The food and beverage industry is booming, and for all the right reasons. For Jordan Buckner, it can still exceed its current success if founders only know where to start. Jordan sits down with Elliot Begoun to discuss how he and his team serve as a springboard for founders in the food and beverage industry in launching their products through Foodbevy. He talks about the importance of peer to peer relationships, breaking the barriers of business growth, and the four questions to help determine if your products are hitting the mark. Furthermore, he shares the lessons learned after suspending his business, TeaSquares, due to the pandemic.

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The Continuous Growth Of Food And Beverage Industry With Jordan Buckner

I want to introduce my guest. Jordan has been a friend, we’ve known each other for quite some time and he’s one of those founders that is emblematic of what makes this business and this industry special. He’s bright, empathetic and he has a higher calling rather than what’s in his best interest as a founder. COVID presented him with some tough challenges as it relates to his brand and his business but rather than sit there and allow it to overwhelm him and turn him from founder into a victim, he’s figured out a way to sidestep, adjust and find a new path to serve fellow founders and to grow the community. That is exactly what entrepreneurship is all about. Entrepreneurship is all about adjusting as the world tilts on its axis. Before I prattle on too much, I’m going to turn it over and let Jordan introduce himself, share a little bit about his background and then tell you about his project. Jordan, thanks for joining me. Please share.

Thank you, Elliot. I appreciate the conversation. You have truly been helpful to my business and it’ll see that run through with different themes as I do a quick intro but for those who don’t know, my name is Jordan Buckner, Founder, Cofounder and CEO of TeaSquares. It’s a line of superfood energy bars. I founded Foodbevy, an online community for food and beverage founders to help take businesses from startup to scale. I’ve been on this journey for a while now of creating a better for your product. With TeaSquares, I was able to grow that business and do well. We hit some snags with COVID that we suspended the business as we pivot through this time. One thing that I want to do is identify ways of helping other founders through this time as well with their businesses and providing tools and resources along the way. We have a lot to cover but I’m happy to dive in.

One of the things that I believe in is the power of community. For those who are regular readers of the show, you can harken back to the episode with Jono Bacon. The community was something that was an a-ha moment. It was a bit of an epiphany. I’m part of a group that meets a couple of times a year. It’s different service providers from other industries from all over the world. Our coach who helps facilitate those meetings posed a question as we were walking into the end of the two-day intensive, what’s your highest value activity?

I had gone there with the mindset around an empathy-based approach to strategy and all of this stuff. As we sat through and had a candid conversation, what it came down to was this ability to cultivate community, build community and create this interconnected fiber that allows founders to cross-pollinate and support one another. That’s what you’re trying to do, founder to founder, peer to peer and provide a platform not only for other founders but for yourself as well. Tell me and share with those readers a bit about how Foodbevy came to be, what your mission is, what you’re trying to do and the things that you’re already embarking on with it?

We’re running TeaSquares since 2016. As everyone knows running any business can be a bit of a lonely experience especially in the food and beverage industry on when we’re first starting out. One of the brilliant things and a reason I love this industry is that many people are in it to genuinely make other people’s lives and the world a better place. There’s a positive community. Over the years, I’ve been able to meet great friends, other founders, advisors, investors in the industry and built a sense of community there. One thing that worked on a couple of years ago with a number of founders was a mini mastermind group to meet on a monthly basis, talk about the challenges that we were going through and how we can help each other to overcome that.

That was going great until the normal course of business takes over, people can’t make meetings all the time and without anyone dedicated to running it, it doesn’t always happen and it fell apart a little bit. With everything going on because of COVID, I saw an opportunity to draw in other founders, create a community where it was all about, “How can we make the pie bigger for the entire food industry?” Especially being in natural products. We’re not billion-dollar companies, we’re much smaller but have a lot of opportunities to grow. Instead of competing with each other, how can we collaborate with each other so that we can all grow throughout the entire process? With Foodbevy, I thought, “What are some of the main problems that brands face when they’re starting out?”

