How Bizzy Coffee was born from consumer data and raised on Amazon

Joining me is a guy who worked for General Mills, but he wanted to start his own company.

He started doing research and one of the things he did was go to Google Trends. He said, “Hey, I drink cold brew coffee and it looks like people are searching for cold brew coffee more and more. I’ll just try launching a cold brew coffee company.” He did. The company is called Bizzy Coffee and it’s been selling on Amazon.

Before the interview started Alex French, the founder told me that getting customers on Amazon is easy but now he’s transitioning to getting them to the website. I want to talk about that problem in the interview.

Alex French is the co-founder of Bizzy Coffee, which sells Organic Cold Brew Coffee on Amazon.

Alex French

Alex French

Bizzy Coffee

Alex French is the co-founder of Bizzy Coffee, which sells Organic Cold Brew Coffee on Amazon.

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Full Interview Transcript

Andrew Warner 0:04
Hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of mixergy, where I interview entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses for an audience of entrepreneurs who are building their businesses or looking for new ideas for businesses. Joining me is a guy who worked for General Mills. So he’s had some experience with food products. And what’s the what’s the category name? It’s DC?

Alex French 0:27
Well, there’s two of them. There’s CPG, which is consumer packaged goods, or in a broader sense, there’s fmcg, fast moving consumer goods. And that’s what you worked in at General Mills. That’s correct. I was on the Cheerios team. Really? I was. Yeah, it was a fun one.

Andrew Warner 0:42
What did you do on the Cheerios team,

Alex French 0:44
I had the only job in marketing that you could hold without an MBA. So I was a marketing analyst. And I dealt with a lot of sales, data sales, reporting, really analyzing the category and presenting it to us. Some of the upper level management,

Andrew Warner 1:00
and just like you, my listener, he’s someone who said, I want to start my own company. And so he started to do research. He’s got more of a research background than the two of us. But I want to learn from his approach. One of the things that he did was he went to Google Trends and he said, Hey, you know, I drink cold brew coffee, it looks like people are searching for cold brew coffee, more and more. I’m just gonna try launching a cold brew coffee company. He did. It’s called busy coffee. It’s been selling on Amazon. I’ve got a quote here on my iPad, where he said before we got started into getting customers on Amazon is easy. And then he said, Now we’re transitioning to getting them on our website, and I said, let’s talk about that in the interview. How did he get customers on Amazon, which is a really competitive space. And what’s he doing now to get customers on his own website. And we can do this all thanks to two phenomenal sponsors. The first if you need a website hosted go to hostgator.com slash mixergy. And the second I want to tell you about a guest that I just booked a few minutes ago, who when he needs develop He just goes to top towel we happen to talk about that. And I’ll tell you why you should be going to top towel calm slash mixergy but first Alex French. Super cool last name, dude. How much revenue you guys doing with busy coffee?

Alex French 2:14
You know we’re not comfortable really fully articulating that but you know, we have been the best seller on Amazon for two years. We also have you know, what I can say is we have a 15% market share

Andrew Warner 2:26
15% market share 15 out of 100 people who are buying coffee on Amazon,

Alex French 2:31
specifically in our category segment,

Andrew Warner 2:34
club coffee, coffee, you know, can you can you just give me a ballpark? Is it over 5 million in sales? Is it over? 10? Just anything that gives me a sense of size?

Alex French 2:42
Yeah, we’re under 10. But we are over one. So kind of another one to $10 million. ranch profitable?

Andrew Warner 2:49
Yeah. outside funding?

Alex French 2:51
Yes, we’ve raised just shy of 2.5 million from friends family, some family offices and then some micro VC

Andrew Warner 3:01
All right. When you tell me about Cheerios, I started to wonder what did you do that was exciting for you at Cheerios, a cereal brand.

Alex French 3:10
So I love data, and I had access to all of the data that any nerd could want. So every single category, every product, whether that was tied soap, chewing gum, um, so I just got to look at how big categories are, which is really fun. Specifically on the Cheerios team, it’s their largest, most profitable brand. They have over 100 million dollar marketing budget. And so I got to be a part of TV ads, they’re Super Bowl commercials.

Andrew Warner 3:41
What are you doing about data that helps you with the Superbowl ad?

Alex French 3:44
So you would just look at who’s the consumer segment? Where are you winning or losing and a market, whether that market is Florida, or it’s Walmart, and so you can splice and dice everything. Essentially even different pack sizes, pricing promotions. And so we’re able to see that, you know, we’re looking at competitors data as well. So we see that Kellogg’s is doing a huge Super Bowl thing. We’re able to get a different display and block them in the market and not report on it. Yeah.

Andrew Warner 4:19
Okay, is there one wind that you specially remember that we would understand?

Alex French 4:24
You know, I was a part of this, we did a partnership with Nellie, the rapper. And so that was one thing where we had a huge TV spots, and they did radio ads and custom swag and shoes and gear and they sent it to influencers. That was probably one of the most unique things that

Andrew Warner 4:42
we got to be a part of their alley and Cheerios. Yeah. And it did pan out.

Alex French 4:46
It did, it did because they, you know, we looked at the data and we said, we’re not winning as well in the African American market as we’d like to. And so they looked at the geography I helped pull the data. And then we basically did the camp. Pain and analyze it and you know showed that there was a lift and there was a positive ROI to that.

Andrew Warner 5:05
Yeah, I see all kinds of news stories about it Nelly explains his new Honey Nut Cheerios commercial Nelly in General Mills debut Honey Nut Cheerios commercial. When you decided or when you start to think about wanting to start a new company, what were you reading? What influences did you have?

Alex French 5:22
A lot of it is, as I was in at General Mills, I sat next to someone who is in the thing called consumer insights. And that’s basically just talking to customers, consumers and learning about why they’re consuming the things that they are. And one of the biggest insights that I learned specifically in the food industry is that almost every trend is driven by health trends or fitness or diets. And so a lot of what I did was just stayed very close to at the time, CrossFit was huge. And so we looked at a lot of those things. Adventure racing was very large. So looking at those Just playing around with all those data sources.

Andrew Warner 6:03
But there aren’t that many people who are adventure racers or watch adventure racers. Are you saying that what they do tends to influence disproportionately?

Alex French 6:13
That’s exactly right. So, so when you look at CrossFit is a wonderful example. Not everyone does CrossFit. Most people don’t most people think CrossFit. People are generally kind of jerks and super macho, but we look to them because they are very fit. And so even though we may not have the strict diet that we do, we’re still going to look to them for tips and tricks with an example of a something that’s crossed over from CrossFit to mainstream. The best example is RX bar. So when they launched, they sold exclusively direct to CrossFit gyms. And I think it was two years ago, they sold for 600 million dollars the company.

