DTC POD - #234 - Matt Czarnecki, Verb: Taking A CPG Energy Bar From Dorm To Scale

DTC POD #234 - Matt Czarnecki, Verb: Taking A CPG Energy Bar From Dorm To Scale

Blaine Bolus 00:00:06 - 00:00:46

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Blaine Bolus 00:00:51 - 00:01:28

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Blaine Bolus 00:01:34 - 00:01:46

What's up, DTC. Pod? Today we're joined by Matt Zarnecki, who is the co founder and CEO of Verb. So, Matt, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about the company you are building?

Matt Czarnecki 00:01:46 - 00:02:19

Sounds great. My name is Matt. I'm one of three co founders of Verb Energy. Verb is on a mission to make great energy accessible every day with better for you effective energy solutions for the modern consumer. This began actually as a side project in a dorm room almost seven years ago and translated to our first product launch in May of 2018. A plant based snack bar caffeinated with organic green tea. We're really excited. We've built our brand direct to consumer to date and are in the process of getting ready to go omnichannel.

Blaine Bolus 00:02:19 - 00:02:39

So, Matt, what's your background? I think it's awesome that you were able to start it as a side project. And it's actually funny. We've heard a couple of brands, sometimes the best ones get started as kind of like a side project that just pulls you in and the next thing you know, you've got a real big business going on. But what was your background before and what kind of prompted you guys to go after the energy bar category?

Matt Czarnecki 00:02:40 - 00:03:35

Yeah, absolutely. So at the time when Verb got started, I was studying biochemistry. I had, from the age of about 15, been super interested in trying out all sorts of diets, figuring out how I could optimize my own personal energy levels. I was paleo before paleo was cool. And as a college student, I was very busy. I was training for races. I was taking a lot of intense biochemistry classes and had this experience one night where I walked into a coffee shop, grabbed a coffee and a granola bar, looked at my receipt and I spent over $7. So thought to myself in that moment, what if there were a sort of less expensive, more convenient way to energize? And that's where Verb was born, kind of right alongside that.

Matt Czarnecki 00:03:35 - 00:04:17

I had a little bit of an entrepreneurial itch. In my first couple of years of college, I had a friend who lived on the floor below me who would come up into my room at two in the morning and say, hey Matt, I think I figured out how we could harness energy from the moon. And I would dylan like, you should probably go back to bed. But he and I actually started an entrepreneurial incubator going into our sophomore year of college. It was called Yale Launch. And the goal of the incubator was to start companies and the two of us had a little bit of experience previously doing that. And the two of us actually, to this day are both working on companies that we started out of that incubator.

Blaine Bolus 00:04:18 - 00:04:43

That's really cool in terms of you guys had the entrepreneurial itch, you had an idea and you had like a background in biochemistry and that sort of, you know, as a side project in college. I don't know, CPG brands are the biggest thing to come out of Yale all the time. So how did you get started? What were the first things in terms of putting the side project together? In your dorm room? Right?