What's up, DTC Pod? Today we've got Dylan Mentor On, who is the founder and CEO of Bear Balance. So Dylan, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your background and what you guys are building at Bear Balance.

Yeah, first and foremost, thanks for having me and hello audience. My name, like it was just aforementioned, is Dylan mentor. I'm the founder and CEO of Bear Balance. We are the creators of the world's first Creatine Gummy. Now, I know a lot of ladies and gents out there. It's probably a good split 50 50 between those of you who know what Creatine is and those of you that don't. So just a quick look through my lens and the PhDs in the space. We refer to it as a super supplement. So exercise, performance, nootropic benefits, cognition and overall brain health, as well as an extremely wide spectrum of general health benefits that, for the sake of the length of the podcast, I won't mention here today, but we've been in business for about three years now. A year the first year spent doing R and D. This was a very tough product to bring to market, but now we're able to share it with the fitness, the wellness and health enthusiasts all over the world. Being the first in the space, creating the category, it wasn't easy, but we're.

Happy to be here, no. So I'm excited. I think we're going to have a lot to talk about on this episode. A couple of things that come to mind. One, I know you guys had started out and you bootstrapped, the whole thing yourself. So I want to talk about that. I want to talk about the origin of the brand, what went into R and D, and then maybe we can talk about the industry you're in, specifically supplements, and how you see the market evolving. So why don't we just start with the origin story? Why don't you tell us a little bit about your background first, and then let's get into what were you doing before you started? Bare balanced?

Yes. Obviously, I didn't go to school for making gummies. I didn't grow up watching too much. Gordon Ramsay the Confectionery trade. All I knew about it is that's where candy comes from. I actually happened to be wearing one of my old work shirts today. This is a SpaceX T shirt for those. I don't know if this is going to be a video that you guys can see, but I am indeed wearing a shirt that I've built probably a couple of dozen rockets in over the course of three years, leading up to the inevitable leave from SpaceX to do bare balance full time. But I was building rockets hands on the actual rocket. Blood, sweat and tears, ten to 12 hours a day, six to seven days a week. It's a pretty fun operation they have there. It's very demanding, both physically and mentally. I was actually taking creatine the entire time I was working there, and it actually helped me sort of with those longer days, both when the coffee stopped kicking in and when your body gets tired, things like creatine. I'd been taking it for 15 years, and that was a pivotal time for me, because when I was making rockets or building rockets, I actually started making creatine gummies in the kitchen. And this was sort of just as a way to cater to the friends of mine that I worked out with from work as well as myself. I know a lot of them had they had made it audible when we would go take our pre workout and things like creatine prior to working out after work, that they hated it. They hated creatine. They loved taking it, but hated the residual powder left over. They mentioned that they're wasting money. It's gritty. It sticks onto your teeth. So they have creatine on their teeth when they're working out. For some reason. There hadn't been any creatines that were popularized with flavor additives or sort of those things that could just make the experience overall more pleasant. So that's where we came in. It was just me and one friend in particular who really pushed the gummy idea, and his girlfriend was actually the first one to mention it. And it was kind of just like a snide comment. If you guys don't like it that much, why don't you just take the gummy bears? I'm sure there's a gummy. And at the time when she initially said it, we didn't really look at each other and have this light bulb explode over our heads. It was sort of just like, yeah, why don't we take the gummies? But lo and behold, we did some research. I primarily did a lot of digging. The two of us were super interested with it at first. This friend of mine was more of a gym rat work friend that didn't want to get into building a business and creating this creatine gummy, this confectionery kitchen project. But this was something that I realized was this was going to be really cool. I have an engineering degree. A lot of chemistry goes into just like the prerequisites in order to get that associates. And I've always loved that stuff. So I took it upon myself to get into the kitchen and start figuring it out.