One is the access to resources at both on have tools and services to grow their business but also connections. The first thing we did was build a directory where we have the list of over 400 buyers from Whole Foods to Target to eCommerce providers. We also built a database of distributors, PR and media contacts, investors and co-manufacturers. It can become like Angie’s List for the food industry so that when you are looking to get in touch with someone, you can go there. The other part is what resources and tools can brands use as they’re growing?

We partner with organizations like RangeMe or WeStock to be able to offer discounts to our members who are starting out so that you can save thousands of dollars on tools that you will most likely use for your business as we’re getting started. Along with that, we also built the community portal where brands can share questions, feedback and get answers from other founders. That all wraps around this idea of, “By working together and by sharing these resources together, we can all grow our businesses and be better off.”

It sounds like you didn’t have a lot on your plate already. You’re navigating your brand through a tumultuous time and having to make some hard decisions. I want to touch a little bit about that part of the journey. You have a young daughter and you’re trying to be home with her. Rather than leaning into those all-encompassing things, you’ve still fought enough to create something like this and take an active role. Why did you feel the need to do that and not catch your breath and say, “My business has taken some big gut punches? I’m going to go ahead and pause, catch my breath, focus on being a dad, get through this pandemic, come back and re-engage.” Instead, you went all in the next thing.

One thing that I’ll say at the beginning is that everyone faces calamity and problems differently. For some people, taking the moment to reset is the right approach for them. What I did was reflect back on my personal mission statement. My wife and I talked about a brand mission statement but we developed personal mission statements as a way to ground ourselves and what’s important for us, a place to go back to. My personal mission statement is about building products or services for people that I care about that can help them succeed and then helping to mentor others along the way so that they can see it as well. That was similar in TeaSquares. When I lost that business being able to make energy bars that help other people to have the mental energy to accomplish what they want to get done in their day. Now with Foodbevy, the opportunity to help other founders find success.

During that time when TeaSquares had a pivot there and had to suspend our operations, I went back and thought, “What are my priorities in life?” First and foremost, my daughter, who was at the time was a couple of months old, being here for her and I transitioned to being a work from home dad. The second is, “How else can I help the community around me?” I was continuing to talk with other founders and the same problems came up around a lot of individuals are now working from home and trying to figure out how to navigate this pandemic. Attending webinars but not having personal one-on-one interactions with other founders. That’s one thing that I want to facilitate and help start. It’s been a fun journey. I thrive in and attack problems head-on, that’s my personality. It all started with a hypothesis of understanding or asking, “Is this a problem that other founders are facing like connection, collaboration, community, access and resources?” I went about proving and understanding if this is something that other founders could want or need. It turns out overwhelmingly yes.

You proved how much of a better person you are than I am, which is amazing. You’re also a perfect example of something I say frequently and that is, in a period of uncertainty like we have in 2020, like no other period in anyone’s lives, there are no better-suited individuals than entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are always awash in uncertainty. They’re looking for that opportunity amidst the chaos. I applaud that. Let’s spend a little time on the hard decision that you made to suspend TeaSquares. Also, some of the lessons that have come out of it both good and bad in terms of going through both the business decisions that were necessary to lead you to that difficult end result to suspend and also the emotional element of that. How did those two things inform what you’re doing with Foodbevy? I laid three deep questions into one.

Let’s roll back a little bit so you can understand how we got here. Starting out with TeaSquares years ago, I was on the journey of creating a healthy snack. I was working at an office in the food industry doing consulting but found myself not eating well, pounding Red Bulls, coffee and all these things make you stay energized. I had total regression, I had migraines and horrible pains from that. I have to quit coffee cold turkey. That led to the launch of TeaSquares. I did a lot of research in terms of looking at other alternative ingredients to coffee and caffeine in coffee I found tea but I needed something to take with me on the day. I combined the energy properties of tea and combined with the light crunchy snack.

My approach to innovation with TeaSquares was to make the product as unique as possible. In the beginning, we had four key differentiators that we were doing all at the same time, which sounds great from a defensibility standpoint but has made it a lot more complicated to explain to consumers what the product was. Their bite-size and energy bars still in a multi-serve pouch with tea, with flavors like green tea matcha and acai blueberry. No one ever goes into a grocery store and thinks, “I want a tea-infused energy snack.” Zero people have ever thought that but that’s what we launched at the time. The product was damn good. Whenever people tried it, they loved it. We do the shotgun approach of understanding where the market was and how can we sell. We try eComm, grocery and tried all these avenues. We found that corporate offices were a great way to introduce our product to consumers and we did because they allowed us to have a trial and we could get sales from the offices themselves.

