Welcome to DTC Pod, where we take you behind the wheel with the best founders and operators of consumer brands. You'll learn the ins and outs of business from setting up shop, hitting your first million, scaling past eight figures, and even navigating an exit. As founders ourselves, our goal is to help you learn from the best as you build. Visit us@dtcpod.com to sign up for our weekly newsletter, join our founder community and find additional resources from every episode. Dtcpod is brought to you by Trend, the creative solution for your brand. Go to trend. IO to access thousands of creators for content needs such as product photography, unboxing videos, or even TikTok. And IG organic creative. Use the code Dtcpod ten for 10% off your next content purchase. As a D to C brand, you need real time financial visibility to save money and make better decisions. Waiting for books from slow and expensive bookkeepers that don't get ecommerce is slowing you down. Trusted by hundreds of brands, final Loop is a real time accounting service built by D to C founders. For D to C. Founders try final loop. Completely free. No credit card required. Just visit Finalloop.com D to CPOD and get 14 days free and a two month PNL within 24 hours with all the ecom data and breakdowns you need to crush it. What's up, DTC Pod? Today we're joined by Robbie Salter, who is the co founder and co CEO of Jupyter. So, Robbie, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about your background and what you guys are building at Jupiter.

Yeah, of course. So, my name is Robbie Salter. I'm one of the co CEO I am the co CEO and co founder of Jupiter. Jupiter is a scalp health brand. We sell scalp care products that don't suck, which is a very low bar, but we actually make products that people love and that people look forward to using. So free of sulfates, parabens, phthalates, safe for color treated and chemically treated hair. And they won't compromise or mess up your routine. A little bit about my background. I spent six years working in the film and television industry, then left to get my JD and my MBA from Northwestern popped out. Started working in the consulting space. So primarily through a company called MediaLink, where we were focusing on the media, marketing, entertainment, and finance and technology sectors. And the intersection of that group helped grow that business from 30 people to 130 people in three years. We sold it. Boston, made a lot of money. I didn't make a lot of money. And I was in my office one day, scratching my head, saying, what am I going to do next? Looked down, saw a pile of dandruff, and had my eureka moment.

Yeah, and I'd love to talk a little bit more about that because, well, one, I think finding a company that when you're coming up with an idea for a company you're going to found it's like finding the right problem and finding a problem that you care about. So I'd love to kind of go a little bit deeper about once you had that moment, what were the next steps? Had you had real experience in the consumer goods sort of area or how do you know that this was the company for you?

Yeah, so first and foremost, I had the problem. Right. So historically when I was banging my head up against the wall saying, what's the direct to consumer business I was going to start? Because everybody was starting direct to consumer businesses, nothing felt really personal. And it really took, frankly 24 months of me stopping thinking about what type of business I was going to start and instead just started living my life. And when I discovered that this was an issue that I had and that 50% to 75% of the world shares this issue and generally speaking, nobody likes using their quote unquote blue bottle generic products. I sort of had a hunch that this was going to be a big opportunity to tackle to prove that it wasn't just me or my business partner that thought this way, we launched a fake brand online, driving traffic to this landing page and at checkout it would say, oops, we're not ready yet. But if you leave your information and answer some questions, we'll give you 20% off when we launch. And that was a really pivotal moment because it told us, or people told us, real consumers or potential consumers told us what they were really looking for in scalp health products. Like I said before, no synthetic fragrances, sulfate, paraben, phthalate free, safer color treated hair, safer chemically treated hair. But the big discovery was that women were being totally left out of the conversation that it wasn't simply guys like you and I were looking for something better, but also women were really looking for something that wouldn't compromise their hair routines.

And why don't you tell me a little bit about the competitors in the space? Right. So you realize you have this problem as do a whole bunch of other people. What were the solutions? And besides, just like the ingredients and maybe you can talk to me about form factor, brand, all that kind of stuff, but what were the signals that the problem itself isn't being treated in a good enough way to warrant you going after and starting a company?