Yeah, and I love that because a lot of times they say it doesn't take a rocket scientist to build a CPT brand, but sometimes it does. So as soon as you guys kind of identified a problem and you realized that, hey, maybe there's something here, what were the next steps in actually productizing bare balance, right? So you've got an idea of a form factor you want to go after, you've got the concept behind it, maybe some ingredients that you're going to go into your mixture. But now let's talk about that step of actually starting a brand. Who's the first phone call? Are you looking for manufacturers? Are you looking for product? How do you turn that idea into your brand? What were your steps?

Yeah, so definitely a stubborn entrepreneur at heart. Never wanted to take on any sort of initial investing or partners that wanted to stake in the business. And so going into it, I knew that whatever is going to be done in these earlier on product development stages, it's going to be all me. I need to figure this out. I need to understand how it works. So the first thing I started doing, and I don't know how this correlates to other founders that want to bring an awesome product to the space or to any category, but I started looking at patents and I started looking at gummy formulas because I knew that there wasn't a brand out there that was already doing this. So it wasn't going to be something that I could iterate on and make better. This was going to be something I more or less had to create from scratch. And I know if you guys think back to 2019, right around there, 2020, a big thing that had really normalized itself in the confectionery trade and in sort of an active ingredient market is CBD and THC products. Gummies, particularly, they took off. I know there's a ton of other edible like substances out there. I personally don't take any of that stuff, so I don't know the wide range, but I know that chocolate gummies, those are very commonly dosed. So the first thing I did was I started reading the patents, realized that there wasn't going to be anyone business development wise that I could reach out to and sort of ask for some way to get traction in the kitchen, r and D wise. So I did the next best thing. And instead of the actual manufacturers where people that make gummies today go and reach out to, I reached out to the food scientists that are employed by those manufacturers. So I was able to circumvent any sort of financial obligation in obtaining information as long as these guys were willing to work with me, and a lot of them be announced to me, I didn't know how well this would work. They were just more on board to do it. And they were enticed to sort of join in on all the fun because they thought that the project was cool. They thought that bringing a creatine gummy to market, something no one's done before, they didn't want anything other than to just actually participate in the process. So we got the Willy Wonkas of the world. We've got the food scientists that work at some pretty major confectionery companies that I'm pretty sure don't want their name leaked during this episode. And we've also just got the THC and CBD edible chemists that I reached out to as well. And for anyone listening thinking, how the heck did you get in touch with all these people? They've got nine to five. They're busy. This is during COVID The world is a mess. It was LinkedIn. I literally reached out to as many people as I could find through LinkedIn, and I got a handful of those that answered, and then of those, like seven or eight that answered, about four or five of them actually spent the next year with me making this product.

My next question is about how you talked a little bit about patents. Right. And I think this is a really interesting area in the supplements and in the food SpaceX. Right. What do patents mean? What's enforceable in the supplement space? What isn't? What are you guys patenting? Just walk me through a little bit about that entire landscape within CPG, but specifically within supplements. Right. Because I think a lot of things make a lot of claims. And you've got pharmaceutical companies on one side that have, like I mean, that's how they make their money is through patents, but supplements are more of like kind of a gray area where you can make claims and maybe do something. So if you could just give us some light on how patents play a role in this space.

