Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / Vaginas, CBD & acquisitions with Coco Meers & Marcy Capron-Vermillion, Co-Founders of Equilibria

Transcript

Vaginas, CBD & acquisitions with Coco Meers & Marcy Capron-Vermillion, Co-Founders of Equilibria · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

• 0:00
  This is Coco Miers and Marcy Capron-Vermilion for Female Startup Club.
• 0:15
  Hey everyone, Doon here, your host and hype girl. In today's episode, I get to learn from two brilliant women, Coco and Marcy. They're both serial entrepreneurs. They've both exited businesses before, and we're going through the ins and outs of their latest venture, Equilibria. We hear what was wrong with Coco's first business model, vaginas, and the key lesson you should know when you're building your own biz.
• 0:40
  Equilibria is a Chicago-based CBD company offering premium, farm-fresh, full-spectrum CBD products. In a sea of CBD brands, Equilibria proudly offers personalized dosage support led by a team of seasoned cannabis educators and unparalleled quality from their exclusive bioscience partner, all to advance the mission of balance for women.
• 1:06
  And before we jump in, we have some really big news. I'm sure you've seen it, but if not, yesterday we launched our private network for women building CPG, D2C and e-com businesses. It's called Hype Club. The doors are now open for founding members to join while we're in beta and the discounted rate of $39 will remain the same forever if you sign up today.
• 1:31
  This is where you'll build your network of folks on a similar journey to you, access our modern mentorship program with women who are featured on the show, find office power hours with experts and resources that will help you on your way to building a seven-figure business. So go to femalesartupclub.com forward slash hype club to claim your spot before they're all taken.
• 1:55
  Otherwise, you know the drill. If you can share it on social media, if you can shout about us to your friends, if you can subscribe and rate and review the show, we love this stuff. It helps other ears find us. But let's get stuck into this episode. This is Coco and Marcy for Female Startup Club. Coco and Marcy, hi. Welcome to the Female Startup Club podcast. Thank you for having us. So good to be here, Dune.
• 2:20
  I'm so excited to jump in today. I always get started by getting you to introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about what your current business is. This subject is near and dear to our hearts because Marcy and I have been building businesses and products on our own and together for a long, long, long time, maybe a decade now, Marcy. Whoa. 2021. 2021.
• 2:47
  uh not quite i think 2013 but we're definitely getting there yeah time flies so we'll give you a little overview of some of the businesses that we've created together and apart and then we can dig more into into this one would love that
• 3:02
  So my whole career has been focused on women and on their health and wellness goals, helping them achieve those goals, helping them look and feel their best. I started out in very traditional brand management at L'Oreal in New York and then in Paris, and then wanted to dip my toe into the entrepreneurial community and had a vision for a consumer technology marketplace that was called Pretty Quick.
• 3:28
  which was like Open Table or there's one in the UK, which is very popular that I'm forgetting. But what's the British equivalent of Open Table? Tabletop or? Yeah, I think it is Open Table though.
• 3:42
  Is it open table? Okay, great. So anyway, seamless booking for salon and spa appointments in the way that you can go and you can press a button on an app and you can book a table in a restaurant, or you can book an airplane, or you can book a car, or you can book a, you name it, you can book it. But you really still, at least in the U.S., are not able to do that in the salon and spa space. So my first company was to solve that problem and help women more easily book salon and spa appointments. It was called Pretty Quick.
• 4:09
  I made all the mistakes in the world, so happy to talk about any of those. You name it, if there was a wrong way to do it, I did it. But then I finally... It can't be too bad though, you still exit it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, you only learn how the right way to do it after you've done it wrong a couple of times. So things started to work out. One of the best decisions I made was to partner with Marcy. Marcy ran a consultancy that helps non-technical founders build and scale their technology products.
• 4:35
  So partnered with Marcy, who understood the pain point in a world full of male engineers. It was really hard to partner with someone who said, oh, yeah, it is. It's super hard to book a bikini wax. I want to help you solve that problem. Anyway, so I love so.
• 4:53
  Built and scaled that company, exited to Groupon in 2015, once we had worked out a lot of the chinks in the armor and started to have a lot of success finally. How much did you sell it for? Is it publicly disclosed information? Can you share?
• 5:09
  We didn't disclose. All investors made money. You know, it was a it was a really great outcome for everybody. Not a life changing event for anybody, but but really great returns all around. Furthermore, the the we got to keep going. Groupon is notoriously very bad at at acquiring.
• 5:27
  at killing innovation that they acquire. But we had a really nice run where what we were doing was we exited into a billion dollar business. Health, Beauty and Wellness and Groupon is a billion dollar P&L. And so what we were doing is we were infusing pretty quick, convenience, quality.
• 5:44
  All of these things that the Groupon brand had lost because it had become known to stand for discounts. And so we got to really invest in the project. The team grew from eight when we sold to 90. And we basically had, you know, unfettered budgets to just really grow and scale nationally with the assets, the salons and spa customers, and then the consumers on the other side. You know, we kind of, we had it all. We got to leapfrog our competition, put it all together with a pretty quick brand and tech.
• 6:11
  and then move forward. So it was also a really, we can talk about, you know, exit strategy and, you know, financial decisions are really important. So is the experience of what it's like when you sell the move to your team. What's going to be like for them? Can they keep going? Can you continue to build the vision that you have? Or is it, are you just wiping your hands and done?
• 6:31
  I'm an active angel investor and immediately after leaving Groupon called Marcy because she always has her finger on the pulse of the next thing. And I'll let her tell the story of her past and then what happened when we reconnected. Yes. Amazing. Marcy, tell me about you. Tell me about your background a little bit.
• 6:50
  Sure. So I identify as a product developer, you know, agnostic medium. I love to solve problems. Best tool for the job can mean a lot of things. Historically, a huge part of my career has definitely been software and IoT, Internet of Things.
• 7:03
  but hardware, CPG, soft guards, all that is so fun to play with because, again, you never know what can best solve a problem. So as Coco mentioned, I ran a consulting firm. It was called Polymathic, where part of our business was acting as the technical co-founder and product counterpart to non-technical founders. The other part of our business was going into antiquated ancient industry businesses that were like 100 plus years old and saying, like, what's next? So when you've hit a point where, you know, a company's gone through how many steps, and it's over a century old, and,
• 7:33
  And like, for instance, things around dairy trading, like people don't know that there's actual communication with farmers involved and things have to do with dairy trading. Kinds of crazy stuff like that. Super fun for me because I love to solve really hard problems. And so when Coco, you know, was a client, so that would have been like 2013, 2014, and she went on her way for her Groupon journey. I kept building all kinds of crazy things. So probably my biggest claim to fame was having produced around 30 products before the age of 30.