Yeah, again, I sort of poke fun at them, but the truth is we have tremendous, tremendous respect for the incumbent brands. Right. So the head and shoulder, Selson, Blue, Nyser, Ltgel, Nioxin, they've been addressing a need that millions of people, again, 50% of the world has been dealing with their entire lives. What we just discovered is that they weren't speaking to us or delivering us a product that was in Blaine with what we were looking for. And specifically in line with our lifestyle. So we knew that better was possible. Something that felt a little bit more elevated. When you looked across the category, other categories, and you saw there was innovation being done, both from a packaging perspective, a formulation perspective, a messaging perspective. We just knew that there was opportunity. Again, Head and Shoulders is case in point. The official shampoo sponsor of the NFL that isn't speaking to women, right? It is addressing a community that really is going to be open and aware of those products. But we wanted to create a product that felt more in line with those who may not watch football or may not be captivated by the football games, but may be passively watching the game. So it was really just looking at the Normandy of the market and also the positioning of the existing products. But to be clear, I think the biggest moment also came. One of the bigger moments came for us when we discovered that there were only five ingredients that one could use or put in their products to be called a dandruff care product. So we said, hey, if we can figure out which ingredient we wanted to use among these five and then build from there, we had a pretty good shot at least being as effective, if not more effective, than the incumbents that had been around 30, 40, 50 years.

And one thing I really like about kind of how you thought about going to market in the early days was the fact that you were like, there is an established market. It's just broader and bigger. The messaging is a little bit different because I think a lot of, especially first time founders, you'll see a lot of people trying to tackle problems that maybe don't really exist and that there actually isn't a market for. Whereas you guys were like, there's a major market for this, and we can start a little bit more niche, targeted and specific, but at the end of the day, it's a really big market that you guys can ultimately grow into.

Yeah, I think a lot of companies look at the existing brands and say, hey, we want to pull market share from them, right? We never thought we're going to beat Head and Shoulders at their own game. Right? They've been doing this for a long time. They spend billions of dollars on advertising. What we wanted to do is we wanted to target and address the customers who weren't buying Head and Shoulders. And there was a portion let's purely look at the statistics here, right? 50% of the world gets dandruff at some point in their lives. 50% of the world is female. 50% of women color, treat or chemically treat their hair. So you're looking at effectively twelve and a half percent of the world's population that doesn't have a dandruff health product that aligns with their hair care routine. So if we can go after that twelve and a half percent and do it really well. We're not upsetting Head and Shoulders, we're carving out our young, unique position. And sure, if some of the Head and Shoulders customers switch over to us, that's Grady, but that was never the intent.

Yeah, actually funny you mentioned this, and this is kind of like a sidebar, but for me personally, I started using I think it's keeps so I don't totally go both, but I started using that and the minoxidil stuff really dried out my scalp. So now my routine is I have some oil or something that I'll put in after just because if I don't, it's like the itchiest head ever. But is that something that you guys take care of or help out with?

Oh, absolutely, yeah. I mean, listen, there is the stigma in the industry that with the word dandruff. Right? So Danforth really is a catch all title. It generally addresses the notion of flaking, but it also incorporates the idea of itchiness tightness redness. From a medical perspective, dandruff equals separate dermatitis, which means an overproduction of oil on the scalp. And again, I don't mean to get too technical here, but the bottom line is what Jupiter does is our active ingredient in our Hero product, which is our shampoo, is intended to control oil production, to moderate oil production. But then our conditioner includes things like colloidal oatmeal, which smooths the skin. Right. Another shout out to a very successful brand here, Aveno. If you've ever heard of the company Aveno. Aveno is just the name of the company is from the Latin derivation of the word like Avenus, which means oatmeal or colloidal oatmeal. We put colloidal oatmeal in our products because it soothes the skin. So in your case, you could absolutely use or shouldn't be using our shampoo to clean the scalp, rebalance your oil production, and then our conditioner to add hydration and moisturization while also soothing your scalp. So you're a perfect candidate. Blaine I love it.

