The Founder Who Built a $20M+ Business and Kept 90% Ownership | Entrepreneurship | How We Profit | E1

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We are real entrepreneurs with real businesses, and a lot of you guys are crushing it behind the scenes. You may not be super famous, you may not be a billionaire yet, but you've got a business that you've learned how to scale. And we want to hear from you. One of the best ways to learn as an entrepreneur is from your peers.

And I found it super helpful to be in these peer entrepreneurship groups, and learn from other entrepreneurs who are at my level, but just in a different industry.

“So that's what I want to bring to this podcast.”

I want this to be our own peer group, but on the podcast,

and so I'm going to be interviewing people who are making anywhere from 500,000 to $10 million a year.

They're not super famous, they're not the typical billionaires that are on my show. These are real entrepreneurs who are crushing it behind the scenes, and we're going to uncover what they do to sell, how they get their customers, with their profit margin looks like, how they market, and so much more. It just sounds like you, and you want to be featured on Young and Profiting Podcasts

for our How We Profit Series, just head to young and profiting.com/apply. And share your story, let me know why you think you should be featured on the show. Again, that's young and profiting.com/apply. And who knows, maybe you'll be our next guest on Young and Profiting Podcast. Plant-based cheese brand with e-commerce, wholesale, and retail revenue streams.

That's all explosive growth after a shark tank appearance. We actually started as a restaurant in Austin, that was 100% of our revenue. And a few months later, COVID hits today, 90% of our revenue is some e-commerce. You go on shark tank and mark human, invested right away, like you didn't even finish your pitch.

“Yeah, it was his fastest, still ever, how much profit are you making every month?”

Right now, we're hovering around 61% profit margin. Wow, that's really high. Traditionally, this industry has very low profit margins with the shipping. What are you doing differently? I honestly believe it's because...

So, talk to me about how you compensate yourself as a business owner. We didn't pay ourselves for years. Really? What would you say is the reason for doubling?

Well, what are the most important KPIs for you?

We're looking at our Cust- [bleep] You are raising another $20 million. No, okay, how much are you raising? We're raising... Welcome to the How We Profit Series.

Real-yapp listeners, real numbers, and real businesses. In every episode of this series in entrepreneur, you've never heard of breaks down exactly how they profit. Real revenue, real margins, employee count, marketing strategy, sale strategy, you, name it. No highlight, real, no motivational fluff.

Just how the business actually works, so you can steal what's relevant for yours. Young and profiting isn't just about learning from billionaires and millionaires. It's about becoming one. Most business podcasts interview people after they've made it. I mean, I've been doing that with Yapp for the last eight years.

But by then, the story is polished, the numbers can be vague, and the advice is sometimes just follow your passion. But that's not useful to somebody trying to figure out pricing

or wondering if they should hire their first employee

or deciding whether they can quit their job. How we Profit is the opposite. We're going to be sitting down with the real entrepreneurs. Yapp listeners who have been studying growth on the show and who are actually applying it in real time.

We're going to ask them to open their books. The result is going to be the most honest business content on the internet. A podcast mastermind group where every member shows up with their receipts. Kristen, welcome to Young and profiting podcast. Hi, thanks for having me.

I'm so excited because this is a brand new series. You are my first guest on the Halley Profit series. And my team was sending me like a list of people to review and I saw Rebel Cheese. And I was like, this would be such a cool business to unpack.

So I'm really excited for this interview for people who don't know what Rebel Cheese is.

“How would you describe your business in a sentence?”

It's an artisanal plant based cheese that's made for cheese lovers.

Why do they want vegan cheese? It's because cheese was taken away from them. Even due to medical reasons or they're allergic. Or they simply just don't feel good after eating cheese. So they're looking for an alternative that they can put on a cheese board, pair with wine.

You know, a gourmet style cheese. And that's where we come in. I bet you guys a lot of you don't know what to do. So vegan cheese is a great option for you. So talk to us about the category that you're in.

So CPG, right? Your consumer product. Yes.

“Is that the only category you consider yourself in or how would you describe that?”

I see it as we're competing with dairy cheeses. We are a CPG brand. Yes. We also have an e-commerce store that's where most of our revenue comes in. But when you look at where we're placed in the grocery store, is right there with the dairy cheeses or next to the vegan products of vegan cheeses.

What is your typical customer like? This is interesting because it's evolved over the years. When we first started, our customers were pretty young, mostly women. And after we aired on Shark Tank a couple years ago, the demographics have gotten higher and higher. And most of our customers tend to be women over 65 years old.

They're worried about their health. They're looking for an alternative that's clean, made with ingredients that they know. And that's why they seek a sell. That's so interesting. So like not only can your product evolve, your audience can evolve as well.

I'm going to talk to you about marketing and branding, and maybe if you had anything to do with that evolution or if it happened naturally. But first, I want to understand, like, how big is your company?

I read somewhere that you have a $20 million evaluation, that's insane.

So talk to us about how big your company is, whether it's revenue, number of employees and so on. Yes, our valuation now is actually $40 million. So we're on track to do $20 million this year, and we're doing our capital race right now. Yes, and I mean, we've doubled our growth year over year, the last couple years. So it's moving really fast, our team size.

If fluctuates, depending on the season, because we are very seasonal. But right now, we have 50 people on the team. We do everything in-house, we're control-free. So we make all the cheeses by hand, ourselves. Some of them take two weeks to make.

We package those, fulfill them, ship them, we do everything.

“So that's why our team is around 50 people.”

Really cool. And everything is based in the US, like, your manufacturing is an Austin correct. Yes, yes, we have a factory here. My husband and I built a lot of it ourselves while we were practicing our short tank pitch. We're doing both for the same time.

Luckily, he has a construction background, so yes, we have our own factory that we built, and that's where we make all our cheeses that all made there. Okay, so you've got multiple different revenue streams. So walk us through each way that you make money. Yes, it's funny, because when we started seven years ago,

we actually started as a restaurant in Austin. And that was 100% of our revenue. And then a few months later, COVID hit. And like, other small businesses, we started pivoting.

And doing things we never planned to do.

Like, ship perishables nationwide. So we started our cheese club online.

“We started shipping direct to businesses.”

It was a little messy in the beginning. You know, orders arrive in warm and, you know, so on and so forth. But we kept iterating, partners helped us, and we figured it out. And now, fast forward seven years to today, 90% of our revenue is from e-commerce. Oh, wow, that's really interesting.

Okay, so for our young in-profiters that want to start a CPG business, what would you say is some of the biggest challenges you faced, especially with like an e-commerce CPG business? Yes, oh my gosh, shipping. Yeah, it comes to mind.

A couple of years ago, we were overcharged by a quarter million dollars. Not an overexaggeration. So I actually built an AI tool. I vibe-coded a tool to get some of that money back,

and to make sure that never happens again.

Ship in is challenging, because if you don't watch it closely, like a hawk, you will get overcharged and there can be sometimes a 600% variance in those charges. And their invoices are huge. There are hundreds of pages along with so many lines of data.

So if you're doing e-commerce, watch your ship in very closely.