• 8:02
  So it's a cool place to be. I've seen a lot of really cool, weird, interesting, not so interesting stuff. Problems come in many forms. And I had sold my consulting firm in early 2017. Consulting exits are never as fun as something like an exit ticker bond, but it was cool to kind of move on. Because one of the things that I wanted was to be able to really embrace that polymathic nature of marketing.
• 8:25
  being able to solve in different agnostic medium. And I was a little locked on the software side. So I kind of went on a sabbatical and the thing that I stumbled into happened to be cannabis. So at least we use that as a catch all term. I know in different countries, it can be different things, but cannabis here we're defining as, you know, cannabis sativa plant, which is either in American terms, hemp is defined as 0.3% THC or less. It's defined as marijuana or weed, if it's more than that in THC. So anyway, here's how I stumbled into that.
• 8:56
  I am a person who really loves to do research, especially when I haven't been asked to do it because I am a naturally curious human. And so I had been in a kayaking accident. Actually it was around when Coco and I met, but it was something that led to damage later. And in 2017, I was someone who...
• 9:13
  you know, should be in the prime of my life, but instead was unable to do a lot of normal everyday activities because I had so much pain in my lower back. So I was contemplating getting surgery. And instead, luckily, a family member had gifted me some CBD for my birthday. So I kind of was like, all right, this thing isn't going to help. I take tons of Advil, like this can't possibly be any better than that. Although knowing that my husband is a veteran and cannabis has been really great for him, but I just was never a me thing. I never smoked pot in high school. Like,
• 9:43
  it wasn't of interest. You know, I I'm glad that I, that I listened to this family member because I was definitely like, I put the jar on the counter and was like, eh, you know, um, because within a couple of days, like I was seeing such incredible improvement in my back injury and being able to actually like move around, being able to like, wow, that's quick. Yeah. It's not always as quick for everyone. For me considering the amount of inflammation that I was dealing with, um, it kicked in pretty quickly. So, um,
• 10:10
  I had this just amazing pain relief. And then I found myself just not feeling so depressed and so anxious. And I was like, well, all right, well this is an unfamiliar feeling of clarity. What do I do now? And I realized that there really had to be something here. I was a little confused as to why it took me that long to find it. So I was doing a lot of work in the industry looking at what was working. Why are some products good? Why are some bad? Why do you have to get a medical marijuana card to get certain products?
• 10:39
  You know, things along those lines. In 2017, it was a super nascent space. And I wound up co-hosting a monthly meetup with a friend of mine. And it was there that I had a lot of transformational conversations with women of all ages and
• 10:54
  You know, there were women that were driving from really far away to come in and talk about how much they were struggling. And there were a couple of moments that really stood out to me. Like a lot of you think of all the different, you know, daughters struggling, mothers struggling, grandmothers, whatever. You know, for me, the biggest thing was was the grandmas, the grandmas driving in from really far away to talk about how.
• 11:12
  much they were struggling and how they were having really dark thoughts. And you hear enough of that. Like, I know it's like, I always say like, save the grandmas because I don't think anyone's talking about. I don't want to hear that in the same sentence. Right. Right. Mental health, especially of post-menopausal women, I think is something that we don't, we don't talk about a lot, but there were women of all ages here and talking to everyone, you know, my job in, as a person who works in product innovation is to look at, you know, trends, patterns, causation, et cetera. And
• 11:39
  it was an undeniable pattern that a lot of people were hurting and not talking about it. And also that high THC cannabis was not appealing to them, was never going to be appealing to them, but that didn't mean, didn't mean that they couldn't benefit from cannabis. So I was looking again at like what was working, what wasn't at the time, there were so many over the counter products that were flat out, terrible quality. If anything could actually make you very sick, the space has improved a little bit, but,
• 12:05
  Still some bad actors out there. And by the time that Coco and I met up, I was just sitting on this wealth of data because I prototyped what's now known as our dosage support service. Basically, by doing phone calls, video chats, et cetera, with these women digging into what it was they needed, their health concerns, you know, are they taking medications, using things safely with cannabis, all that.
• 12:27
  When Coco and I went to meet up, I think she was expecting, here's what I'm working on, like this, this, this, this, this. And instead it was like, let me tell you this dramatic story. But, and it was probably a funny thing to witness. But it was a really big moment for us to...
• 12:43
  I shared with her a certain level of vulnerability that obviously you can only do with someone that you know relatively well. But I think it was clear to her that we had to do something about it. But the thing that really stuck out was that we could not do this without a human element. So you'll notice that we're basically the only cannabis company that has both a product and a service company baked in with technology. And the reason we did that is it was really clear from these conversations that a human had to be available or these women were not going to touch this category at all.
• 13:11
  Because they need to ask questions. They need to figure out like what's right for them. And they're not able to do that decision-making on their own. Is that what you mean? Yeah. Well, I don't want to say decision-making on their own. They want to make informed decisions. Women are trust-based consumers. And so they were like, I have so many questions. There's so much, you know,
• 13:28
  unclear stuff out on the internet right now. And it's just like, it's a scary thing. It's a taboo thing. Even if you can't get high from it, it's still, it's still a scary thing. How do you know? I mean, literally, how do you know, dude? Like, are you, do you start with 10 milligrams a day or do you start with a hundred? Do you microdose throughout the day or do you take a big dose at night before you go to sleep? Is it going to make you sleepy? Is it going to make you tired? But then it's also supposed to be used for focus. What does it do? How can one simple ingredient actually do all these things in your body? That sounds a lot
• 13:56
  like snake oil. I called bullshit on Marcy, really. If she wasn't a data-driven full-stack engineer, I would have just walked out of the room. But bullshit, how can one ingredient do so much within the body? And it only makes sense when you are empowered by education, when...
• 14:14
  you understand the way that the endocannabinoid system works in our body. We are so committed to education because more than any other category, this is the newest, oldest industry, right? Humans have been using cannabis for medicine for millennia, but...
