How I Built This with Guy Raz - Advice Line: Reaching New Customers

Advice Line: Reaching New Customers

Oct 3, 2024 - 38m 24s

This week, Guy is joined by Leah Solivan of TaskRabbit, Scott and Ally Svenson of MOD Pizza, and Holly Thaggard of Supergoop! to answer questions about reaching new customers from three early-stage founders in this special “mashup” episode of the How I Built This Lab Advice Line.

First, Erin from Alameda, California wants to introduce users to an online divorce platform so the legal process isn’t any harder than it has to be. Then, Kaveh in San Diego seeks to bring his olive oil beyond the farmers market and into kitchens nationwide. And finally, Erik from New Jersey offers on-the-go medical kits to make travel prep that much easier.

Thank you to the founders of Hello Divorce, aficio22 and JetSet Meds for being a part of our show.

If you’d like to be featured on a future Advice Line episode, leave us a one-minute message that tells us about your business and a specific question you’d like answered. Send a voice memo to hibt@id.wondery.com or call 1-800-433-1298.

To hear our guests’ previous episodes:

TaskRabbit: Leah Solivan | Advice Line with Leah Solivan

MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson | Advice Line with Scott and Ally Svenson

Supergoop!: Holly Thaggard | Advice Line with Holly Thaggard

This episode was produced by Chris Maccini with music by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by John Isabella. Our audio engineers were Gilly Moon and Robert Rodriguez.

You can follow HIBT on X & Instagram and sign up for Guy's free

newsletter at guyraz.com.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Discover more and add this to your library.

Thank you to the founders of Hello Divorce, aficio22 and JetSet Meds for being a part of our show.

To hear our guests’ previous episodes:

TaskRabbit: Leah Solivan | Advice Line with Leah Solivan

MOD Pizza & Seattle Coffee Company: Scott and Ally Svenson | Advice Line with Scott and Ally Svenson

Supergoop!: Holly Thaggard | Advice Line with Holly Thaggard

This episode was produced by Chris Maccini with music by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by John Isabella. Our audio engineers were Gilly Moon and Robert Rodriguez.

You can follow HIBT on X & Instagram and sign up for Guy's free

newsletter at guyraz.com.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Key Takeaways

1
Building trust is crucial for new business models, especially in sensitive industries like divorce.
2
Creating a strong brand narrative around product quality and mission can enhance customer loyalty.
3
Leveraging partnerships with local businesses, chefs, and influencers can significantly boost brand visibility.
4
Education is key—communicating the value and necessity of services in crowded markets helps drive engagement.
5
Entrepreneurs should actively seek feedback and revise their strategies based on audience needs and market demands.

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Introduction to the Advice Line

The episode kicks off with Guy Ross introducing the 'Advice Line,' where he connects with successful founders to help aspiring entrepreneurs with their business challenges. This week features three former guests—Leah Sullivan (TaskRabbit), Scott and Ally Svenson (MOD Pizza), and Holly Thaggard (Supergoop!). Together, they address questions from early-stage founders looking to enhance their customer outreach and business growth strategies.

Making Online Divorce Accessible

Erin, co-founder of Hello Divorce, reaches out for advice on overcoming the stigma that individuals need to hire a lawyer for divorce proceedings. She explains how their platform simplifies the often convoluted divorce process by offering accessible legal forms and support. Leah Sullivan shares her insights, noting the importance of building trust and educating potential users on the value of using an online platform for such sensitive matters. They discuss strategies like sharing success stories and testimonials to communicate efficiency and trustworthiness.

Scaling Aficio 22's Olive Oil Brand

Kaveh Nirmafidi of Aficio 22 seeks guidance on expanding his premium olive oil brand beyond farmers' markets. He highlights their mission of donating a portion of sales to youth organizations while also emphasizing the challenge of establishing retail distribution channels. Scott and Ally Svenson advise focusing on product quality and creating a narrative that resonates with consumers. They emphasize the power of partnerships with local chefs and influencers to enhance brand visibility and advocate for identifying opportunities in gift marketing.

