method, right? And Eric's gone on to do now so much more than just and but what you realize when you start to talk know founders like that is like they have a genius there, is a genius there. They're not good at everything. In fact, they may not be good at very many things, but they're really good at something. And my job, and I think executives jobs as we start to come into companies to help this growth stage is to identify what that genius is. And you usually do this the interview process and the getting to know you process, because you should coming into the job have a sense of what that is and have a lot of candor about if there is a way you can help. But if you're like, hey, this is your genius. And guess what? I'm a perfect sort of puzzle piece to your genius.

I then say, okay, I can operate over here and that's the way this thing fits. And I've been fortunate to have it fit like that where I've worked with either existing executive teams or founders who need my skill set. And my skill set is that initial diagnosis and a lot of fixing and certainly a ton of growing but it's a hands on approach and that's the way know my style works. And so I think, yes, coming in, I was given the opportunity, frankly, at Share of Bundy to have lots of runway, to make a lot of unilateral decisions about what was working, what was not working, to change allocations of spend, to influence right to, frankly, really, I won't say demand, but definitely challenge supply chain to make improvements or optimizations to facilitate Amazon growth. Because everyone knows Amazon is an Ops game as much as it is in a marketing game. D to C had all sorts of challenges with unit economics, which every D to C company, big or small, seems to have around shipping small parcels around the like. Those things are hard and they demand other parts of the other. You know, me being in the mix particularly sort of is my way.

And the company gave me that sort of lifeline to be successful. Now I think the other thing that I would say is my particular points of view is one yes coming in and doing what we've talked about in a hands on way and trying to be very quick to gain some wins. I think every executive needs to understand that that you need some quick wins. Startups aren't patient, investors aren't patient. So not only do you have to identify but you have to correct and you got to be able to point to some pretty quick, small, even wins to showcase that like okay impact is being seen and felt. The other thing we took a hard look at and I think this goes out to a lot of the startups because all of know at every stage are facing this is what's the strategy to win against the giants because I don't care know you're Sarah at Gem or Bundy. Me at Bundy. Like we're fighting very big companies, right we have basically the David and the Goliath sort of scenario is real and it's no more real than in sports know, whether you walk into the aisle and you look at sports hydration or you go to Amazon and you Google any one of sports, right like it's a big world.

Yeah so Rob, why don't you give us a little sort of tour or overview of how this world works of nutrition, right? Like who are the biggest players, what are your challenges and how do you like you were saying as a Series B company in the David Goliath sense, how do you knowing that landscape and knowing what the landscape looks like, how do you kind of chart your own path to grow beyond Series B up through the ranks?

Yeah so once you stabilize legitimize like I said the early stage playbook, right you get those channels at least functionally working because you can't compete with anybody if you don't have a sound paid social, paid search, at least a little bit of call it founder PR already sort of working within the business. But once you then decide, okay, who am I going to fight against? Because my hope is, as you've built a small business, you know what you're fighting for. Cherry Bundy is fighting for all natural recovery. We are fighting against synthetic science. Now, who's. Synthetic science in our categories, it's pretty obvious. Like, you walk into the store, you're going to see a lot of neon green, a lot of electric blue. All of these products, they clearly did not come from nature.

And you can Gatorade's in that mix. Body Armor is in that mix. Muscle Milk is in that mix. It's not hard. They own all the shelf space, by the way. There's nobody else there. And Powerade's got a little bit of a play in there, but they're all the look at the ingredients. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out, whoa, I can't pronounce most of those words, and I'm betting most of them weren't made in nature.

So that is not necessarily who we're fighting against in terms of competitors because we're not in the hydration game. But we are in terms of understanding synthetic science. We are in terms of educating people around ingredients. And they control that narrative. The war on Sugar isn't our fight to fight, right? Everyone's been I mean, that fight's been going on for decades. And so for us, though, that is for me, where I start is understanding the cultural conversation. Because that, to me, is a far more interesting sort of approach than saying, hey, we're a CPG brand in food and beverage, we must fight. Food and beverage consumers don't think like that.