• 14:30
  How you use it, why you use it, what you should know before you use it, how much you should use, how you should change what you're using based on your own health goals and outcomes. Those are all questions, very legitimate questions. And we believe it is our responsibility to empower our members with that education. That's amazing.
• 14:49
  CBD should be taken daily. It's like birth control, right? The whole point is that you want that steady drip of exactly that right amount in your body at all times, right? What we're doing with CBD is we're helping our body's own endocannabinoid system, which is this meta system within our body, which is itself responsible for regulating all these systems. Circadian rhythms, our response to stress,
• 15:15
  you name it, physiological pain and inflammation.
• 15:21
  we are helping that master balancing system balance better. So you don't do that like by reactively taking a bunch of CBD, you know, when you're already stressed. You don't do that by reactively taking CBD to help you heal from an injury. You do it by augmenting that system every day consistently. So from the beginning, what Marcy and I have done is we've paired high quality products that's as clinical grade as it gets. We are owners in our own farm based in Colorado here in the United States.
• 15:49
  And then we pair that premium product with personalized service. And every single member at Equilibria has a dosage specialist who's a real life, clinically cannabis trained educator who's just there for her. And 35% of our members talk to her. Over 65% of our members chat or email with her own person to just say, I started with this collection. Literally, what do I do tonight? Right.
• 16:13
  Can I start tonight? Yeah, dude, you can start tonight. Do this. We just were there to hold your hand and talk with you physically, psychologically, emotionally about what you're putting in your body and what you should expect from the outcome. I am so into chat hotlines, especially if it's like on like something like WhatsApp, where you can literally just be like, can you please answer my questions in the way that I want to ask you questions? Just a quick note there. Love that. Love that for people.
• 16:43
  So when you guys were meeting up, Coco, you were in private equity or you were investing in businesses. And was this a conversation of like, oh, do you want to invest in the business or what do you think of my idea? Or was this a conversation of like, hey, do you want to be my business partner? It's coming from you, Marcy. Yeah.
• 16:59
  I mean, it started with like something that I, if anyone who's ever heard me speak on anything, I talk a lot about the can't not do reflex, which is the huge, the biggest driver for me is like an entrepreneur and innovator. The conversation largely started as like, I've had this can't not do moment, like I'm doing this research and I literally can't stop thinking about it. And I'd like to talk to you about it. And Coco had been investigating the kind of medical side of things for investment or otherwise. So it sort of was like a fortuitous timing moment, I'd say initially. Got it.
• 17:28
  I fully expected to go, I, you know, as Marcy mentioned, I had been making some investments on the hemp side of things. I also just really love writing checks for women who are smart and who are, you know, focused on results and outcomes. And Marcy's one of those women. So I totally met up thinking I could just passively help and write a check. I did not think that Marcy was going to like, again, she just opened her like heart to me. Right. And was like brave and said,
• 17:57
  No, everything's not perfect. This is what's been going on. It's been really hard. Who does that when you're just catching up, right? I think we've, we've, everything's supposed to be perfect all the time and you're working on great things and everything. So you've got it all under control. Like.
• 18:11
  We give women the space to say, I need help. I don't have everything under control, which is totally okay. I was just really impacted by mission and the results that cannabis as this super powerful plant therapy can have for women, plus just creating a community where it is okay to say I'm not okay. And so for me, I said, screw it. This is not just a passive check that I'm writing to this capable founder.
• 18:41
  Like I want in too. And for me, this was a really beautiful kind of coming home where my early part of my career was all CPG, all L'Oreal, like physical goods. And then my pivot to entrepreneurship after business school was hardcore product and tech, building a consumer marketplace. And so this was both. This is both. This is a products company with a tech company.
• 19:07
  layer that's telehealth services. And if you're a services company, you're a data company, right? So it's like all together. And it's just deeply rewarding because we're growing like a rocket ship, but we are genuinely mission driven. And every single person who works in Equilibria is here because we want to help women. And we know that high quality CBD and education can change her life.
• 19:33
  Oh, I love that. That's so cool. I have so many questions and I want to know where do you guys want to start with this or where do you want to go with this? Because obviously we definitely want to touch on what you learned from your exits in your past businesses that you and the failures that you had there that you were able to learn from and bring into this new business. But we also want to talk about how you actually brought this business to life and like what the model was. So maybe we start with Equilibria like now and then we come back to the exits at the end.
• 20:03
  you've got this idea, you've both got experience. How were you able to get this brand off the ground? Like what kind of capital did you need to put in? What were those early steps like if you're just to really dumb it down for me? Yeah. So, you know, we talked earlier about the mistakes, how, how failures and mistakes from your past can inform your present and your future. And
• 20:27
  And, you know, full disclosure, pretty quick, my first company that, and we had a very successful exit. It was never a good business model. The business model didn't really work. Okay. Our take rate, our commission was, here's why our commission was 20%. Our average order value was $40. That meant we were making eight bucks. There's eight.
• 20:55
  eight bucks every single time someone booked an appointment. To acquire a member, if we were lucky, we would spend $40, which meant break even on a customer was five times. Name an app that you go back to five times in a couple months period, right? I mean, truthfully, earning that frequency is really, really, really hard. And if you are solving a
• 21:22
  hair on fire problem, like freaking morphine, then of course you're going to get her five times, but you have to be like morphine in order to earn the trust of a consumer to use you, you know, more than once, to be honest. Like we got a lot of choices. Consumers don't have time to like come back to something, which wasn't fucking awesome the first time. So this isn't about pretty quick. This is about equilibria. That's why you pivot into something that someone has to take every single day.
• 21:49
  Yeah, you started the morphine brand. We, well, I mean, like, yes. And you know what? So, and recurring revenue, like.
• 22:00
  you know, I don't invest in businesses that are not either GP positive on the first transaction or recurring revenue. Like it's so hard to break through all of the noise that is out there in our digital and physical consumer economy. So, and at the end of the day, like there's passion plays and then there's businesses and like, this is a business and we had very, very limited early paid in capital. We raised, you know,
• 22:27
  to start from one lead angel and ourselves who were able to contribute also as serial entrepreneurs, we raise, you know,
• 22:39
  $350,000 to get us started. That's not a lot when you're having to buy physical inventory and also invest in marketing to figure out what your channels are going to be to grow the business. And so the one thing that I would urge everybody listening to this podcast to remember is that like your business model has to work.