I'm going to give it a shot. But a couple of things that you also mentioned that I want to get into. One, you were just talking about your Hero product being the shampoo and saying that when you guys did launch, you spun up some landing pages. You tested and validated the concept before going into any mass scale production. So the couple of questions that I have are when you were just starting out and you launched that landing page, right, were you guys testing for specifically that shampoo? And then also what stage of the business were you in? Were you already in discovery mode with potential manufacturers? Like how far along had the brand come? How sure were you that this was something that you were pursuing? Or were you just like putting up a whole bunch of different landers about different things and validating before even getting there?

Yeah, so it's a lot of questions, all good questions at that point, we had already made the commitment that we were going to do this. I think what makes a good entrepreneur, one of the qualities that makes a good entrepreneur is a great level of comfort looking stupid when asking questions, right? So you have to have this natural curiosity, right? So when we said, hey, the size of the market looks really interesting, it's a very personal problem that we personally want to solve this. And worst case scenario, and we produce 15,000 bottles of this stuff, we're going to use it ourselves. Right? But at that point, when we created those landing pages, we were starting formulation, and we were right at the point where we had to start making decisions as to what was included and what wasn't included. So really, the results came at a perfect time because it allowed us to say, hey, we should be including more ingredients that would reduce hair breakage, which is a major concern for women. Right? So our shampoo reduces hair breakage by 75%, which is enormous for a dandruff product. So it was little bits and pieces at that point in the journey that were helping us with the formulation. To be clear, we didn't even know what products we were to launch with. I mean, it was a fake company with fake products. I think it was a shampoo conditioner and serum, which was an early sneaking suspicion. We had an early sneaking suspicion that those were going to be some of the products that we were launching, but we had no clue, really. So it was good to see that those early premonitions were validated, but truly, we had no clue.

No. That's amazing. And the only other question that I have in terms of spinning up and validating the concept and the site is, when you did that, from a technical standpoint, how are you guys doing that? Was it in shopify? Were you using another tool to drive traffic and capture emails?

It was an instapage. So it took us three days to create fake branding. It took us maybe a week to put together the landing page, and then it took us three or four days to drain, call it $10,000 worth of ad spend or media spend to really drive traffic to these landing pages. We had a variety of landing pages where we were ABCDE testing, variable testing. It didn't take us long to drain that spend to gather the data that we were looking for.

So, yeah, no, that's super helpful. And then beyond that, so now we validated the idea. We know the problem, we're solving the problem. Talk to me a little bit about the initial, like, how you guys found the manufacturer that you're working with, what other components were involved. Because like you said, there's formulation, there's packaging, and in the personal care space, it's a little bit different than food or, like food and bev or apparel or stuff like that. So, yeah, I would love some insight in terms of who'd you go talk to. What decisions were you considering? What type of MOQ were you dealing with the first time around? And how did you find the manufacturer that you worked?

Yeah. So at that point, it was just myself and the first founder. So there's two partners that I have. Two founding partners that I have. Ross stood hard and Alexa Adler. At that point, it was just Ross and I. Ross has a history of building physical products, so he kind of knew, generally speaking, how to build a physical product. My background was mostly in building or supporting the build of digital products. Again, it goes back to this idea of not feeling stupid or uncomfortable asking questions. So I just hit LinkedIn, right? Like, I just hit everybody who had any brand that was a shampoo or beauty product. And I would just try to buy them coffee and sit down and say, like, how was this made? Who do I talk to? Where do I go? And after five of those coffees, people were pretty much saying the same thing, like, this is where you find the manufacturers. You should reach out to my cousin. He's done something like this. Or my aunt is big in a beauty world. So it was just sort of going down the paths and see which got us to the promised land first. Eventually, we found a number of manufacturers that, frankly, wouldn't really return our phone calls, because they get calls and inquiries every day from idiots like us saying, hey, we want to start a company. And there's no level of seriousness to those inquiries most of the time. But we were very fortunate that we came across a team of consultants at a company called SOS Beauty whose job is to help us get in the door, to help us select and then work with manufacturers. They were young and starting their business and hungry to get our business. And we were very fortunate that they found us and we found them at the same time. And they got us in the door to some of these manufacturers that simply weren't returning our phone calls.

Sweet. And then from there, once you guys start talking to the manufacturers tell me a little bit about that process. What were you? Because, like you were saying, you're building. You know, there's certain ingredients that are going to work. You're going to be working with formulation to get there. Walk me through that whole process.