Absolutely. I think that anyone that's going to do anything proprietary and when I say proprietary, I don't mean they're going to have an active ingredient formula that they don't disclose. And a lot of people, they use proprietary information or what the FDA considers a proprietary guideline to sort of hide what's actually in their product. We didn't do that. And moving forward, I'm going to use the term proprietary. Not in the sense where it prevents the consumer from knowing what's inside of it. Proprietary has another meaning to it and it's just a specific formula dosage, anything that's part of that ingredient profile that's exclusive to your product, not something that you're necessarily trying to hide. So the proprietary information as it pertains to dietary supplements or really anything along that, sports nutrition, functional food, sustainable supplement lines, anything in that area which could be drinks, gummies, different foods, you've got to make claims on things that are one hyper pacific to the formula that you're using. And when you start there, make sure you can get that bit of information patent first because a lot of people, they're going to want to broaden that sort of protection not only from that specific formula, but to the, let's say the manufacturing or the production of variants of that formula. So I'm going to try to water this down and make it as easy to digest as humanly possible and I'll do it. I'll just use my gummy for example. So we went in, there was no proprietary information or claims on this before we went and filed. So we were definitely going to be able to file for our blueberry flavor, our spirulina color. No one's using this. It's not something found in nature. It's very specific to what we were putting in our packaging. So without a doubt we could get that pushed across an examiner's desk rather easily. The next thing you want to do is make sure that if you're going to file any sort of broader sort of claims or increase the protection of your product, at the end of the day, that you're looking at all of the research or all of the patents possible by going on the USPTO. Using the search engine, use those high level keywords that are obviously going to give you way too broad of a net at first. But you're going to have to start super wide with that scientific approach almost before you really narrow it down to things that might impede on what you're trying to do. But the supplements based, let's face it, there's a million different protein powders, there's a million different electrolyte drinks out there powders. The possibility of claiming any sort of broader protection and preventing anyone else from sort of treading on your proprietary formula is very low at this day and age. There's almost nothing that hasn't been touched on or tapped into to some degree. And a lot of these patents they're filed with companies or law firms, law firms and patent lawyers that they're going to make sure that these bigger companies like Goalie, for instance, they had a patent earlier on on the ACV gummy that prevented a ton of competitors from coming in the space. And that's really how they were able to gain that leadway into the market and capitalize on it. Earlier on. But even those patent lawyers, they left holes in the patent. And now you see Goalies gummies at Whole Foods next to four other apple cider vinegar gummies. They're all priced lower. I think Goalies, they're definitely a household name at this point, especially in the ACV space. Anyone that's concerned with immunity or just the general health benefits that come along with it, or don't like taking the apple cider vinegar shots. But even those patents, the people that assisted them with those patents, even they left room for iteration, or they left those loopholes that other companies were able to get in and capitalize on. So just make sure that you can, one, patent your very hyper specific formula down to the T, and then broaden the research and make sure that you can prevent the general manufacturing of whatever product or category it is that you're trying to either create or join. Because there's a lot of barbed wire trying to climb that fence.

And that's kind of what I want to talk about. So let's assume you're on the other side, right? Let's assume you're coming up with your own idea. I think what you were saying is it can be tricky to navigate, right? So if you're trying to come up with your own thing, how do you know what is okay to pursue or not okay to pursue? Because as an entrepreneur, just starting out, you might be like, I see a patent here, I see a patent here. But kind of what you're saying, there's a million different powders for protein. So I'm just trying to kind of understand if you're starting out and you start seeing things where, yes, there's obviously patents about the general things that you're doing in a supplement, they could be as broad as, like, oh, like putting a certain two powders together in a capsule. You know what I mean? How do you navigate that if you're an entrepreneur trying to launch a business, what flies and what doesn't fly in the supplement space?

Yeah, I think it boils itself down to looking at the market. Look at your market. Is it oversaturated if your market is oversaturated? If you want to get into something like liquid IV or Hydrant, those guys, they have electrolyte powder solutions. If you're looking at a market like that, you should just know off the bat, Generalizing, any sort of IP is going to be nearly impossible. More than likely, you're just not going to be able to do it at this point, especially when the market caps of those industries are 500 million, a billion dollars. Like, if I wanted to go and do this with a collagen product, the collagen market is a billion dollar industry at this point, and it's going to take three years for your patent to get approved. There's just no way someone hasn't already put in the elbow or the sweat equity, done the hard work and beat everyone else to it. Not to say that there isn't room to iterate, because this is part two, really, of me answering the question. So that's one way to just save a ton of time. Look at the market. Is it oversaturated? Don't even bother with it. Two, let's say it is oversaturated like the same exact market we just covered the hydration powders. So if you want to do something in that space and you want to do something new and innovative, let's make sure that it's new and innovative. And to do that, you're going to have to, one, start with those patent searches on USPTO. Find the patents for the products that are dominating the space. So you could literally go in, search hydrant, search electrolyte, and maybe even use the word powder. You add all those three in your search query, you're going to find the actual patents for those products. Now you want to make something different, and you do. As someone that an entrepreneur or business owner that wants to actually win in a market that's oversaturated, you're not going to want to eat off the same pizza that has already had all the pies put or pieces of the pie on everyone else's plate. You're going to have to go and make your own. So when you're trying to make your own pizza and there's already a market like the hydrants and liquid IV dominate, you're going to have to do something incredibly different, which could be flavors, you could be adding novelty flavors. You could be adding an active ingredient blend that differentiates it from the rest of the products in the space, at least according to the patents. But when you look at the patents and you're thinking, what flavors and active ingredients am I going to add to make this a novelty product? You just have to make sure that in hydrants and liquid IVs product in the patent, it doesn't say that they're not able to add those at some point in time as well because they're going to go as broad as they can on protection. So look, find the companies. These companies, the companies that are killing the markets are the category killers. They're going to be the ones with the patents. They're going to be the ones with the broadest protection on the patents. You really want to start there. You should be close to safe. If you can find active ingredients or flavors or anything else you can think of to differentiate your product that is not in those bigger companies patents. Take that information to a patent lawyer and have them do the minute the dotted I's, the cross t's all of the things under the magnifying glass that you might overlook.