They have a number of preconditioned sort of thinking thoughts. I have an eight year old, right? He plays every sport under the sun. He's living his best life right now. And guess what? After every game, Karen's, they bring Gatorade from that age. And I remember that as a kid. He is predisposed to that experience. And so that is the cultural truth. It's not like, oh, fight sugar.

It's like, no, actually, this is a behavior that for order for us to win, we have to change. And then you identify, like, oh, a whole bunch of occasions, and you see behaviors and you understand the cultural, social conversation. And right, like, that's your truth. That's who you're fighting against. And once that is how I've tried to identify in every one of the companies that I've worked for, is to look outside first, see that conversation, and see how we fit. I was watching a TikTok the other day, and of course it was like a Ted Talk or some sort of like my feeds are all filled with that type of corporate inspo. But the comment was super interesting because I think it is exactly the difference in which big companies and small companies go. I think deal think about social media, but in general, go to market.

And the thinking was like, there's two ways to think about your marketing plan. Are you trying to pay attention or are you just trying to get noticed? And like, this idea of paying attention is a far more interesting way for me to think about my job, which is, all I want to do is pay attention. I want to listen. I have all these feeds. I'm far too old to be on TikTok. I'm there for the show, I'm not there to be making videos. Right? And so for us, for me, our strategy is very much about watch and learn, then think about how we can be interesting.

Yeah, I think that one part you mentioned that really stands out is the fact that you're saying not just pay attention, but also be realistic about who your consumer is and the fact that you are battling the status quo. Right? So you're almost like breaking it down and saying, okay, we know who our ideal customer is, right? How are they actually consumed? What is the status quo in practice? Like you had just said, the status quo in practice is a dad who's showing up to their sports league, who's been drinking Gatorade his whole life, who's like, Here, have some Gatorade. So now the question when you're thinking about marketing is like, okay, if that's one of the use cases and that's an ICP for us, how do we enter that conversation and how do we replace the Gatorade that he's been bringing the sports league his whole life? Right? And like you're saying, even in professional sports, team gatorade has been a mega sponsor of all these sports leagues for the longest time. I grew up watching basketball, watching every sport, and you see Gatorade on the sideline, you see all the athletes drinking those Gatorade drinks. So with that in mind, how do you enter that conversation knowing that it's an uphill battle, knowing that that's the status quo, but knowing, hey, that's my ICP, they have these specific values, and maybe the recovery, the natural recovery, being healthy, being able to be in better shape for their next go at it. All of these different things you can really tap into to know all your different ICPS, all the different places that they live, and start building out into those use case, telling those stories and gaining market share that way.

Yeah, you work backwards, right? And again, that's this whole idea of culture first sort of approach is, yeah, you have the realities of these titans of industry living in all these places for decades, if not longer. And then you have the realities of how consumers consume and you're like, okay, where those overlap, I need to identify and be choiceful, be disciplined about picking my spots. And then, yes, as you establish product market fit, as you spend into those to test and learn, you start to see some opportunities, right? And that's where Chair Bundy. Began in my tenure that said, I will say this. Cherubundy went through a period of time where they thought the right way to fight industry titans was to emulate them. It's no secret we sponsored a college football bowl game. The Internet has history of it's. We also had a large TV deal with ESPN.

We had spokespeople in the media. We had a number of deals with universities for signage at football and basketball games. We rinsed and repeat that strategy that every one of those companies that you just mentioned is on every sideline already. And I believe the strategy was sound, which is, go deeper in sports, utilize our sports credentials. We're a recovery sports nutrition brand. Cool. Let's expose this in ways that we can really take a strong stance in. That's a seven figure, eight figure strategy that is difficult to create distinction because of you have these bigger brands spending nine figures doing it, and you're like, this feels hard.