Yeah. So part of working with consultant like SOS Beauty is they're able to see around the corner. They have years of expertise in telling us, hey, you don't want to include that ingredient or this ingredient. Or maybe you should include this ingredient, which currently isn't in the products. Again, I'm extremely fortunate that my business partner, Ross, he has just this endless appetite for research, especially as it relates to product development. And he just you know, the learning curve for him was very quick, where he just dove deep into this industry and really research every ingredient under the sun and really got familiar with what should be included and what shouldn't be included. So we were exceptionally fortunate that the contractor or the formulator that we reached out to, when we told them our idea, they were like, thank God you're doing this. We've been telling some of our clients to do this for ten years and nobody's been listening to us. We're so excited to work on this. We have so many ideas. We have stuff that we've been building in house that we'd love to share with you. So again, it was one of these moments and these ideas that everybody wanted to do it, and it just seems so obvious, but nobody took the leap. And again, I think we had that perfect combination of courage, hubris and stupidity to dive in the deep end and just say, hey, we can do this and we can do it really well. And if it doesn't work out, then we will have learned a lot. We would have taken on a big challenge.

Sweet. So now you've got the manufacturing kind of set up, you've got your partner, you've got the formulation taken care of. Talk to me a little bit about going back and going to your product launch. Right. What products are you actually launching with? Where are you? Did you have a three PL? Were you storing this in house? How big was your first production run? Walk me through the launch of the brand, if you will.

Yeah. Again, a lot of questions in there. But at that point, we had made the determination that, one, we knew from a dermatological perspective that a two in one is never going to do as good of a job as two and two. Right. So 1st 1st step is decouple the two in one, which that in of itself makes a lot of men uncomfortable or pulls them out of our target market. Right. Men want to get in and out of the shower as quickly as physically possible. If you have a scalp issue, you're more open to taking the advice of dermatologists as to what to do. So at the beginning we said, okay, we're taking the two in one and we're splitting it up. Shampoo and conditioner. We then thought about the communities that have things like protective hairstyles or wear wigs or extensions or don't wash their hair as frequently. So we developed a serum that was effectively our shampoo just out of the shower, intended to extend the wash while also controlling oil production. So that third product was pretty important. We had an Exfoliating Mask, which was sort of like a cosmetic spa product. And then at the time, we had an elixir, a soothing elixir, so something to put in your hair or on your scalp in the middle of the day, if you had some sort of discomfort and then finally a physical explorient of brush. So we launched with five SKUs, knowing that there were some people who really wanted the kitchen sink and some people who would only want the shampoo and conditioner.

No, absolutely. And I'm very curious because again, a lot of companies will launch with just one particular SKU. You were going after a problem and like you said, there's a bunch of different tools in that tool set to kind of tackle with. So I'd love to learn a little bit more about when you were launching. How did you see it go? What did sales for different products look like? How did you build the processes? Because each one of those has different packaging. So was your packaging, for example, was that done by the manufacturer? How do you organize all of these to launch with five SKUs instead of just one?

Yeah, so we launched in probably the worst week in 100 years to launch a business which was awesome. Don't encourage anybody to do that. And when we were launching, it was also around the time when unboxing was a thing, right? You open your package and you have this beautiful box with amazing messaging and it's custom made for you. And in many respects, it was even more expensive than the product itself because of the modularity of what we were doing. Meaning like, people would buy one of this, one of that, two of this, we couldn't do this beautiful unboxing experience and we were a little nervous about it. The truth was, in hindsight, we were spot on. At the end of the day, I don't think people really care about the package that they received. And in many cases, it's no disrespect to anybody who has a yellow Corvette, but it's kind of like driving a yellow Corvette, right? Like overcompensating for something. Right. So for us, our focus was exclusively on products. Packaging wasn't as much of a concern, even though we wanted it to be beautiful and we wanted it to align with our brand, which is elevated because we use elevated ingredients. In that case, we were extremely fortunate that one of our investors happened to own a packaging supply company. So we leaned on that company to really help with our first run. And it was all a shot in the dark. We had no idea whether or not the quantities were going to be sufficient, whether or not we were going to have a crazy surplus. But when we opened our doors and we got our first customer who basically ordered the entire thing, the kitchen sink, and it wasn't one of our friends and it wasn't one of our family members. It was just a random person in upstate New York who was exactly the target of person that we were going for. We knew that we had made the right decisions and that we were on to something good.