No, I think that's super helpful because I know there's a lot of entrepreneurs who are thinking about supplements and health and wellness. It's the hot topic. But then again, they're coming in from the product side and maybe not necessarily the patent side. And all of a sudden you start thinking about patents and you're like, oh my God, what am I going to do? So that's super helpful. Okay, so now that we've got the patent stuff figured out, why don't you talk to me a little bit about next steps in terms of actually launching and manufacturing your product starting? What are the next steps for you in terms of taking this to market?

Yeah, so not that the research side of things. It can take as long as you want it to. And if you want a perfect product, chances are you're never going to get a perfect product, right? But you can get pretty close to it with the research alone. It's going to take the actual R and D to sort of figure it out, especially if you're working on something novelty like the Creatine gummy was at the time. There was no formula. There's no base formula. All you know is the general chemistry. All I was able to find was the general chemistry, the people that knew the chemistry a little better than I did. And you're sort of that interstitial that pinpoint between the allotted information and the experts available. So you've really got to be the one that just stitches everything together. So what that meant for me was going on Amazon buying a ton of gummy making material, whether it have been the sugar, the molds, ketchup bottles that I would actually pour the ready to set gummy slurry into, and use that to fill the molds. It was as pedestrian as you could possibly think of. It was just like the young mom and her six bear old. That was me minus the mom with the apron on in there trying to just figure out how to make these pectin gummies. There's a million ways. There's literally a million ways that you can make a gummy because there's just so many different natural ingredients out there. There's so many different types of gummies that you can make. You've got the all natural pectins, you've got the gelatin approach, and there are those that are harder than other and others. And the more natural you go, the more difficult it gets. But going into what I thought was going to be a business that would really thrive one day, I knew that we'd have to go as natural as humanly possible with the ingredient selection. So it was going to be as difficult as it could possibly be. So over the next year, really, it took an entire year. We made a ton of gummies over that 365. And a lot of them just were not something that we would put out to market. And now when I see you do a quick Google search and you look at the competitors that are selling right now in our space, I recognize a lot of the imperfect, or imperfections that I was able to really see earlier on that a lot of these companies went to market with. And it's not easy getting the quality of product that we have. I mean, I know that even the manufacturers that we spoke to, there's been about a dozen over the last year even since post R and D. They all want to know how to make it. These are people trying to license the IP. It took a very long time to learn how to do this, but with the R and D, I think everyone's it sounds like a lot of fun. Like getting in there, getting your hands dirty and doing something that you're generally passionate about and that's exactly what was going on. But you've got to think you can't just quit your job or there is no infinite amount of time. You have to work on this before someone else does it. You've got to work fast, you've got to have the money and you've got to make sure that this is something you're going to be doing in ten years from now if that's how long it takes for you to get your business to where it wants to be or even if you're trying to ultimately sell it. I wouldn't do anything for a day that I wasn't thinking about I could be doing in ten years from now. So money was a huge thing too because without still working at SpaceX during the time, there would have been no way to fund all of the redundant R and D mistakes that kept occurring. I think every I've easily on the weekends, nine hour days, just not getting any product or any sort of progress made during R and D and this is with the help of the experts and even they're itching their heads and scratching their chins and just wondering why things aren't going to plan. So unless you want to take an idea like this that is super nascent to a VC fund, or maybe you've got some friends and family that you want to do an a round with and you've got some angel investors in mind, I highly doubt anyone's going to want to give you money to do something like that. Or something like I was doing, at least. So keeping my job, working after work, working the entire weekends for a year, that's really what it took to just get a product worth putting it in a bottle and ready for consumers.