“If you don't do it in-house, and you partner with like a co-man or co-pack,”

I've heard, I haven't experienced this, because we do everything ourselves. But I've heard the same challenges can happen there, where you know, charges come out of nowhere, and the contracts are hard to navigate. So just keep in a very close eye on your numbers, on your data, and make sure that it matches what you're agreed to.

Yeah, and you've got this like added layer of complexity, because you've got perishable foods. And it needs to be cold as it's shipped, and there's an expiration date. Like for somebody who wants to start a CPG brand that is also food, what are the things that they have to consider?

Obviously, packaging is huge. I say, obviously, but probably not obvious, actually. It took us a while to refine this and figure it out. We're a mission driven brand. Therefore, it's important that we use compostable packaging or recyclable packaging.

We're not going to use styrofoam.

Never, ever, which you know, has the longest refrigeration out of everything.

So we had to experiment a lot, and we're always shopping around and trying new things. Even when we've settled on our packaging, mostly our installation and our eyes. We're still looking for the next thing to see if there's something that is better, and we'll extend the shipping time, or be more reliable. So constantly be shopping your options, test a new things, to see what does and doesn't work.

When we first started shipping, we were getting one day out of our packaging, meaning it would keep it cold for one day. Now we get three days. Oh, nice. And it's fully compostable.

Really cool. So that must have been a lot of experimentation and a lot of cost associated with that.

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Get more with Northwest RegisteredAgent and NorthwestRegisteredAgent.com /yapfree. So talk us through the unit economics of cheese, vegan cheese. Somebody buys, like, how much is a cost on your website? How much is a cost to ship?

How much do you make per unit? Mm-hmm. Or cheese varies from 15 to 20 dollars a unit. We have very different types of cheeses. Some take two days to make, others take two weeks to make.

“So that's why there's that variance there.”

It really depends how much hand hold in it needs. And then the shipping costs, there's still expensive. Yeah. Even with a volume, we're averaging 22 to 25 dollars a box, depending on the time of year.

And what's really challenging with that, customers are used to Amazon, free shipping, get it in an hour. So you can't really pass those costs on to your customer. Yes, you have to find a way to build it in to the box. If you try to charge them, $20 for shipping,

you know, they're having a panic attack. They're just not used to that. Which is understandable, right? Yeah, so give us an example. So if you need to bake in $20 for shipping costs,

that you don't want to charge separately on a separate line item, because they'll just exit out of the cart. What are you doing and putting in the box to make it worth it? We offer a lot of prepackaged options. Like we have a shark tank box, a birthday celebration box.

So we let that dominate our page. We do offer single units of cheese too. But of course, we'd rather customers purchase the prepackaged boxes, because they're optimized for shipping and packaging. If they do select to buy individual wheels or cheese,

then there is a minimum to get the free shipping. So they have to spend $80 in order for free shipping to apply. And if they're below that, then there's a $20 shipping cost. How big is subscriptions for you guys?

“Are you doing like recurring subscriptions for people who want their cheese all the time?”

Is something we're working on currently? We're improving that due to a rapid e-commerce growth. We doubled ourselves over a year. We've basically been doing the bare minimum. So now that we have some room to breathe and take a step back,

we're actually improving our subscription model and adding on incentives and tiers like exclusive events and free shipping. You know, discounts and so on and so forth. So we haven't really historically done a lot of subscription models, but we're planning to launch that in the next couple of months.

Okay, so I wanted to take a pause on the actual business and talk about Kirsten's origin story.

Because you weren't always an entrepreneur.

You were in tech, right? I started in the Navy. We go way back. I was actually in the Navy on a ship. And that's what got me into tech.

I was in a car accident transferred off of my ship. My captain was at the same time. Initially, they had me answering phones. And he said, "I can't imagine you doing that. I'm going to transfer you to tech."

I had never worked in tech before. I said, "Okay, I like to learn." And they just started handing me tickets. I figured it out on the job. And that was the launch of my over a decade tech career.

Really cool. So you worked at all these different companies. You got divorced at some point. And you met your husband at a put-put club or something like that.

Yeah. So we met a puppet goal because we're both going through divorces. My husband and I, we wanted to meet new circle with friends. And so we joined this puppet with no intention of meeting anyone. And of course, we met each other.

We were together for several months before we got together. And several years later, we transitioned to a vegan diet. I lost my parents at a very young age, both to cancer. And I read about a link between cancer and dairy in Dr. Michael Greggersburg,

how not to die. And the second I read that I quit dairy overnight.

But I loved cheese. I had it with every single meal. We used to have cheese boards all the time and picnics. And all the things you do around cheese.

“So we were like, well, what are we going to do now?”

Yeah. We started experimenting at home. And we had a little wine fridge. That's where, first, Bree was born, a little eight bottle wine fridge. And we knew we were on to something, you know, with those experiments.

And at the same time, we were both consultants. We had these very successful careers and businesses. But we kept having this nagging feeling that we wanted to do something that better aligned with our values. Which, you know, is animal welfare or health or planets, we're very passionate about their things.

So we just went for it. You know, we can get rid of that nagging feeling. And we dove right in and opened our restaurant in Austin. Wow. But there had to have been steps before you actually opened up the restaurant.

So I really want to dig deep there. Because I bet you there's a lot of young improvisers listening out there who have this awesome idea, for a product because vegan cheese wasn't really an existence at that point.

“Like you were one of the first vegan cheese suppliers, right?”

So talk to us about how you, like, perfected the cheese. Did you do any research? Did you do any testing? How did you come up with the restaurant idea? Why not go straight to e-commerce?

Like, talk to me about how it all happened. Yeah, luckily I'm very OCD about things. This is where it pays off and we still do tests in R&D now. We have someone who's dedicated to that. That he's been with us for six years now.

It's part of our DNA is very important to us. Even for our top-selling items, we still have tests going to see if we can improve them even more, even if it's just by a margin. So when we decided to launch Rebel Cheese, we hired a chef, we were still both working full time,

“and we worked with the chef for a year on doing our development and testing and coming up with these ideas.”

And that's when our first cheeses were born, and we also defined our restaurant menu at that time too.

And then when we opened the restaurant, we hired people on the team to continue that R&D. We also brought in cheese scientists, collaborated with them. We've learned a lot from the dairy industry and dairy experts who've been working in the dairy industry for decades. We truly believed because we've been vegan for a long time ourselves, that we needed to lean into that dairy expertise, including trying the cheese,

given us feedback on it, because we knew it had been too long for us to really know. What good cheese tastes like anymore? So you basically started as a restaurant. Yes. So talk just about the challenges of having a restaurant.

I know you no longer have the restaurant in Austin. Talk to us about the challenges in terms of like margin with restaurants and the things that if somebody wants to open up a restaurant,

they need to consider, and why ultimately you had to close your doors.

The restaurant was extremely hard. Well, one, we opened it three months before COVID hit, don't know. And when we opened the restaurant, we had no idea how it would do. It was such a unique concept of vegan wine and cheese shop. Really nothing like it in the world.