This feels like a means to an end. This feels like a never ending spend to chase this down. And it's really hard at that times to measure, which also drives investors crazy. You're spending with these big properties, doing these flashy things and measurement, wow, that sounds like in my world, that's a real quick way to be done with that strategy. That's a strategy killer.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think just as a startup, you're not going to be capitalized and you're not going to be able to spend the same way like a conglomerate can. Right. But I think what's interesting about your guys'perspective is the fact that you guys did that. You developed some of those relationships that brand marketing in place. And then when you came in, you were able to actually spin that up and say, hey, wait a minute, we have this sports angle. If we invest in community and we do things other way, we can take this investment that we made and really capitalize it. So why don't you walk us through a little bit about what that next stage was like when you understood that, hey, we've done all this spend getting our name into the sports world, and now we have these sports teams.

Now let's leverage that as a marketing flywheel where we can really through community and through other avenues outcompete the way other conglomerates are thinking about what they're doing.

Yeah, I mean, you go back to what I said, what do we have? What did I discover besides the power of tart cherry juice when I got here? Right? Community, Amazon. Right. I'm like, okay, okay, we got some good stuff. Now I see the strategy, frankly, around communications that just feels not like a great fit for us to compete in this category based on what I'm seeing in culture. So how do we do this different? And so what we did very early on, we were like, okay, we know, we know the biggest barrier to trying tart cherry juice and falling in love with cherbundi is education. Just like you. You'd kind of heard about it, but you didn't know really what it did. You didn't know the benefits.

And so we had to go out and educate people around the juice, let alone our brand. And so we're like, okay, how do we do that in a way that isn't about reach and frequency? Because we can't buy enough of that in media. And so what we did was we invented what we call the Pit Crew. The Pit Crew is our influencer. Ambassador initiative. It's a collection of now well over 100 thought leaders, registered dietitians, athletes, scientists, nutritionists, a bunch of people that frankly know what they're talking about, live and breathe. Tart cherry juice in our brand did so well before I joined here, by the way. So all I had to do was go out and talk to them.

We called the dietitians from our university's teams and our sports teams and said, hey, you want to join us and do this? We just need to make some content. We went out to the scientific and the medical community and we said, hey, can you write some facts about this stuff? You've done a bunch of research. Can we use some of it? And so it was an education initiative that we just built straight grassroots with people who already part of our community. And that's what we leaned into. Now, that takes time and you got to do it right, meaning content obviously does matter. You need to make the right stuff. But we did it in simple ways. And then we took it and we put it in paid social.

And that's where we learned that paid social is a thing. It was wrong because what we were using was wrong. And so content wise, creative wise, it was wrong strategy, it was right. So we took that, made content, then put it into paid social, and then we started to see it. And then, by the way, also we refaced our Amazon pages with more recovery messaging, with better content, started to see Amazon grow and optimize even better on top of that paid plan. And so it was just kind of the thing that fed everything. And then we refaced our website with actual user content and you see it today, right? Those are real people, right? Those aren't models. Those are yes, some of them are influencers, but those were already people that were part of our community to begin with.

They joined the Pit Crew and didn't change a thing. We just put them on film. And so that all started to coalesce. And that's something that most big companies either don't want to do, decide not to do. It's hard, it's high touch, and they need more reach and frequency. They need their TV ads. An army of all natural ambassadors, right, isn't going to get most of these big companies to meet their revenue goals to make the stock market make investors happy on a quarterly basis. So they're like not worth it.

They're out there trying to get noticed. That's all they're trying to do. That new sneaker drop, that new collab, that new PR thing that is the game that the big brands are in is they're just trying to be top of mind with sort of the PR headline of the day. And I don't blame them, but that's not the game we're in. And so it was a fundamentally different strategy that we took and still continue to use today.