The Essentials of Safe Travel: JetSet Meds

Eric Wolk introduces JetSet Meds, a physician-curated travel medical kit designed for travelers to ensure safety abroad. He shares the challenge of educating potential consumers about the kit's necessity and reaching the target audience through the plethora of marketing channels available today. Holly Faggard emphasizes leveraging John’s medical expertise to gain trust and focus on creating partnerships with companies for employee benefits. They brainstorm ideas for marketing strategies, using social media to establish a connection with their audience.

Conclusion and Call to Action

Guy concludes the episode by encouraging listeners to share their business challenges and participate in future advice sessions. He provides contact methods for those interested in being featured on the Advice Line and highlights the importance of continual learning and community support for entrepreneurs.

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The NPR Politics Podcast, listen on Spotify. This episode is brought to you by Clayvio. Clayvio helps you build smarter, digital relationships with your customers, with its unified data and marketing platform, featuring email, SMS, reviews, and more. This Black Friday Cyber Monday make every moment count with Klavio.

Learn more at klavio.com-bfcm. Hello and welcome to the advice line on how I built this lab. I'm Guy Ross. This is the place where we help try to solve your business challenges.

Each week, I'm joined by a legendary founder, a former guest on the show who will attempt with me to help you. In this week, we have a special episode, a bit of a mashup, three colors, and three different former guests, but all tackling some version of the same question. How do you get the word out about a growing business and reach new customers? numbers.

And by the way, if you're building something and you need advice, give us a call and you just might be the next guest on the show. Our number is 1-800-433-1298. Send us a one-minute message that tells us about your business and the issues or questions that you'd like help with. You can also send us a voice memo at hibt at id.wondery.com and make sure to tell us how to reach you.

And also, don't forget to sign up for my newsletter. It's full of insights and ideas from the world's greatest entrepreneurs. You can sign up for free at gyros.com. And we'll put all this info in the podcast description.

Alright, let's get to it. Our first guest today is Leah Sullivan, the founder of TaskRabbit, the online marketplace for services like cleaning, building furniture, running errands, and a whole lot more. And Leah told the story of TaskRabbit on how I built this back in 2022. It is such a cool story.

You can find it in our podcast queue and we'll put a link in the podcast description as well. And as you'll hear, Leah had some fantastic advice for our collars when she joined me on the advice line earlier this month. Hello, welcome to the advice line. Hi, Guy and Leah.

Hello, hello. Tell us your name where you're calling from and a little bit about your business. Sure. I'm Erin.

I'm calling from Alameda, California, and I am the CEO and co-founder of Hello Divorce. Hello Divorce. Yep. We are an online platform that transforms the notoriously complicated and messy and super expensive divorce journey into an easier, kinder and much more equitable and affordable process us through a platform that combines easy to use technology and tools with built-in access to expert support along the way.

Wow. So it's like a platform like legalism or whatever to make an online will or whatever trust and you just speed through the divorce in a simple straightforward way. Similar. But from one platform, you not only complete your legal forms and there's a lot.

Yeah. But you can also send them for filing with the court. You can chat with a lawyer or a financial advisor, or even a mediator to help you resolve conflict. And you can get the resources you need for everything from dividing home equity to co-parenting challenges, and then to navigating post-diverse hurdles as well.

And what's your question for us today? Okay, so when I started a load of words, I knew it would be a great option for people who couldn't afford lawyers, but what surprised me in a good way was that even those who could afford an attorney have started to find value and be successful with us. However, we continue to face this recurring challenge. Most people still think they need to hire a lawyer to get divorced.

So, how do we overcome this deeply rooted belief and build trust in the idea that an online divorce can work? Right. Okay. Well, as somebody who has not experienced this in hopes never to, I'm curious how I'm assuming that you have a background in this, like maybe as an attorney or?

Actually, I spent 15 years practicing law as a divorce attorney. right and I saw just how broken the system is it is unfair it ramps up conflict literally every step of the way and it's set up to make divorces longer and messier because lawyers get paid by the hour and it creates literally no incentive for us to add efficiencies or to work towards a resolution, the longer the divorce goes the more we get paid. So I knew we could do better, but to truly make a difference, we had to help people opt out of the system all together and provide much more holistic support. And so basically it's like a flat fee that you pay?

