DTC POD #344 - David Protein’s $1,000,000 Week Launch with Cofounder Zach Ranen
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What is going on? DTC pod. Today we're joined by Zach Ranon, who's the president and co founder at David and David is a protein bar. And it's something that we've been seeing pop up sort of everywhere. It's this gold bar. It says David on it. Like I've seen it all over, blowing up all over dtc. You guys are, you know, coming off a new launch. So Zach, I'll let you kick us off.
Why don't you tell us. There we go. Why don't you tell us a little bit about David, maybe the inspiration behind it as well as your background and then we can get into the convo.
Yeah, sure thing. So David creates tools to increase muscle and decrease fat. Our first product is a protein bar. And we are creating a bar with the most protein per calorie of anything on the market in general. With David, we wanted to create a brand that really reflected the ideals that its namesake evokes. So the name is really a reflection of our approach to idealism, our dedication to materializing perfection, our desire for excellence, and all of these attributes that an artist like Michelangelo would embody to create a sculpture like David, we seek to apply to the rigor that we develop our products with. And we hope to create what people in the protein bar space look at as a masterpiece, similar to how people in the art space look at the David statue as a masterpiece. And I know it's a lofty way to talk about a protein bar, and some might listen to that and think it's a little bit out of touch equating trying to create a protein bar to sculpting a masterpiece.
But to us, it's the same approach and it is the type of spirit that we wanted to embody with the product. So when Peter and I first started to think about what we wanted to do with a protein bar and what ultimately became David, we took a look at what a protein bar should really be from first principles. And to us, a protein bar should be just that, as much protein and as little anything else as possible. Anecdotally, the first thing that consumers do when they go to the grocery store aisle of the bar market is they pick up the package and they flip it over and look at protein, calories and sugar from a data perspective. You take a look at the two top selling protein bar brands in the United States, it's Quest and Bare Bells. And those are two of the top three protein to calorie ratio bars on the market. So that really validates anecdotally, consumers look for it from a data driven perspective. That's what consumers look for.
So then the question became, do we think we can do it better than them? And we thought the answer to that was a clear yes, based off of certain ingredients and processes that we thought could be used that were not currently being used in the protein bar space to allow us to create this unprecedented protein to calorie ratio where Quest and Bear bells have about 44 and 40% of their calories coming from protein respectively. Now coming out with David, which has 75% of its calories coming from protein. So we see this as a really meaningful stuck and like a real jump in what is possible in the protein bar space. And we're really excited about that because one, we expect to take a lot of share in the protein bar market, but two, we also expect to bring a lot of new people into the space, whether it's people who, like me, didn't need protein bars because it wasn't high enough in protein on a calorie per calorie basis, or whether it's people who didn't realize that there could be a tasty on the go product that could satisfy their hunger and keep them full for as long as a David does. So that's a little bit more about the product.
Ramon Berrios 00:05:59 - 00:06:31
Yeah, I'm excited to dive into David because I'm a. I'm a protein guy myself, protein bar guy myself. But I'd love to dive into your story and how you got here in the first place. So funny enough for anyone listening, you know, Zach, you previously had a company called Raise in the CPG space, and you were actually in our media kit whenever we would have sponsors. And because it was a testimony for. I remember you mentioned you were a listener of DTC Pod way back then. Then you started Raise. And so it was.
Ramon Berrios 00:06:31 - 00:06:44
It was a part in our deck of, like, our listeners also become operators. And so now to see you doing David is just so awesome. So I would like to take a step back all the way from even starting Raise and how that journey led you to David.
Yeah, it's funny. This will be a little bit part of the story, but I had no D2C experience at all when I started Raise, so I was listening to podcasts like this to learn what different terms meant or what different people were testing out in their own businesses. So it's fun to come full circle a bit and be back on here and chat with you guys. So my background, originally from Baltimore, I all growing up, I thought I wanted to work in finance. Like I was in middle school, telling my parents that I wanted to be a hedge fund manager, which is totally not normal. And then having an interest in finance, that led me to school at UPenn where I majored in finance there, learned a little bit more about different realms of the finance world and really honed in on an interest in one specific sector called private equity. Essentially taking large amounts of money from institutional investors and finding good businesses to buy, hold for a certain period of time, hopefully grow their earnings and then sell. During that time period, I was first really excited to be in there, like, thought I was doing exactly what I wanted to do.