It's a crazy feeling right when you put your baby out there and it's like the first non someone that you don't actually know and you see them in your product and you're like, wait, what?

Oh yeah. I mean, I remember the first you launched. We had like literally we launched probably at like three or 04:00 p.m. That day. And at the end of the day, we had like 50 orders and we're like, holy shit, where is hick part? I don't know if we can wear in here, but we got like, holy shit, this is going to be amazing. And I can't believe people actually want this stuff. And again, as an entrepreneur, you just kind of have to have that confidence that you're not the only one who has this need or wants the same thing you do. You could be totally wrong. And by the way, we can still be wrong. Just because we've made really good momentum so far doesn't mean that in ten years we're a going concern. It's again, this combination of stupidity and hubris and confidence.

You just kind of have to believe, oh, 100%. My next question is kind of around after you guys have launched, right? So clearly we've got a whole bunch of people coming in the door. People are liking it. Other people share the same problem that you guys have. You've launched with a whole bunch of different SKUs. What is the next kind of why don't you walk me through that post launch phase? Right. What are some of the key learnings from launch that if you had to look back that maybe you would have changed and say, oh, this is a key learning that we integrated into our product that we're able to take forward. And then I guess the other question that's kind of along those same lines is just like just characterize what else happened, I guess in your first couple weeks or months live?

Yeah, I mean, listen, I'll even back up and say and just reiterate one of the most important puzzle pieces here, which is our third partner, Alexa. Right. When Ross and I launched, when we came up with the idea, we knew that we needed somebody who had a phenomenal customer experience background. We was able to answer questions in a technical manner despite it not being a medical office or practice. Right. So which company did that best? And that was warby. Parker So we looked at Warby Parker to try to find somebody who was willing to jump ship and start and join our journey. Unfortunately, we convinced a lother to do that. She had been one of the leaders of the Customer experience team over there, so she was integral into helping us think about how do we prepare for any questions from our customers, how do we get ahead of proactively answer questions that they may be asking us. And then when it came time to launch, we were much more prepared because of her. And, frankly, having a female voice at a seat at the table, it just brought us a perspective that we really needed, frankly. So post launch some learnings. For me, brand is everything, right? At the beginning, I was so concerned with every pixel and making it perfect and making every image absolutely perfect, frankly, to my detriment, what I discovered, or what we discovered, is that perfection is the enemy of good. Right? I think that's the phrase. Really, what happened was we were spending too much time on making it perfect, when in reality we could iterate more and quickly, and we didn't have to spend a ton of money on some of these things, like photo shoots, frankly, that we would have to do ten more in the next year and a half, two years. So it really gave us perspective that we have to change creative regularly, and at the same time, learn what creative is working and what creative isn't working. Keep what works and get rid of the stuff that does.

Yeah, I think that's actually such a really it's such a fascinating topic, and I think a lot of people who get into the space are naturally brand conscious people, right. If you're thinking about launching a consumer brand or product, you have your own take, you have an aesthetic, you have your personality, you want that to come through. But I think there's this really interesting dichotomy between brand and creative. Like you were saying, right? Like, brand, you want certain things, you want your brand to speak the same way, you want it to be uniform, et cetera. But on the creative side, what works in organic social land is changing every minute of every day, right? So being able to iterate test put things out there. I think we saw, even if you back up a couple of different years, think like, 510 years ago, it was like everything was super high production. And then especially when Instagram started first coming out, right? And then, you know, TikTok comes out and everything's like it's like the opposite stuff is like, really performing. It's like the UGC that you, like, see, and you're like, oh, my God. It's like just someone in front of a green screen pointing at things and being like, oh, you should use this. And people are loving it. So there's always that pendulum, and things are always changing. It's important.