Correct. So depending on the complexity of your divorce, customers pay between $400 and $3800 for a plan that covers their entire divorce and they can pay that as a flat fee or they can pay that over time. And then from there, they can seek all a cart expert help to the extent that they need some extra advice along the way or help resolving conflict. Leah Sullivan, I'm gonna bring you in.

You may have questions of your own before we answer these questions. Yeah, well, well, first off, I mean, Erin, I'm always looking for founders that I say have product market fit and you as a founder having experienced this industry. I mean, it makes so much sense that you have built this company. I love that you have seen where the gaps are and you've seen that it can be done a different way and that's what you want to tackle.

So I think that's so fantastic. What What percentage of divorces do you feel like this works for? Does it work for everyone or are there outliers or like, I have had this experience myself, right? It's a really big deal.

You don't want to mess it up. And so you don't want to start down a path if you're not sure it's going to work. Is it going to make it worse or is it actually going to be better to go this way? So how do you think about that?

when you look at the the customers that you've worked with today and you know what what percentage does it work for? Yes well that is on my mind all the time primarily because women file for divorce 70 to 75% the time and that is their biggest fear so you get it and it works for the vast majority of divorces and the reason being is because most divorces don't go to trial and most divorces don't happen overnight. So you will have time to use our software and complete everything you need to complete and have a lawyer, an incredible lawyer on the platform review it with you, if you'd like advice. You'll have time to work with a financial advisor and have them really think through how you can come out of this in a much more resilient way.

In fact, the problem with the lawyer-led divorce is that lawyers end up leading everything there is to lead about divorce when in reality most of us should be working with a financial advisor or a real estate expert. And so what I love about our platform is yes it's emotional but it makes space for that and gives you the opportunity to connect with whoever you might need before you make that big decision to sign on the dotted line and sign your divorce judgment. Okay. Yeah, I mean, I have a couple of ideas.

I mean, it is sort of, this is much higher stakes, but it is sort of reminiscent when we were first launching TaskRabbit again, building that trust around, am I going to invite someone a stranger into my home? People were really scared about that. They were really nervous about that in the beginning. And so there is this element of education I think that has to be done to overcome that and trust building.

You know a taskrabbit we did it with background checking and we did it with you know utilizing social networks. I think in your case bringing in some more of those emotional support elements that sort of give people the trust and confidence that listen I've got you. I know what you're going through, we're going to support you through this. Right now it feels very transactional, which is good.

It's fine. It makes me feel confident that you're going to be able to handle all of the paperwork and filings and keep sort of the trains running on time. I think what I want to feel is that element of I understand how to make this path a healthy your happier approach for you. I mean, is it even possible to take some divorced uncouples and bring them to the forefront with some reviews of how it went, you know, with some videos of, hey, listen, yep, we got divorced and we feel better off for it.

And this is where we are today. Thank you to Hello divorce for making it so uncontentious for us. I love that and I think that's actually what we do best but kind of leaned away from because for the longest time we were leaning into the empathy and the storytelling and the videos and the testimonials but the problem was is that people didn't think we had the authority, like that we had the ability to handle their needs. And so now it sounds like we need to go back, we need to find the balance.

It's a balance. It's a balance. And you have the credibility, you have the background to say, I know how to do this. I can handle the legal forms and the filings and all those things.

So it's a little bit of maybe bringing you to the forefront too, while you balance that empathy piece, I think building that credibility with directly as a founder with your customer base. But you also have that empathy as well. I mean, that's where this really all started. This is why you built what you built.

So actually, I think it's really about you, like you are the balance, and maybe bringing that more to the forefront would be helpful. Yeah, agree, agree, 100%. Aaron Levine, hello, divorce is the platform. Good luck and Thanks for calling in.