Living in New York, making money, staying at nice hotels, talking to important people. And then after the shine of that wore off, I started to think a little bit more about whether I actually enjoyed what I was doing. And I realized that I definitely didn't. And there were really two reasons. The first was this culture side, and the second was quality of work. So on the culture side, I found finance to be very hierarchical, where you were right. If you were more senior, you weren't right because you had the best idea there was a lack of focus on doing valuable work and more of a focus on quantum of work. So if there were a hundred files that a company gave you, you would analyze all 100, even if the team would only end up looking at five of them, just because you never knew what was going to be in the other 95, even though you were pretty sure they were never going to be looked at.
And I didn't think there was a good focus on like value of time and value of work and a real rigor around how you thought about where to allocate time. And then from like a quality of work standpoint, I really enjoyed learning about new businesses, learning about new industries, talking to interesting people, talking to experts to kind of learn about those companies and industries. But I really didn't enjoy a lot of the nitty gritty of plugging away numbers at Excel and PowerPoint. And all of these thoughts led me to kind of hone in on some requirements that I gave myself for what I would do after that job. The first was I only want to do work that I agree is valuable. And the other was I want to work somewhere where I am working on interests that I would explore outside of a work context. So on that first piece, only doing valuable work that lent itself towards either join an early stage company or start by myself. And on the interest piece, I thought a little bit more about what I actually am curious about, just personally.
And at that point, I would come home from work and I would spend an hour on YouTube every day, like watching videos on how your diet affects your health, how your diet affects fat loss and muscle building, how you can make healthier versions of traditionally unhealthy foods, videos on fitness regimens, and how someone did like a muscle gain fat loss diet over the course of two months. All things within that food, health, fitness, muscle, fat realm. And on the side, at the same time, I was actually starting to bake my own low carb cookies because I was doing a low carb diet at the time to lose fat. And I made them for myself, started giving them to friends, started giving them to family, and my friends started joking like, oh, Zach's gonna go do something crazy like leave his finance job to start a low carb bakery. And after a little while I realized that maybe one, it's not so bad of an idea, even though it's totally off the beaten path, especially for someone who like has this seemingly prestigious finance job. And two, that I would way more regret never trying than I would regret trying to do something that I cared about and was interested in and failing. So when I had that realization that I wouldn't actually regret doing it and failing, that really pushed me over the edge to go for it. And at that point I.
I found a chef to partner with, developed some better recipes than I was making in my apartment. I found a commercial kitchen in New Jersey. I paid a college kid $500 to build a Shopify website for me and started shipping cookies out to customers around the country. Ended up running raise for about two years. By the early spring of 2023, we were doing a little under $2 million of run rate revenue per year and we're outgrowing our commercial kitchen footprint while also realizing that the production we were doing at that commercial kitchen was way too manual and not particularly profitable from a unit economics basis. As we continued to grow, that led me to go out to speak to investors because one, we needed capital to continue to grow given the lack of profitability due to our production process and two, because I wanted to move the recipe from our commercial kitchen to a contract manufacturer to continue to scale and to get better margins. When I pitched investors, that was essentially the pitch of we built this brand to a not trivial level, but we need money to scale further and we need money to reformulate a bit so that we can be processable on Conan's machinery. Because unfortunately what we found was that the dough was too sticky to move through machinery at a factory level, which was something I frankly did not even think about once until we tried to do it.
And then one of the investors that I pitched said hey, we're not interested in your cookie business but we want to introduce you to our friend Peter. And at that time Peter Rahal, my co founder, he just had his non Compete agreement expire 5 years post selling his initial brand called RX Bar and he was still obsessed with protein bars and he was interested in getting back into the space. Peter is extremely self aware and knows what he's good at and knows where he wants support and aside from just wanting someone to work with, he wanted someone like me because Peter is more creative and less reliable and I am more reliable and less creative and we make a good pair in that way. And I think he was talking to his friend that I pitched about raise, asking if they had any recommendations for introductions for him and they mentioned me. So we ended up connecting and chatting at that point. Peter and I got to know each other over the spring of 2023. At the same time I was not successful in getting any investors to kind of bite on my plan to reformulate the raise cookies and kind of reintroduce a new product. So I started to wind that business down while I started to pick up conversations with Peter around potentially bringing a new bar to market.