We started doing a hybrid approach or retail, online, offices and it was all over the place for the first three years or so. It was a conversation that I had with Elliot after meeting him and understanding at the early stages of a business, your goal is to come up with a hypothesis of what you think why your brand exists in the world, it’s up to you to prove that. Focus on that with a dedicated lens until you exhaust that opportunity. For us, we reflected and said, “Our opportunity is not in groceries.” It’s too costly to educate our consumers there. Online, we had some success but it was still expensive but offices, airports and universities, these alternative channels were amazing for our business.

We focused on that channel in the last couple of years and found some amazing success. At the end of 2019, we had tons of new offices lined up that we were launching. We launched Cisco’s office and for January and February, we’re buying pallets of TeaSquares every week. We couldn’t even keep up with demand. We had offices like Google and others coming online. Were all in on our corporate office strategy. We had made the decision to not raise another round of investment and use our cashflows to fund the business. When the pandemic hit, it was the worst of both worlds. We completely lost 80% of our business within a couple of weeks. We also didn’t have a ton of cash on hand to hold out and test a new market.

We would have to raise another round and find a new business model that worked. That was a daunting point. We tried it. We pivoted and launched our new Shopify site. We were driving traffic there but we found those super expensive and it would take at least two orders from a customer for us to make back our acquisition costs. We realized that we would be pumping money into there without the guarantee that we would be making that money back. That’s a ride that I didn’t want to take my investors on or our partners. Ultimately, we decided that let’s take a step back. Let’s think about the product, the market, our business strategy and decide how we move forward from here.

At the same time, I had a young daughter. My wife works in healthcare. She was at the hospital day in and day out and dealing with the pandemic. I was at home also with my daughter. It was hard to decide to stop our operations. We manufacture our own product. We had a team of four employees at our facility and we tried to keep them on as long as possible. We did get funding through the small business loan program, which was great so we kept everyone on as long as we could but our customers weren’t coming back. The pandemic kept going on and there was no light in terms of when these offices will open back up. From our past experience, we knew that pushing into grocery or eComm again could work to a degree but would be a money suck us. That’s when I made the decision to end with our investors and with our partners, suspend operations and wait for another time to reopen up and start again.

I applaud because I think for founders, that’s hard to do. Gary Hirshberg always says, “Founders tend to be pathologically optimistic.” You’re down in your own Kool-Aid in cork sized containers. You don’t want to accept the realities that the marketplace may have dealt you. What I see is that founders wait too long to make this decision and they cannot come back from it. To have the courage to say, “It’s better for us to pause, hibernate,” to use my often leveraged tardigrade analogy, “To go into cryptobiosis.”

You reduce your metabolic rate to such a level that you can exist, stay and come back another day when the environment is less foreboding. It’s a courageous and difficult thing to do. Where I think you’re batshit is crazy is that instead of going, “I’m going to catch my breath, hang out with my daughter, get through this pandemic and support my wife.” You said, “I got this time. How do I go out and serve others that create something that some of the other founders out in the space have a better chance of success?” That’s awesome but it’s a bit nut. When did you make that decision to move right in and throw yourself fully into Foodbevy?

I approached it in a very similar way as I did when launching TeaSquares which is about testing out if this was something that’s going to be useful. I remember back in March or April 2020, I was starting to think about it. Expo was canceled, there were virtual events coming online and I didn’t want to keep throwing something else into the noise and have something that wasn’t useful for founders. One thing that I did was launch a beta program. I started with basics I already had, a couple of months prior, I had worked with a number of brands to put together a directory of retail buyers as a starting point that we share with each other. I reached out to all the other founders of my network and said, “I’m putting together this community. Here are some of the main tenets. We have resources, tools, community, webinars, to help you grow your business. Would you like to be part of it?”