Thank you so much. We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, the founder of a premium olive oil company asks for advice from two founders with decades of experience in the food industry. Stick around, you're listening to The Vice Line right here on How I Built This Lab. I'm Molly Bloom, and my podcast torched tells some of the greatest stories of scandal and redemption on the world's biggest stage, the Olympics.

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At a time when we're debating where policing is going, we're gonna tell you where the police came from. They wanted me to write about the New York City Police Department, but without using the words, violence or corruption, which is effectively impossible. A story of how the largest and most influential police department in the country became one of the most violent and corrupt organizations in the world. It doesn't matter if you're self emancipated by a person, or if you're free, they're just sending people back to the South, kidnapping them.

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Follow Empire City on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of Empire City early and add free right now by joining Wondry Plus. Welcome back to the advice line on how I built this lab, I'm Guy Ross. Our next return guests are the husband and wife team behind Maud Pizza and Seattle coffee company, Scott and Ali Svensson, and when they were first on the show they told the story of how they brought Pizza to the fast casual industry after selling their coffee company to Starbucks and will stick a link to that full episode in the podcast description.

Anyway, when Scott and Allie came back onto the device line, they offered some really great advice to our collars. Hello, hello collar, please introduce yourself. Tell us your name, where you're calling from, and just a little bit about your business briefly. Hi there, it's great to be here.

My name is Kaveh Nirmafidi. I'm calling from San Diego, California, and I'm the co-founder of Aficio 22. We're a mission driven premium olive oil company sourcing our single origin olive oil from Central California. All right, and what's what's your question for us today?

My question is, you know, given our growth aspirations for FECIO-22, what is the best strategy to scale our brain nationwide and enhance our distribution channels? Got it. Okay, great. Well, thanks for calling in, Covey.

Tell us a little bit about the business. You're in Southern California, you said? That is correct. We're currently based in San Diego.

We participate in various weekly farmers markets is between San Diego, all the way to Malibu. We also align ourselves with various wine festivals, most in California. And so you source your olive oil from California and it's called a Ficio 2022. Yeah, tell me about that name.

So a Ficio is driven from a Ficio Nado and the 22 is we're launched in December of 2022. We're also mission driven. So we allocate 2% of our total sales to two youth organizations in San Diego. Tell me how you got into the olive oil business.

That's a great question. I mean, olive oil was always a staple in my mom's kitchen. She, whether we use salad dressings or she made stews, it was always a staple ingredient. And my brothers and I really developed an appreciation for the flavor profile, the health benefits that comes with using olive oil.

And what were you doing? I mean, did you do this right out of school? Did you were you doing something else in life when you started this? Similar to Scott, my background is in banking and finance.

I let a team of investment advisors. Cool. All right. Before we get to your question, Scott, Ali, questions for Kavi, do you have any for the questions for him about the about the brand that he's starting?

Yeah, yeah, Kavi, your business sounds really neat and it's a fantastic product. I'm curious where you're connecting with customers today. It sounds like through the farmer's markets and wine festivals, is that your primary distribution channel today? It's got one thing that we're really proud of.

We're able to have the opportunity to move into for mothers day weekend, this past mother's day weekend. We were able to get into Nordstrom. And we had to sell out today events on the 15th and 16th of May. We're really proud of that the amount of traffic that we receive and the amount of overwhelming support, positive response that gave us the confidence to continue to move forward and propel the farmer's markets currently and the wine festivals and various events across the state.

It's currently where we're growing and where we get a chance to speak to our customers and develop that relationship. And we're trying to organically grow from here. It's quite challenging trying to get distribution outside of California from the time being. Just out of curiosity, how did you end up generating that opportunity with Nordstrom.

Great question. One of our customers visited us at a farmer's market. She loved the product. She was a huge advocate.

She reached back to Nordstrom. They have a family, a committee that helps with pop-up and collaboration with local brands. And met with them, their head of team development came and visited us again at our farmer's market. She loved the product.

She loved the design. She loved our interaction with our customers. because when we do tastings it's more than just people come and you know check out the bottle and we talk about the story. We allow them to sample our products.