Over the summer of 2023, Peter and I started to meet and have these sessions, really diving into, like, if we were to create a protein bar from scratch, what do we want it to be? And that led into those thoughts that I mentioned previously around creating a bar that had the most protein per calorie of anything on the market by a large margin in a differentiated way. So that's how the vision came together and how we got started.
Ramon Berrios 00:16:34 - 00:16:54
I love it. That's such a cool story. I mean, it's when, you know, timing meets opportunity. And, I mean, you. You. Maybe you could have raced it if you kept going, but sometimes it's best to jump on a new opportunity that might just have way more upside. So, um, you know, I. I'm a bar guy.
Ramon Berrios 00:16:54 - 00:17:17
I love bar. It's like my breakfast. It's the first thing I eat and the only thing I eat until noon. Because for me, it's like the perfect punch of energy. And if I have breakfast, I just get really tired for some reason. But I haven't been able to find something in the market that I really like. And Bear, I'm a. You know, I buy Bare Bells because it's just the best nutrients that I can find.
Ramon Berrios 00:17:17 - 00:18:05
But the problem is, number one, I'm a chocolate guy as well, and I saw you have cookie dough and the other brownie one, so I have to try it. But the closest thing Bear Bells has is the peanut butter one, and I eat it every morning, and I freaking hate it at the same time. While I'm eating it, I'm like, this tastes awful, but I just do it because it's my best form of nutrition for breakfast. So would love to hear how you guys were able to nail, you know, not sacrificing taste, or did you have to sacrifice taste and just walk us through the journey of, like, all right, here's. We know what we want, but how do we actually make this happen in a way that people are excited to eat this? They're not just like, oh, I have to eat this for its nutrition, but I don't look forward to eating it.
Totally. So we. We think the bars are delicious. People who are listening will have to decide for themselves. And the price is reasonable as well. I'll plug it. Yes. So on a.
On a dollar per gram of protein basis, we are one of the cheapest bars out there because we have such a high protein load, about 40% more protein than a bar like bare bells in one of our bars. And really to, to accomplish this, you start off with what are the limits of physics? The limits of physics are 1 gram of protein is 4 calories. So if you were to design the absolute ideal protein bar, it would be say 25 grams of protein for a hundred calories. It's actually not possible because at that point you're just a protein powder. And even at that point, protein powders have small amounts of fat and carbs. So even a whey protein isolate shake is not going to be 25 grams of protein and a hundred calories. So there's, there's always going to be a little bit else in there with most of the commercially available proteins that can be used these days. So you can't minimize calories from protein because we're trying to maximize protein.
So then you have two other options. There's fat and there's carb. We can take a look at what a lot of bars have traditionally used as carbohydrates and see how we can improve on that. So first, like V1 of protein bar back in the 1990s, let's say they used typically a sugar syrup, so brown rice syrup, high fructose corn syrup, and that's four calories per gram of sugar. V2 of protein bars would maybe use part traditional sugar and part fibers or part sugar alcohols. And in that way they can reduce the caloric load a bit. So for example, a common fiber that's used in bars is called polydextrose, and it's a fiber that is shown to have like prebiotic gut health benefits and digestion benefits. And it has the benefit of being only one calorie per gram instead of four calories per gram.
Then you have ingredients that some bars use, like sugar alcohols like erythritol or maltitol, which have fewer calories per gram as well than traditional sugars. And then you have what we're using, which is a blend of only fiber and allulose, which is a rare sugar that does not get metabolized by the body in the same way that traditional sugar does. And as the FDA kind of saw the research on this, they, they saw that it was not metabolized so that it only effectively costs you 4.0.4 calories per gram instead of the traditional 4 calories per gram. And then that polydextrose is only 1 calorie per gram instead of 4. So that blend of our binding syrups effectively helps us, one, hold the protein powder together, and two, it allows us to minimize calories that would traditionally come from the carbohydrates in a bar. So While you see 14 total carbs on our bar, we actually only have 1 to 2 grams of net carbohydrates per bar, depending on the flavor. Then that takes you to the last macronutrient, which is fat. Fat is traditionally where most of the calories in a protein bar come from.