Yeah, I think that is such a good point because it takes a lot to bring a product to market, especially when you're doing it as kind of a side hustle, right? You've got your work, you've got your obligations, but it's like how are you able to get something off the ground on the side? And one of the other things that I think is really interesting about side hustle and being able to start something off is projects don't always sometimes things take time, right? Especially in the CPG world. It takes time to get your designs, get your formula just right, like, do all these things. So, like, you are in a great position. If you have a job, if you have an income, you need to know when the right time is to jump ship, basically. Right? If you have the luxury of having time where you're able to iterate and do all the things in your spare time, that's awesome, because that stuff needs to happen in any case. So you may as well be able to do it and make that jump when you're able to and the business can support you.

Don't quit your job just because you've got an idea. Because I had people tell me earlier on, why don't you just quit your job? You have an S egg, you got money saved up, you can always go back to SpaceX. And the matter of the fact is, I probably could go back and apply for the same job I had back then today, and I might actually get it. But that's not the position vulnerability when it comes to one, being able to further the project along because I would have ran out of money at some point, and B, just like paying your bills, a lot of people, they're not able to get knocked down ten times and get up in 11th. For some people. That's just the unfortunate reality is that once you've risked it all and you've maxed out all the credit cards and your board game doesn't get you a shark to invest on ABC, that's the end of the road. I just knew earlier on that I didn't want to put myself in a position where there was any probability or possibility that I was going to be in a state of insecurity financially. You have the fiduciary responsibility to yourself to make sure that your life is in order when you're conducting a side hustle that takes the amount of time, energy and financial backing to complete successfully.

No, totally. And the next thing I want to talk about is talk to me a little bit about now that you've made the product. I'm curious about your first couple batches or runs or production runs. How much volume were you doing once you kind of brought your team together, how much money were you putting in it to get through a production run? What were you doing? Who are you testing these different gummies with? Yeah, talk to me a little bit about that.

So we started off as about as bare bones as you could possibly be, and it was a test kitchen that turned into our production kitchen, and we as in me, as soon as I figured out how to make these gummies the right way, I knew that training a team up would be nearly impossible. So I just basically scaled the solo cook method as high as you possibly could. And I know teams of three that work at manufacturing facilities nowadays that do maybe one 10th of what I was. Doing in a day at some point, but it was at the aid of I made some good friends in the space doing the R and D, and there's a lot of trade secrets out there, and there's hacks in the gummy industry. I can guarantee you that. There's nobody selling gummies right now, at least from a brand owner's perspective, that can actually make them not more than a single 35 cavity mold at a time. So earlier on, I was pouring around 150 bottles a day. What's that times 150? Times 60? I was pouring about 9000 gummies a day earlier on. And this is very exhausting work. It's mentally exhausting, too, because it's one big chemistry project. Every time you cook, you've got to make sure the PH is correct. There's a lot of varying factors working with natural products that can just destroy your cook in an instant if you're not careful. I blew a ton of outlets. I caused our apartment complex to lose power in certain areas of it. At some points, it's just a matter of really having all of it's the perfect storm. So those 9000 gummies doing that, it would take about 12 hours of work, and that's like with your sandwich and doritos in one hand, and you're working a spatula with the other, eventually that turned into what you might see in a chemistry class or like the electric stirs things that are used in lab equipment. So it did get to that point, but we were not really able to get past that 150 bottle a day point without either renting out a bigger space or what we eventually did is reach out to manufacturers, and that went on for about a year. So 150 bottles a day for a bear. And looking back, we bottlenecked the heck out of this business doing that. Granted, if you want a production run for something like our gummy, six figures. We didn't have six figures back then, and we didn't want to take on funding either. So you've got to pick your battles. Looking back, it's like we did the 150 bottles a day. Should we have taken on funding? Should we have just paid back a loan? Should we have got some business credit cards to max them out and put a down payment on some product? The answer is no, it's really not. Because even working with manufacturing now, there's so much inconsistency in product. I'm happy that we were able to get our 1st 1020 30,000 customers just working out of the kitchen because they got the best product. I think that's the best product we ever put out.