Yeah, I think that's such a good point in terms of understanding from their vantage point some of the tactics that a startup is going to employ. They can't quantifiably move the bottom line, so they're better off doing their mega spend at this crazy scale because that will and hey, that's fine for them, but it's all the opportunity for you. So that's really exciting. One thing that I was really excited to be able to talk about with you on this podcast was the fact that you have experience operating not just in the CPG and the consumer space, but as well as the consumer services space. Right. So anytime I see this kind of overlap where you've worked at a major consumer services company, in your case you were the VP of Marketing at TaskRabbit, I would love to kind of dive into a little bit about what that experience was like. Right. They were obviously a massive high growth company which ended up being acquired by, you know, they came with their own set of challenges and I'm sure you had to get in there.

So for our listeners who may not know, rob, why don't you just give a little breakdown of what TaskRabbit is? I've used them, I'm sure a lot of our listeners have. But just in case someone hasn't, why don't you just tell us a little bit about what TaskRabbit was and then what your kind of involvement there was yeah, no problem.

TaskRabbit was and is today a home services company. So basically they're an on demand app that you go in and request, say, help hanging shelves or moving furniture or assembling furniture, anything that is around. Call it home services, which is inside your home. It's a marketplace where they'll match you with someone local who will then come over and help you do that said Task. Right. We call those people Taskers. The company was founded in 2008, same year as the iPhone was invented. So it was really born from mobile and it was by far the OG of the sharing economy.

They were there before Uber, they were there before Lyft or before Instacart, all of these other apps clearly that have come and some gone since that time. And they were internet famous in 2008. The founder, Leah, was definitely on the COVID of multiple magazines. Fast Company and all those other sort of startup pubs, and they parlayed that business into big enough to matter. And it was really a star example of the power of the sharing economy. Now, on the heels of Know came Uber, Came lyft came ride sharing. And oddly, TaskRabbit was Know, not just as a home services company, but they were really like the Amazon of services. So you could get a ride, you could get computer services, like It services, obviously, you could get your groceries picked up, you could get food delivered.

It was very horizontal in its services or in its capabilities. And so that was great because it allowed it to know what really people needed. But at some point, the other ride sharing companies or home sharing economy started to come in and pick off those verticals. All of a sudden, Uber showed up and took over ride sharing. Instacart showed up and took over grocery delivery, right? A bunch of apps have come in and obviously DoorDash and others taken away food delivery. And those are the big verticals. Those are the ones that had a ton of promise. And so all of a sudden, Taskrab is like, uh oh, these companies have leapfrogged us.

And before I joined, right before I joined, TechCrunch did kind of an expose that had rabbits burning on a barbecue on fire doing this sort of like behind the scenes work, trying to due diligence TaskRabbit, and where had they gone? And so enter my time at TaskRabbit. While I was there, we really did identify the key services of the business. We removed a number of verticals that were auxiliary, that weren't around our value prop. We did all the things I told you we did, like, same sort of real approaches. We stopped doing the things around that were expensive. We started to lean into retention. The business had been around then six, seven years. So we had a huge community.

We improved our quality of services so the product got better. Meaning, like, the Taskers who showed up, did the thing better, did the thing faster, showed up on time, that kind of stuff. And so fast forward, anyway, that was my time at TaskRabbit is kind of rinsing repeating the strategy. Now, it is different in services, and it is different in a marketplace. It's funny, I still see a lot of marketplaces out there, and I still talk to a lot of founders, and I don't think there's a founder of a marketplace that has come or gone that would tell you that marketplaces aren't the hardest startup to do, right? Because you're building two businesses, and those businesses are one. Yes, you have to build supply. Demand doesn't matter unless you have supply. And in a marketplace, particularly around services, supply is about quality.

So you better have a good driver with a nice car. If you're uber Remember when they launched, it was a town car service, like tons of quality, right? And with Instacart, those groceries better be fresh and they better show up on time. And so that is one business you have to build from day one. You have to go out and recruit high quality supply, all while building an app that can match you with a consumer who has an expectation around demand. So you have to drive demand. And now you have a two sided marketplace that have two completely different organizations, right? You have Ops, which in the services world is supply, and then you have Marketing, which in the services world is demand. And so you're like, wow, marketing and Ops are totally married together, yet they have completely different user bases. And so anyway, I learned a lot about Marketplaces.