Andrew Warner 7:01
Okay. All right. So you’re saying there’s something here? What is it that super health health conscious people are doing that might cross over to the general population? And what are some of the things that you saw.

Alex French 7:13
So some of the major trends and I’m not gonna be specific on the product format, but what we were seeing was fewer ingredients, lower sugar, clean ingredient deck ingredient for word products. And so you’ll see an example was like chia. That was a really big deal for about seven years, and there’s a brand called mama chia, and then you saw chia seeds and everything. And that was driven by the health and wellness community, because it had good antioxidants and it had a functional benefit to it. And so we looked at kind of all of those things. And then we would then try and create our product innovations at General Mills that would align with those functional benefits of products.

Andrew Warner 7:58
When you You were pitching me on being on mixergy. And I think we were introduced to a friend who I was reaching out to say, Who should I be interviewing? And they introduced me to you. And you said, Andrew, look, this is what we saw. You sent me a Google Trends report that was just remarkable. You can clearly see an upward trend with a giant spike every summer right when the weather gets warm, or cold brew coffee. You saw that how beyond your own drinking, what did you see that told you this is coming because what you’re showing me here was just starting in 2013 2014 and started 2015. Yeah. What do you How did you know?

Alex French 8:39
Well, it kind of goes back to I was looking at everything and I had knew I knew that I wanted to be in the food and beverage industry because that’s what I was doing with my job and I felt I had kind of a leg up. So as I was mentioning, I was looking at every research report I could that my my desk mate had and everything pointed to fewer calories, lower sugar, fewer ingredients, craft product. And I was drinking cold brew myself. For me it was on the functional side because I wanted to hire caffeine. And candidly, I just don’t like hot beverages. So I was drinking it myself. And it kind of aligned with this internal Venn diagram I had of what a good business was to me. And it was consumable. It was searchable, it was craft, and it had all those health attributes that I was thinking of. And so then I just started searching and looking at what was how were people searching. Google

Andrew Warner 9:37
search. Let me take a moment. Of course, it seems like what you’re saying is, let’s say Coca Cola. Not only the ingredient list, not clean. You don’t really know how much and what’s going into it and they’re proud of that right the secret formula said the world still wants caffeine the way that I Alex French does does. They want a cleaner ingredient deck as you said cold brew gives in that it’s very clear what’s in it. This could be the new form of caffeine. It’s a craft drink that’s accepted, right? You care about your barista, the way that she pours coffee. People care about what’s in it. Got it. That’s that’s the qual. That’s the qualitative stuff that went in before we get into the quantitative Am I right?

Alex French 10:18
That’s exactly right.

Andrew Warner 10:19
It does make a lot of sense when you put it that way. But before I continue, I have to say that immediately when I think of that, I go, Well, you got major coffee players that are already in this space that are going to jump in. They’ve got a brand name they’ve got got Starbucks, you’ve got Nestle, you’ve got was blue bottle around at the time, maybe on that level, there wasn’t there wasn’t an alternative to Starbucks. Why weren’t you scared at that point and said, This is too big. These players are too big.

Alex French 10:48
A lot of it was my gut reaction because I was even thinking looking at Maxwell House and Folgers and the really big ones that would have 30 40% market share a little known fact Yours is still the number one market share. It is not Starbucks and then it’s Maxwell House. And so I was looking at those really big brands thinking to myself, again doing lots of consumer research knowing that this consumer is a millennial, generally speaking, they don’t like Folgers. They don’t want to drink Folgers. They don’t want to drink Maxwell House. So there’s a great opportunity for someone to be a millennial focused brand within this category because it’s going to be inauthentic. We talked a lot about authenticity of brands at the time, and it’s gonna be very inauthentic for Folgers or Maxwell House to launch a cold brew brand. So our thought was long term, there’s opportunity to be that

Andrew Warner 11:42
to be that gap. And you almost have an advantage because you’re not one of the bigger players. Every time I say Starbucks. I feel like Starbucks is a generic brand at this point. If somebody’s looking for a craft product. That’s That’s too generic to feel proud to be a Starbucks drinker. What about this Before we get again into the, into the quantitative stuff, it’s also a heavy thing to ship. If I’m thinking about a world that’s moving towards online, I’m thinking about powdered coffee more than I am thinking about a coffee beans and I am about about the drink. What do you think about that?

Alex French 12:18
You’re exactly right. And when we started, our initial plan was to not even manufacture products, but to leverage the search traffic to get affiliate sales to other people. Because we listened to the four hour workweek. And that was that was the model but you’re spot on. And so our model was to do that, leveraging the search. And as we got into it, we realized that Yeah, there’s no unit economics, you cannot be profitable shipping liquids online.

Andrew Warner 12:50
You realize you could not do that they couldn’t do that.

Alex French 12:53
No one can. The only way you can is by having a large multi pack and then at that point, you’re challenged with getting To try the product.

Andrew Warner 13:01
Alright, so we’re gonna get into that that this was an issue somehow you still proceeded despite that, well, not somehow because you were thinking about affiliate sales first with Tell me about the data, what were you seeing that said, it’s time for me to get into the space. The data was,

Alex French 13:15
as I kind of showed in the in the Google Trends. And for the listeners, if you just go to Google Trends and search and cold brew coffee, you’ll see it was an exploding category. I mean, there was millions of searches a month that we were seeing, and there was no clear winner, there was no authority figure. There was no one that was leveraging all of this traffic. And that really was the start of it. As I mentioned, our original plan was to just take that traffic and affiliate it and send the traffic to someone else and get $1 for every time we did that. That was the plan. And then what we did is we found out so I’m in Minnesota where target and both BestBuy are located and at that time, it was you actually couldn’t do affiliate revenue through Minnesota through the through the blahs. And so we had to scrap it right out of the gates. And then to test it, we basically did a Kickstarter campaign and put up a product that was basically fake. Maybe it was Indiegogo. And then just tested to see if people were willing to buy a liquid coffee product online. And it was actually a different brand at the time it was called cause coffee. And it worked. And so we tested very cheaply, very small. And I don’t know, maybe we did like $5,000 or something like that. But it was enough for us to say there’s a ton of people searching for this and people are willing to buy stuff online. Let’s Let’s go give it a shot.

Andrew Warner 14:42
looking it up, cause kayo s ca us. Oh, got it. And you saw people are willing to go buy this. buy coffee online in multipacks. And that’s what you need in order to make economics work.

