w/ Dylan Menter, Bear Balanced
One life-changing realization transformed him from a SpaceX employee to a pioneering entrepreneur…
We have Dylan Menter, the brain behind Bear Balanced and the world's first Creatine gummies, on The Unofficial Shopify Podcast this week.
Dylan recounts his unusual path to entrepreneurship, highlighting how determination and self-teaching led to the mastery of Google Ads. He also provides valuable insights into harnessing the right resources, maximizing outputs with minimum input, and his plans for breaking into the retail market.
To learn more about Dylan's entrepreneurial journey and gain actionable business advice, subscribe to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
See the full interview on YouTube: https://youtu.be/QVNS5G3M4yA
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
6/27/2023
Kurt Elster: Welcome back to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, my friends. I’m your host, Kurt Elster.
Ezra Firestone Sound Board Clip: Tech Nasty!
Kurt Elster: And today’s episode is all about creating a one of a kind product and taking a risk to pursue your passion.
Sound Board:
Kurt Elster: These are the best episodes. I love these. Our guest today is Dylan Menter, founder of Bear Balanced, and the mastermind behind the world’s first creatine gummy. I don’t know if that claim is true, but we’re gonna press him on it.
Dylan’s gonna share with us his journey from quitting SpaceX to creating a product that challenges both physical and mental endurance, and how he took it from ideation to the hands of his customers. Dylan, welcome. How you doing?
Dylan Menter: Kurt, thank you for having me on. Long time listener, first time caller. Big fan of the show. You were pivotal and critical in my success earlier on as an entrepreneur online.
Kurt Elster: I’m honored. I don’t know what to say and I don’t have a good sound effect for that.
Dylan Menter: I think that’s the one. I don’t know what to say. I think you need to record that and put it down.
Kurt Elster: There’s too much… If I have sound clips of myself, that’s just inception. It’s too weird. I could argue with myself.
Dylan Menter: I agree.
Kurt Elster: All right, so I caught in there you used to work at SpaceX, as in like Elon Musk’s rocket company?
Dylan Menter: Once upon a time. That was the gig.
Kurt Elster: And this seems like a good gig, or at least a dream gig for a lot of people. What’s your background?
Dylan Menter: So, military, worked on circuit cards, pretty boring in the Marine Corps. It was still very much a Marine Corps enlistment, but I was sitting there troubleshooting circuits, more or less, for four years. Got out, decided I was gonna sort of either continue in that direction or do something slightly different, but not too far off, because I did have about four years of OJT and education under my belt, so the biggest goal I could set was to sort of up the ante and take the technician to an engineering position, and I wanted to do this in the aerospace field, so it was NASA or SpaceX and I got a call one day from a military recruiter and said, “Hey, there’s a SpaceX recruiting event happening two days from now. Can you make it in LA?”
And at the time, I lived in San Diego. I didn’t even think about the logistics. I just said yes and hung up the phone. And-
Kurt Elster: Started driving?
Dylan Menter: Started driving. I got a haircut, and I hit the road, and yeah, bought a better set of clothing for the hiring event thinking everyone was gonna be very business formal, which was not so much the case. But yeah, it sort of all just took on a life of its own after that.
Kurt Elster: And how long ago was this?
Dylan Menter: This was in 2017 in March.
Kurt Elster: Okay, so not that long ago. Six years. And today you sell creatine gummies?
Dylan Menter: Correct.
Kurt Elster: What is a creatine gummy?
Dylan Menter: So, I am the founder and CEO of Bear Balanced, and we created the world’s first creatine gummy. Creatine, for those who are less familiar with it, because creatine is pretty esoteric. A lot of the PhDs and maybe more fitness enthused individuals are the only ones who really know about creatine, which is what they refer to as a super supplement. It’s got a very, very strong science backing in exercise performance, cognitive performance and brain health. It can help with things like sarcopenia, age-related brain degenerative things like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s. It’s got a very wide range of benefits that more or less just keep our bodies the way that we like them. Healthy and young.
The gummy aspect of the product is something I have iterated on more times than I’d like to admit. It started off as a gelatin gummy in the kitchen here when I was still working at SpaceX, and it has evolved very much over the last three years of business. We’re now using an all-natural sugar-free ingredient, a pectin-based gummy. We’ve partnered with Creapure. That’s the purest, highest grade creatine on the planet. The only elite-level creatine on the market. This is the stuff that Olympians, elite level cross fitters, they’re most familiar with. So, this gummy in itself, it’s a confectionery masterpiece. I’ve myself poured over five million gummies by hand when we were making them in house. I can really speak to the quality of the product from the confectionery side of things and I’m someone that endorses the product because I know it works.
I was taking creatine for a decade before I started making the gummies and when I transitioned from the powder, the raw powder form to the gummy… We’ve added some additional active ingredients that sort of help maximize the traditional benefits. I not only noticed there was no decline in any way, shape, or form. There was an increase in performance. And I don’t know if that’s a placebo effect or not, but I’m happy with it, and I’m happy to share that with our customers.
Kurt Elster: So, you personally are all-in on creatine. Creatine, popular dietary supplement. Famous for its effects on athletic performance in regards to muscle strength, power, size, volume. And then interestingly it also assists with recovery and there are studies that suggest this has neuro-protective effects. All right, so I’m sold on the benefits of creatine here, and so creatine, readily available. Been available many years. What inspires you to say hey, what’s on the market’s not good enough. I need to make my own creatine supplement. And also, to make things really tough it needs to be a gummy?