We provide an interactive and engaging customer experience so that when they leave they have really good feeling about our product and what we're trying to do. That's fabulous. Have you experienced any other retail distribution? Have you gotten your product into any other outlets?

I've tried with Whole Foods. I've tried with some of the local boutique shops and it's kind of hard to get your foot into the door But you know, I'm a one-man show essentially. I do all the farmers markets I do all the filling of the bottles packing shipping So it's marketing sales distribution accounting as you can imagine, you know, we're quite scrappy But I'm confident with my skill sets. We can grow the grain First of all, congratulations on starting something that's special that's mission-based that's really cool and and and important so thank you.

I do have one question before we can help answer your question and that's around your subscription situation. I know that was mentioned or I think I saw it on your website and I just want to know what kind of what's the what's the status of that right now. So it's actually growing Ali as we speak I actually have subscribers joining on a weekly basis so it's not a tremendous growth of listening right now but as As I increase the awareness at farmers markets, at wine festivals, anyone approaches us. I usually talk about our subscription plan, and it's quite flexible in terms of the frequency and the number of bottles that customers want us to ship to that.

Okay. Cafe, a couple of questions for you. The first is, the price point is high, so obviously you have a premium product. It thinks about 45 bucks a bottle right now, is that right?

That is correct. Which makes it, I think, challenging for some retailers because they, you know, they want to put that on the shelves and they need you to get your price point down. What are the possibilities for getting your price point down? I mean, is there a world where you can, you're able to reduce the cost?

Currently our cost of goods sold is high because everything is worked on in the US with the exception of our bottles, glass bottles, naked arrives in the US from Italy and Spain. We work on it locally in the US, whether we UV protected, labeling the labor, the California olive oil in itself is very expensive, and if everything is certified, olive oil extra virgin through the California olive oil castle. All those things pose a challenge in terms of reducing the cost of goods, so the next way to go about this business is to reduce our cost of goods sold through our glass manufactured to move over to Asia, which was significant to reduce our production cost, and obviously we can pass on those savings to our customers and eventually be able to have the option to go into retail. You know, it's interesting before we answer your question, I'm looking at your website, and the bottles are beautiful.

I mean, clearly this is a beautiful design, but what you just told me about the quality of the bottles and the quality of the olive oil, it doesn't jump out of you right away. The thing that you emphasize initially on the website is the mission, which is awesome, you know, allocating 2% to supporting kids. But, and Scott and Ali, you know, correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think ultimately consumers, you know, they might like the mission, but they're gonna be interested in this product based on its quality, based on what makes it really great. Because you guys have a mission with Mod Pizza.

I mean, one of your biggest missions is you employ formerly incarcerated people in the shops. Amazing, but I don't think people go to Mod Pizza for that reason. and maybe one, two percent of customers too, but they go to it because they like the pizza. Yeah, Guy, I think you've hit on an incredibly important point.

And, and Cavi, it feels like you've have all of the foundations for this, which is ultimately, the consumer's going to focus on the quality of the product. And that's what's going to bring them in. It's going to bring them back. The, the mission will then create that, that incremental emotional connection with the consumer that I think will build loyalty over time.

But it's not likely going to be the thing that necessarily brings people in in the first place, and it feels to me that example that you gave with Nordstroms is such a great example of building a followership, building disciples of the brand, and then having them help you extend and grow the business, and that's maybe an extreme example where somebody went to bat for you and actually helped opened the doors at Nordstroms, but man, going into the farmers markets, the wine festivals, and trying to find a way to leverage, build that community, build that followership, and then leverage that into having those individuals advocating for you with their local gourmet shop or their local, and starting to kind of build it that way, and having that ground swell, if you will, if somebody who wants that super high quality product, as Guy said, Now, they might love the product. They might go to bat for you once they learn of the mission behind it. But it's gonna be driven by their appreciation for the quality. The only thing I would add is the first thing that came to mind when I saw your profile was the importance of things like gift guides.

And I'm sure you're very familiar with, I mean, Brightland has done an incredible job, I think. Yes, they have. Getting into the mindset of gift guides and when you mentioned Nordstrom, I thought, well, you're not far from there. If you did that for Mother's Day, that kind of getting yourself into those publications and that kind of thing would be huge.