So luckily we started small. It was only 1100 square feet, which was a lifesaver during COVID. Because we didn't know. And when we opened our doors, we had a line down the streets. So we were like, oh, we'll be okay.

But then of course, COVID. The challenge with the restaurant and it actually set us up for success ultimately is that the margins are so tight. And then you layer in, you know, vegan concept. And that makes it even more challenging because you have a smaller demographic that's going to go to your restaurant. So you have to watch them like a hawk, you have to be careful with every single expense.

And I'm so glad I did. Because had I not done that, I don't think we would have survived the six years that we did. So for somebody who wants to open up a restaurant business, like if any of the listeners are interested in doing that. What are the guard rails that they need to put in place? Like, what are some of the things that you were realizing that the money was just going away? Because it was getting spent frivolously in certain areas.

Like, what do they exactly need to watch margins? Very, very important. I used a tool called margin edge. And one of the reasons that tool works so well is because if the prices went up on any of the ingredients, it would alert you. So you could see any price changes. You could say this is what my margin needs to be.

Send me an email if that margin changes. Because ingredient costs, especially now, constantly fluctuating. And they really are a big factor when you're looking at your margins.

“So you have to watch that closely, waste what's selling, what's not.”

And if something's not performing, make the hard decision to remove it from your menu or from your store. Don't keep it because you're attached. Which is the most recipe or whatever. It is not working. Cut it because that will eat away at your margins too.

So monitoring those things very, very closely. Of course, making sure you have your schedules tight for when you're open. You know, opening hours need to match with customer demands. If there are hours when you're, where you're not busy, cut those two. Yeah, so you have to watch every little expense.

Very closely and act on things that aren't working well immediately. So then COVID happened. You pivoted to e-commerce. At what point did you go on Shark Tank? Yes. We went on Shark Tank in 2023 towards the end right before the holidays.

We opened our restaurant in 2019. So it was four years after our opening. And we applied during COVID because like everyone, we would, we were trying everything. Yeah. I was applying to every competition there was.

Thank you. I grabbed that. You name it. It's like, you know, it was in survival.

I didn't think for a second, we would get on.

I mean, great decision. And like, thank God you did that. Yeah. And, you know, they told us all along, you may not get on. You may not air.

Even when they told us, we were air in. They said you still may not. If there's an emergency. So we were excited. But holding our breath the entire time into it actually aired.

But still trying to prepare for this moment too. So you go on Shark Tank and Mark Cuban actually invested like right away. Like you didn't even finish your pitch. Yeah.

“I think he was, he's like actually passionate about, I think veganism and the topic, right?”

So talk to us about how much money made and what happened after the Shark Tank episode aired. Yes. It was his fastest, still ever. Wow. Mark is known for weighting until the end.

And he tried the cheese and immediately made us an offer. And we were worried because we were like, were we out there long enough for there to be material for this to air? Because it felt like we were out there for five minutes. But the producers, they were like, no, it's okay. You were actually out there for 15 minutes.

It just felt like five.

And, you know, it's been amazing.

And we are so grateful. Mark is incredibly supportive and helpful. We asked him to help us with some videos for Mark it in. He said, yes, he gave us a whole hour this time. Anytime I send him an update or an email, he responds immediately.

I don't know how. Well, I don't know where everyone can even when I email him. He'll like answer and like, but you want to come on. You happen to be like, soon. I like one word answers.

Yes. Sometimes they're a little cryptic. Yeah. I'm like trying to turn it upside down to decipher what he's trying to tell me. Yeah.

Because it's like one sentence. But he's been fantastic. And he has a team that's also very supportive and helpful. And we're very grateful for this opportunity. That's really cool.

So you got $750,000.

“Was that your, so talking me about how you funded your company?”

Yeah. Did you use your personal money?

Was it the first time you had an investor?

And Lori also invested as well, right? No, not the end. She made us an offer. But then she had a conflict with another company. Got it.

Mark to her shares. Nice. Yes. Mark is our only investor at this point. Amazing.

Yes. When we started the restaurant, we worked right up until the day we opened.

As I mentioned before, my husband has a construction background. He used to be a carpenter.

“So we were able to build that out pretty efficiently too.”

We've just this heloc. And that's all we've raised into now. We're doing a capital raise now to continue our growth. But we built a $20 million company from 750K. I love that. I love that.

That's so, so inspiring. If you could do it all over again. Would you take that $750 from Mark, $750,000 from Mark, even if you could do it all over again. Would you, would you do it that way?

Absolutely. One of the challenges we face as a vegan brand. There's a lot of hesitation around vegan foods. People are being burned by vegan cheese before.

They're always asking, is it actually really good?

Is it truly healthy? Is it overly processed? And having the sharks share their delight and excitement over a product has helped us tremendously. Yeah, convert those customers. Yes, so you guys blew up basically after shark tank.

Yes.

“At that point, were you ready for that kind of business to be coming your way?”

Well, my husband and I, after we aired, we worked 5,000 items in a row. It's not an offering situation. Luckily, the Navy taught me how to do that. Although I'm getting a little older for that now.

But we were determined and we really wanted to succeed. And we get one chance with these customers. So it's important that we deliver. And we're very strict about our quality standards and everything being perfect. So we got in the kitchen.

We made that cheese. We overcommunicated to our customers. Like if there are any delays or anything like that, we just made sure they knew. And because of all those things, it was a success.

Although, you know, very well could have not been because it's a lot of traffic coming your way out of nowhere. Yeah. You've really branded yourself as this like gourmet vegan cheese. Yes. And one of the things that comes across in this interview is you're really into quality.

And you, everything's US-based. You're doing everything by hand.

You've never really outsourced it.

What are like the pros and cons of doing that? Oh, gosh. The pros you can pivot quickly. And you can always be tested and learn in. If we outsourced our production,

if we wanted to try a new idea, it would take weeks to months to do so. Whereas, you know, we can turn around a new idea in a couple of weeks. Like it or even lessen that depending on what it is. Yeah.

So that's a huge plus quality like you mentioned is another one. I've heard of companies going to comans and then having quality issues. Especially with cultured products like hers are. It can get complicated fast. You know, our breed only has five ingredients, but it's 20 steps to make.

And that's one of the main reasons we want to keep all of that in house. We just don't trust that someone will understand or process like redo. Yeah. Rebel cheese is a cool name. I mean, that's one of the reasons why I saw the name.

And I was like, this sounds cool. Like I want her on the app. What was up with the name? And do you feel like it's helped you? That's one part of the question.

The second part of the question is, how do you think people find you now? Like it's been a couple years since the shark tank thing. Like how are people finding out about you? Yeah.

The name was such a process. My husband, he's an executor. I love to analyze. I definitely. If it wasn't for him, I probably still be analyzing things now.

Which she's would have never started.

And I was like that with the name and the branding. You know, we went through so many iterations of names. And we wanted something sentimental. So we started with pet names and family names. And they all just were just weird.

They didn't work. So then we moved on to things that we felt like defined what we were trying to accomplish. And that's where rebel cheese came about. And, you know, we used the same techniques as the dairy industry, like I mentioned. Yeah.