I spent years there. The company, yes, thankfully sold to Ikea. It was a successful exit, but the playbook, honestly was very similar. Right. We had to get really focused on what we did well, we had to lean into our strengths. We had to utilize the channels because we still didn't have as much money, frankly, as some of the other home services providers. Angie's List is a good example. Postmates right thumbtack.

They were raising tens of millions of dollars. We were not. So, same thing. Young titans of industry nonetheless. Titans big, much more capital than we had. So there's a lot of parallels. The nuances of the businesses were much more different. They were much more complicated.

Like we just weren't putting juice in a bottle and setting it at a store and trying to set it high and make it fly. That wasn't services. And so I would encourage anyone who is interested in services to take a hard look about how those unit economics work because it is a much different business in the way it operates. That said, I think some of the marketing challenges are really similar.

Yeah, I mean, I have experience building Marketplaces with my first company seeded. And I think the challenge with Marketplaces is kind of what you alluded to. It's like you're building these two different sides that don't necessarily have overlap, and then also you're the one in the middle, so you're trying to the end experience that the customer receives. It is your responsibility because you're the one that facilitated the transaction. But it's also like if you have a different service provider, in our case, restaurant, that messes something up or something doesn't go well, you're responsible because you facilitated this transaction. Right. So I think what you said about taking the inventory of what is our job to do. How can we make sure that our supply side is really focused on quality so that we can have a repeatable service and really focus on the business case and then kind of lean into, like you were saying, all the different things you do.

Doing the diligence, understanding the use cases, doing the storytelling, and leaning into what's working and optimizing what's not. I think there are a lot of parallels. And then when you move into the CPG space with Cherry Bundy, you're going to have your own set of challenges that sometimes the marketplace can handle itself. Whereas in Cherubundi, you're actually responsible for shipping product, delivering product, coming up with your own thing, being manufacturing the product that ends up, in the end, consumers, in your case, body. So it's just interesting to see how understand what the unique parts are that you're able to go after and how you can apply those lessons and how they do translate because at the end of the day you're running a strategy here and you're applying those across different businesses. So that's really cool and the last thing I wanted to kind of get into before we wrap up here was your role as an operating partner with so you know, you've like we said, you've had a ton of experience operating all sorts of different businesses. So what does your role with Emil sort of look like as an operating partner and how are you involved in everything that they do?

Yeah, I got to say I'm really blessed. I think the operating model within venture firms or private equity firms isn't new. A lot of the larger venture firms have huge operating teams and the operating teams operate in one of two ways in Share Bundy we operate like legitimately operate. I am inside that company if you can't tell already pretty like every day and whether it be building teams or making executive decisions. It's one of the companies that I spend a lot of time with. The other part of the operating model which is more management consulting right. It's problem solving. And a lot of the larger venture firms have teams like that that are much more consultative.

They're brought in to give guidance on a particular issue or on helping frame an initiative connecting people to a network of individuals who can help remove challenges foreseeable in the future. But they're really the responsible the executive team to execute on that. And both of those things I do by the way. So depending on the company there's a number of companies that I am much more consultative about. I give them guidelines. Some of them are early stage so for someone like me they don't need someone like me yet they need guidance. For someone like me that can tell them be like hey, I think you have an opportunity here or hey I think that's going to be a problem. Here's how I would think about it.