And by the way, that's in the visual form, right. At one point, audio is a big thing, and people were talking all about Clubhouse, and I never understood Clubhouse, and they didn't do anything on Clubhouse because I spent my days on conference calls. Why would I want to spend the rest of my day like my downtime on conference calls? But it's just this reminder there's so many levers you can pull and so many different things that you can do. There's this obviously the perpetual question or this notion of, does brand.

Matter.

And I think the answer is yes, maybe, right? Brand matters to get people in the door. But product quality will always be the most important thing. So you have to be pretty, but also good. And I'm exceptionally proud that I think our products are beautiful, but they also work. It's one of the reasons why we spent so much time on product development and why we offer 100% guarantee on our products.

100%. I think that is like if I had to summarize everything that you would learn about brand. Brand is very important and you need to be able to get it right because it builds trust. But at the end of the day, if you have a great branded product that doesn't do what it says it does, then people are going to go elsewhere and people are looking for utility a lot of the times, especially in these sort of products. Right. So if you say you do something and you don't do it, and maybe another brand has it's not as aesthetically pleasing, but it does the job, people are going to go there. So I think that's really good. And also what you were saying about just iteration, right? It's, iterating, it's testing, it's messaging, it's creative, it's all the different things. And being able to constantly understand why and what and having a lens through your brand to identify the winners, double down on them and apply them in the lens of your brand, I think that's the way to do it. So that leads me into my next question about after you've launched, after you've scaled, you've seen creative work, you've seen the product start to resonate, what are the next big steps for the business that you have to take either from an operational perspective or just a scaling perspective? What are the next things that you start to kind of focus on?

Yeah, I mean, for us, a lot of it was about supply chain and keeping up with demand. So we had a pretty tough 2022 because we went out of stock on our shampoo and conditioner, which are our Hero products. And it was to no fault of our own, right. The world was falling apart. The supply chain for most companies, most physical product companies was in disarray. But we thought that we had established a solid supply chain. Long story short is we had an issue with our manufacturer. We went out of stocks where, if you can believe it, almost ten months of our Hero products. Off and on, collectively. Ten months. Really what was at that time, the next big hurdle was how do we focus our attention on the other products and really sell how amazing they were without losing the customers that were so used to using and so happy with and so committed to the shampoo conditioner. And if you've ever gotten dandruff and flakes dryness, itchiness redness, whatever. It's really embarrassing, or can be really embarrassing when you find a product that works, we become like drug dealers. I need this, give this to Me as quickly as physically possible. And if you run out of those drugs, again, making a terrible metaphor here, but it's really accurate. There's a chance that you lose that customer base. So what we had to do is we really had to think on our feet about how do we redirect the attention to products, how do we keep our existing customers happy, how do we prioritize the customers, our subscription customers, more important than one time purchasers? So it's really learning extremely hard questions early on and at the same time thinking about inventory planning. So how do we make sure that this never is an issue again? Do we split up manufacturing? Do we place larger orders? What impact will that have on our finances? Can we find Creative financing so we can make these bigger bets? So Again, I think one of the biggest challenges that any physical product company will have perpetualty is again inventory and Planet. So that was really, I'd say the big next step for us was, hey, we're not just this tiny little lifestyle brand, we're Real. And now we're having real problems, big Boy, Big girl problems that we really need to, that we really need to resolve if we're going to scale to be the company we know we can be.

Wow, that's crazy. I feel like you always hear it, especially in Ecommerce where people sell out of inventory, they can't do it. But I'd love to talk about what actions you are actually taking to address it, what actions you've since taken to remedy it, so you're able to have inventory planned on much better. But also when it happened. I know you said you started focusing on other products and how you were able to keep customers happy and satiated. From a communication standpoint, what did communication look like with the customers around your hero products and around other products? And how did you keep them as engaged as you could while you were sourcing more product to have on the way?