• 23:02
  Like it's going to cost you more money than you think to go out there and find customers and acquire them. So make sure that you are literally in the black the first time they use you or that your product is so good or your model is so sticky that they're going to come back again. So we had our unit economics dialed from the beginning because I've been there and I've had to raise money when my customers couldn't fund the business's growth. And that is not success. That's not where you want to be.
• 23:34
  Got it. Do you have anything you want to add, Marcy? Or should we keep moving on from there? Okay. So you raised the 350 grand. This is what allows you to develop your products to, I assume, find your partners in the, I think you said you owned your farms, right? That's also pretty, pretty major. And basically get the initial stage of the business going.
• 23:56
  So, and this is also where, you know, the partners that you choose are so important between Marcy and I, and I want Marcy to share her perspective on this, but we had a lot of the skill sets that were required to test the viability of our concept early on. So we had $350,000 in cash fines.
• 24:16
  We had a, we are owners in our farm. We are not the exclusive owner. So we didn't have a huge cash outlay for that investment, but we were able to secure the joint venture relationship with the farm, began buying inventory. And then Marcy as a,
• 24:34
  full-stack developer and products designer as well. She truly is polymathic, was able to build the first version of our site. We would partner together on operations and I would handle the marketing. So between the two of us, our skill sets were such that we could take this minimum viable product to market, which was
• 24:54
  The science in the bottom and the product itself is absolutely amazing. What we were testing in the first phase with this early, early capital was would people take it every day and would they subscribe? And how would they like to interact with the dosage specialist? Do they care about having a person that they can talk to to get their daily routine right?
• 25:17
  And what we learned, this was in late 2018, early 2019, when we were in beta before we actually launched the site. We learned that, yes, you know, women were willing to give it a try and to take it daily and to stay consistent. And for you, what did proof of concept look like? Was that like how many users or how many kind of what was the goal for you to reach to be like, yeah, OK, we've nailed it. We've got everything ready. Now we're ready to hard launch. It's a good question. I'm trying to think about how many people were in our beta.
• 25:47
  It was, I want to say it was like probably approaching a thousand customers by the time we launched in March. So, I mean, it picked up speed. We did initially, we tried a couple of different mechanisms. Like we had a free trial program, which is tough because-
• 26:02
  CBD does take a while to seek full benefit for most people. We tried a lot of different sorts of things. We were only subscription in the beginning. We pivoted to allow both traditional one-time purchase e-commerce and subscription, not actually a couple of months after we publicly launched. But we were pretty lucky that anyone who wasn't having a good experience, which largely had to do with things with their endocannabinoid system, the ECS,
• 26:28
  were very vocal with us. So we were able to kind of work through all of that. Like even like, you know, Coco's mom had an experience where she didn't want to be a customer anymore. And then it just turned out that she was taking it at the wrong time of day. And like, you know, these sorts of things that we had to, you know, sort of work through. And once we did that, there was a lot of confidence. I mean, I, I've built a lot of things and I've never had this level of engagement with a customer base, nor just like this quick pace. Yeah. It was obvious, Dune. Yeah.
• 26:54
  We knew like, yes, Marcy's right. You know, we had about a thousand women who are subscribing on a monthly basis. We were growing net new customers every single month. We had like the beginnings of a, of a channel strategy, but like, it was obvious, like what was happening, what we were hearing from her was like, holy shit. Like I am a better parent. I am kinder to myself.
• 27:19
  I feel like the weight of the world isn't on my shoulders all of the time. I have been able to have sex for the first time in four years, whatever. Like women were telling us that we were helping her life, like intimately, you know, whether it was an injury or sleep or just all the anxiety that we all feel all the time because we're just balancing everything.
• 27:43
  Name one woman who isn't balancing more than one thing. We all are. No matter who you are, where you are in life, or what you want to do, you've got a lot on your plate. Everyone needs this. Everyone needs this, especially women. Women need this. You really, you need this. We got you, dude. You need this. So, I mean, that's the kind of stuff. So my mom, you know...
• 28:07
  We were watching the metrics like a hawk. So for all of you listeners, of course, when you get your proof of concept going, don't let perfection be the enemy of the good. There were many conversations that Marcy and I said where I was like, oh, let's not do it. It's not ready. And Marcy said,
• 28:22
  Come on, we got a launch. Done is better than perfect. Done is better than perfect, exactly. And again, what we were testing was efficacy. What we were testing was delight. What we were testing was consistency. What we were looking for was churn. So we're obsessing data-driven orientation. Who cares if you have a proof of concept if you're not saying like, what are the metrics that tell me that this is going to work? The number one metric that we were looking for was twofold. It's always going to be acquisition and retention. Can you help her start? And can you help her stay?
• 28:52
  We were acquiring more net new ads per month and, you know, month, month over month. And then also we, people were staying with it. So we're obsessing over churn and who's canceling and the cancellation reasons. And the first person to cancel was my mom. So I call her up and I'm like, mom, what is going on? Like free country. I'm glad you were honest with me, but like, really, you're going to be our first subscriber to a trip. Why? Why?
• 29:22
  So she said it was actually really working well for her. Her goal was to get off of the last five milligrams of Zoloft that she'd been taking since her divorce 25 years ago. And so she was really committed to it. But she said that she was taking it at night, one soft gel, just 10 milligrams. But the THC was waking her up. She was feeling very alert in the middle of the night, which is, of course, the opposite of what we want.
• 29:46
  Now we know from all of, from, you know, three years of doing this, that about 5% of our members do have kind of an elevated agitated experience from the trace amounts of THC, which are in a powerful spectrum product. So I said, mom, like, this is why we have the dosage specialist. Just before you cancel, talk with your dosage specialist about your routine, your body, your routine. Maybe you're taking it at the wrong time or the wrong amount or not enough or too much.
• 30:13
  So she finally meets with the woman who architected our program. Her name is Maya Reed. And they switch her to a morning dose. And by taking it consistently for a couple of weeks, she found that she was indeed able to get off of that last five milligrams of her SSRI. And, you know. That's amazing. But she would have given up. She would have given up. This isn't something that you can just give to someone and be like, see ya. You know, this isn't e-commerce. This is like telehealth. Totally. Yeah, I get that.