“So that's why we wanted cheese in the name.”

And that's why we kept the spelling the same. Many vegan companies will change the spelling like they'll be busy in there or something like that. But since we used the techniques, same techniques, we wanted to keep it. Oh, that's so smart. That's such a, that's such a good hack.

Yeah. So it's like don't get fancy with your name where you have no SEO.

Exactly. There's that too.

And then your second question around keeping customers coming back.

We invest a lot in marketing now. We didn't use to. We started that with Shark Tank. We have a pretty substantial email list that we've been building. That's very important to us. We've learned a lot along the way about that.

We also advertise on meta that can be challenging. We're doing like paydads. Paydads. Yes. And again, we watch our numbers daily with that because that's another thing like the restaurant that

You know, can become very expensive. And before you know it, you're not profitable. If you're not watching that very closely. Yeah. The way we reach our customers.

Plus, we're big into community. So we love to get involved with our community. We do a lot of events. We're doing a market in California this month. We're partnering with a restaurant in L.A.

To do a wine and cheese night. So we believe, you know, in the world of AI that's connecting with your community and customers is more important than ever. So we put a lot of emphasis on that too.

“Are you leveraging podcasts or influencers or doing like a lot for me, like as an influencer?”

I'm getting a lot of influx, especially for consumer-based products.

For like UGC and white listed ads, we're basically all have a video.

And I'll promote the brand and then the brand will put paydads on it. And that's becoming really popular. Are you doing things like that? We just started looking at that. We haven't done a ton of that historically to be quite honest.

But we are trying to diversify. And that is certainly one way to do that. We're testing out a tool called Reef funnel that we discovered for our shark tank community. Which helps you find influencers and do white listed and so on. But we just started like a month ago.

We're also looking into podcasts too. We really want to diversify. We don't want to be as dependent as we are on paydads and meta-specifically. Yeah. Well, the community events are really smart.

How do you think about your personal brand when it comes to marketing of rebel cheese? Personal brands. Like myself? Yeah, like yourself. That might be the answer in itself.

“Is that like you're just all about pushing the product brand?”

Is that right? Interesting. So my husband and I, we want to do more. You know, like be on my more organically and do more behind the scenes. Because again, you know, in the world of AI, that authenticity and the story and the people

between the brand is so important. I started a few months ago doing founder emails every week. And those have been really popular. So yeah, put in yourselves out there. So your customers can see where their dollar is going.

I think is incredibly important. Yeah. Okay, let's talk revenue. Let's talk money. Yeah.

This is young and profiting after all. And I think everybody wants to understand like how to profit off a CPG business. So talk to me about like year one, how much you make year two, year three. Like, and when did it really like start to take off? Yes.

So here one, you know, we were like 750K, year two, one point two. And then it went up like 500K each year after that until we were on Shark Tank in 2024. Which is still great because that was all organic growth. And it was mostly the restaurant and during COVID. So it proved the demand.

We did launch your e-commerce too, but we didn't do any kind of marketing with that. So that e-commerce really took off once Shark Tank hits. Yes. We were in the New York Times before Shark Tank. And we learned a lot from that.

We got a huge influx of traffic, but then we didn't do anything with that. Yeah. So all these people came in and then they went away. And we're like, oh no, come back. Yeah.

So we learned a lot about email and SMS marketing in. And we implemented those learnings when we were on Shark Tank. Because the same thing could have happened there. If we didn't do more, you know, with our marketing, like our paid and email.

“Yeah. So how about currently? How much are you making a month?”

How many, like, what do you call your units of cheese? Like, what are you having fun with? Cheese wheels. Cheese wheels. Are you selling for months?

It depends on the month. We're very seasonal. The holidays are a busiest time a year. Mothers day, Christmas Thanksgiving.

We're on track to do 21 million this year.

And a big chunk of that will be quarter four in quarter one. Because of the, you know, special occasions. People are celebrating with her cheese.

And then you asked year over a year.

So last year we did 15. The year before that we did seven. So we've pretty much doubled year over a year. The last couple of years. What would you say is the reason for doubling?

How did you double? Well, sticking to your values like our quality. Very important. So we have a very high returning customer rate. Around 40 to 45 percent.

And that's with investing a lot in marketing. Because that oversees drives that down. Because you bring a new customer's in. So quality having new products launches. So there's a reason, you know, another reason for them to come back.

Because definitely helped with grow ourselves. And then, you know, the marketing things that I've mentioned. You know, that's without a doubt, fuel or growth. Because if people don't know about us. Obviously they're not going to buy us.

Yeah. And even with that, I still hear all the time. I didn't know about you. I wish I did. Even with us reach in millions and millions of people with her meta ads.

Now, where are you? Where's your website house?

“Are you using like Shopify or what are you using Shopify?”

Yes. Yes. Another Shopify user. I love this was not a sponsored plug. But Shopify is going to be very happy about this.

I love that you're using Shopify. That's what you've used from the start. We were using something else called Charge Bee before Shopify. But then we outgrew them and moved over right before Shark Tank. We saw like all the traffic that was coming.

And we recruited our friend Paul. He used to work at Amazon to help us with her Shopify store. He's been with us a few years now. So he got us ready for Shark Tank. He made sure everything was stable.

All the integrations were set up correctly with like ship station. And, you know, all the other ship intools. And he's been helping us ever since. Love that. Yeah.

I'm in business communication as part of. What's up, young and profiteers? When you start a business, nobody warns you that you're about to become the creator, the marketer, the finance team, the customer support team, and the person who's chat GB team.

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Think about it.

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Plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to quote.com/propheting. That's QUO.com/propheting. Quote.com/propheting. My mind goes, okay, LTV is very important to her. And you mentioned like upsells and new products.

So what are the KPIs that you're tracking?

“Like what are the most important KPIs for you when it comes to what you sell?”

Absolutely. We're psycho about KPIs. It's everything. We watch our marketing data daily. And we're looking at our customer acquisition costs.

We're looking at new versus returning customers. What our lifetime value is, what our average order value. Yeah. And we're looking at our mirror. So our marketing efficiency ratio.

I never heard of that. What's that? That one's really important because it encompasses all of your marketing costs. So the challenge we've row as if you look at that single handedly is you may still be losing money. You row as may look great, but if you're spending a ton on content or these platform fees,

you actually may not be doing as well as you think. So Mer accounts for like our team or marketing team.

It accounts for all the platform costs, basically everything.

If we're spending a dollar on marketing is being accounted for in that ratio. And we target a mirror three and we adjust our spend based on that. So if that starts declining, then we reduce our spend. If it goes up, then we increase our spend. So walk us through like an actual example.

Like what is good look like for these KPIs? Take like maybe like one customer order. And like break it down for us like the cost of the order. How much a cost to get that customer?

“What you expect to get that customer to do in a lifetime?”

Like walk us through like what good looks like for a customer life cycle for you. Yes, one thing I know for sure. Lifetime value to your customer acquisition cost is a very important number to be monitoring. Or is our customer acquisition cost average is fifty dollars. And our 30 day lifetime value is two hundred and eight.