And I also, you know, your mission, as we've already discussed, as being something that people discover, don't underestimate the importance of working with the organizations that you are supporting. I saw that Big Brother's Big Sisters is one of the groups you donate to. That's a fantastic organization. and you should make sure that they're, you know, talking to all of their people and their supporters for you on your behalf and make it easy for them.

Provide them with information, links to things, subscription application, whatever, but helping them help you might not be a bad idea. I love it, I love it. I mean, that's a great example of if you could have them help you extend and market your brand to their community. And if you can get a bunch of the supporters of big brothers, big sisters to start being subscribers to your product, that gets that flywheel turning of people who have a direct connection with your purpose, who want to support.

You know, and I think we're all in different ways, answering your question about how to grow your brand nationwide and enhance your distribution channels. And Ali mentioned Brightland and they do a great job with Fla-Theriulu, Flaver, Olive of oil's basil and hot pepper and things like that. There's another brand, Graza, which I'm sure you're familiar with in the Squeezy bottle. And what they do so well is they've got two options, drizzle or sizzle, right?

You're gonna use it to drizzle on olive oil on a salad or you're gonna use it to cook with. And so you basically know what to do with it. What you've done here is you've got three options, delicate, medium, and bold. And one of my suggestions, especially for kind of building out the brand is to say maybe in parentheses underneath delicate, you know, great for salad dressing, medium, you know, drizzle this on your tomatoes and then bold and, you know, use this with, eat this dip your bread in it, just something small, simple like that, to kind of do a version of what Graza did, but certainly appealing to consumers who are really, you know, open and interested in trying and working with a premium olive oil.

And perhaps also you could partner up or become friends with certain chefs in your area get them to love your product and perhaps even feature it with some of their dishes or in their restaurants, kind of to Guy's point. Having them promote what olive oil goes great with, you know, dipping their bread or things like that. You create more ambassadors of people that can really help inspire consumers. That's a great point.

We actually do custom recipes every week or every two weeks with a local chef or Instagram influencers. They come up with cool recipes that we showcase on our social media. And to your point, gifts, ideas, a fantastic thing. We're actually re-banking our packaging with the new custom boxes, with inserts.

So that should really separate us from, you know, the competition, hopefully. Everybody who signs up and subscribes every email you collect, start a newsletter, make sure there are recipes in it once a week, send that out even if it's to 200 people, a group of 500 and so on, recipes with your olive oil or work. Cave, the brand is called Aficio 22 good luck awesome products and we'll we're gonna keep our eye on on you and your growth guys got Ali thank you for this opportunity and thank you for allowing me to share my story with you nice to meet you Congratulations and best of luck, gov She know I was in Italy The earlier this summer and I went to a restaurant and it's very Italian But they get at the end of the meal they gave me a me and my wife a little bottle of olive oil And so this is the olive oil we use in our restaurant We, and they tell you the story, there's a little sort of letter that comes then, it tells you how they source it and it was a delicious restaurant, and I thought, what a cool idea. It's so cool.

It's a beautiful little bottle. Yes. What a fun business, too. To be in a business where you love your product and you love all of the mystery and the magic around it, what a neat business.

We're going to take another quick break, but when we come back, another caller with another question for another former guest. Stay with us, you're listening to a special mashup edition of the advice line right here on how I built this lab. We usually know famous people for kind of one big thing, but what if we took a fresh perspective? That is what famous engravy is all about.

We tell celebrity biographies from a different point of view. On each episode, we choose a famous figure who has died recently. Muhammad Ali? Gene Wilder.

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You can listen to new episodes of famous engravey early and add free right now by joining Wendry Plus on the Wendry app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Rise. And joining me next is Holly Faggard back in 2020.

Holly told the story of how a friend's skin cancer diagnosis Inspired her to launch her sunscreen brand Supergoop. And if you want to hear that incredible story Just check out the link in the podcast description Holly was also the perfect founder to answer some advice line questions from some of our up-and-coming entrepreneurs All right, let's bring in our next Collar. Hello, welcome to show. Hey, guy, hey, Holly, how are you?