Alex French 14:56
That’s what we needed and and we started and We were of the camp of, you know, I saw you had the founder of Kavita on, you have to get to scale to really make any sort of money. So we said, I think we can get there some day. And that and that was the hope. How did you get all those people to go to Indiegogo or Kickstarter or whatever you were on at the time? we leveraged a lot. And I think it was 2014, maybe 2015. We reached out to a lot of kind of influencers, if you will, the brand was very focused on entrepreneurship, and supporting the cause, if you will. And so we reached out to a lot of entrepreneurial influencers, sent them swag kits with boxes and product got it and asked that they that they shared for us.

Andrew Warner 15:45
5000 is not that much, though.

Alex French 15:47
It’s not nearly enough. But it was it was just that vote of confidence. You know, I had been working in corporate America and taking that leap from corporate America to entrepreneurship. You know, I just just needed some level of confidence that my idea people were willing to vote with their dollars.

Andrew Warner 16:06
I wonder why you decided to still go online? Why not go into stores? I keep thinking about sorry, there are entrepreneurs we interviewed, I forget the name of that brand that has coconut chips like slices of coconut in bags. I remember since I interviewed them, I see him in the frickin stores all the time. Now. They’re just a standard, a standard product. At the time that they started, it felt like a weird thing for a startup to be able to make it into stores across the country and they’re just blowing up. I’m wondering why you with your experience didn’t say forget online, some things are better offline. Let’s just go into stores the way that smaller indie drinks did.

Alex French 16:45
So our original plan was always affiliates online. So that felt the most logical to us. I will say that we’ve tried to get into retail many, many times. We’re finally cracked The nod. My thought was, I worked at Best Buy, I worked at General Mills, I’m going to get into target, I’m going to get into Kroger. And that is very, very, very difficult because we have to steal space from a global company that has billions of dollars and they don’t want me in there. So it’s actually very difficult to get into those, those grocery stores where you can move enough volume to generate actual revenue.

Andrew Warner 17:28
All right, to me, it seems like you did a lot of research the research that is a chance, but it’s not likely. And you said, Oh, man, there’s a chance and your entrepreneurial heart allowed you to go where your corporate head wouldn’t have taken you. Am I right?

Alex French 17:45
You’re spot on.

Andrew Warner 17:46
Alright, let me talk about my first sponsor, and then get back into this story. My first sponsor is a company called top towel. The guys over top towel Alex introduced me to someone who knew who knew my work because the longtime mixergy listener. guy runs a company called picker. Anytime an influencer online, somebody who publishes on Instagram on YouTube, whatever in the Spanish world wants to link out to the products they love. They have a very simple way to do with picker, they just easily pick the products they love or the products they mentioned in a post or whatever picker makes it all look beautiful. And then people can go and click on it and buy it. And if they do if, and they’re an influencer, they get a cut of the sales that happened because of their their link totally makes a lot of sense. I said, What are you guys doing with top towel? I said we had this issue. We needed somebody to create a web page for us. That was an aggregation page and it would have taken 21 story points, which for us means seven days as a new developer article. Yeah, that didn’t seem like a long time. They said No, it doesn’t. But we went to Thomas over top towel. And Thomas said he could put it together in a day or two. We said that’s faster than seven days. So we hired top towel. We hired Thomas through top towel and within a day or two he was able to put it together. And that’s the beauty of top towel. You need somebody they’re there and they could do it really fast. for you. So my response to this founder of picker was, how is it someone a top towel is going to be someone at your company to creating a product for your company? How did your people know your product and your software better than anyone else? And he said, Well, actually, we’ve worked with Thomas at top towel several times in the past, what we do is whenever we need him, we just go and hire him from top towel. Whenever we don’t we just move on. And we keep on building with our own team. When we need something fast, we go to top towel. And so the reason I’m bringing this up is I think a lot of people when they hear me say, if you’re hiring, go to top towel comm slash mixergy. And they think, Oh, I have a full time hire, I should go there. What they should be thinking of is someone like Enric, from picker who says, I just need this one thing done right now. expertly, expertly done really fast. And I’m going to go to top down and then when I don’t need it, I’ve got flexibility not to have that long term commitment. So if you’re out there listening to me, and you want to hire developers with the best of the best developers go to top 10 dot com slash mixergy. Yes, you can do full time people, you can have a team of people. But you could also do what picker does, which is hire someone for a quick project that’s done right and move on. And then when you need them again, you’ll be able to go back to top towel. For details on how to do that and how to make it work for your company. Just start a call with somebody at top towel. And if you use my URL, not only will you get to start a call with them, you’ll get 80 hours of developer credit when you pay for your first 80 hours. In addition to a no risk trial period, really, they’re making it super simple. All you have to do is go to top tau comm slash mixergy Alex, you should write this down now that you’re getting your own web development. That’s TLP TL comm slash MIXE rG why top Tao comm slash mixergy you decided to sell on Amazon eventually. Let’s take a few minutes to talk about how to create the product and then talk about marketing. What did you do to create it to make sure that you had something that you can be proud of?

Alex French 20:56
So we spent a ton of time building out our our product and creating the TPO or the total product offering as some would call it. And so I’m very fortunate my business partner Andrew is a mechanical engineer and perfectionist by nature. And so we looked at everything we learned everything we possibly could about the coffee supply chain and origins and roast profiles and grind size and brew times. So we took classes we did everything that we could, we tried all of our competitors, and we plotted them on this thing called the specialty coffee Association flavor wheel. So we thought we had a good idea of what we were doing. We went to all of our local co ops and we cold brewed every type of coffee you could imagine single large and light roast medium roast blends. we scaled them. I remember getting up at five in the morning before our desk jobs and drinking four cups of coffee before getting into work, rating everything and then we went to that next level of detail and we Actually, I’d mentioned my coworker at General Motors who was in consumer insights, we actually hired her to create a consumer learning plan. And so we brought in 100 self proclaimed cold brew coffee enthusiasts. And we asked them to look at the flavor wheel and tell us blindly which types of coffees they liked, and what about them they liked, and we had really then kind of figured out a really good idea of what that perfect taste profile is for a cold brew coffee. And then we just reverse engineered those flavor attributes based on our previous flavor notes of which origins create which taste profiles, and then kind of blended them all together. And then that was on the coffee side. After that, we looked at all the different brewing processes and types to get us their packaging formats. So once we had our own liquid and brewing process established, we then went and found some manufacturers that Had brewing capabilities started at beer breweries, and then tried to find some that were willing to do some r&d with us. And then the next phase was finding some roasters that were in that that venue.