So that's a four to one ratio. The industry standard is three to one. So we're above that, which is good. So you want to make sure you get a return on your investment. And that's one way to look at that.

It is going to be costly to acquire those brand new customers. That's the unfortunate reality. But as long as they're staying with you. And you're getting that return from lifetime value. Then it's okay to make that upfront investment.

And the other thing that's really important, you know, when you look at the unit economics, because shipping is so expensive for e-commerce, making sure your ALV is good. You know, our ALV, your average order value. So ours hovers around a hundred and seven. So that, you know, allows us to absorb those shipping costs, packing costs for filling.

And then also that customer acquisition cost.

So depending on the time of year, we may actually be profitable with our first order or

at a minimum break even, which is, you know, challenging to do. It blows my mind that people are going online and buying a hundred dollars worth of vegan cheese. Or two hundred dollars in the first month you said, yeah.

“What kind of people are these like, describe your customer?”

I know you did before, but like, what need do they have for two hundred dollars worth of vegan cheese? So this is where things get really interesting. Dairy is actually addictive. It has an ingredient in there called casin, which is addicted. I know that sounds crazy.

Wow. So when people are forced to give up cheese because of high cholesterol. They had a heart attack or they have a new allergy to it. They still want cheese. And, you know, that's where we come in and they will do anything for good cheese.

I've found they will drive 10 hours with a cooler and fill that cooler up. They would spend $400 for a special occasion on just cheese because they miss it and they crave it. And they're yearning those experiences that they used to have around cheese. So that's, yeah, I didn't know this when I started Rebel Cheese. I've kind of learned this over the years.

That's really lucky. Yeah, yeah, you got an addictive replacement. Yes. So that's really good. So seasonality was something else that was really interesting with your model.

“And I think a lot of CBG brands have seasonality.”

How do you like prepare, make the most out of those seasons. I'm sure you're like gearing up for them and trying your best to capitalize on everything. So like what are the things that you do to prepare for that? We start planning six months, nine months out. And depending on what's going on and our capacity.

Quarter four is the most important time of year for us.

So it's crucial where prepared is also important for our customers. They're celebrating with her cheese. We don't want to ruin those moments because they're special occasions. Yeah, they're getting their family together.

So we need to execute and deliver on those moments. And there's a lot of moving parts. We're dealing with outside shipping partners that may get delayed. And the last couple of years, the holidays fell right in the middle of the week, which meant we lost a lot of our shipping days during the main holidays.

So we had a plan around that.

So plan in is crucial having backup plans when things go awry because they will.

They always do despite all of your best efforts is really important when you're dealing with a seasonal business. Because you don't want to lose that revenue. Quarter four, you know, that's the bulk of our revenue. So we need to make sure we do everything we can to provide an amazing customer experience. Now, I know you mentioned that every month is kind of, you know, you're doing 20 million you said this year.

Every month you said it varies. You're making the most money in Q4. I have a couple questions around that.

“The first is like, what is a good profit margin every month for you?”

Like how much profit are you making every month? Right now we're hovering around 61% profit margin. That's really high, right? Yeah, compared to most businesses. I think my business is like 40%.

60%. That's really, really great. So what do you account that for? Why do you think you have such high profit margins when traditionally this industry has very low profit margins with the shipping? What are you doing differently?

I honestly believe it's because we do everything ourselves. So we have, you know, full control of the end-to-end process. And when we see something is becoming expensive, we can do something about it. You know, when you don't have control, like we don't have control over the shipping, you know, gas prices are fluctuating now. So that's going up.

The solution to that would be this long-term shipping. Obviously, that's not going to happen. But, you know, for the things that we can have control over, that's been a huge plus for us. Yeah.

“Because we can pivot and make adjustments, you know, when we see prices going up.”

Yeah. So you also mentioned that you're in grocery stores. What business model do you like better? Like what's a better business model? Oh, my gosh, e-commerce by far.

And, you know, we just launched in Whole Foods. Oh, congrats. Yeah, the California region retail is very, very challenging. It goes back to having control again. When those, when the products leave your building, you lose control.

And there's so many things that can happen along the way. For example, we just had an order that shipped to the East Coast. It was supposed to take two days and it took two weeks. No, no. And then, you know, it's arriving late.

And they're charging us back for that order. So they're saying it got here late. We're not going to accept it. And that product goes to waste. And there, you know, we lose thousands of dollars.

And there's, you know, so many other things that can go wrong. You know, they leave it sitting outside too long. They don't store it correctly. And then that's your brand reputation when people eat the bad cheese. Exactly.

They don't display, you know, well, or they put it in a bad spot in the store. You know, so you don't have as much control with retail. So the margins are a lot smaller. However, with that said, our customers want to see us in retail. It's a number two thing search for in our website.

They go to a fine near me.

Constantly, they're always looking when they're going to be near us.

They don't want to necessarily get perishable ship to their door. Got it. So like, you don't want to do it. It's not better for your margins. But your customers are demanding it.

Yeah.

“Do you feel like it helps you with your branding and your trust as well?”

Yes. And here's why. For customers that have never tried us before in their hesitant. They don't want to spend $80 to get free shipping. Or $20 on a wheel or cheese plus the 20 for shipping.

You know, that's a huge commitment for something that you've never tried before. So it is good for them. They can go in their luxury grocery store by a wheel cheese. Give it a try and get okay. I like this.

I'm ready to commit to a larger purchase now. That makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense.

This has been such an awesome first interview of how we profit.

Like, I feel like we've just covered so much ground. And it's just been so interesting to learn to be honest. I'm blown away by like everything that you're teaching me. Because I have a totally different agency and a network and totally different business. So it's so cool to kind of like pull back the curtain.

Now, I found out that you're actually a yapp listener.

So I guess like, how do you learn as an entrepreneur? How did you find yapp? Like, just curious, because I think it's really cool. One of the premises of the series is to actually interview other yapp listeners. I'm sure you listen to try to try to grow your business.

So how do you learn as an entrepreneur? Oh, I love podcasts. Actually, I'm going to Dallas tomorrow. And I'm like, so excited because I get to listen to six hours of podcasts. I like that.

It's a great way to listen to learn on the go.

I'm always driving around or cooking or doing stuff in the kitchen.

So I can have a podcast going and feel like I'm being productive at the same time. I also enjoy newsletters.

“That's how I spend my free time because they're quick.”

I learn a lot. I can focus on what I'm interested in, which right now. I'm reading a lot about that and learning a lot about that. So yeah, most of my learning comes from those two things. Yeah, I love that.

Newsletters are really awesome because sometimes you'll find like the most expert people are writing a newsletter. Right? And they're not necessarily published in like newspapers or whatever they're on subs. Yeah. Or you're just on their email list and they're sending you like really valuable information.

So I agree newsletters are kind of like underrated. Everybody talks about podcasts, but not nearly not usually newsletters. Okay. So let's talk tech and stuff for AI. I knew that one of the ways that you caught that big shipping mistake, that $400,000 shipping mistake was actually through AI that you built.