Yeah. And that's awesome, right? Like, thinking about how to go from zero to one to two and scaling up, I think is really important because a lot of founders, they might see, oh, I'm either at zero, or I have to get a manufacturing facility to put together the whole run for me. And what's the in between there, especially what you're saying is that can be very expensive. So I'd love to learn a little bit more about when you guys decided to make that jump, right? Eventually, demand is growing. You guys are scaling and you need to make the jump. Talk to me a little bit about what that was like. How did you find your manufacturing partner? How did you vet them? How did you make sure everything was going to be right? Because like you were saying, if, if you get one production run and they mess it up, you're like, okay, what am I supposed to do with all this inventory that I literally just spent all my money on?

Yeah. So disclaimer, this is something we learned the hard way. But before you even start interviewing manufacturers, when you start interviewing to the time where you actually have something made or R, indeed, there's going to be a lot of time in between there even. But before all of that, make sure you've got a contract that has what I like to refer to as stop losses in place. Because any manufacturer you talk to is going to tell you they can make the product you want. And at the end of the day, it's just simply not the case. Not that they're bad businessmen all the time, but more often than not, they are just willing to take on the project and try to figure it out and they're going to do their best. But there are those times when some manufacturers, they're just not there yet expertise wise, and they're definitely not going to be where you need them to be if you're at a different scale than them going into it. There are such manufacturers that are working from PO to PO, and if they mess up a PO, their business is done. Your project could be that one PO. You need to find a manufacturer that has been around for a while. It's substantial enough in size to where they can get you in at sort of a phone calls notice on the production schedule, because you're going to need that kind of attention earlier on as a younger brand. You don't know what your scale is going to be like, but put those stop losses in place in your manufacturing contract. That just state if you guys can't make the product or if the product is overdue or late by x amount of days, you either, a, owe us x amount of dollars every day it's overdue, or b, owe us a full refund, plus the amount of money we would have lost or that we lost not being able to sell our product. These were things that, like I mentioned, I learned the hard way and thank God it wasn't the hardest way. We're still functioning today. We're up and running. But it wasn't the glory story you might see in a movie where some entrepreneur goes out, finds a manufacturer, and then they're a millionaire the next day. But inventing them, I can speak to the difficulties that I've had, I'm also familiar with, and you guys are probably too listening, midday Squares, they interviewed, I think, almost every confectionery manufacturer in the company in the country to make their chocolate. And what they ended up doing is a little thing I like to call vertically integrating. That just means that they went and they built their own manufacturing facility. And I'm sure it choked the heck out of their production. If you look at their retail map right now, though, they're in just about every natural grocer in the country. And some they're doing phenomenal and they're breaking their daily production records quite often nowadays. So just make sure that the manufacturers you're going out there and looking for a can make the product to your standards. Because there's a lot of companies out there, or Chinese manufacturers like on Alibaba that are going to say, hey, we've got these chocolate bars or these creatine gummies. And when you get them, they might say that on the label. But the inside of those products, it's full of tears, full of children's tears and refunds, that's exactly what you're going to get when you buy that kind of stuff. But what we were able to do, thank God, is we were able to find some reliable manufacturers. And we defined them as reliable because we found out they had products that were already in retailers that we wanted to get into. So manufacturers that already had products in Whole Foods or Sprouts, you want to find your product, where does it live? On the shelf, and then reverse engineer that shelf placement to the manufacturer. Try to piece that together, whatever you have to do. It's going to be difficult. You probably have to go on LinkedIn and you might run into a lot of dead ends, but at some point you're going to be able to align the stars and you're going to find the manufacturers that are doing that type of work. And then it's your job to get the price of your product to where your margins make sense. Because we had 30%, 40%, our first manufacturer quoted us $15, you know, finished product. And that's because we were working with a broker and a whole ton of other things. I think they were trying to take advantage of us as early on as a younger brand with no experience, and they nearly did. We've got the pricing down substantially. Just building genuine relationships with the manufacturers we work with now and being able to sort of leverage the pricing that we've found out truly exists in our market. So I'm not saying pin your manufacturers against each other or sort of fabricate some sort of back and forth trying to weasel the price down, but you are going to want to know a vast majority of manufacturers price and try to do whatever you can ask them, how do we get this down $0.05? How do we get this down a dollar? Are there alternative ingredients? So we vetted them to summarize that long winded answer. We found the manufacturers that were already making products in the retailers that we wanted, and then from there, we were able to niche it down even tighter based on who was able to sort of give us the ingredients that we wanted or improve on the product at the most cost effective solution.