We had an initial beta group of twenty founders who joined. From that, it cultivated what was valuable, what was not valuable and what might be repetitive in the space. That led to the launch of the main Foodbevy site. Even at that point, there’s still a little bit of a test and learn period where my role is to act as a connector and as a hub for the needs that brands could want. The number one question that I ask every brand who joins the event is thinking about becoming part of our community is what’s the top barrier that you need to overcome? I don’t want to put out information. I want to actively help other founders overcome these barriers. That’s the main drive that I have in terms of building out the pipeline for Foodbevy. Previously, we didn’t have a list of investors but a lot of friends said like, “We need to raise money. We need to raise funds. Who would you recommend?” I did a combination of providing individual introductions to investors but then also put together a list where we have over 200 investors in the food and beverage industry that they can then build their lead list out, reach out proactively and start building those relationships. It’s all driven by helping brands overcome those barriers.

It’s mostly informed by the things that you wish were out of your way, obstacles or challenges that you didn’t have to face. What’s your long-term vision for Foodbevy? If you and I are chatting about this in five years, tell me what Foodbevy looks like in your mind.

I see Foodbevy as a platform to grow throughout the rest of my life because I am at home when I’m able to help other people accomplish their goals. That’s a satisfying thing for me. Foodbevy is a couple of pieces, we have our directory or community. My goal is to continue helping founders solve those problems. There’s a long list of problems that founders encounter. Things like ingredient purchases. When you are at your early stage, you can’t get volume discounts or bulk discounts. Being able to leverage the size of our network to negotiate discounts there, as an example. I want to make an impact on founders where I can create a pipeline from startup to scale so that if you have an idea, you want to start a natural products company, you come to Foodbevy. You get all their resources guides past experiences from other founders so that it can help you fast track the growth of your company. You’ll still make mistakes but you can make fewer mistakes by learning how other people have built successful businesses as well.

Having that kind of resource and that connectivity is huge. I also want to talk about the importance of peer to peer support. I spend every day in the service of founders and I’m grateful for it every day. I remind myself of that. I find it amazing to work in the service of all of you because what you do day in and day out blows me away. It truly is awe-inspiring. One of the things that I’ve recognized and feel is critical for founders to know that they’re not doing this alone. To know that they’re not the only ones going to bed at night wracked with doubt and worry or that are facing some difficult challenges or what seemingly are insurmountable odds. What’s that peer to peer support look like within Foodbevy? What’s your vision there?

That’s incredibly important because as founders, we spend our entire days putting on a good face for our family, customers, advisors or the public. This life is a roller coaster. Within the same day, you can have a great thing happen and a bad thing. We had an order from a customer that was giant and one day we were like, “This is amazing,” but at the same time it would completely break our logistics and we wouldn’t be able to do that. We would have to spend thousands of dollars to even try to make it work so we decided not to take the opportunity. Sharing those experiences with other brands and other founders is crucial. There is kind of three bucks and as I see there was like the shit-talking where you have a bad day, you need someone to tell it to you that he understands what you’re going through. There’s the problem solving where you have an issue and you’re looking for help from someone who’s done it or is doing it. The third is to celebrate successes.

That’s something that I think about, big little successes because this is a tough journey. If you are only going to celebrate at the end when you’re a multi-millionaire or sell your company, that’s way too late. It’s about experience on the journey. We have an online platform. We have a Facebook group where brands and founders can share questions. I started a small group of round tables around specific issues. We have one coming up on branding. We’re talking about, “What’s working about your brand? What’s not working about your brand? How you can build those key ingredients to find success?” Get the learning experience from other founders in a real and authentic way. I’ll be helping to mediate that conversation but allowing founders to get vulnerable about what they like, what they don’t like and empower them to make that change as well.

One of the reasons I pursued Jordan to come on to this show and let me emphasize that was my doing. He’s reluctant to self-promote Foodbevy because it’s too close to him. This is critical. All of us purported experts can share with you our acquired wisdom, which is an amalgamation of our lived experiences and all of your lived experiences and aggregate. It’s a bit of cross-pollination. The thing that we can’t do and the thing that we shouldn’t even attempt to do is to support you from a founder to founder and peer to peer level. As a student of this business, I’ve witnessed those brands that perform, those founders that have the results that most of you are aspiring to and aspiring for are those that have created strong communities and strong networks. That peer to peer network, to use the term that Jono Bacon does is that community of collaborators.