Andrew Warner 23:13
Okay, and then is this cold brew bottle, the first thing that you came up with?

Alex French 23:18
Yep, that’s exactly right. It’s a cold brew coffee concentrate.

Andrew Warner 23:22
Got it? And that’s one of the ways that you’re able to deal with the fact that shipping liquids is heavy and tough. So you send over a concentrate, people add a little bit of water to it. Cold water?

Alex French 23:34
Yeah, generally speaking, most people will consume a cold the vast majority, some do heated up in the winter, but 95% of them drink a cold.

Andrew Warner 23:42
All right, you got into Amazon, I’m assuming because that was the fastest way to get started. Am I right?

Alex French 23:47
Yep, that’s exactly right. We had pretty serious challenges getting into retail stores right out of the gates, and we had quit our jobs. And at this point, we were really all in and you know, You got to start making some money at that point. So we had actually mentioned I worked at BestBuy. Previously, one of my really good friends there had left to work for Amazon. He worked there for a couple years and then actually started an Amazon agency to help brands get set up on Amazon. So we basically threw it over the fence to him and got up and running as quickly as we could.

Andrew Warner 24:23
So a lot of money feels like you’re hiring somebody, you’re throwing it over to an outside agency, etc. Where’s the money coming from?

Alex French 24:30
So my business partner and I invested everything that we had in total and doing all the r&d and the product launches was about $50,000 of our own money that we had just saved up from our corporate lives. And then we ended up getting into a food accelerator called food x in New York. And then that gave us the next bit of capital to do our first major production run so that we had inventory to start selling.

Andrew Warner 24:57
Okay, talk to me about what you did to stand Add on Amazon, or did you need to do anything in the beginning?

Alex French 25:03
Right away, there wasn’t a lot of competition. And so we were able to get our product out there, we did launch with something called Amazon launch pad at the time, which did give us a little bit of leg up within the search engine algorithm. So we were able to get that liquid product up on the site, people would search for it, we had a pretty, you know, cute name. And so we were able to acquire those customers through that now the game has changed dramatically. And it’s an extremely competitive category. So we do have some tactics to maintain that position that we use. And I’m going to get into specifics with you because we talked about before the interview started that that’s what I think my audience is going to crave. But let’s talk about the first thing launch pad on Amazon, I thought was just their partnership with Kickstarter and a few other places to help get more attention for new products. You’re saying anyone could have been a part of Launchpad. And if you were a part of Launchpad, you’d be In higher search results, it wasn’t anyone you did have to apply. And they were generally working with partners. Because we did have investment from a venture, a small venture capital fund, they were able to push our application through food x helped you get

Unknown Speaker 26:17
through goddess, correct. What else could food apps help you do the accelerator, your partner?

Alex French 26:21
They taught us a lot about fundraising. And so even though I had worked in the venture capital side of General Mills prior, I was only on the corporate side. I hadn’t done it as an entrepreneur. And the companies we were investing in were a little bit later stage than what we were. So they really teach you how to put together a business plan, how to pitch investors, the social side of it to actually close the deals. They tell us a lot about that. The biz dev side of it, if you will. And then another big piece was we were you know, locked up in a room with 10 other startups and just being in that social circle. Being around like minded people, actually was extremely valuable. So those were those were the two biggest things for us.

Andrew Warner 27:08
Had you sales do it first when you are in Launchpad?

Alex French 27:11
Not great. No, not not very good. For context. My business partner, we had both quit our jobs. When we were in the accelerator, we only had enough money to launch the product. So we slept at the office on the floor for three months at night, literally at night. at home. There was no we couldn’t afford an apartment in New York. So we literally slept on the floor of the office always

Andrew Warner 27:32
that so you were at General Mills for? Well, it looks like it’s three years about right one year doing as a business analyst. And one year and a half. And then another year and a half roughly. It that division that you and I talked about where you were funding startups through General Mills. You had a job before that. As a demand forecast analysts for Best Buy, you had money was that you were putting the money into the business. Is or that it cost a lot of money to live?

Alex French 28:03
That’s exactly right. It was both. So I had mentioned that my business partner I had put in 50 k 25 each. That was everything that I had. And I think you had you’re willing to put in all of it.

Andrew Warner 28:13
Did you? Like what is going on here? like Alex, it feels like you’re a guy almost possess the there’s enough stats to make it make sense, but not that much. And you don’t have that much money and you’re giving up a really comfortable life. Right? Yeah, with good prospects. You start off with with a General Mills logo on your resume. You’ve got a lot of possibilities later on. Why did you do this? Why did you feel you had to be an entrepreneur?

Alex French 28:42
You know, I’ve always wanted to be this. The short story is I grew up with like a lot of kids. I had a picture of a Ferrari on my wall, no entrepreneurs in my family. I asked my dad, dad, how do I get one of these? Well, you got to be a business owner kid. And that was my driving force since I was probably 12. So I had been mowing lawns selling Beanie Babies kind of your typical kind of hustler kids story. And we get one thing. Beanie Babies for sure.

Andrew Warner 29:09
Beanie Babies how much yeah,

Alex French 29:10
you know I don’t even remember that number to where you were probably doing five figures I bet a year so nothing crazy lot

yeah as you know a 12 year old This was good.

Andrew Warner 29:23
So I would just this stuff would just come into your house you do sell it what on eBay?

Alex French 29:27
Yep, exactly. And like SWAT meats and stuff would go to as well you know, my mom awesome. drive me around to all these places, helping out here and there. But so the what it really came to is we were so broke at the time and we were ready to quit. And you know, we were 50 K and then we’re like our we’ve spent so much money we cannot keep putting money in. We got accepted into the accelerator. And then the question that my business partner Andrew and I really asked ourselves is, are we going to regret it? Not doing it or regret more trying and failing And we came to the conclusion that we just had to go for it.

Andrew Warner 30:03
Okay, regret minimization framework that Bezos came up with to decide whether to go into Amazon or not. Yeah, that makes sense. All right, so you’re sleeping on the floor of the office, things weren’t selling very well on Amazon. What’s the first big thing that worked for you?

Alex French 30:20
The first big thing is we just started advertising the product in the platform. And using Amazon ads, exactly using the pay per click advertising. To get in front of people that were searching for the product, as I had highlighted earlier on, there was a lot of search traffic. And so people were searching for cold brew coffee, primarily in the early days. It was just people were searching how to make cold brew coffee, cold brew coffee recipe, best cold brew beans, things of that nature. But there was a lot of search traffic. And so once we were able to harness that search traffic and get them to the page, kind of Revenues story took a nice turn. And you were figuring out advertising yourself because you’ve got a data data background, the exact stuff.