So a crust bar, for example, will have nine or so grams of fat in it, which is 81 calories. Nine calories per gram of fat. As you probably could tell, fat is the most calorically dense of all macronutrients because I said it's 9 calories per gram instead of the traditional 4 from carbs and from proteins. So it's super important to minimize calories coming from fat. To achieve a high protein per calorie bomb, we were able to leverage a great ingredient that allows us to essentially achieve the mouthfeel of fat without the caloric load. So when you add in the protein powder, it's now bound by syrup, and then you have to add in fat, because that's what allows for, like a good mouthfeel and like a moist mouthfeel, as well as for allowing it to be machinable. So if it's just protein powder plus syrups, it's going to stick to the mixers, it's going to stick to the conveyor belts, it's not going to be able to actually get put into a package. So fat's really important for those two reasons, and we can minimize it with this fat blend that we have that we are leveraging that allows us to get the mouthfeel benefit, the machinability benefit, without the caloric load.
Ramon Berrios 00:23:41 - 00:23:45
And so how do you achieve double fudge brownie with no sugars?
So their flavor is a cocoa powder base, which we use in sparing amounts given cocoa powders, you know, non protein calories that we want to minimize. And then we bolster those with natural flavors as well as natural sweeteners like stevia and monk fruit. So Allyrose actually has about 70% of the sweetness of sugar in itself, and then we bolster that sweetness a bit to make up for that 30% gap with a stevia and monk fruit blend.
So, Zach, it. It sounds like you guys obviously took an approach to a product led approach as well as, you know, you had the product requirements that you wanted to do, to be able to make a product that basically didn't exist before. A ton of rigor went into that. But tell me a little bit more about like the branding, the go to market, like what went into like once you had a product, once you found something that you could take to market, walk, walk us through like the next step of getting ready to like launch this thing.
Yeah. So before moving to branding, my last comment on product is like that fully was the primary focus from the very beginning because product has to be king. Like you have to have an amazing product and the way to succeed long term is to do just that. And Peter and I are both maniacal about constantly evaluating and improving our product and we never intend to stop doing that. And we will never let someone come into the bar category and create a better bar than we have and that we will continue to iterate on.
Ramon Berrios 00:25:40 - 00:25:50
I love that. I want to definitely touch on the go to market but one last question there. How long did that process take? That R and D phase took us about 10 months.
So it was actually a quick process because of how much attention was put into it. And we were also I think willing to take risks that a larger company might not have been willing to take in terms of we or that a smaller company wouldn't have the resources to take without kind of Peter's background. So for example, we went to a trial at our manufacturer within three months of starting development. And that was way before we knew we would have a commercially viable recipe. But we knew that even if we were 60% of the way there or 50% of the way there, we would learn so much that would inform the rest of development based off of the trial run at the manufacturer that we were able to put the resources to it because of Peter's resources. And then compared to what a larger company might do, they might wait one full year of iterating in the lab before they get to the manufacturer scale. So I think we really had the right mix of meaningful resources and know how with the agility and risk seeking abilities of a small two person company at the time.
I like what you said about product. No one will outcompete us on product. I think that's so important because you know, especially today you hear more and more, you know, distributions, everything. But like when you're building a business, you there's a couple things that you need to have like core to your identity, whatever that is. And there may be businesses that do well and said that's like, you know, distributions are a thing we don't really care about the product. But I think in the long run, especially when you're building a brand and you're tied, I mean, you have the name David, right? Like, it's tied into the brand identity and DNA. So I love that I'm always a product first person, so I love how you guys are thinking about that. So, yeah, let's move it forward into, like, you know, go to market.
What has to happen next? You formulated something that you like. You solve this challenge. You guys know your product first. Like, what happens next? How do you get things moving?
So next thing for us was to develop the brand. And for this, we put a lot of our effort up front into developing what we think was a really comprehensive brand brief. And you can choose the best branding agency in the world, but if you give them garbage, they're going to give you garbage back. And the quality of what you get is often the quality of the brief that you give. And Peter and I spent a lot of effort creating a document that laid out one, the evolution of branding in the protein bar space. From the very beginning in the 1980s to what we've seen as, like, different iterations of protein bar branding up until today. Then we looked at what do we want our customers to feel when they look at our brand? What do we want to embody ourselves? What are we? If you look at us as a person with attributes, what are we not? What do we not want you to feel? And what are we okay with you not feeling that a lot of other brands maybe want you to feel? So, for example, like, David is competitive, not peaceful, whereas some brands may take pride in being peaceful. So we really wanted to be clear and intentional about what we were looking to evoke from a brand perspective.