• 30:41
  Our mission in the beginning was that it was really clear from my initial research that you could not give someone CBD and then just like walk away, that it was like not responsible, especially since a lot of women don't know that there are oral medications that need to be like timed separately from their doses.
• 30:56
  et cetera. And so Coco's mom helped us, you know, like she sort of spurred some investigation into why people were feeling alert before night. THC can be part of it. The other part of it is a small amounts of CBD can be energizing, whereas large amounts can be sedating. There's so many different factors involved, but acknowledging like now, when you, when you buy from us, actually, your sort of routine page that you get where you get sort of this, this customized thing that, that looks at the products that you bought and your health goals,
• 31:21
  it flat out tells you what to do if that happens so that you have like, you know, some troubleshooting ways to move through it, knowing that there's always this person standing by to help you if you need them. I mean, I fall into that category. I tried CBD. I stuck with it for like maybe, let's say a month, maybe a little bit longer. But then I was like, I don't know if this is working. Like I give up. And like, I just bought what someone told me to buy. Like I didn't do any research. You know, I couldn't even tell you the brand name. And I was like, yeah, pretty sure this doesn't work for me. Give up. Yeah.
• 31:50
  No, definitely like no kind of looking into it. So I can totally see the benefit and the value in that side of the business.
• 31:58
  You mentioned that you were acquiring these customers. You obviously had 1,000 before you kind of launched, but then I think I read that you were growing consistently like 20% to 50% month on month, which is awesome. And I'm wanting to know how you're acquiring customers given that CBD is one of those kind of, is it called the sin space or something where, you know, you're not allowed to advertise like normally through regular channels like Facebook and da-da-da-da. So how were you acquiring those customers at that scale consistently?
• 32:28
  Awesome. Yeah. So early on when we were doing our, our beta testing referral, really word of mouth was the main driver. I mean, it was,
• 32:38
  a woman telling her mother, sister, daughter, friend, grandmother, that like the results were real. And we were incenting the referral program through a, you know, give get kind of standard product marketing. So the numbers, the base wasn't very big, the numbers weren't very big, but we were seeing consistent referral, which led us to believe that word of mouth and like, you know, kind of trust based evangelism was like critical for this, which totally makes sense. Like it's scary. Yeah.
• 33:03
  Uh, there's more questions than answers and like hearing about it from someone you trust is probably really, really important. So we, we have an affiliate, um, program and we have since the beginning. Um, and we've had a lot of success. I mean, we still have many clinicians and doctors and, you know, authoritative people in the health and wellness space who recommend and refer Equilibria.
• 33:26
  But one day I'll never forget. We, you know, we're constantly refreshing to see like what the metrics are doing with the dashboard say. And one day we went to go look, it was like right when we launched and, and someone had an affiliate had posted. We honestly like,
• 33:47
  I mean, listen, my first startup was when we exited in 2015. Influencer marketing was like just only then beginning. Like it was called, you were called a blogger before you were an influencer, right? Like, so influencers were...
• 34:00
  I wasn't even thinking about this as a channel. I was thinking about our affiliates as more like, again, serious health and wellness, you know, credentialed professionals. Well, professionals. Well, someone who we knew, she was just a friend of a friend, had used our relief cream, which is
• 34:19
  like people call it magic cream. It's like very potent and has like a cult following. And so she went on Instagram and she said that she had this like thumb arthritis thing. And she was like, my thumb is cured. Like I put it on and my thumb is cured. And it was just like unvarnished. It wasn't an ad. We weren't paying her. It was just face to camera. And she was like, holy shit, this stuff. So we go and we look and like minutes later, I mean, the sales are just like totally spiking. So that was the beginning of us realizing that
• 34:47
  One, influencer marketing can be really dangerous for a brand. And we're not about just like perfect posts of some gorgeous product shot or unboxing. What we care about is have you genuinely been affected positively and seen great results from Equilibria?
• 35:07
  So all of our influencer partners take Equilibria for at least a month. They have a dosage specialist conversation. They are educated on the science and how it works. But if they are like authentic, you know, if they've had an authentic experience themselves, then we encourage them to share with our community. And that has been our number one source of customer acquisition. And that's how we were able from that first phone stories series.
• 35:31
  we were able to grow 50% month over month all year one and 20% all year two. And Dune, because that's your correct, that there are lots of places. In the beginning, we could advertise almost nowhere. Now we have like a couple places that we could do traditional advertising, but it's still... Oh, that's interesting. Where? Well, you can, for instance, if you call it hemp instead of CBD, there are some places that you can advertise certain types of display ads. But the options available to us are like,
• 35:59
  10% of what it, or less actually, than what it would be if we were running any other kind of business, which we think largely is very unfair in case any American regulators are listening. But it, but it means that we had to get really creative. And since this is a such a taboo space, the influencer scene was actually like a perfect fit as long as we maintained integrity and authenticity that it had to work for them before they could post that.
• 36:24
  about it. We're not looking, we're not interested to this day in anyone hawking, hawking products, similar to how our dosage specialists are not salespeople. They don't get commission. Like they're, they're just there to educate, like having ethics in certain places has been a huge part of our brand. That's really interesting. And since that moment around the launch, when you had the influencer post about the thumb, what have been the key moments of growth since then that have really propelled you forward in leaps rather than incremental growth?
• 36:55
  Yeah, so, you know, influencer has been a, it's such an important channel for us. I mean, we tell our influencer community all the time that they're not, we don't do them as like a channel. We view them as just an extension of our company and in our team, right? We are deeply, deeply connected with our influencer partners. So the focus on growth has meant that we've had to get like really scientific about building that machine. It wasn't enough to just sort of like,
• 37:23
  see who could join us and who is like trying it and like oh like cool we've got like two new influencers this month it was like no no we're going to build a real funnel here and we're going to do this much seeding and then we're going to do this much you know relationship development and then we're going to do this much and and so we just we have you know kpis around that funnel just like any sales funnel what are those kind of numbers per month like how much do you seed and how much do you like how many people actually then are able to share
• 37:48
  Yeah, we seed about, you know, and we also have sort of diversification goals too, because, you know, Instagram is great and Instagram has been our main channel, but we're seeing some really exciting activity on YouTube now where it's more evergreen, which is really exciting. We have just launched a TikTok initiative, so we're learning more about TikTok. We have a long way to go. So we seed about, you know, 100 to 150 influencers a month,
• 38:14
  And our goals are to contract 50 of them a month. Our influencer marketing team. Yes, they are marketers, but really they are just like relationship, relationship owners. Right. So each of our account executives has a book of business that is these, that is influencers. Right.