Andrew Warner 31:08
I love it. And what was it that you were doing? You remember some of the tweaks that were early wins?

Alex French 31:12
Yeah, the biggest thing is, I look at Amazon as it is a search engine people are there to buy. And the two biggest things that that matter for the search engine is, you know, you have to have reviews, so we did a lot of that. But then there’s also the goal is to not pay for the click, but to have someone organically buy. So what we learned over time is that you can do this thing called an auto PPC campaign, and you turn it on and Amazon puts your product on a bunch of random keywords and products. You can then download that report and see which keywords or products that consumers bought your product off of. And that gives you all of your insights to say okay, someone’s searching for best cold brew beans. Wow, I need to make sure that those keywords are in my back end of my profile and the front end of my profile, and then, and then I like to pull those keywords out and put them into a separate campaign. And then I’m advertising for those keywords that I know are converting, and you can be much more efficient and it’s much cheaper to do it that way.

Andrew Warner 32:15
Makes sense? Was there any Was there any keywords that didn’t make sense that were surprising?

Alex French 32:20
You know, the biggest insight that we got was people were searching for cold brew coffee maker. And we generated significant revenue off of that. And what we, it logically made sense people would go to a coffee shop and they say why I always make coffee myself. Why is this 656 bucks a cup, when I can make a cup for 10 cents at home, they wanted to make it themselves but you need a device to make it because you can’t use your hot drip machine or a K cup. So people were searching for those and they’d be like, Okay, this looks like a lot of work. I’m going to buy the liquid instead. And so we had a major insight that People are, there’s this huge demand for people to make it at home. And some people are just too busy and they don’t want to wait the 18 hours to make the product. And that’s where nice confidence came in.

Andrew Warner 33:10
I see that by the way, I just typed in cold brew coffee maker. Look at what come Oh, man, I just hit the wrong right at the very top of it if I can show it to you there right at the very top is your product. And then on the bottom are these makers. Alright, maybe I’m asking you an amateur question that I feel like you’re going to love answering. Why can’t I just take coffee out of my coffeemaker throw some ice cubes in it or put it in the fridge overnight and have cold brew coffee. When you see that difference? That’s

Alex French 33:39
iced coffee and you certainly can do that. And Starbucks has a massive business selling iced coffee. It’s going to be higher acidity and generally tastes burnt. So cold brew coffee is cold brewing is a process similar to a spresso. And those two are on the opposite ends. So when you cold call brew, you do it generally for 18 hours is our recommended brew time use a coarser grind of coffee. And it creates a much smoother, lower acidic product. So I kind of mentioned a lot of the founding story was I wanted to hire caffeine. Well, my business partner Andrew had acid reflux, he actually couldn’t drink hot coffee. And so cold brew is 67% less acidic, and so it’s going to be a smoother, better finish. So a lot of the the market growth we’re seeing is people who would never drink hot coffee, but that they used to drink energy drinks or sodas. They’re looking for a smoother coffee that’s not better. And that’s when cold brew comes in and takes over half a

Andrew Warner 34:43
day of going through the beans just drip drip,

Alex French 34:46
drip, drip, drip. Most of what we do is it brews with the coffee grounds in a vessel continuously so less of a drip, and more of a steep if you will, okay, so if I’m if I’m looking at this

Andrew Warner 35:00
We’re looking at right here that it’s just sitting in the coffee beans. Yep. All day. And then at some point when I’m ready, I let it come down and get rid of the ground of coffee beans. That’s the difference. Yep. And people could taste a difference between the average person can taste the difference between cold brew and, and iced coffee.

Alex French 35:24
I wouldn’t say the average person can but people that consume the category without creams and sugars, they certainly can there there is a very noticeable difference. And that’s why you’re seeing such high growth. And also it has that craft beer nature. It’s kind of like having a Budweiser versus your local craft beer. There’s just that a craft feel to it and taste. And you know what, and at first, I couldn’t tell the difference. I thought it was just, I mean, when it comes to beer, I thought craft beer makers just had interesting marketing. And now I look back and I go Did I ever think they tasted the same

Andrew Warner 36:01
at all? How do they think Budweiser in any craft beer tastes the same? Alright, let me talk about my second sponsor, and then we’ll get into some of the better or the more sophisticated techniques that you use for marketing. My second sponsor is a company called hostgator. If you’re out there and you haven’t started a company, now’s the time to do it. Listen, you’ve got some energy and this year I feel like 2020 Alex, you feel that too? This is the year of inner rage inner What the hell is going on? What do I do with my life? Potentially you’re gonna go I don’t know about you guys. But for me, I always think Am I going to be Am I gonna be homeless? I think lately the Am I gonna be homeless thought is out of my head. But the Am I going to financially ruin myself? Somehow or get ruined keeps coming up in my head. This is the year that all of us are dealing with that anxiety. I’m gonna tell you what I do with that. I channel it to work to work on something, anything at all. If you’re out there and you’re feeling this inner rage, if you’re feeling this inner what’s going to happen in the future, you could just sit and just steep, let it steeps that what do you guys do with your coffee beans, right? Just let it just steeping in. Alex is smiling. We let it see. Yeah, you could either do that or you could do something productive with it. You’re not coffee. you’re somebody who should be using that. Rachel. Let me just try this thing. Angela’s been talking about creating a website. I have no idea for no good website. Fine. I’m gonna go to hostgator.com slash mixer Gemini, hit that button. I’m going to see that really It is that easy, inexpensive, no tricks, no nothing. You can see what they’re charging, and then create a website and then you know what, guys, if you don’t like it, get rid of it. Or if you don’t like it, try again the next day. Just go hit another button on Hostgator and start another little temporary website just to see what it’s about. I have been journaling every single day for the majority of my life. Most days, there’s nothing to say there’s nothing going on. But the fact that I’m in the habit of journaling journaling. journaling means that when there’s something raging inside me or something I’m trying to process I now have the habit of going and sitting and journaling. It’s not gonna thing that goes, do I have something to say? And what do I do? Maybe I should go write what I write it, do I do it on a piece of paper? No, I have a process. So maybe it’s like 30 days of journal entries that are just okay that I’m never going to go back and read that somehow, I’m sure helping you, but not very much. And then boom, that one difficult day, I have the outlet and the habit of going and creating something meaningful. Same things happening here, when you create a website with hostgator. And allow it not to be the be all and end all business for you. But allow it to be a start for another site and another site and then boom, one idea takes off and you’ve got the muscles, you’ve got the ability, you’ve got the habit of just creating, creating, creating, if that’s what you want, there’s no better platform to do it than Hostgator comm slash mixergy because if you look at that middle option they’ve got for you. They’re gonna let you host unlimited domains, unlimited experiments, unlimited different sites, and you might and you probably will do host Hostgator with WordPress, but you’ll see if you look on the left side of the page, when you After you create your account, you’ll see they’ve got tons of open Source platforms for you to create all kinds of different sites, maybe you just go and experiment with one and delete it. My guess is you’ll end up with Hostgator for WordPress, but you’ll have options and you’ll have the habit of creating this is the year to do it. Go to Hostgator comm slash mixergy To get started, when you do, you’ll get the lowest price they have and they already have a super low price. You’ll also get tagged as a mixergy customer. And don’t forget, this is absolutely guaranteed details on the site lots of features on the site that I won’t get into because I know it’s just going to work for you and the list of features is not what’s going to sell it. It’s you getting going and you’re going to see the results in your life. Go to Hostgator comm slash mixergy Do you like being an entrepreneur? How does it feel Alex like oh my god, what do I get myself into? I could have been a nice cushy job right now.