Yes. So talk to us about how you use AI in your business. Like what are the ways that you use it today? Oh, how much time do we have? Yes.

So we all started with that shipping mistake a couple years ago. That just completed our busy Q4, you know, we were heads down, focused on that, and get him, you know, boxes out the door. And we come up for air in January, February.

“And we're like, why isn't there more money in the bag?”

We just had this super successful quarter. What's going on?

So I started digging around and I realized we've been overcharged from shipping by quarter million dollars.

And that's not an over exaggeration. And I was like, oh, what am I going to do about this? So I turned to AI. I gave it all the data. I had it analyze it.

And I was able to get most of that quarter million dollars back because of that. So I was hooked and sold. And I was also worried about the future. So I was like, okay, great. I got this money back.

But now what do I do to make sure this doesn't happen again? Because it could very easily. So I turned to vibe code in and I created a tool using, you know, Manus and Claude and lovable different AI tools that are out there. And we use it all the time now.

So every month what this tool does.

We upload our invoice for the week. And we upload our contract. And it compares them side by side.

“And it spits out any discrepancies that I can then take to a shipping partner.”

Save another $150,000 with that. And the overcharges have gone down over time because they know we're watching. Yeah. So of course, now I use AI for everything. Yeah, cash flow analysis.

I just did that this past weekend. Yes, we have a finance team. But I wanted to get more granular. I wanted to do what ifs, you know, analysis. And I could use AI for that.

I use it to do in capital raise right now. I use it to manage my investor pipeline to create the investor deck. I love it. To do research on our investors before we meet with them. So we're not going in blind.

I encourage my team to use I use AI. And I do trainings with them. So, you know, that we're all on the same page and getting the most out of it. So yeah, obviously, you can't, you've still need a human in the loop. You can't have it run your entire business.

But where it makes sense data analysis. You know, anything that's repetitious. Some of the more mundane things that you maybe the team doesn't enjoy. Or you don't enjoy is great for that. Yeah.

Now, I know a lot of listeners are probably trying to figure out what tools they actually want to use. For me, I'm constantly flipping between Claude and chat with you. I kind of use them for two different things. I've kind of like chat with you more lately. Mm-hmm.

Which is just so funny. It seems like these tools will like start to suck and then get better. Which tools do you love to use?

I've built out all of these projects and skills. I have all of these connections to your meta ads and all of these different systems. But what I like to do is every now and then I'll compare them side by side. So I'll put the same prompt in chat, Claude, Manus. And you'll see what they come up with to test our strengths and weaknesses.

To see what's changed is chatGBT improving in an area. I may not be aware of. So doing the same thing in all the LLMs.

“I think it's a good thing to do every now and then.”

Yeah.

So I know you said that you are raising another $20 million.

You're not raising $20 million. How much are you raising? We're raising $5 million. You're raising $5 million. Well, why raise so much money if you're 60% profitable and making money every month?

Like, why do you think you need that money? As a great question, it goes back to shipping. That's one of the big reasons why we want to open our own fulfillment centers on the east and the west coast. That will cut our shipping costs in half, which is significant. And it will help us mitigate some of the rise in shipping costs with fuel going up.

We also are heavily focused on innovation this year. We're creating a new cheese with vegan casin. So I mentioned the dairy casin earlier. There are European companies that have created a vegan casin, which is a clean protein. And it's responsible for the stretch and melt in cheese.

It's like the missing piece of the puzzle. Yeah, we've been waiting for it for years. So we're going to be heavily focused on that this year. And we'll be able to create like a gooey camin there and a melty, stretchy mozzarella.

“So that's why and we also, we're growing our retail as challenging as it is.”

In retail, it costs a lot of money to do that. So we want to make sure we can support that growth.

Now, this type of, this will be your first investment after shark tank.

That must be such a different feeling because shark tank came with like all this promotion and branding and mark Cuban stamp of approval. Whereas this investment, it's more money, which means more of your company, right, and potentially. And not all the exposure. So like, how are you thinking about it? Was it a big decision to make? Yes, it's very important to us that whoever we partner with, we're aligned on values.

We really don't want someone coming in and asking us to cut corners or jeopardize our products in any way. So we've been very picky about who we meet with. And there's actually some innovative ways to raise capital. We're doing what's called an SPV and our VIP customers are invested in that.

“So can you explain what that is? What does that stand for?”

It's a fund in which customers and angels can invest in. Okay, so it's really cool because you know, your mission aligned. And, you know, we reached out to our customers to see if there's interest and hundreds of people responded. So we're doing that and then we met with a syndicate today. So it's like another type of fund where we're going to pitch to like sports F athletes and see if they're interested in investing.

So there are all these creative ways I didn't know about them until now to find mission aligned investors. You know, you don't have to just do the VC path. Yeah, that's really, really interesting. Have you considered teaming up, I know you mentioned sports folks, but have you considered teaming up with like influencers who are in that like health space or who talk about not eating vegan influencers? It's a good idea, but we haven't. I mean, maybe we should.

Yeah, I wish I could. So I know you're big on AI. One of the things that I'm finding with AI is that it's helped me not hire as much. And I find that like I'm more involved in finance now, I'm more involved in certain aspects of the business were in the past.

I didn't have the capacity to be involved, but now I'm really able to just like dive into the numbers and like basically have this like support system that helps me.

If I'm stuck or I don't know the words or, you know, like had to navigate things. What is your leadership team look like and do you think AI has helped you kind of keep a small leadership team?

But we knew them before rebel cheese. We have multiple couples that that work for us. We're a couple too. My husband and I run in rebel cheese.

“I swear it's going to get us in trouble one of these days. We have five couples a family.”

Oh my God. Yes. So it's very, very much as a family office in the literal sense. And it's been fine. It's been that way for years. So we have our sales director, Kyle, you know, he was a friend and still is a friend. I don't know why keeps saying that before rebel cheese. Yeah, but he was a friend and then hired himself. Yes. Yes. And his husband works for us too as our chief technology officer. So he helps us with Shopify, all the integrations, the shipping tools. We have our customer service manager, our marketing creative director. She's been with us since day one.

Our procurement manager, she started as a dishwasher when we loved that. And she's never procurement manager. So she she's been with us since day one. So nearly seven years.

And her brother works with us and her daughter did at one point. So we, we like to have, you know, families working with us because we know them and friends. We know them and we trust them and they're mission aligned to which is of course very important. That that must be hard though. It must be hard because mixing personal and business. Have you ever had to let go a friend or was somebody ever like not pulling their weight. We had to let them go. Absolutely. And it is it is challenging and it's something we're always cognizant of and, you know, we we're getting away from you hiring friends. So there's more balance.

Yeah, and boundaries. Yes, exactly boundaries. As we grow. But it hasn't been a huge issue to be honest. I normally we're very transparent in our office about everything. So normally when that happens. They understand and you know, there aren't any huge surprises even if it is a friend. So they get it.

