What's up, Dtcpod? Today we're joined by Vasa Martinez, who's the founder and CEO of Perfy. So, Vasa, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about the beverage brand you're building and maybe some of your experience.

In the past as well. Yeah, I'll start with the experience in the past and finish that up with Perfy. I started my career as an unpaid intern at Quest Nutrition. I was working in the nightlife industry after I graduated from UCLA for five or six years, and there was no jobs. It was terrible recession that we probably all remember. And I'd swallowed my pride, started working in the service industry, got tired of that, saw literally an ad on Craigslist that said, unpaid marketing intern. I was like, yep, I'll do that. And going from making a ton of money in the nightlife industry to an unpaid intern was a bit of a change, but ultimately was able to work my way in to a full time salary and learned there for four years.

After that, I was able to create my own social media marketing agency called Growthbuster, where I was able to learn a lot from a bunch of different brands that we've worked with, like Magic Spoon, Legendary Foods, Outer Al, Gourmet, tons of other brands too. And then after four years, five years of that, I was winning a bunch of awards for the agency, not just me, like the team was. And I felt like just it wasn't doing the trick for my personal reason for being. Simultaneously, I had undergone a tremendous amount of loss from my mom getting diagnosed with a sickness, to misdiagnose, to rediagnose, to losing my best friend of Fentanyl, my old roommate of five years, to suicide. And it was ultimately like about 18 friends and family members I lost in that course of five years. So I dug deeper and deeper into the agency, and it's no wonder why the agency did well, but my personal health went to shit. So I wanted to do something that was a little bit more impactful. And I'm a huge fan of soda.

And I saw that there was a trending type of soda out there for gut health. And I was like, well, I love soda, and I need to take these supplements because I don't take any prescriptions or anything like that. I'm not about not even over the counter stuff. I was buying, like Ltheanine and Ashwagandha stuff like pills. I was like, what if I applied these two things together and created a soda that's just as delicious as a full sugar soda, not even a diet soda, way more delicious than a sparkling water and had it be good for your brain. So that was the idea there. The mental fitness market is three times the size of the functional carbonated soft drink market. So there was some strategy there in the positioning, but ultimately it was based out of need.

And Perfy is actually I didn't even tell you what Perfi is. It's a low sugar enhanced with nootropics and adaptogens. It's got LDnine in all four flavors, ashwagandha and two and Turmeric and two no.

And it's so meaningful being able to work on a brand not only you have domain expertise in, but also that has, like, personal meaning to be able to go after. So that's awesome to hear. And the question that I'd have around that, that I'd kind of like to go into before we get into Perfi is let's talk about some of the agency stuff. Right. Obviously, working with some of the top brands you've been able to learn from, kind of the best in the industry and help them scale up different initiatives. So what were you working on in the agency? What were some of the initiatives that you were taking on with these brands, and what were some of the key learnings that you were able to learn across all these multiple brands you were working with?