Alex French 39:44
Both of them for sure. As everyone’s probably would align, the highs are high and the lows are low. But I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Andrew Warner 39:52
So depending on the other life what when I fantasize about the other life I could have taken here’s what I think about my boss hawser Berra, I remember after I graduated from school to start my own company, he and a bunch of his friends took just we went out driving somewhere, each one of them had a BMW. I don’t know why they all fell in love with BMW at the time different type of BMW, they were racing down the streets. And I thought, this is pretty life. This is not bad. They don’t have the same agenda that I do. Right? They have health insurance. For one thing, I don’t know that I could get health insurance for the rest of my life. That’s where I’ve spaced to what would have been if I would have driven in the in the BMW with them. Where does your life go? What’s the vision that you have?

Alex French 40:32
You know, the vision within that corporate life was was not working very hard, because that’s a game to play and in big corporations, as long as people like you and you can do the baseline work, you can you can get away with the 20 Hour Work Week. No, no problem. So that would be the only thing

Andrew Warner 40:50
like why are you middle of the night emailing Andrew, Who asked you to be on and then is asking you for like detailed follow up questions instead of being courteous. You don’t have to To do that, you can try, right? Alright, I get it. Give me some of the more sophisticated marketing techniques that you used on Amazon to grow.

Alex French 41:09
So a lot of it is just getting started. So it really is a snowball. So I had mentioned the ad strategy to help build out your keyword base that’s really important. The objective is always to get someone to purchase the product without advertising increases your margins. Some of the other really important pieces are review count. So as just a consumer ourselves, if we see a product that has 157 930 reviews, and there’s another product next to it that’s got 1300 you’re probably not going to choose that lower review count product. So we do a ton right out of the gates is when we launch a new product. We will instantly have a list of superfans, and we email me say hey, we just launched this product, go get it leave a five star review, we’ll make sure that you feel compensated for more Whatever that is, and we’ll get that ball rolling.

Andrew Warner 42:03
When you say compensated. What do you mean by compensate? Money?

Alex French 42:06
No, which simply give them free product or things of that nature? You don’t you know, you’re not illegal to do that, but everyone does. So it’s kind of table stakes. So we’ll, we’ll just give people product and they’re super fans, and they love us. So, you know, we do kind of surprise and delight stuff. So within that same vein reviews are really important. And if you don’t ask for a review, you’re probably not going to get one. So we use software that every time someone purchases a product, we do ask them to leave a review, if they love it. If they don’t, we say hey, email us, tell us what we can do to make it right. The goal is to drive as many reviews that are positive as possible, and mitigate all the negative reviews. So that’s one of the one of the big pieces and then what we’ve learned over time, is if you don’t advertise at all your search rankings will drop. Even if you have a fantastic product with great reviews. Amazon rewards people that spend more with them, and it’s gotten to unfortunately more of a pay to play game. If you go on Amazon and you search any keyword, there’s going to be probably two organic search to organic products. The rest of them are paid above the fold. And so we now leverage every marketing vehicle that we can within Amazon. So we just kicked off video ads. We do product display ads, so if someone searches a competitor product and they go to that product detail page will be on there. We’ve done even things like partnering with cold brew coffee makers, one of the benefits of our product is we know that if someone’s buying a cold brew coffee maker, they will be buying a bag of coffee to put into that. And so we do everything in our power the term would be attached. We want to attach our product to every single cold brew coffee maker maker that sold on Amazon. And with that lens we’ve tried putting inserts and cold room makers, we do Sponsored product where if someone’s on a cold brew coffee maker page, our product is on there advertised. As you saw, when you searched for a cold brew maker, we have a banner ad above that, we know that those people will be buying coffee and we want to make sure that they buy ours. So those are kind of some of the major things that we do are always optimizing, the more that you can do within Amazon, and leveraging all of their marketing vehicles, and some of them are not even paid. They just last week launched a new founders story section on products. And we instantly filled that out added the pictures, because they will reward you for investing in them. And so we’ve taken it upon ourselves to do every single thing that we can to maintain that number one search ranking. Do they do that on an automated basis or they do they have an ad team that watches who’s participating and then finds ways to move the levers for you You know, they don’t tell you how it works. But we’ve noticed we’ve kind of a be tested when we turn off ads, our search ranking goes down. When we do ads, our search ranking goes up. So we’ve seen that correlation within the last several months, we now have an a specific team member at Amazon that just focuses on our advertising platform. And now that we’re at that level, we’re able to move the needle on some other things within the platform, but I’m not gonna lie and getting started. It’s very difficult to get in touch with someone. But we do strongly believe that by advertising, it shows Amazon you’re willing to invest in the platform, and they will reward you through increased search rankings.

Andrew Warner 45:46
It’s kind of frustrating, but you got to live in the world that you’re in. Yeah. You know, I thought that I was really good at spotting Amazon ads. I didn’t realize how many of these are sponsored and I’m just not noticing that they’re spying answered. Obviously now that I’m looking at it, I could, I could see the sponsor, label. But when I’m just scrolling quickly because I need to find something, I don’t think I pay that much attention. I more likely spot that this Takia patented Deluxe cold brew iced coffee maker is Amazon’s choice, then to look for that gray marking underneath it that says that it’s a sponsored ad.

Alex French 46:23
And that’s exactly what they’re going for.

Andrew Warner 46:24
And so are you partnering up with these guys with Takeda? They seem to be sponsoring a lot on Amazon.