No, I think that's super good insight in terms of working with manufacturers because again, they don't always have your best interests in mind. They're not thinking no one's going to care about your business as much as you do. So I think that just using that as a framework to work with them is super important. The other question that I had in regards to kind of what you were talking about is let's talk about the demand side of things as you guys were first getting started, right? What was the reception of the product? How did things grow? Talk to me about the customer experience with not only like you were saying, your initial production runs that you guys were handling yourself, but then as you transition to again, you guys mentioned you're bringing a new product to market. How are you doing the communication and the messaging and the marketing and the growth behind all of that?

Yeah, night and day, between launching our product when we were cooking it versus the manufacturer, and it's going to be that way, I don't think there's any manufacturer that can replicate your product at 100% when you've got over X amount of ingredients in them, especially if it's natural. And that was definitely the case for us, the market. Initially when we launched, we didn't have some huge budget. We didn't seed our product to 1000 influencers. We couldn't justify a lot of the rationale behind what other brands do that have the funding, have the backing, have this infinite amount of product, what they're able to do. So we knew we weren't going to be able to scale Meta off the bat. So we did the next best thing, and I personally did the next best thing. And I became extremely proficient with Google Ads. I actually went as far as basically getting a couple of Google Ad coaches and having these guys basically train me up and they more or less worked alongside me for free, helping us grow the strengthening our account, and just doing all of the ninja stuff that you hire an agency to do. They helped us out for maybe a year, and this was a very small fee we incurred. I think that we were just at the right place. I was at the right place at the right time when these guys sort of wanted to, one, mentor somebody, and two, possibly use me as a case study, which they didn't end up doing. And I almost feel like I cheated the system, or I feel bad in that regard because these guys really, it was transformative what they helped us do. And even if you're on Twitter all day and you're going on these known marketers go on their Twitters, you can search in their search engines just about anything you need, as long as you know the keywords. Like, if you want to search cost caps or you want to search highest volume or what it is you need to do inside of your ad accounts, that's going to really just make it an indestructible force, you can do that. But this is just something that we lucked out on. And we were the only product for a year, so people were arms wide open, really. I mean, I don't think we never got anyone really leaving a review or a bad review saying, there's got to be a better way to do this, or this just isn't quite there yet. Product wise, we spent a long time and I think anyone with the OCD perfectionist sort of mind state, which I know a lot of entrepreneurs have, I made sure that the product was not going to get returned earlier on. And not only was it aesthetically pleasing, it was experiential devouring these little bears. We really put something out there that we were proud of, and it reflected in the lack of refunds. For the longest time, I could count on one hand how many people returned our product, and I think it was like it took maybe nine months before we saw over five refunds. And I don't know if it's because we're the only product in the space, and where else are you going to go? Are you going to make them yourself? But we were extremely underpriced back then, too, so I know that there were people looking at other Creatine products before the category really took off during COVID because Creatine prices, like, doubled during that time. And we kept our product at the same price point so that we had that working for us. But people loved it. They absolutely loved it. It was different with manufacturing, though, because the first product we got back from our first manufacturer, it just wasn't up to quality. The R and D was beautiful and the gummies that came out of the gummy machines that they use, it was a sad day. It was a sad day in the bare balance household when those got delivered and they were in our new packaging, and we just knew it was something that was not going to thrive in the markets. And we sent some of it out to our more loyal customers to give a taste test and sort of give some real feedback on. And they said the same exact thing. They're just like, this isn't where it was. And some people even said, you guys really shouldn't even sell this. So that's exactly what we took into consideration, and we actually went out looking for more manufacturers that could do a better job. And it goes back to saying, you've got to vet the correct manufacturers, and you can't get knocked down too many times. A lot of companies I've seen numerous people on Shark Tank that invested hundreds of thousands in R and D and never got the product they needed or they or they were $300,000 in the hole, and that's why they're on Shark Tank. You just don't want to be that company. But now we've got a product that it absolutely kills. I have not got one negative response ever on any platform, comment wise. On Facebook, there might be I've seen some competitors out there that get our ads, and they'll say, oh, it tastes awful. And then I'm like, hey, I recognize that name. They own that company. But I mean, other than those salty competitors, we don't have zero negative feedback on the product, and I'm super proud of it today.

