Hey everyone, we're super excited to announce the launch of our Slack community for D two C pod. This is a space exclusively for D two C 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 sales hub what is going on? DTC Pod today we are joined by Benjamin Witte, who is the founder and CEO of Recess. So Ben, really excited to kick it off with you. Why don't you just tell us a little bit about yourself and the brand and maybe how you guys got started originally.

Yeah, awesome. Great to be here. So at first my background spent the first six years of my career in Silicon Valley. I was in San Francisco from 2010 to 2016 at two different startups, actually both in the marketing technology space. My first startup out of college was like a three person startup that was building an influencer marketing platform for social media back in 2010, which was just a little too early. This is the right idea at the wrong time. That should have launched on MySpace to give you a sense of where the world was at the time, but learned a lot about startups and what mistakes not to make and also got to think about how do you build a brand in a social media driven world from the earliest days, which ended up being pretty relevant for recess. From there, I joined another ad tech startup called Adderall that I pioneered retargeting ads.

Basically I was there from 15 people to 600 people and had a bunch of different leadership positions at the company and saw what basically a high growth startup was like. But always knew I ultimately wanted to start my own company and also recognize my passions and strengths were better suited for consumer. Ive always been kind of more of a creative at art and so kind of knew I wanted to do something in the consumer space. And so I kind of quit my job and kind of went out on my own in around 2016. And that period in time is kind of when it started to feel to me like we were entering this new period in history, kind of driven by technology, was leaving us kind of increasingly stressed out and anxious. And so I just had this kind of thesis and mental model that in the future that we were entering, people would be prioritizing their mental wellness and looking for healthier ways to reduce stress and relax as compared to things like alcohol, even tobacco, and these kind of pre existing and unhealthy forms of relaxation. And then shortly thereafter, kind of observed the rise of this kind of new class of functional ingredients such as CBD, adaptogenic herbs, magnesium, nootropics, even THC that people are increasingly using to relax. And that kind of insight was the common property amongst all those ingredients was that people were using them to relax.

And I kind of had this light bulb moment of Red Bull for relaxation. Think of the ingredients as the inputs coming into this fundamentally new class of beverage, but also many other product types that would ultimately emerge that had this consumer value proposition of healthy relaxation. And yeah, that was how I thought about the initial market opportunity and I decided to move forward on working on building the brand, the initial formula, and ultimately creating a business to go after the opportunity.