Totally. I mean, listen, because of my background in working with some fairly big names, both on the celebrity side when I was working film and television production, working with big corporate names as a consultant, honesty is always the best policy. Right. I don't understand when a lot of these big personalities don't admit when they were wrong because it just drags out the moment. So in plain, it was just being honest. We were in a really bad spot. It wasn't intended. We're young, we're trying to figure out how to scale this business and we appreciate your patience. We understand that these products are important to you. So One, we gave them a break when they decided to come back to us, so we offered them an incentive to come back to us. And then two, we explained to them that, for example, our serum, which contains the same active ingredient as our shampoo. I mentioned that earlier. We conveyed that, hey, if you don't have the shampoo, this will do just as good of a job. But it's outside of the shower. It's a different application method that you're used to, but it's still going to do the trick. And here are some of the other tools that you can use or the tips that you can use in order to stave off some of that discomfort that you're experiencing. But again, it goes back to honesty, right? When people were raising prices in 2021 and 2022, there's two approaches. One, you just increase the price and hope people don't notice. Or instead you increase the price and you tell them, hey, we're increasing the price. And this is why can't get around the fact that it's a shitty situation, but at least if you can be upfront about it and communicate about it, it makes it a little easier.

Yeah, I totally agree. Communication and being upfront. People are smart, right? Especially shoppers, and they know when they're being jerked around and being able to just communicate clearly and effectively, people are willing to listen. I always notice that from a CX point of view, so long as you're willing to talk to them, they're willing to listen. So I think that from a brand perspective, that's like the right way to handle something.

Yeah, listen, take a step back. We're a company that gives 5% of our proceeds back to mental health causes, right? And part of my belief is that part of being mentally healthy is also just frankly being honest with yourself about your feelings. And we find that it's so much easier to be honest with each other and honest about and honest with our customers rather than sugar things. And true to this podcast, I want to be clear to you and your listeners, I am not a scion of the dandruff industry, right? My kids and grandkids are quote unquote, taken care of, right? I'm hustling every day just like everybody else is. I don't have all the answers. All I have is my experiences. And all we have are our experiences and our passion for this product in this category. And we're betting that that passion and the quality of the product is going to make us win or it's going to help us win, but we don't really know. So again, in a sphere of honesty, we want to be honest. We want to be honest with our customers.

Absolutely. My next question going off something you mentioned, right? You mentioned mental health. How that's a really important part of what you guys do at Jupiter. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about the background about mental health, specifically how it ties into your brand, your mission and the whole ethos of the company.

Yeah, for sure. We had the idea for the business in late 2017, left our jobs or what we were doing in late 2018. 2019 is when we really started focusing on the business and going full time on it. We had always felt, as people who had Alexa Ross and myself, I always felt that Dandor for Sculpt discomfort was one of those things that made you feel super uncomfortable and that we ourselves felt insecure when we had it. So we knew that there was a mental health component to everything that we were doing. We also just felt like it was an area that was totally being that wasn't being discussed. And if you look back in time like 2018, people weren't really talking about medwell health the way that they are today. When we started to do some research on the category and the sort of psychological aspects of having Dandruff, we found that it wasn't, again, just us, that we were hearing these horror stories of a girl who was in Korea and she was being bullied about her dandruff. So she killed her parents and she killed herself over it. And it's just like, again, these horror stories. And having also appreciated, I wouldn't say being bullied in high school, but certainly being picked on as a kid who hit puberty late in life, we just generally knew that that wasn't a feeling we wanted anybody to ever feel. And we certainly didn't want to contribute to an industry that oftentimes makes you feel worse because you don't look a certain way. So very early on, we established this idea that we're going to do well while also doing good. So we decided to allocate 5% of our proceeds to mental health resources. Today we work with three different charities, or 501, that we think are doing an excellent job. One is project Healthy Minds. Another is Land illegal. And the other one is truck project. Really, our intention is to always have people feel good about what's on their head is what's in their head. And I should also say that in addition to the 5%, we give people the opportunity to donate 5% of their orders over $85 to any mental health charity of their choice, not just those three charities. Because again, we know that beauty in general and Dandruff and stealth care in general can be something that drives a tremendous amount of insecurity and we want to be involved and associate with the opposite.

I love that. I love the healthy inside and out. I totally agree with that. That's really great. And then another thing I want to talk about is kind of your background outside of Jupiter and stuff you've worked on. So you've done some investing as well. Why don't you tell me about kind of what else you do?