• 38:32
  We know them. We're friends with them. We it's our job. We understand what their financial goals are. If anyone has like education questions or, you know, it's our job to partner with them on content creation. We are all in the business together of educating women about how powerful this can be. So it's really, this is not a transactional channel for us. This is really a relationship development partnership with us for us. And so it's just been, how do we scientifically grow?
• 39:00
  a what's it's essentially like an outside sales force um and um and that's how we've done it and it's been really successful so that's like you know kind of pillar one and then with any with any business you don't you can't you know a billion name a billion dollar business it's built on the back of one channel right so so we are looking as marcy mentioned you know we can advertise in many more places now i'd say um expanding our team to include um
• 39:25
  paid social. Getting another inflection point was getting Facebook live, even though it's, as Marcy says, 10% of what we'd be able to do. We do have a domain that is Facebook friendly that is all hemp and all topical that we're able to drive traffic to through topical and hemp only ads. So there've been some other kind of tailwinds besides just influencer. Yeah, that's amazing.
• 39:55
  So in the CBD slash this personal care industry, and this is more like related to the business and, you know, how this kind of model works, because I have no idea. Do you optimize for profits along the way or is the goal or is the, I don't know what the term is here, but is the strategy, I guess, that you make money on the sale when you sell the business? Yeah.
• 40:25
  It's sort of given the tailwinds and the massive growth in the space, it's not enough to just have top line velocity. You know, strategics and whether they are strategic CPG companies or vertically integrated cannabis companies or financial acquirers, people are holding cannabis companies accountable for both top line growth and some level of event up.
• 40:53
  So we are not optimizing for margin at this point, but we are very responsible to make sure that we're at least neutral there. And also that allows us to grow top line. So we're responsible growth is what we're all about. And it's kind of that balance between the two. It's really easy to just keep on growing crazy double digits month over month if you're not mindful about how much you're spending or who you're, what traffic, everybody can do that.
• 41:22
  What's hard is sustaining exciting growth without burning through cash. And that's what we do. Yeah, that's amazing. I didn't ask this earlier, but are you guys also, are you just online D2C or are you going into the retail space as well? We're currently direct to consumer only.
• 41:43
  You know, always open and thinking about other channels, but like it's this is really where we shine, too, because owning the relationship with the customer. She has her own dosage specialist. Like there's sort of this whole thing here that would be a little tough if we were like something you bought at Target, you know. So. Yeah, totally. I get it. So where is the business today? What exciting things can you shout about? What's coming up this year? What's on the roadmap that you want to tell everyone about?
• 42:12
  I bet you have some cool innovation on the way. I have no doubt. We do. I don't know, Coco, where you want to start in terms of like, so in terms of growth, I mean, obviously we're, we're trying to hit an ambitious multiplier for the year, but from an innovation standpoint, I mean, we're constantly innovating on both the technical and like physical product side of things. So looking at,
• 42:36
  the digital experience of learning about being educated about and using our products. We've, we've definitely dived into personalization recently. We're sitting on just an incredible pool of data, you know, two years worth that tells us like what products work for, what health conditions and things along those lines. So doing a lot within the digital personalization space. And then we have some, some really fun stuff coming out toward the end of the year. Like we'll have the first ever,
• 43:03
  non-oil-based cannabis suppository in the American market will be coming out in the fall.
• 43:08
  Um, and that sounds like a bunch of words put together, but if you've ever used, uh, we talk about vaginas a lot at this company. So I feel like anyone who's listening to that means you're gonna, that means the vagina is the main line of cannabinoid reception. And so it is like, when we talk about this mission of women, like, and restoring balance to her lives, that's why we show up at work every day. What if you could restore balance to her lives through her anatomy? It's pretty awesome. Yeah.
• 43:37
  So yeah, a vaginal suppository is... It's a pathway that bypasses metabolism in your liver. So it's literally like the closest to an IV of it that you're going to get, you know, that it isn't disrupted by digestion at all, among other things. It also means that you, it will never conflict with oral medications. So if you're someone who is on a ton of medications for a health concern, you don't have to worry about any sort of issues there. Tons of other benefits, you know, sexual health benefits, et cetera, um...
• 44:06
  But for anyone who's ever tried a typical cannabis suppository, they are made from extract and cocoa butter. And what goes up must come down. And it's a really unpleasant experience. Let's put it that way. And so we were determined if we were going to roll this out, we wanted to. I insisted from the very beginning because I've, gosh, prototyped all kinds of different things. And the oil ones work. But...
• 44:32
  I just could never see mainstream pickup of that modality because fearing that you're going to mess up your clothes and damaged clothing, you have to deal with all this mess. It would be like having to use Monistat every day and no one wants to do that. So we were determined to find a better way. And the way we were able to accomplish that is we have this incredible biotech partner that we worked on, our Rapid Calming Melts that came out recently.
• 44:55
  that use patents for mucosal adhesion. So being able to have it be a powder-based suppository that adheres to tissue and then slowly sort of dissolves is a much more pleasant experience. It's much more sanitary. There's lots of benefits there. So we're really excited about it. It's something that I've been like co-developing for like two years. So. This is so cool. Wow. When did you say it comes out?
• 45:21
  So the suppositories will hit in October, and then we've got a really exciting holiday, and then before suppositories, two more use case-based products. So we are, you know, the past two years have taught us, after our proof of concept, that premium product plus personalized service can restore balance to women.
• 45:41
  Now, rather than that personalization happening post-purchase where we fine-tune Dune's routine based on a couple of static boxes that you were able to kind of starter kits that you try, we're really focusing on personalization, as Marcy was saying, throughout the digital experience from the very, very beginning.
• 45:57
  So before you even purchase, the products that you buy are right for you based on the health goal that you've told us that you have, based on what you've told us about your life, which means we're starting you off in a better place. You still have your unfettered access to your dosage specialist to help fine tune and tweak. But it's important to deliver on true personalization that we have a range of, you know, use case based products available for you. Yeah.
• 46:22
  That's what we're doing. It's going to be a really exciting year, just as it has been for the past three years. This sounds amazing. Everyone needs this. I don't understand why everyone doesn't know about it.