I'm not going to tell you what to do but I'm going to tell you let's go through this exercise of searching and seeking together and then you solve. And that is my sort of the duality of, I think, any operating partner role at any one of these firms to any degree mine. Like I said, generally I'm more of a high touch operator, so they plug and play me into companies that need that type of guidance. And Amil has built this team over the past three plus years. So in the life of the venture firm in this space, three years is not very long, right? There's about ten to 15 of us that range over 30 plus companies one way or another in both or one of those sorts of types of commitments or responsibilities. And on the other side of the fence though is the investment team and that's the really interesting model about that ECP. So ECP is part of this like 30 plus portfolio company. One of their thesis is the future is all natural, whether that be sustainable fashion or all natural recovery or a variety of products certified organic, that they believe that that is what consumers eventually want.

So they invest in companies of various sizes and stages with that thesis in mind. And so there is a through line, right? Terra Bundy is clearly a good example of that thesis coming to life. And all of that though is done really in the investment team. So there's the operating team and the investment team. We are separate teams. We often have tons of overlap, completely different responsibilities, but it gives us a lens into them and them into us in that they start to see the challenges of operating because they're not operators, right? They make decisions most often on dollars and cents charts and graphs, Excel spreadsheets and as an operator those are helpful. But every good startup, I believe that's fighting these titans of industry, I believe, and this is my own personal bias and people will tell me like Pepsi, that I'm wrong, but that a chart and a graph isn't going to tell you what you should do. If it did, Pepsi already did it, right? They have thousands more analysts than we do with tens of millions of dollars more.

They have people studying these charts and graphs every day. Do you think little old me is going to draw out a graph and plot some companies and find white space? That is going to be a multibillion dollar idea like overnight? No, that ain't happening. So when I'm like, yeah I get it, you're saying the data says that. I'm like but if the data so obviously said that gatorade, body armor, Pepsi, Coke, someone's already tried that or they're going to be there tomorrow and then by the time we get there they're going to outspend us. So we got to think a little different about how to make operating decisions and that's the sort of Ying and the yang of the investment in the operating team model that really works well when you have good really sort of like collaboration between the teams. And at ECP, I'm happy to say that there is a lot of overlap. Good example is we ran the Hood to coast, which is the longest relay in America. We ran it two weeks ago in Portland.

It's 200 miles. You run from the Mount Hood, which is a mountain range outside of Portland, all the way to the beach in Oregon, 200 miles. Twelve of you run it. It's the longest relay in America. It took us 27 hours. 27 hours. We averaged an eight minute mile for 27 hours. That's incredible.

We have all the good feels of that as a team. We did it as a company, so it was a company cultural event. And we went in saying, this is all about team building. And that's why I'll tell you, like, team matters, as you know, as every good startup feels. But on that team, we had a number of people from the investment team who ran with us that kind of living in a van, two vans, six people each for 27 hours, you're going to get to know one another. And I guess that's what I'll leave you with, Blaine, is like, don't sleep on the people. Like chemistry, culture matters, and especially when you're making hard decisions in very fast moving categories, fighting industry titans, like, you need everyone, every brain in the game. And I think if you're committed to doing that as a human, as a person, and you actually can have real conversations that generally are about what's going on in culture versus what's going on in category, I think it's an interesting recipe that gives small companies like us chances to win.

Yeah, well, Rob, I couldn't agree with that more. It's awesome to see that. I think what you mentioned about the relationship between operating partners and investing partners, right. The fact that you guys are able to see eye to eye and understand that you're on the same team, that's really special because I totally agree where investors might be looking at something and not really see it. And as an operator, you just kind of have to get in there and you're always stuck with opportunity costs of making decisions. It's just about where you allocate your resources, right? It's resource allocation. And like you said, the graph isn't necessarily going to point that out. And you as an operator need to be able to know where are we going to get exponential turn by reallocating our resources.

So anyway, just wanted to thank you so much for coming on DTC Pod. We learned a ton today about how to approach marketing as an executive at scale. Congrats to where you guys are at with Cherry Bundy. Looking forward to keeping tabs on your continued growth. And hopefully next time around, everyone's going to know all about tart cherry, the benefits, and everyone's going to be drinking cherbundi. So thanks for coming on GTC Pod today.

Thanks, Blaine.