“Okay, so talk to me about how you compensate yourself as a business owner because I think there's so many different ways to do it. A lot of entrepreneurs like don't actually pay themselves for a long time.”

So in the beginning, how did you pay yourself a what point to change? How would you own of your company? Yeah, talk to me.

We didn't pay ourselves for years. Really. And, you know, that was very challenging. Because even though, you know, we're profitable. We have been reinvesting into the business for years now because we've been growing. We had to build this factory that cost money. And then we had to add on to the factory we needed to add some automation and so on and so forth. So for years, we didn't pay ourselves. We just kind of figured it out. Luckily when you're working around the clock, like we do, you don't really spend much money. So it wasn't an issue. But you do need to pay yourself. If you want to do a raise at some point or if you ever plan to have a bank or an investor looking at your books, you have to pay yourself.

Really, I would think that they wouldn't, they'd be happy that you're not paying yourself. They flag that. So that's a red flag to them because it looks like you're trying to make the company look more profitable than it is if you don't pay yourself, which is, you know, that that. Normally, isn't the reason why? Yeah. Founders aren't paying themselves, you know, because they want to pay their team or benefits or grow. Well, whatever, it's not me a million other reasons, but they found on that I learned.

“So you have to pay yourself and about what? Okay, so I opinion you're getting a salary. I'm assuming are you also getting distributions? No.”

No, not salary. Yes. At what point are you like, I'm deserving of distributions or is it because you've investors? It's like different. How does that work? This year, we're focused on our primary goal is to get options for a team, especially the people that have been most for a long time. So their part owners too. So that's our priority before anything else. We want to make sure we're set up for that, you know, before we do the raise, and then the other stuff like distributions, we're going to worry about that later.

Yeah, I'd love to unpack that a bit and you know, I'm like getting like so nerdy and so deep, but it's the stuff that you don't get to talk to other entrepreneurs often about, right? So how much how much percentage of the company do you have versus mark human versus your husband? So we're majority owners, so we own 90% and mark human.

Yeah, never gave equity to anybody else. Yeah. And how are you going to like you mentioned options to like how are you structuring this equity to your employees? We're very excited about this. We wanted to do this for a while.

“So they'll get some company shares so there'll be part owners in the company. And we're going to do that, you know, for the employees that have been with us for a while and that's a lot of them. So we're really excited to do this.”

It's like a certain percentage that you're like, okay, this 10% is for employees or something like that. We do have a percentage allocated, but it shifted.

So I can't remember exactly what it is. I want to say it's like, it's like 5% for employees or something like that. Okay. Yeah, so I don't remember exactly because it does get complicated when you break those shares down and you know, you're making room for other. Yeah, because that will shift the whole table. Yeah, so how much are you going to give away to investors for this 5 million. That's a great question. So we're doing it on a 40 million valuation. You know, 5 million, but some of that, this is where it gets complicated again, some of that's Mark because he's investing again. And there's some other small offices. So it's really that whatever that, you know, percentage ends up breaking down to of the 40 million will be their percentage.

And you did really good $750,000 to kick start for only 10% of your business and that drove you to 20 million. And you still own 90% of your business. It's incredible.

It makes me feel like I've been given out my equity willy nilly. I mean, I own like 90% of my company still, but I'll be at 85 because I give it to my early employees like I gave a lot of equity away. But it's interesting. It's it's really smart because I've had clients who've gotten kicked out of their own companies. Yes, that's terrifying. And also, I have friends that own so little in their companies, even though they work so hard, they need to get some massive exit in order to make any money out of the deal.

“Yeah. And so like they get caught in this like cycle. So I think you've got to be really careful. You do. I, you know, it's challenging. I go back and forth on this all the time because, you know, we have made sacrifices to get to that point.”

You know, we had to work. We've had to work seven days a week since we've started long hours multiple roles because we've been very careful about hiring to keep those costs down and stay profitable. Well, if we had done a raise earlier, you know, we could have made those hirers and maybe had, you know, a little bit more freedom. Yeah. You know, so there's trade-offs, you know, maybe we could have hired someone to build our factories to do us through it. I go back and forth on this all the time. So I definitely understand the desire to do raises earlier on. I get it. I can see the benefits of doing that, but it does come with some risks.

So you are a co-founder of a $20 million company. Hope that you are buying nice things for yourself.

So what's the nicest thing that you bought so far? Oh, well, I do love to receive stuff in the mail. I tell my husband this market research. So I can see whatever you come companies are doing. So I'm trying to think you have been traveling a lot. I do love there's a company called Petite Ave and I bought a coat for New York because I'm in New York a lot through there. It's sustainable. And, you know, I'm Petite. So I knew it would fit well and it's high quality. So that was like a treat that I go on myself.

Yeah, we're Petite twins. I love that. Okay. Last couple of questions is about general entrepreneurship.

“So what do you feel like is the thing that you love about being an entrepreneur and what do you hate about being an entrepreneur?”

Oh, my gosh. I'm a control freak. So I love having full control. I don't think I could ever work for anyone again to be quite honest. I love creating and building and implementing new ideas and that's everything to me. And when you work with someone else, even if they're an innovative company, you can still be restricted on how much you can do. So I love that part. I love our team, you know, that we get to pick who we work with and there's great synergy there. You know, because that's important. That's who you spend your days with.

So there's that. You know, in terms of what I hate is it can be really stressful and hard. I mean, there's definitely been moments, even with all of this success, where I've wondered, are we going to make it?

And you know, haven't been able to sleep and we're going to get through this. How much longer do we have? I've had many of those moments and they're hard.

Some of the hardest moments I've had in my life. And you know, because we're value mission driven company, I was able to come out, you know, on the other side of those moments. If we started this for money from material reasons only, I don't think I would have, you know, because they would just too hard to navigate for just money.

“Speaking of rainy days, how much money do you have saved in the bank for a rainy day or how much months run away? Are you keeping for a rainy day?”

Yes, so six months is are, you know, a rainy day from way, but I'm watching that constantly. And, you know, there's a lot of things that can impact that like, you know, you know, are new fulfillment center. If that ends up costing more, you don't know what can happen. Terrace overnight. So I'm watching our cash flow weekly. It's so important. Six months is really good. I feel like a lot of people have three months. So six months is like going the extra mile. But to your point, you're really seasonal business. So it's like you kind of don't even know how much money you're going to make until the end of the year. So is that why you you save six months?

Yeah, seasonal. And then we always have these projects we're doing where we're reinvesting in the business. And even though we plan for those and my husband has a lot of construction experience,

there still can be a lot of fluctuation there that can impact the bottom line. So that's the other reason why.

“And how do you and your husband like divvy up responsibilities? This is really important. If you work with your partner.”

It's important you have some lanes defined each day in your lanes. That's a hard and fast rule we have. He's not allowed in my lane. I'm not allowed in his lane. So I'm focused on R&D quality sales. Mark it in. Those are my big things. And my husband Fred, he's focused on operations production. Those are his strengths. Anything related to execution. He crushes that and he also does some of the market in and sales too.

“What part of entrepreneurship has like surprised you the most?”