Yeah, sure. So when I was launching or during the period of time when I was putting together Jupiter, I had to continue to contribute to Rent, right. My wife wasn't going to just let me skate off scot free. So I said, I'm going to have to work nights and weekends in order to pay those bills. So I said, oh, that's kind of an interesting idea. I'm going to start a company called Nights and Weekend. So Nights and Weekends today, it originally started as a brand strategy or consultancy, supporting brands of all sizes. Think about their creative positioning. Today Nights and Weekends is really focused on creative headhunting. So it got to the point where people were saying to me, hey, love your work. Do you want to come and be the Chief Brand Officer or do you want to come be the Chief Marketing Officer, XYZ? And I said, I can't because I'm about to go start this business, Jupiter. And they said, okay, but do you know somebody who could do this? And because of my network, I was able to place those people. But eventually I was getting so many calls for the do you know this person or a person who can do XYZ? So I said, hey, it's a little bit of a better business model here, maybe if I don't do the work. And instead my work is finding the right fit for these companies. So today Nights and Weekends, who is run by my partner? I don't really have anything to do with it other than being an owner and owner of the business is we help source, call it director plus level executives for the visual or spoken words. So part time, project based or full time copywriters art directors, creative directors, chief brand officers. So that takes up a portion of my time, a little bit of my time. And then the other stuff I'd like to do is supporting other funds and founders. So I'm invested in a number of venture capital funds and private equity funds, and then also I've invested directly into a number of startups as well.

That's amazing. Yeah. Talent. It's such a big market. Finding the right person for the right role and the right fit. It's always a tough job, but if you can do it, it's huge. You're a matchmaker. Yeah, right?

Totally. And if listen, as somebody responsible for three marriages, you got three I got three mitzvahs. Three mitzvahs. That's right. One of my greatest joys is giving other people joy, right. Is helping people find the right person for them, maritally or professionally. It's something I love to do and something I think I'm pretty good at. So I learned from the best, a guy named Michael Cassin. And now these days, I'm just sort of taking all the learnings that he gave me and doing it as a little bit of a side hustle to help keep the lights on at home.

That's awesome. And Robbie, as we wrap up here, I had one last question that I wanted to ask you. You said you're co CEO, so what does that look like in practice? I know it's something that I've seen from a couple of different companies but typically there's one CEO and a COO. But so tell me a little bit about what it looks like in the day to day. What does being co CEO look like?

Yeah. It's having a best friend who is totally opposite from you. Right. So, Ross Goodheart is my partner and co CEO in the business. We quibble and like an old married couple, and we can get into huge fights, but at the same time, make up right after and send text right after that say, I love you. And good discussion. Being a co CEO is having a best friend that, you know, has a different skill set from you and is going to push back on you and is going to treat the business equally as it's theirs. In the operating agreement of our business, we have ways of resolving any disputes, but we've never had to use any of those methods because at the end of the day, we trust one another. And I think we are extremely fortunate that Alexa is there, frankly, to also help moderate or mediate excuse me when there are some disagreements and to help us get to a resolution. Being a co CEO is really just having a partner in crime who is going to require you to do your best work in a way that doesn't feel like, hey, you're my subordinate. You answer to me.

Yeah, I love that. And I think, like you're saying, in these type of businesses, trust is so important. Being able to build with people that you really respect, love building with, and have a separate sort of skill set that's really complementary. So, as we wrap up here, where can our listeners connect with you or you on LinkedIn or you on Twitter? Where can we find more about you and Jupiter?

Yeah, sure. Less about me and more about Jupiter. So you can find us@hellojupiter.com you can find us at hello, Jupiter on Instagram or Jupiterhair on TikTok. But if you do want to find me, I am on LinkedIn. Just look up my name. R-O-B-B-I-E. Last name salter. S-A-L-T-E-R. Would love to help out any founder or frankly, just hear anybody's stories. And again, if I can be helpful in any way, shape or form, that's what we're honored to do is to help each other out.

So whenever I can be sweet. Well, thanks for coming on the show, Robbie.

Thanks for having me. It's been pleasure you.

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