The people that you can work through things with, who gets it and also where there’s enough psychological safety that you can be vulnerable. This was something that needed to get more attention and I wanted to bring it to all of you who are reading. My commitment is to try to use this show as a place to showcase the resources that exist in this industry to support all of you and Foodbevy is one of them. Let’s change the topic a little bit and it still relates to your mission of Foodbevy but also your mission in general. For all the things that we do well in this industry, the one that we have yet to do well is to support founders, minorities, women-owned founders and grow the diversity of our entrepreneurs in this business. Talk to me a little bit about your efforts around that and what you’re trying to do individually but also through Foodbevy to change that and to make this business look a little bit more like the consumers that it serves.

That’s something that is close to my heart and living through that. I remember getting into this business as a black founder myself, there’s a lot of uncertainty in terms of how to start this journey. Fortunately, I did have a lot of privilege growing up in terms of being able to go to get schools, developed certain networks, have a good college and grad school experience. Getting into the food industry, my first customer was Whole Foods but it’s particularly because Whole Foods are opening up a store at South Side in Chicago in a 99% black community in Inglewood. They were looking for local companies and local vendors to launch there. Through the local chamber of commerce, I was able to start with TeaSquares there amongst 20 or 25 other brands.

That was my first entry into the food industry. That was within three months of even launching the product. It was that connection that resource and knowing this networking community group that helped us in touch with Whole Foods. At the same time, a lot of founders don’t have those connections or don’t have the luck of the opportunity, especially for minority and women-owned founders. The opportunities to grow come from a combination of grit, hard work but also luck and what comes from being in the right place, the right time and with the right people. If you don’t have a network of the right people, it’s hard to develop one coming from the outside of the industry. That’s one thing that I found that’s been crucial to my success.

The first investor that we brought on had no idea where I was but as soon as I mentioned that I went to a private elementary school here in Chicago and his kids went to the same school, there’s an immediate bond and connection there who was like, “Let’s bring you on. I can have this sense of familiarity and trust.” For people that don’t have those connections and don’t have that experience is difficult. Here’s the tough part about our industry. If you talk to most people within there, most investors at Pfizer’s and other founders, they are open to helping minority founders and helping women-owned founders, which I think is great. I applaud that. The challenge is understanding the difficulties and the other challenges that founders will experience along the way and providing them not with advice but tangible help.

Investors in general are open to working with the best product idea and the best vision but this is across the entire ecosystem. Founders like to invest in what they think will be successful. They look at business metrics but they also look at the founder, where the founder went to school, what their background was and if other successful founders have similar traits to what they have. If you look back at successful companies because of the past, a lot of them were white males who maybe went to top schools and colleges. If you’re using that as a lens for determining the next generation of successful companies then you’re going to miss out on an entire world. My goal with Foodbevy and my personal mission is to help to meet founders, women-owned founders, minority founders, even other disadvantaged or founders from disadvantaged groups. I connect them with the key decision-makers and being able to help them build relationships so that they can be successful.

That means introducing them to investors but also prepping them for what the investor cares about. That might be something they don’t have experience with. Walking through this investor cares about numbers and metrics. They can’t give a shit about your story before or as talking with an investor and saying this one cares about your story and your experience but prepping them for what that experience is going to be like. By breaking down those barriers and breaking down those walls, helping these other founders be successful, even the fact of introducing them to buyers at Whole Foods, Target or other locations that might be impossible to get to. One of the biggest things is for a lot of founders, they aren’t looking necessarily to be placed in a position because of their disadvantaged status, race or gender. What they’re looking for is a seat at the table, a chance to have those same opportunities and to have the door open to be able to walk through them. They are putting in as much work, if not more, to be successful and overcoming everything that they do. The knowledge, resource and the networking gap for all three areas that I’m hoping to use at Foodbevy to help companies overcome by providing them those access points and make that path easier.