And I think that allowed the extremely talented folks at day job that we worked with on branding to come back to us with a clear perspective on how they could put all of that into a name and to a visual identity. So they came back to us first with a bunch of different name options, and they flipped to the last slide of their deck, and the last slide said David. And we kind of just, you know, we slept on it for a night, but it really clicked pretty quickly. And to us, it was one a little bit odd, like calling a protein bar brand David, but too, like, perfect in its own way. And I talked about it a little bit at the beginning, but the name is a reflection of how we want to approach product and how we want to approach building this company. And it's sort of our cocky way of saying our bar is a masterpiece and not shying away from what we want to say in that realm. So we adopted the name David and then put together the visual identity from there, which we always, from the beginning, wanted to make sure that the guiding North Star of our product was going to be accurately reflected in the branding. So when you take a look at our package, you very clearly like, you don't see a lot on here and that's intentional.
But the few things you see are the brand name, the flavor, and then the protein, calories and sugar. So we're not muddying this with all the various other claims that we can make, like gluten free or low net carbs. Like, we're really focusing in on what are the three biggest reasons someone's going to buy our product. And to us, that's protein, calories and sugar. So reflecting that in the packaging and then further as we kind of developed the website and the brand tone of voice, we just wanted all of that to reflect exactly what I talked about with the brief that we made and really happy with the choices that we made there. And I think in general, when you take a look at the branding, the packaging, the name, whether you like it or not, you probably remember it and it probably stands out to you in the protein bar space. So that takes us through branding sort of towards go to market. And by the time we got to the summer, we started putting a lot of our mind share to what's the best way to introduce David.
And we had a final trial production run to validate all of our final recipes before going into our first full scale production run right before we launched. And we realized we'd have about 20,000 bars coming from our trial run. And we decided that instead of trying to just hold these and sell them when we launched, we would let our product kind of do the work for us. And we think it's an amazing differentiated product. So we wanted to get it out to the world and let people talk about it and share their experience with it. So a couple weeks before our launch, we posted that we were giving away 20,000 bars. And the first 5,000 people to sign up for our giveaway got sent a sample pack of four bars, one of each flavor. And from there we saw that people just started posting about it and talking about it.
And like everyone seemed to want to be one of the people who could show their friends that they were one of the first to try this new, innovative, amazing product. And it kind of got pulled on LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, and I know my feed is biased because the algorithms know to serve me David content, but I think a lot of people were seeing it on social media even before we launched. So when we did launch there was a ton of buzz with people wanting to try it and that just really fed into an extremely productive launch week.
We are really excited to announce that DTCpod is officially part of the HubSpot Podcast Network. The HubSpot Podcast Network is the audio destination for business professionals and we're really excited about being part of the network because we're going to be able to keep growing the show, bringing you guys amazing guests and obviously helping you guys learn from the best founders, marketers and builders of the most successful consumer brands. So anyway, keep listening to DTC Pod and more shows like us on the HubSpot Podcast Network at HubSpot.com podcast network and Zach, another question. So we've got, you know, we've got the creative strategy, the branding, we've got some of like the pre launch tactics and go to market and you know, bringing those together really talk to me a little bit about like what was happening on the company ends. I know you guys also, at the same time, you know, Peter has connections from having worked in this, this field before. So what are some of the lessons that you know, being able to work with him that he knew like to get right this time around to be able to launch a successful venture?
Yeah. So Peter has, you know, seen all of the mistakes that can happen in the protein bar space when building a company, which is amazing to have that resource with us. And from the very beginning, like his focus on quality is very telling. And you know, we put a lot of attention towards manufacturing and creating a great product on a batch to batch basis. So mitigating a lot of the risks of the supply chain by actually being there at the manufacturing plant and working with them to really nail the recipes when they actually go on to the manufacturing line was a great lesson from him. And on the distribution side, like one thing that he learned from RXBar that we really wanted to adopt here was like when you have a product that is great and that people want, you just need to get them to taste it and then they'll become customers. So that really influenced a lot of our initial strategy around doing this sampling because one of the most productive marketing spends that Rxbar had was just sampling people. And we think our product can do a lot of work for us in that same way.