Like, did you think that you were going to be the co-founder of a $20 million company? Never.

I don't know why. I guess I never really sat down and thought about it. I'm very much a head-stown kind of person. I just get in there and figure it out. And then occasionally I'll come up for air and be like, "Oh, well. I can't believe I'm here." So I've never really thought about it. I've always dreamed of starting my own business and being an entrepreneur ever since I was a little girl. So I knew I would do that, but I didn't think about the specifics like the size of the business or anything like that.

You know, on this podcast, I often interview like celebrities and influencers and people who created like billion dollar companies and they're super well-known and they're really big personalities, which is why they're so well-known. They put out books. And you know, but here you are, like this extremely successful entrepreneur so well-spoken was able to kind of like just like distill down all these things for us. We learned so much from you. What's your advice to the person out there who's listening who wants to start a company, who doesn't have a personal brand yet, who doesn't even want to be in front of the camera necessarily, but just has a really good idea.

It has not, you know, typically been like the captain of the team or the president of any sort of club, which where I feel like a lot of the entrepreneurs that I talked to are like those types. What advice do you have to that person? That's a great question. The things that I'm most proud of came out of nothing. So it came out of nothing and it came from putting myself out there. You know, I'm an introvert myself. I did not want to go on Shark Tank. I was terrified. You know, I thought I was going to puke.

I was so scared, but I did it anyways and I put myself out there and there have been tremendous rewards from that experience. So my advice would be put yourself out there, just do it. Even no matter what, even if you think it's a bad idea, you don't really know if it's a bad idea.

And if nothing else, you're learn and then you can pivot from those learns or build something else.

But, you know, unless you put yourself out there, you will never know.

So that's my key piece of advice. It's just take a step, get out there, execute, learn and you know, build from those learns. Have you ever? I'm sure people are approaching you now and telling you their ideas. How do you decipher from like a good idea? Like you had a great idea of putting out vegan cheese when vegan cheese was not a thing.

“How do you decipher between like a great idea and idea that you should shoot in the shed?”

Well, you know, again, there's so many ways with AI and you know, the, you know, e-commerce and all these platforms to get feedback. My advice would be put it out there and see what the responses do. You know, one way we test ideas will put a picture of the product that we're dreaming up and we'll have a sign up button and we'll see how many people sign up. If no one signs up, that means there's very little interest, so we're not going to invest your time in developing that product.

If we get thousands of signups, we're like, okay, there's something there. We should develop this. So, you know, you could easily create a landing page with AI now to get that feedback. You can throw it up there or a Shopify store. Yeah, and you know, just do a mock-up and put it out there and see what happens. See if there's a response and if there's traffic. I mean, that's all you really need to know.

Yeah, it's like, are you going to get a initial traffic before you go invest a whole ton of money and raise money and do all these things. Like, see if you can just do it yourself with the resources that you have before you just go all in. Exactly. I love this. Yeah.

This is such a great conversation. Thank you. Um, what is your last piece of advice for any of the entrepreneurs tuning in who are, you know, thinking about starting a business. What's your last piece of advice that you want to part ways with? I just do it.

Just do it. Just do it.

“I mean, that's why I started rebel cheese.”

I didn't want to get to, you know, 60, 70, 80, whatever age and look back and have regrets and, you know, wished that I left that job and started that business. You know, to me that would be the worst thing in the world. So if you're thinking about something or if you think you would have those regrets, you know, when you're older, then that's your cue that you need to get out there and do it. Just, you know, just do, um, how did you prepare for for entrepreneurship?

Like, did you do it as a side hustle at first or did you just like, you know, you had a great job.

So did you, were you just able to quit and kind of just use whatever savings you had? We started developing the products before we launched rebel cheese. So that was kind of a side hustle and we were figuring things out. We did a couple pop-ups. So we were able to get some feedback from our customers and see what the response was like.

So we kind of started as a side hustle, but we did have very successful careers before this. And we lived way below our means. So that actually gave us the confidence to start this because we, you know, I see this quite a bit. Why I used to when I worked in corporate, you know, people would max themselves out and would feel like they were stuck in their jobs. Because of their lifestyle. Exactly. Yeah.

So, you know, that's another piece of advice I would give if you can live below your means. So you have some flexibility and freedom to start other businesses. It will give you the confidence to take that next step, which was the case with us. You know, when we moved to Austin, we lived above a garage and then we lived in a town home. And you know, then our house is really small.

So we always lived your way way below our means. So we had this freedom to try things like a business.

And what do you want out of rebel cheese? Like, you don't seem like somebody who's doing this for money. Right. Not at all. You don't seem very flashy. I asked you, what do you like to buy? You didn't give me a real comment.

“Like, close. I was expecting like a jet or something. You know, so why are you doing this? Like, what's the outcome?”

To get a good question. Actually, I was going to say to get our cheese and as many mouths as possible. Yeah. But there's a bigger goal than that. And that is, it goes back to original values and mission, which is to move the needle on animal welfare.

But if we could get people to eat or cheese, you know, one meal a week or one meal a month, the collective impact of that on the things I just mentioned is huge. And that's why I do what I do. I love it.

Kirsten, this was such an amazing interview. Thank you so much for joining us on young and profiting podcasts.

Thanks for having me.

“And that's how Kirsten, Mayland and Rebel Cheese profit.”

Every business has a hidden engine and today we learned that for a CPG premium plant-based food brand, the real leverage is not just making a great product. It's about aligning to a mission that's bigger than money. Being efficient with shipping costs and understanding your key KPIs, like CAC, LTV and MIR, leveraging technology like AI to catch mistakes that would usually take hundreds of hours or executive hires. And lastly, taking big swings, like pitching your business on Shark Tank even when you're in introvert.

This was an amazing first episode of How We Profit.

Until next time, this is your host, Halita. We're about to launch something that might be my favorite thing we've ever done on the podcast. A brand new series called How We Profit. Now, I've been doing young and profiting podcasts for eight years. And my listeners are successful.

We are real entrepreneurs with real businesses and a lot of you guys are crushing it behind the scenes. You may not be super famous. You may not be a billionaire yet, but you've got a business that you've learned how to scale. And we want to hear from you. One of the best ways to learn as an entrepreneur is from your peers.

And I found it super helpful to be in these peer entrepreneurship groups and learn from other entrepreneurs who are at my level, but just in a different industry.

“So that's what I want to bring to this podcast.”

I want this to be our own peer group, but on the podcast.

And so I'm going to be interviewing people who are making anywhere from 500,000 to $10 million a year.

They're not super famous. They're not the typical billionaires that are on my show. These are real entrepreneurs who are crushing it behind the scenes and we're going to uncover what they do to sell, how they get their customers, what their profit margin looks like, how they market and so much more. It just sounds like you and you want to be featured on young and profiting podcasts for our how we profit series.

Just head to you, young and profiting.com/apply. And share your story.

“Let me know why you think you should be featured on the show.”

Again, that's young and profiting.com/apply. And who knows, maybe you'll be our next guest on Young and Profiting Podcast.