I want to call up one other gap and that is the one that you don’t see yourself in as much but one of the realities and this is my belief. One of the realities is that if we truly want to see a more diverse founder community, which we certainly do then it starts with people of color, women and so forth. Seeing themselves as entrepreneurs is seeing entrepreneurship as a path forward as a real opportunity and as something that they can do. It’s people like you, Jordan, who immediately are willing to stand up and say, “I’m not perfect. It doesn’t mean that it’s been easy but you can do this. I’m an example of it and I’m giving back.” That’s the most important element is that we have to begin to be a mirror and shine the reflective light back into those communities to let people believe and see that this is a viable path.

All the things that you’ve said, “We’ve got to do what we can to bridge the gap between the knowledge, resources and network.” The latter is where everyone in this industry can help because this is an incestuous industry. There’s no question about it. I don’t say that necessarily in a derogatory form but this is an industry that is about being plugged in, connected and being able to send that email. Send that text, pick up that phone and reach that person who can be the difference-maker, the door opener and the conduit to that next step forward. If you have access to that network, that’s a huge advantage. Those that come to it without it after work that much harder. If we can find ways like Foodbevy to immediately provide that connectivity, that helps. It’s incumbent upon every founder. I say this all the time, “As you reach one hand to grab the next rung in the ladder, with the other hand, you should be reaching down and pulling the next person behind you up.” That’s how we are going to race forward.

One thing too that’s interesting about the point you mentioned before is a lot of times when I talk to founders from these communities who are starting businesses and are thinking about is a lack of a full understanding of the different ways to be successful in the industry and the implications that has on your business. People hear about companies like RXBAR and these large national companies and because it’s not public, they don’t quite know How those companies got there and the sacrifices along the way. For companies to grow fast, there’s an avenue and way to do that but that might take venture capital money. Venture capital money means having a product that has great margins and that can scale fast and taking a different lifestyle change where you give up some control over the business and the direction to achieve that size.

There’s a much different emotional path that takes to see a high growth company versus having a company that’s successful on a local or regional level and being able to maintain control and grow it there. There are lots of paths in between. That’s one thing that I educate on is talking to founders and ask them, “What’s your ultimate goal? Is it something you want to keep running? Do you have a mentality of ‘We want to grow it to be a nationwide company quickly and do it with outside money?’ Do you want it to be a legacy that you can pass down to your family?” Help them figure out what are the puzzle pieces they need to build along the way to help them achieve that goal. Even providing out those paths helps them to understand what goals are even possible and so that they can start making the decisions to grow their business in a direct way or test that out.

If we were being honest and if we were to look at all of those overnight success brands or the hockey stick trajectory brands, if you looked at that hockey stick, the actual end of that hockey stick, it’s much longer than what’s out there on the ice rink. It takes a long time to get to that growth and you have to survive an immense amount of challenges and headwinds to even get to the point where you can then accelerate that growth. I know that it isn’t the only path and it’s not necessarily the right path for most brands, building good, smart and fundamentally sound businesses that are nimble, capital-efficient and resilient are.

A great example is what you’ve done with TeaSquares. This is a great shining example because you’ve suspended the business. By being smart, building a fundamentally sound business, controlling your own ability to manufacture and limiting the number of people in the capital stack, you were able to make a decision as a founder to suspend the business. If you were further entrenched with VC money, if you had more people involved and you were using multiple co-packers, you might not have had that decision. You would have had to figure out how to continue to push forward and try to drive growth even if that meant careening off the edge of a cliff to almost certain death.

It stemmed from building a business as a founder that was structured in a way to provide choices. You have a good chance of going back to the business and reinvigorate when the economic realities of the pandemic arc on and life return back to whatever that next version of normal looks like. Let’s talk a little bit about how brands can get involved with Foodbevy. If I’m a founder reading this and I’m interested in getting involved in Foodbevy, what do I do? What does it look like? What’s required from me in order to participate?

There are two ways to get involved or a couple of ways to get involved for Foodbevy. The first is on their brand side. We launched a database for emerging food and beverage brands so that you can list your product on their listing information and be discovered by investors, journalists and other partners in the space. You can do that by going to Foodbevy.com and click on For Brands. That’s a searchable database that’s open to everyone. The second way is joining as a premium Foodbevy member where you get access to contact details and our full directory of over 2,500 suppliers and industry partners. You can use that to grow your business, your discounts and our premium webinars that you can access for free.