Ramon Berrios 00:37:13 - 00:37:40
What are some of the lessons you learned that you could share with the audience. When it comes to whether the actual pre launch or preparing for a launch, you know, should there be a well put strategy together? Because there are things that are going to catch you off guard that happened in the launch. And so preparation can only go so far. So I'm curious, like, what lessons do you have for anyone who might be planning a launch?
Yeah, so there were a couple things that we wanted to do to help set us up for strong demand in our initial launch. The first was this sampling effort. The second was building an email list. So from the time we launched or we revealed the name for the brand, which was back in probably March or so or February of 2024, we started to funnel people to our website to build that email list. And just having that potential built in customer base from the very beginning was a great place to start. And they're, you know, some of the most enthusiastic customers that we have because they've been following us from the beginning, then from kind of outside of those two areas. One other thing that we wanted to do was just build a list of people with followers and send out as many bars as we could to them. So we we spent a lot of time also just combing through social media, various platforms, identifying people with large follower bases and working to get product out to them.
So that there was this kind of element of people seeing the bar everywhere when we first launched. And I think all of that kind of fed into the hype that we were building around launching the brand. And I think what it also did was it set us up really nicely on platforms that lend themselves to virality, like TikTok. So we're seeing TikTok as like a huge awareness builder for David, because one, initially we seeded a lot of product to people on the platform, and two, once people started talking about the product there, some videos started kind of catching hold and going viral, which then leads more people wanting to create content about it because they see other creators have gotten viral videos from it and they maybe if they post about the bar too, they'll get viral content. So it's a virtuous cycle that leads to more people posting about it, more people learning about it, then more people posting about it again. And at the same time, TikTok shop is this whole new beast where a lot of these creators who like the bar would want to also promote the bar and get a commission for doing so and can all do it very seamlessly within the TikTok shop platform. So that's been really beneficial for us, not just from sales that are generated directly on TikTok, but also sales that are generated through our website with people citing TikTok as the place they learned about us.
Hey, Zach, one question I wanted to just double click on there and I think Ramona has something to ask as well. What scale are we talking when you talk product? Seating. Right. You said you put together a list of people. So like how many, how many bars, how many people are you seeding in an initiative like this?
Yeah, so for our giveaway it was 5,000 sample packs. So that's 5,000 people. And then for the influencer list that we built, that was about 800 people.
Ramon Berrios 00:41:15 - 00:41:48
I mean, I love it because what you mentioned is it starts going viral and so then other people want to make content for David. So that is, you know, initially it's such an outbound push, but you can flip it to an inbound if you have an enticing offer or be the product just as inherent virality because of the story and everything that comes with it. The platforms almost. It's almost like they even recognize a product and like it increases the odds of it becoming more viral. So my final question when it comes to launches is, was it successful? What can you share about how the launch went?
Yeah, it was. It was super successful. We were really happy with it. We did a. We did over a million dollars in our first week, which was exciting and looking forward to continuing to grow from there.
Ramon Berrios 00:42:08 - 00:42:10
Yeah, love it. What is your team size now?
Our team size? Nine people.
Ramon Berrios 00:42:14 - 00:42:32
Okay. And the reason I asked that is because has AI been a role into how you guys are thinking of like growing the company and the team? Like, is AI a part of the conversation when you guys are together? When it comes to scaling creative, how you. How you think about creative, how you think about internal processes on.
We probably don't leverage it enough as we should, but we, we use it most when actually trying to learn about the science behind our bar and thinking about like potential new ingredients to test. So I'd say like Peter and I probably reference it the most. And then I know the folks on the marketing front that we work with in addition to in house, like we'll. We'll reference it as well. But I would say we are probably not even scratching the surface of what we could use it for. So it's probably a to do for me.
Ramon Berrios 00:43:21 - 00:43:37
Yeah. Well, man, it's exciting to hear that that was validating a million dollar week. It was validating from jumping from raise, I'd assume so. One question I have for you is, was the team Internal with the seating and like all the influencer stuff.
Yes, that was internal.