Hello, please introduce yourself. Tell us your name where you're calling from and just a bit about your business. My name is Eric Wolk. I am calling from the lovely beach town of Margate, New Jersey.

I am the co-founder of Jetsetmeds.com. We provide our patients with a physician curated travel medical kit. The kit includes about a dozen prescription medications and about a half a dozen over the counter medications and some first aid supplies. And it leaves our patients feeling pretty comfortable while they're traveling overseas in case the inevitable happens.

Yep, and what's your question for us, Eric? This is a product that is a bit unique and I think requires as much education as it does marketing to the potential consumer. And so there's so many channels and so many options these days and how I could potentially reach my audience. And so keeping in mind that we're trying to educate while marketing, what channels do you think I should spend my time and my energy pursuing?

All right. We'll get to your question in a moment, Eric. Let me ask you for a couple questions first. You are, you're an MD, right?

Yeah, so I'm a word certified emergency medicine doctor. I worked 15 years in a very busy level one trauma center. And I started a boutique concierge medical practice about four years ago. And one of the things that I started doing for my patients was providing them with these travel kits.

After the fourth, fifth or sixth time that I found myself on the phone with a pharmacist in Paris trying to speak French, trying to explain to them what medication I was trying to ask them to provide for my patient, I said there has to be a better way. and my co-founders also a physician. He's a urologic surgeon. He had a little bit of experience in e-commerce and so we put together this travel kit and we're live as of a month ago.

Okay, so you've got these kits and I should mention that I when I used to go overseas for a covered wars, this is a war course upon it 25 years ago, Afghanistan and Iraq, I always traveled with doxycycline with of Moxasillin, and that's essentially what you do, right? People can basically, you have people travel with these things just in case. Exactly, yeah, so in my 15 years of doing this, it's really the same 10 or 12 medications that come up over and over again. And we're able to meet the needs of probably about 95% of the different issues that may occur, antibiotics being one of those, but also things just like antinologian medications, topical medications, steroid creams, antibiotic ointments, it's all in the kit.

And because there's prescriptions involved, the way it works is our patients come to our site. They fill out a brief medical intake survey. Based on the answers they provide us with that survey, our physicians have to go through and determine to make sure that the kid is safe for them to have. So if somebody has an allergy to blank medication, we're not prescribing said medication.

Once our physician deems it's safe for the person to have that kit, it all happens on the back end where the prescriptions that get sent to a third party logistic pharmacy, they build the kit for us and it gets shipped directly to the consumer. And some of it is prescription medication, some of it's over the counter medication. That's right. Got it.

All right. Let me bring the expert in. Holly Thaggard is building multi-million dollar business and skincare and sunscreen. Holly, interesting idea, it's a curated, custom-made kit here.

I'm looking at these are not cheap, but they're very reasonably priced for a $400 for the starter kit. What are your thoughts about what Eric is trying to do here and also use question? So I have one question for you. So with the purchase of this kit, do they have access to you while they're on their trip?

Not not to meet personally, but to our doctor network, which is a physician network that we partnered with to help support the kids like on like through texts or emails or something like that. Exactly. Yeah, through text through chat. That's exactly right.

Yeah. Well, having just returned from South Africa about a month ago. So our family, we did take medicine with us, but we have a concierge doctor as well. And she, we've had that relationship for gosh, five years or so.

And I know that's kind of a newer concept in doctoring. She's what we've learned from that experience is she's incredibly hands on and wants to be at the, you know, text of anything that would ever go wrong. and so to kind of think about your question in what channels to focus on, I think thinking about the bigger part of our population that even still goes to an urgent care clinic and doesn't have access beyond maybe a primary doctor when it's actually very difficult to even get in touch with primary doctors. You have to go through the administrative office, the nurse, the nurse, than contacts the doctor.