• 46:34
  Maybe everyone does know about it, just not me. No, I'm too. You know, look, it's it's it's it's federally legal, but not yet regulated by the FDA. Right. In the U.S. Like the countries and the legislation around it globally are different. So we're here to help. We're here to be educators and tell you to tell women more about it so you can make informed decisions for your own body. But we agree. We think everybody needs this, which is why we're here.
• 46:59
  I'm with you. I'm with you. Okay. So at the end of every episode, I ask a series of six quick questions, which we're going to get to in a second. I want to wrap up with both of you letting me know what your key piece of advice is for women who are on the entrepreneurial journey and a few steps behind where you are. Oh my gosh. I, I almost always say to this question is like actually plan for what happens when things go well.
• 47:25
  I mean, we grew so incredibly quickly. And like, if you don't, you should always have multiple plans in front of you and, you know, sort of assess as you're going. But like actually planning for success, because there are a lot of things that you have to do if you do have a rocket ship and actually having a plan in place for that. I mean, we were very scrappy, resilient humans who could kind of sort of jump in and get it figured out. But I've definitely seen friends, businesses struggle where they really were onto something and they weren't prepared for that. And then it hurt them in the long run.
• 47:54
  Hmm. I've heard of this too, as well. Like if you don't have your, um, you know, if your supply chain's not set up, for example, and you go on Shark Tank and you know, the demand is much more than you anticipated and then you can't fulfill. And then it sets you back, even though, you know, great problem to have you're sold out, et cetera, et cetera, but also bad problem to have. You're
• 48:17
  Mine goes back to customer acquisition and what I was sharing about, you know, investment thesis and just making sure that you are, you know, GP positive, at least on that first transaction. It is always more expensive and harder to go out there and find consumers. Just know that. Customer acquisition, if you are starting a business...
• 48:38
  whether it's a B2B platform and you're doing SaaS sales or guerrilla consumer marketing or whatever it is, it's going to be harder than you think. So make sure that you are a marketer or a sales-minded person. I don't care if you don't self-identify as sales. You are in the business of selling as a founder, ultimately, strategically, but in the beginning, you're your best salesperson. So just sales and marketing, get good at it.
• 49:06
  I love that. Just a quick one. What's GP positive? Gross profit. So revenue minus what it costs you to make that product. Don't go into the red. And that is very, very, very hard to do. A lot of businesses say, oh, but they'll come back. And then they'll come back again. And by the time they come back the third time, I'll be in the money.
• 49:29
  You still have to pay for your office rent and your payroll. And you don't have a prayer at making any money as a business unless that first level of gross profit is, you know, gross profit minus CAC. You know, you got to see it. When's that coming? You have to see that.
• 49:49
  Yeah, totally. Totally. All right. Six quick questions. I'm going to alternate between the two of you. So some of them we might have covered already, but I asked them all the same at the end of every episode. So Marcy, let's start with you. Question number one. What's your why? Why do you do what you do? For me, it's always about like what gets me out of bed in the morning.
• 50:11
  Um, you know, if there's a really good problem in front of me, like that has always been my why, I think to a point of, you know, like my husband would make fun of me. Like that's, that's how much it is. My why it's problem solving. Yeah. I love that question. Number two for you, Coco, what has been the number one marketing moment that made your business pop? The thumb, the thumb on Instagram stories. The thumb that's so low. I love that.
• 50:40
  Oh man. Question number three, maybe I have to get the answers from both of you on this because this is a good one. Where do you hang out to get smarter? What are you reading or subscribing to or listening to that other people should check up on?
• 50:57
  Oh gosh. Well, in the, in the post pandemic space, right? Like, you know, we used, there were lots of in Chicago where we both live, there are lots of great places to go and be around other entrepreneurs and founders. And, you know, I think we used to do a lot of that. And I love to hang out places that are very like multidisciplinary, like where people are building different types of products than I am. But for me, this is, well, of course there's great podcasts, blogs, various things that, that, that I read all the time for sure. Um,
• 51:26
  I love to do pattern seeking in consumer Facebook groups. So that seems like a weird thing, but in terms of like getting smarter. So if you're in a sector, like go in and dig into what the people are talking about and start looking for patterns. And for us, for instance, like the marijuana side of cannabis is always six to 18 months ahead of the hemp side. And the easiest way for me to monitor how people are responding to what is launched on that side is to get into where they're all talking about it. So whether it's Facebook, Reddit or wherever, I spend a fair amount of time
• 51:56
  looking at customer behavior that way. And it has served us well. Do you mean like you're just scrolling through the group and trying to pick out the trends and the patterns, like certain words, certain things like that, and just keeping a little bit of a tally in like a simple way? So like I participate in industry as well too. But so for instance, if like we're seeing a surge in CBG products or THCV or some other cannabinoid, and it's much more popular on
• 52:20
  the marijuana side of things. And it is hemp at this point for various reasons, looking at like how people responding to that. Are people saying that it's too expensive? Are they using it? What are they actually using it for? Like really digging in to consumer patterns. It's like one of my favorite things in the world.
• 52:35
  I love that. That is so cool. I've never had that on the show before. So thank you so much. I told you she's amazing. She's got it. That's awesome. It's only because I use social media more than Coco does. If Coco was more into social media, she would get pulled into those conversations too. You mean if I wasn't a Luddite? You mean if I wasn't a Luddite? It's okay. You can say it. You can say it.
• 52:57
  No, it just, it does take a certain level of patience and to like really sit and like monitor that and see what comes of it, I will say. And like Coco is a very, very busy, busy human. So got it, got it. Coco, where do you hang out to get smarter? Two books that I've read a couple of times now. The thing is, it is just gonna be really hard. Marcy's thing about planning for success is beautiful and optimistic, but most of you will fail.
• 53:26
  I didn't fail the first time around, but it wasn't, as I said, it wasn't like a home run exit. It wasn't a full on success. And what does a full on success mean? Anything. Name one business that's not constantly like in trouble. Like Jeff Bezos is constantly like trying to make Amazon endure and be seriously, even the most successful companies in the world, like struggle. And it's really fucking hard all the time.
• 53:48
  I saw an interview with Elon Musk recently and he was talking about how he like almost went bankrupt at one point and was asking his friends for money.