Alex French 46:30
You know, we haven’t done any formal partnerships with them. But I can assure you that we do we target all of their advertising. So if someone searches for that product, we will show up on that page, whether it’s through the search rankings, or if you click into that product, we’ll also be buying the ad space on their product. We did reach out to them and then attempt to do some marketing with them and they did decline

Andrew Warner 46:57
and what you want to do is ideally Have them somehow give a coupon away for busy coffee? Whenever somebody buys their device, right?

Alex French 47:07
That would be the best case scenario.

Andrew Warner 47:08
And until then what you’ve got are is an ad from you guys, the the one that says frequently bought together and I see your coffee right next to them,

Alex French 47:16
you know, actually that one is free. We do not pay for that. But no, there’s no way for us to track how many people add to cart through that. But making sure that’s one of the ways that we rank our performance is making sure that we show up on in that space on every single cold brew coffee maker that’s on Amazon

Andrew Warner 47:37
by buying ads around them so that people do naturally buy your product with their product. And then eventually it gets into that spot. And you don’t know how effective it is. But you’re just counting on it working because it makes sense.

Unknown Speaker 47:50
That’s exactly right.

Andrew Warner 47:52
What about search engine optimization, you’ve told me that that’s that’s fairly big for you guys.

Oh, you’re Um, you

Alex French 48:01
apologize, that’s the that’s the biggest piece for us. And it really goes back to working through those keywords and making sure that we have them in our profile. Because one of the biggest things that we found to be the success within gaining Amazon’s choice, you kind of mentioned that banner that shows up on products is making sure that you have a high conversion rate. So as an example, you know, average products on websites converted about 4%. Last week, our conversion rate was 65%. On Amazon 65%

Andrew Warner 48:33
of people who hate one of your product pages by Yep. So you know what, I can see that we’ll talk to me about what you do to get that number and then we’ll do SEO. And then I also want to know, how are you getting people on a list so that you can come back and ask them for reviews, but the landing page, what are you doing to get to 65%. What’s working

Alex French 48:53
for the biggest piece is we make sure that we’re getting relevant eyeballs to the product. So when we had a originally started, we’re like, okay, we’re in the coffee category, we’re going to get anyone that’s searching for coffee to get them to our page. And what we found out is not all traffic is good traffic. And so Amazon really reinforces conversion rate to be an Amazon’s choice. And so we really narrowed down our focus on getting people that we’re searching very specifically for what we’re offering to the page. And that goes back to looking at the keywords to help drive that SEO. because our goal is to organically acquire that customer and not do the paid ad. Even though we do a lot of paid ads. I don’t, I would rather someone click and adjust our organic product than one that’s sponsored. So a lot of it goes back into really identifying which keywords people are searching, and in volume and in smaller the term called long tail. So we leverage all available resources. So even though we’re selling on Amazon, we’ll go into Google Keyword tool, and we can put in cold brew coffee, and then get search volume for every related keyword to that. And we can then prioritize our list of back end keywords and words that we put on our profile, and in our title to make sure that we’re organically ranking for those keywords. And then we do negative keywords for things that would not be relevant or that someone would search which we might think would work but actually could negatively affect you. And so we’re constantly looking at improving our keyword search because that’s how we can leverage the search engine of Amazon to acquire those customers for free.

Andrew Warner 50:38
Meaning in the past, we might have thought somebody who’s looking for hot coffee might also consider cold brew coffee. If they’re looking for hot coffee, we might buy an ad and then get them to our page and hope that they’ll buy the conversion rate on that is not very strong, which then hurts your conversion rate overall, which means that Amazon’s not likely to promote your page in the future. That’s the type of thinking.

Alex French 51:01
That is exactly right. Great example.

Andrew Warner 51:03
Give me some of the software that you use to, to market yourself.

Alex French 51:07
Yeah, some of the main ones we use are is seller labs. And they have wonderful tools where they can give you what your search ranking is search volume by keywords. They you had mentioned kind of that email list and they automate your emails. So when someone buys the product, they automatically email them with information, whether that’s an Amazon review request or shipping notifications or product details, you can choose that. So we do that. We also use a tool called scope. And that allows us to look at different categories and look at our competitive landscape. As an example, I mentioned we have 15% market share. We know that because we pull scope reports and we look at our category and look at our competitors to know what their sales rates are versus our sales rate and then we measure those over time. Those are really kind of the the major ones that that we use and then we have with the seller labs tool, right?

Yeah, that’s one of them it within the seller labs platform.

Andrew Warner 52:09
Okay. And you’re saying there was one other tool to use.

Alex French 52:13
That was the main one we use a bunch of the features within seller labs. I think geek seller, I’m can’t recall facts within sound labs or as a separate one. But we do use some of those products as well. I think there’s another one called feedback genius. And I don’t know if that’s within seller labs, or it also is another separate tool. But those are the names that that pop out of my head. Keith seller is its own product, and it looks like it works on Amazon and on Walmart.

Andrew Warner 52:39
How do you do? What do you think about Walmart?

Alex French 52:42
You know, we’re actually fun information we just submitted our new items for Walmart’s the difference between them. They’re not live yet. But the difference with Amazon is we do what’s called a three p or third party seller. So we actually are The inventory, we ship that inventory that we own to Amazon. And then when someone buys it, they fulfill it for us out of their warehouse, but we own the inventory all the way until that customer pays for it. Within Walmart, we do what’s called a one p relationship where we sell our inventory to Walmart at a wholesale price. And then they own that inventory and then they resell it to the shopper on walmart.com. So we’re just getting started there. We actually had the the buyer reach out to us because we’ve been pretty successful on Amazon. So they reached out to us and we just established that relationship.

Andrew Warner 53:39
It seems like now they’re available in store according to Walmart’s website.

Alex French 53:43
We do have a couple of products in store. It’s probably the 12 some 12 ounce items that we do have some on on Amazon but those will be focused. We’re actually transitioning to a new product format for that at Walmart. That’s all going to be one pound and that was just a learning That we had over time.

Andrew Warner 54:02
One pound bag of course, coffee. Yep, exactly. Yeah, that’s what I’m seeing over here. So the, when you say that seller labs, emails people and says, Go review our product that’s using Amazon’s email system, right because you don’t get your customers email address.

Alex French 54:20
That’s right. And that that’s actually a massive frustration for us. And oh, Amazon sellers, we don’t get that data, we can’t remarket them.

Andrew Warner 54:28
And what you’re using is, I’m gonna say it’s a crappy email from Amazon. I’ve never once responded to one of those messages. I actually am the type of person who has an automated filter on my Gmail that automatically takes any email from Amazon and tosses it into archives so I can search for it but I don’t want to be bothered by it because there are too many messages. That’s awful. Have you found anything that works for getting a direct relationship with your customer?