So I wonder if marketing towards urgent care, even in the form of pamphlets and posters and things that like bringing awareness, because as you said, we need to let the world know that this is a possibility. They can access prescription drugs this easily before, maybe a big vacation. I have a, Holly, I have a slightly different take, which is because I think you're right, right? You know, looking into those kind of urgent care kind of places.

But, but like to me, what you're doing here, it seems like a great opportunity for an employer to offer this as a benefit to their employees, you know, a big consulting firm, a big law firm. They have people who travel all around the world every single day, sales reps, companies with a lot of employees who then have access to this. It's a benefit. It's part of the package that they get as part of just being an employee.

And you know, your question is about how do we take our money and spend it and there's a million ways to skin that cap. But one way might be to look for a consulting firm that can help you get access to some big companies to make the case for why this should be a benefit. Okay. We're always thinking at Supergoop of ways to make our team more comfortable to give our team benefits, things that they need to make their life happier.

And I think this definitely would be one if we had a lot of international. And we do. We have an office in Singapore in Paris and we have people traveling internationally as we've launched the Middle East two years ago. And we have, you know, I mean, there's things that come up.

And the last thing that we would one is for anyone in our brand, our company to be uncomfortable and to not have access to the medicine that they need. So B2B, just go kind of go that route. I don't think it's one of the other, but I think that's a really promising channel for you because this is something that, you know, you could sell to like my family is going to, you know, we just got back from Italy for three weeks. We could have gone and done that, but selling a kid a one-off kit, you know, to a family every five or seven years is one channel, but having a company that has people traveling all the time that will then need to renew the kits because, you know, medicine, as you know, right?

It expires. That, to me, seems like a really cool opportunity to really think about working with, you know, corporate partners. And I would imagine you can use your FSA dollars for this too as well. 100% HSA and FSA both, that's right.

But the luxury market is one, it's certainly an opportunity, but it is limited at a certain point, right? You really want to get this in front of, because a lot of people, if you're working for a big company and the company's going to pay the $400 for the kid, it's worth the dollars spend for them because if it could keep their play healthy and working while they're overseas, they're on board with that. And then from a marketing, I mean, I think also getting in touch with the travel and leisure, Wall Street, off duty, all these magazines and media outlets that could help bring awareness to, hey, before your next trip or... Right.

I think part of it, one of the challenges I'm running into is as opposed to 2005, when and it was media, it was print. Now there's social, there's YouTube, there's Facebook. Influencers, yeah. Influencers, micro-influencers, it's like it's very overwhelming and I feel like I'm getting a little scatterbrain.

There's too many choices. And so I'm really trying to make sure I spend my time going down the right path and I'm not spending my wheels. I think that there is, and look, when you talk about social media strategy, that can take time. But what you bring to the table is your expertise.

You are a medical doctor. You have over 20 years of experience in emergency medicine. And that carries a lot of weight, especially when you're sitting across a table from somebody who makes purchasing decisions for a company. But at the same time, makes a lot of sense if you're trying to do social media.

I would put you out there, put your co-founder out there. You both doctors. I would put your cells out there in your scrubs talking about how important it is to be safe and healthy when you travel and just start experimenting with videos. Right.

Right. Right. No, yeah. I love that.

That's great feedback. I appreciate it. We're testing all our channels and seeing what's going to work. It's a really exciting time, actually.

I think in the phase in the journey of an entrepreneur, we're 18 months to get to where we are and we're a month out of a launch. And so it's an exciting time, a challenging time. and so we'll see what happens. Yeah.

Eric, good luck with the brand's called Jetset Meds. So cool, congrats on taking the leap and we're cheering on, man. Thank you so much. Thanks for your time, Holly, and Guy, I appreciate it.

Thank you. Yeah, nice visiting with you. All right, take care. Hey, thanks so much for listening to this special mashup edition of The Advice Line this week.

And a special thanks to Leah Sullivan of Task Grabets Scott and Ali Svensson of Mod Pizza and Holly Thagger of Supergoop for joining me on the show. By the way, if you haven't already, please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode. And also, please check out my newsletter. You can sign up for it for free at GuyRos.com.

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