• 53:59
  And it's really sad. I was like, shit, that's crazy. Anyway, go on. Yes. No, it's just that your chances of success are very small. And so Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, I find just like chock full of like really good, like it's just going to be hard. You have to know that and like get ready for it. Teflon, build Teflon. Like ride your highs a little lower, ride your lows a little higher. Like it's a marathon, not a sprint. And it's going to be very hard to have grit. If you don't have grit, don't do it.
• 54:26
  And then Founders Dilemma, I find really interesting, too, by Noam Wasserman. You know, as we scale, Marcy and I, like scaling is now our biggest challenge. That means people. That means process. That means like removing ourselves from the day to day, focusing on strategy, focusing on talent, focusing on making equilibrium an amazing place to work. There's a lot about scaling that is a different skill set than the foundation.
• 54:49
  gritty Marcy and I getting in and like doing it ourselves, which we totally do, but we can also scale with this business and we're going to scale with this business. So how do we get ourselves onto that next level of executive vision and preparation for scale founders dilemma?
• 55:07
  Love it. Going to link both of those books in the show notes for sure for anyone who wants to check them out. Question number four, I forget who we're up to. So Marcy, let's go to you. How do you win the day? What is your AM or PM rituals that keep you feeling happy and successful and motivated? I'd actually say that Coco is a better person to answer that question because I, I have the weirdest days and she's really good at keeping a level kind of routine. And like she has her boundary that she will,
• 55:36
  Not to spoil, I guess. Seven hours of sleep, no less. Ideally, eight. Eight. Eight. It has to be eight. Eight hours of sleep, no less, for her. Yeah. And then, also, I'm a mom. I have two kids. And I...
• 55:52
  Like they ground me. I need them. They like, I am not, I'm not good at work. If I have not like my like kid bucket isn't full, I don't see them a bunch of hours during the day. I have an incredible nanny and a really involved husband. I'm really busy, but I will not sacrifice my quality time with them. So again, quality over quantity, but like, honestly, that's kind of all I need. If I sleep and feel connected with my kids, like I'm good. I love that.
• 56:19
  You guys can choose who's going to be best to answer this one. Question number five is if you were given $1,000 of no strings attached grant money, where would you spend it? I think we probably have the same answer. But I'm going to let Coco answer, but I'm pretty sure we have the same answer. You got only $1,000 left. I figured we would pick like our best influencer and place a bet. Yeah. Yeah.
• 56:43
  Put it back into the biz. The thumb chick. Yeah, the thumb chick. Totally. Liz Adams, love you. Love you, girl. Coming back to you. Shout out to Liz. Forever. Forever, Liz Adams. Oh, my God. I love that. Okay. And last question, which applies to both of you. So let's get both of your answers. How do you deal with failure? What's your mindset and approach when things inevitably don't go to plan? Data.
• 57:09
  The answer always lives in the data. And if the data is inconclusive, then you're not. Then there's somewhere else that you need to look or there's something else you're not considering. But that's also why, like, I tend to be the tempered response to something not going well because I just always believe that there's more information. Maybe it's like the weirdest optimistic streak for me. Embrace it.
• 57:32
  I think my answer is optimistic too, like, cause you're just gonna fail. It's just part of it. You're the definition of a startup. If there was a blueprint, like then it wouldn't be hard and then everyone else would have been doing it and then it would have existed and like, don't waste your time. So it's gonna be hard and you're gonna fail a lot. You're gonna make the wrong people decisions. You're gonna make the wrong marketing decisions. You're gonna make the wrong capital raising decisions. Like we're just gonna do shit wrong. Get used to it and know that like, that is how you learn.
• 58:01
  Equilibria is better because Marcy and I made mistakes with Polymathic and Pretty Quick. We are serial founders and we are better because we have failed big time in the past. So just say thank you when you fail because you've just learned a lesson that will make you better and more valuable in the future. And if you don't feel like you learned something from it, then this is not the right field for you.
• 58:24
  Yeah. Don't be, don't, don't be a defeatist. One of our core values at equilibrium is optimism, which doesn't mean everything's perfect because everything's not perfect. But when you fail, like come to work, like knowing it's going to be okay. And like excited to get back up again, or you probably shouldn't be at a startup and knowing that every failure is an opportunity.
• 58:44
  Yes, failure is an opportunity. That's so true. Gosh, this was so awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time to be on the show and share all of the things. I'm just so excited to see what you do next. I'm so excited for these new products coming in October. And yeah, I'm so grateful to have met you. This was awesome. Thank you for having us.
• 59:04
  Stoon, thank you so much for having us and for opening up this community around Real Talk. Real Talk is something else we talk about all the time. In addition to vaginas and thumbs, we talk about Real Talk. So thanks for being so real about business and helping women succeed. It's super near and dear to our hearts. For anybody listening, we also have a promo code for you all if you're interested in trying. Female Startup Club is 20% off of your order. So just know that. Amazing. Thank you so much.
• 59:36
  Hey, it's June here. Thanks for listening to this amazing episode of the Female Startup Club podcast. If you're a fan of the show and want even more of the good stuff, I'd recommend checking out femalestartupclub.com where you can subscribe to our free newsletter. We send it out weekly covering female founder business news, insights and learnings in D2C, and interesting business resources.
• 1:00:01
  And if you're a founder building an e-commerce brand, you can join our private network of entrepreneurs called Hype Club at femalestartupclub.com forward slash Hype Club. We have guests from the show joining us for intimate Ask Me Anythings, expert workshops, and a group of totally amazing, like-minded women building the future of D2C brands.
• 1:00:23
  As always, please do subscribe, rate and review the show and post your favorite episodes to Instagram stories. I am beyond grateful when you do that. Thank you.
• 1:00:40
  Hey, it's June here. Thanks for listening to this amazing episode of the Female Startup Club podcast. If you're a fan of the show and want even more of the good stuff, I'd recommend checking out femalestartupclub.com where you can subscribe to our free newsletter. We send it out weekly covering female founder business news, insights and learnings in D2C, and interesting business resources.
• 1:01:04
  And if you're a founder building an e-commerce brand, you can join our private network of entrepreneurs called Hype Club at femalestartupclub.com forward slash Hype Club. We have guests from the show joining us for intimate Ask Me Anythings, expert workshops, and a group of totally amazing, like-minded women building the future of D2C brands.
• 1:01:27
  As always, please do subscribe, rate and review the show and post your favorite episodes to Instagram stories. I am beyond grateful when you do that.