Alex French 54:53
Yeah, we so we leverage one of the things that they taught me at General Mills, they say your package is your number one asset. So what we’ve done is we’ve we’ve really gone deep into who the consumer is and the use case of the product. And we’ve found that generally people are buying this for their first time making cold brew coffee at home. And so they’re looking for resources and information on how to actually make the product. And so what we’ve done is we have some copy on our packaging that says, we spent five years trying to craft the perfect product, learned about how we do it busy coffee.com slash how to brew, and then we get them to type in that URL. And that’s actually one of our most visited landing pages on our site. And then we instantly have an email pop up that captures email and then we’re able to use that to remark it to them over time. That’s the

Andrew Warner 55:46
busy coffee calm slash how to brew. And then on the other side of that on your bag is the busy coffee calm slash swag where I can redeem my points with every bag of coffee. And then again, I think I get one point. Yep. And is that working for you?

Alex French 56:05
No, that one doesn’t work as well. We’re actually transitioning that to a QR code to, again, refocus on capturing that email address, because then they then have to mail it in. It’s less effective. It’s more work, or we’re learning that consumers are very lazy. And they want to do the minimal amount of work to get as much value as possible. And so we’re focusing on doing that we’ve actually, we recently launched those swag items for purchase. And we instantly within a week sold more items have that swag than we had in the last year of people sending in coupons for free stuff.

Andrew Warner 56:42
Wow. More people are likely to buy it than they are to redeem coupons to get it and then what percentage of people are going to the How to page

Alex French 56:51
it’s probably about 5%. So it’s still a small small percentage, but on a total visits basis, it’s to enough to where we certainly are putting Some effort behind it.

Unknown Speaker 57:02
All right now you’re going over to your website.

Andrew Warner 57:05
Starting now you’ve built this, well, you had the site for a bit, but now you’re making a push to sell on the site.

Alex French 57:11
Yeah, we’ve always been of the, of the mindset of Amazon’s a snowball. So we want to put all effort into that channel to be as successful as possible. We’re now at the point where we’ve gotten to a pretty good business on Amazon. And we’ve run into a couple of issues where it’s quite high risk to have so much business with Amazon, where they can shut your profile off at any time for any reason that we want to just mitigate that risk and get them on to our site. So we don’t even offer Currently our ground coffees which are Amazon’s bestseller on our site. So we are launching those this month though. So we’re very excited about that.

Andrew Warner 57:52
Feels like what’s probably going to do fast is office coffee. Wow. It’s a little bit harder now but but it seems like that’s the move on on a website. What do you think is going to do best that or wholesale? It feels like having interviewed other people, the website is where you get wholesale sales.

Alex French 58:13
I think we’ve done well on the wholesale. That’s that’s generally been. So we actually do. We’re a manufacturer, so we brew the coffee ourselves now. And so that wholesale has been primarily actually food service where we make a concentrate private label to them. The Office coffee was doing well. But as you said, with everyone working from home, we actually saw a massive shift, where people were now making coffee on their own. But we haven’t ever done the ground coffee. So we’re very optimistic about that. We do know some other coffee brands that have been successful there. We’re hoping that becomes the major driver with kind of a coffee club subscription. But that’s certainly TBD.

Andrew Warner 58:55
And how have you done since people have started working from home? How have you salesmen

Alex French 59:01
out of this world, I would say Really? Yes, we have our retail business on a we look at the term is called the velocity. So how many units per store per week? Are you selling? That’s doubled in the grocery store. And then our Amazon business has more than tripled.

Andrew Warner 59:19
Because of what why are more people buying from you now,

Alex French 59:23
as unfortunate as it is, the majority of coffee dollars are actually done through coffee shops, and they’re shut down. And and so that demand did not go away. It just shifted to different sales channels. And because we did have that number one bestseller, we were able to capture a substantial amount of that demand.

Andrew Warner 59:45
Got it? You’re saying that all the people who would go into coffee shops to buy coffee, now have to go make it themselves. And that makes sense. I guess I always thought of coffee at coffee shops is in addition to what you get at home. It’s there because it’s so convenient. But I can see that there are a lot of people here in San Francisco anyway who are, who don’t make coffee at home who just want to go out and get it. The the restaurants on Valencia street all started to open up these like doorway sales options, you know, where you can just walk up to the doorway, pick up something you ordered online or place an order and then wait a little bit on the sidewalk and then pick it up. And I thought the biggest seller would be that suddenly you can buy alcohol on the streets, like restaurants were now allowed to, or at least the city was looking the other way while they were selling alcohol on the street and some of them had interesting looking drinks. Nope. Like in coffee shops. Even at a time when everyone was scared of getting COVID from cardboard. They were buying coffee in those in those cardboard cups. Alright, I get it. Alex, congratulations.

Unknown Speaker 1:00:57
Thank you. Thank you.

Andrew Warner 1:00:58
Hi. I’m looking forward to having you back on I before this interview started, I went to similarweb to get a sense of what your traffic was on busy coffee calm. It’s minuscule. It’s hardly anything, right? That is correct. Yeah. So hopefully we’ll do another interview where you figured out what it takes to sell on your own website. And you’ll come back here and talk about how you did it. I’m looking forward to that.

Alex French 1:01:17
Yeah, that sounds fantastic.

Andrew Warner 1:01:18
All right. And for everyone out there, if you want to go check it out. It’s bi z, z. Why do you regret having that name instead of like, be us why coffee?

Alex French 1:01:27
No, no, I love it. I always do have to explain that. It’s not busy. It’s busy, but it allowed us to identify the problem and the solution the name and we could get the trademark for it.

Andrew Warner 1:01:41
It feels like buzzy for some reason when I see it, like there’s some kind of energy around it. I never thought Uh huh. I do get a lot of emails that have the subject line, buzzy coffee and a it’s very easy to weed those salespeople out. But it also is misinterpreted at times. Well, it is a beautiful brand. I like what you guys have done. It’s bi z z y coffee.com. Go find them on their own website. And of course on Amazon as we’ve talked about here today, if you want to follow up with my two sponsors, that’s not a way for me to pitch to sponsors. If you need to hire or go to top Tao comm slash mixergy. If you need to get a new website, build or transition your website to one that will work better to a hosting company that will work better and cost less, go to hostgator.com slash mixergy. Alex, thank you so much for being here.

Unknown Speaker 1:02:30
Yes. Thanks for having me, Andrew. That

Unknown Speaker 1:02:32
Bye Bye, everyone.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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