Ramon Berrios 00:43:39 - 00:44:13
Okay. So I think it's great context for people to hear it, that it's absolutely possible to do it in house. You don't necessarily need to spend a ton of money on an agency and there are playbooks out there to be able to implement this. So as we get towards the end here, Zach, my final question is around the capital that you guys have raised, especially with having authorities like Peter Attia and Huberman being part of the round, can you tell us more about why you would bring someone like Peter and Huberman into the round and how has that manifested itself as you guys have now launched publicly?
Yeah, so Dr. Peter Attia, he's our chief science officer and he's a great resource for the business and he's been involved since the spring of 2024. And yeah, Dr. Andrew Huberman too is one of the absolute authorities in distilling science to the general public. So the way we think about it is sort of Peter Attia is America's doctor and Andrew Huberman is America's scientist. And those two together really help us validate the concept to consumers. And both of them will, you know, they'll only promote a product that they believe in, which is really important to kind of that brand and ambassador alignment. And even at that deeper level, with Peter Attia being involved as our chief science officer, he's like very intimately discussing ingredients within our bar with us to ensure that it's something that he approves of and would want to eat himself.
So when Peter Rahal and I first created our formulation brief, we voiced over to each other, we want to create a bar that Peter Attia and Andrew Huberman want to eat. And it's really validating because both of them have said, we never used to eat protein bars and this is the only bar that we will eat. And the reason is because it has so much protein per calorie without a bunch of other crap in it that you don't want. And we think that message resonates with a consumer because it is authentic. Like, these are people who have platforms because they are very, you know, well learned in the scientific field. And when they promote a product or put their names behind a product like ours, it shows that it's something that people who subscribe to similar beliefs and trust their evidence based lens, that it's a good product as well for them to try. So the reason we approached those two people in particular is kind of because of how we view their influence in the space and from the very beginning that we were creating a bar that we wanted them to be able to eat.
Yeah.
Ramon Berrios 00:47:05 - 00:47:08
And it was a $10 million seed round, is that right?
Yeah, that's right. $10 million seed round led by Peter Rahul venture capital firm called Valor Siren Ventures and Dr. Peter Attia, Andrew Huberman and Lane Norton as well, who's a really, really smart, evidence based PhD in muscles protein synthesis as well as kind of a champion weightlifter. So he's awesome because he really focuses people on looking at the effect that food has on the human body and cutting through a lot of noise of, you know, people talking about whether something's natural or organic or processed versus unprocessed and really trying to drive into like, what does the science say whether this ingredient is good for you, bad for you or neutral.
One question, one last question that I've got for you Zach, is what's the, what's the play now? You've, you know, you've got your round together, you've got your product, you've launched, you've done your, you guys are blowing up on social like when you think about the business, right. How do you think about like where you're allocating product, like what channels you're on? You know, are you omnichannel? I know you mentioned some TikTok Shops, some direct stuff you can buy on your website. How are you thinking about Amazon? Where, what stores are you going to roll out with? Like, how do you deploy that seed round into like growing this company?
Yeah. So right now we're available on our website, davidprotein.com as well as on TikTok Shop. We are looking to move onto Amazon in the near future. That's more of a question of product capacity and supply chain capacity. We don't yet have enough product to allocate over to the Amazon channel given the demand that we're seeing from our website and TikTok Shop. But once we do, we intend to get going on Amazon as well. And then really long term, where this business wins and grows is in retail. Bars are something that you need to make available to people on the spot in the store right away.
And the, the big retail accounts across the club channel mass like Walmart and Target and then grocery. Those are what really moved the needle long term for a business like ours. And thankfully given the product that we've created and I think the buzz that's around the business and how people are seeing the product market fit there, we're getting a lot of great inbound interest from those partners and we're excited to be launching with some stores by January 1, which will be really fun to see the bar in real life.
Sweet. Well, Zach, this was awesome. We'll have to run it back once you guys are in some stores and kind of scaling up the different sides of your business, but this has been an awesome convo for anyone who's tuning in and wants to connect with you. Follow along with the David Journey. Why don't you shout out your socials yourself and as well as the brand.
Yeah. So brand is david protein davidprotein.com @david protein on Instagram @david protein on TikTok. Me personally, best way to follow along is on LinkedIn. You can search me up Zach Rain in there and I maybe very infrequently will throw a post onto Instagram at Zach Rain in there as well.
There we go. Well, thanks for coming on, Zach.
Ramon Berrios 00:50:59 - 00:51:00
Thank you, Zach.
Thanks guys.
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