That’s a great way to jump on and get involved. Everyone that joins is able to find instant access or instant value for whatever you are looking for and whatever barrier you’re overcoming with your business. On the other side, we’re also looking for industry partners. In running Foodbevy, a lot of companies reached out and said, “How can I get involved? How can I provide my services to the community?” If you’re an industry partner, everyone from an agency, a consultant, retail buyer and out of their investor, you can also join. We have membership options for an investor or our partners to be able to get to know our brands and build relationships with them. One thing that I want to do is foster a curated set of partners. Everyone who comes in gets to apply and then we’ll select the best partners on there.

As a brand, you’re not overwhelmed with tons of different options. We’ve created a vetted set of partners for you to work with. That’s the other thing that’s super important. We provide the ability for founders to anonymously review different partners on there. I’m working in this business for several years. Some of the partners are crap, meaning that’s not a good fit and it’s not a good relationship that they aren’t able to drive your business forward or to meet your goals. If that’s what their experience has been, we want brands to share that but then also there’s a lot of great partners who are out there and we want to help them raise the top and for brands to be able to find them. We’re putting the power back in the hands of brands and founders to be able to elevate the best partners in the space and the industry. That’s the best way to get involved is to go over to Foodbevy.com whether you’re a brand or a partner, be able to hop in and join.

I assume that Foodbevy gets stronger and better as participation increases. It’s informed by its members and somewhat a living or breathing organism.

Being part of other communities as well, there’s always that effect where there’s a small tight-knit group that people are active and talking. As the community grows to a medium-sized some people are more active than others some are active listeners where they don’t post anything but they read everything that goes on. As the community gets larger, you get a good mix of all of that. As Foodbevy grows, we’ll continue to have both levels of participants on there as well and being able to have this thriving community for founders. I find the community successful at the end of the day. If I can help move the needle for founders and being able to have more leverage and control in the industry over some of the other partners so that we can all be successful and find success that way. It grinds my gears a little bit the fact that brands end up being screwed out of everyone in the industry the most. I’m looking to help turn that trajectory around.

I’m going to change gears slightly and I want to pull from a bit of your five years of hard-fought lessons. What do you know now that you wish you knew when you started?

The number one thing is how to know if you have product-market fit and if you are on the right path. That’s because as a founder starting out, most ideas come from a personal experience that you have and the personal need. Who’s to say if a large enough group or other people have that same problem that you’re dealing with as well. I have done a lot of thinking about this, a lot of work and a lot of reading. I came across some work by Rahul Vohra who’s the Founder of Superhuman and Sean Ellis who led growth at Dropbox. They did a lot of research in determining what makes a brand successful and what metrics do you use to determine if your product has a product-market fit? The way that I defined product-market fit is if your product is continuing to grow without you having to pump more marketing dollars into it, that it’s continuing on that growth trajectory.

One thing that Sean Ellis found is a leading indicator to understand that. He said, “Ask users, how would you feel if you could no longer use the product? Measure the percentage of people who answer, I’d be very disappointed. You will unlock what your product-market fit in customer basis.” After benchmarking hundreds of startups with this development survey, Ellis found that the magic number was about 40% of companies or of your customers that replied they’d be very disappointed if your product didn’t exist. Companies that struggle to find growth almost always had less than that 40% of users respond that way. Those founders that have strong traction almost always exceeded that number. As a brand, they developed this in the tech industry but it applies in the food industry as well.

As a founder, you can ask this and should ask this to your customers in a simple survey. It should be a couple of questions. First questions directly asking, “How would you feel if you can no longer eat TeaSquares or consume my product?” I have three answers, disappointed, somewhat disappointed or not disappointed. The second question is what type of people do you think would most benefit from this product? What this question gets to is understanding the word of mouth effect. Who this customer would tell about your product because they see it would be a good fit? Third, what is the main benefit you receive from this product? This question is important because as founders, we over overemphasize certain aspects and functionality of our product that a customer may or may not relate to.