That's amazing. So as we kind of wrap up here, two questions. One, what is your guys'core focus of this year? Right? Like, what do you have to get done as you think about building through the rest of 2023? Are there any big upgrades coming? Are you launching new products? Are you focused on optimization? Are you focused on scaling? Where is your core focus? And then, yeah, that's my last question.

Yeah. So 2023, we've got about half the year left. I just came from the Commerce summit in New York yesterday. I got to spend a lot of time with some of the biggest brands across all industries and spaces. Forget his name. Was it true? Classic Tease founder was there with the co founder from Mary Ruse Organics, and was at the table with Big Ron from Abby the CEO. And just listening to what these guys have done and realizing that our playbook doesn't quite it doesn't it doesn't quite mirror the same trajectory that they had. It's really just it's made me think about the cool stuff that we're doing in terms of working on more novelty stuff and more products and just realizing that the core focus from here on out, the product launches are important. Scaling the ad platforms, that's super important. Those are all things that are going to move the needle substantially. But having more evangelists for the brand, I think it's our goal now to bring as many professional athletes, people that are real thought leaders in the realm of health and wellness as well as fitness. Sharing what we have with those people and getting more people to sort of join in on the journey, I think, is ultimately that's not only what builds a better business, it just builds a better brand. And being that the world class brand that we want to be, we need to bring in those world class people. So everyone listening expect to see someone, you know, in some vertical of sports, health and wellness. They're going to be taking our product at some point this year, and I'm going to make sure to it.

Well, Dylan, we loved having you on the show. I mean, that was an absolute crash course in building a fast growing supplements brand. We're really excited to watch you guys grow. Why don't you shout out, where can we find you? Where can we connect with you? Are you on Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter? Where can we find more about Bare Balance? Yeah, just shout out your socials.

Yeah, absolutely. Guys, I'm on LinkedIn, Dylan mentor. I mean, everywhere else, I'm pretty much off of social media. I'm not anonymous. I'm just not even I don't even use the apps. So I'm on LinkedIn, Dylan mentor. You can find me there. I'm more than happy to engage any sort of dialogue you guys want to start, or if you've got questions, you want a blog post done about something Creatine related, I'm happy to do the research and get something out. Other than that, bare balance. At Bare Balance, on every platform, instagram is really our go to. We're going to be campaigning on there a lot throughout the rest of this year, so it's probably where you're going to see the majority of content distribution. But our YouTube shorts will be right on par with the real set of release.

Sweet. Well, thanks for coming on the show and we can't wait to see you guys keep growing.

Awesome. Thank you for having me. Blaine, you.

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