An example with TeaSquares is we had two elements. One is our snack tastes good and it’s like a fun crunchy energy bar. The second element is the ingredients or designed to help support mental focus and clarity. When we surveyed our customers, we saw a 50/50 split in terms of what functionality people liked most. Half of our customers said, “We liked the functionality, we liked the energy benefits and I like green tea as a delivery system. This is great and it tastes great too.” The other half said the reverse where they said, “I love the texture of your product. I love the taste, it’s light, it’s airy and it’s delicious. I’m not sure if I get the energy benefits or not but I’m not buying it for that reason.”

That helped us understand how we develop messaging around each of these and if we want to go closer to one group or the other. The fourth question being how can we improve this product for you so that you can further highlight those strengths of the product? If you take these four questions and ask our customers, you’ll get super-valuable data in terms of, “Is your product hitting the mark? If so, how you can grow and if not, where do you need to change?” This makes a world of difference. If you’re struggling to figure out like, “Is this the right channel? Are these the right customers that I’m selling to? Who’s my tribe?” Answer and ask these four questions. Once you dive into those details on who are the people who essentially need and want your product, what characteristics they have, you will find if you have a product-market fit or not. If you don’t, it gives you the tools to then ask how can you change your product to achieve it?

Those are four powerful questions and they all lead back to something that we talk a lot about the importance of empathy. If you want to understand product-market fit, it starts with understanding and being able to look through the lens of your own consumer, glean and viscerally connect with what it is that you’re doing for them. What is the problem that you’re solving or the need that you’re filling? How do people reach out to you? How do people learn more about Foodbevy? Any last parting words of wisdom you want to share with them?

If you are interested in learning more, checking us out at Foodbevy.com. Sign up for our brand directory at least and you can check out some of the partners that we have on the platform. If you want to get in touch with me, you can shoot me an email at [email protected] or [email protected]. You can get to me. We also have webinars every other week or so on practical issues. The last thing to say is we’re rounding out 2020, it’s been a terrible year for most of us. As we go into 2021, you’re looking into ways of solidifying your personal goals, what you want to accomplish and what your priorities are.

Circling back to when I first started in 2020, I sat down to evaluate what are the top three priorities that I have in my life and wrote those down. I wrote a whole blog post about it but it’s clear in terms of saying, “My family priorities are number one. TeaSquares is number two. Finding a community of Foodbevy was number three.” It’s changing as the world has changed but I then listed and look at my to-do list to make sure that everything that I planned for the day aligned with none of my three priorities. If it didn’t align with my priorities then I would give myself permission to take that off the list and not even think about it or putting it on some backlog that I didn’t look at.

I found that clutter comes in every single day to your inbox and to-do lists, things that you want to accomplish. It can be overwhelming. As a new year’s resolution coming up, think about what are those top three priorities that you have in your life and build your entire life around them and stick to that. Put it in the background on your desktop or your daily to-do list on every page so that you’re making sure that you are making progress towards your goals and that will help you feel accomplished every single day.

We tackle that somewhat differently but similarly in the fact that I’m a big believer in the use of, “Our objectives and key results in identifying those three most important things that need to be done.” Doing them in 90-day increments helps discern the difference between what’s interesting and what’s important. We can be overwhelmed by all the interesting shit that we have that confronts us that we want to do but what’s most important is that. Staying narrow and focused on that is important.

Thank you for joining. I appreciate you doing this. I do admire and respect you. You’re emblematic of what every founder stands for in this business. You are the exact entrepreneur and founder that gives me so much hope for what the future’s going to look like. I appreciate what you’re doing with Foodbevy. It’s an awesome community that’s going to be a terrific resource for many founders. Thanks, Jordan. Thank you everybody for joining. I appreciate it and see you next time. Take care.

Thank you.

Important Links

• TeaSquares

• Foodbevy

• Jono Bacon – Previous episode

• RangeMe

• WeStock

• Foodbevy.com

• [email protected]

• [email protected]

About Jordan Buckner

Entrepreneur re-inventing how we snack through TeaSquares.

Startup advisor to a dozen growing startups in the tech, food, health, mobile, and healthcare spaces

Specialties: Design-Thinking, Customer Analytics, Business Strategy, Product Design, Business Design

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