Dylan Menter: Yeah. Absolutely. I’ve got a lot of people that bend my ear in the fitness industry, whether they were Marines at the time, whether they were the group of guys I was working out with at SpaceX that took bodybuilding seriously, or the guys I met at the gym that were actively competing. There was a common theme amongst the majority of these people. It’s the inconvenience of powdered supplements. And this was when gummies had already started to sort of trend. Goli was making its way into the market, and I think that really solidified what now is a real prominent industry in the sports supplementation space, the sustainable supplements, the sports nutrition, the functional foods. Gummies are sort of at the front of that.
And earlier on, call it foresight, call it intuition, I kind of thought to myself this is where supplementation is going. And after having so many conversations with these bodybuilders, these guys that were just a little overly vocal about how much they were displeased with the powdered supplement forms, I put the two together. And I’ve always been very entrepreneurial. Since an early age, always wanted to start a business as an adult, and I honestly think that I’m a little too optimistic and delusional at times, but we know those are good traits of entrepreneurship and we know that those people can change the world.
So, I decided to take it on, try it out in the kitchen, and sure enough once I found out I could make it, I did some due diligence into the background of the actual fitness industry, the supplement companies, and realized no one else was doing this. So, it was really a golden opportunity that… It’s something I always wanted to do. Something I realized could be capitalized on. And I just got to work.
Kurt Elster: So, you’re plugged into this community through friends, acquaintances, and realized like, “Hey, we’re all using creatine and other supplements, but the big pain here is tubs and bags of powder.” Frustrating, and annoying, and pretty soon everything is covered in powder. And so, the gummies solve for that problem, and give you more… In theory, right? If it’s done right, gives you more consistent dosing.
Dylan Menter: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: And they’re convenient, they’re not messy, I get it. And so, you look. You’re like, “Wait a second. I can put these two together,” and you claim to be the first. Do we just start Googling it? How do we figure that out?
Dylan Menter: Yeah. I mean, I think everything starts… All validations or good due diligence starts with a solid hour of Googling. I made my way to I think maybe the eighth page I think before I gave up the first time, and so I did see that there were some other confectionery products that were made over the last… I think since 1996, there’s been two companies that did something along the lines of a confectionery. We have one in 1996 that made… It was almost a chew, and I’d have to go back and look at this, however, there is a very, very clear differentiator between gummy products, taffies, things like nerd ropes in the confectionery space, and that’s based off the amount of types of sugars, amounts of sugars, water percentages. I’m kind of familiar with a lot of this stuff and won’t do too much of a deep dive, but the only other company did make a chew, and that was GNC. So, it was like a Starburst candy, more or less.
So, we’ve got those two since 1996. I couldn’t find anything else. I looked at the patents. I got on USPTO. I did as much background searching as I could, even internationally. I even hopped on Alibaba. Because you know that if it’s out there, you can get it on Alibaba, and it was not.
Kurt Elster: That’s a good point.
Dylan Menter: It was not.
Kurt Elster: It did not occur to me. They sell supplements, and just like straight up, here’s powders on Alibaba?
Dylan Menter: Oh, I mean they’ll sell you anything. We’ve got a couple competitors and I won’t say names that actually get their products from Alibaba, and I know for a fact that they try to rip us off or duplicate, or reverse engineer, but as someone who knows how to make the product and knowing what these competitors sell, I can tell you firsthand that it’s not what we have in our product, or it’s not what we have in our packaging.
Kurt Elster: I bought a lot of goofy, inexpensive stuff off like Ali Express and DHgate over the pandemic with varying levels of success, and there is no universe in which I would buy supplements and try that out. I’m not gonna be the guinea pig here.
Dylan Menter: Yeah. No, I feel bad. I really do. I’m focused on very few things, but I like to channel the focus, do good at those very few things that I have to really put my energy and time into. To go out of my way and try to educate others on the non-efficacious supplements that may be out there, it’s really just… It’s one man against the world and I hate to say it, but a lot of supplements that come from Alibaba, and there’s a lot of supplement brands on Amazon right now, there’s a lot of brands popping up, and a lot of these are being made in these same factories and the efficacy is not there. If these products were tested, they probably… I mean, if they published these tests, they’d have very few people making their way through checkout.
But I know that the FDA most recently… They published something that is going to… The FDA and the FTC, they’re even working with Amazon to sort of help get all of those less efficacious products off of Amazon and it’s gonna be tough, because this is the first time they’ve made any move in this direction in over I think 10 years. But we, as consumer conscious people that we are now days, the right groups are taking the right actions to kind of make sure that these things don’t thrive as much as they have recently in the future.
Kurt Elster: The phrase non-efficacious is quite the euphemism for snake oil, isn’t it?
Dylan Menter: 110%. And that’s probably… Snake oil is probably… That’s the colloquial used throughout the fitness industry for products that are just… They don’t belong in… They might be in your house, but they shouldn’t be in your cupboards. They should be under the sink in the can with the bag in it.
Kurt Elster: So, all right, I accept that you are the first here, and we sometimes refer to first mover advantage, but at the same time sometimes being the first means there’s a reason no one else tried. So, advantages or disadvantages to being the first mover here?
Dylan Menter: I’d like to say it’s 60-40, 40-60, and that goes in both directions. We did… I filed the patent before we even started making the product. What’s more important than producing the product is protecting it and we made sure to file the provisional day one. So, going into it, we knew this was going to be tough, no one’s done it. There’s no information. There’s no roadmap. The confectionery trade, it’s not this… There’s not a cookbook or there’s not a really solid source of information on how to do this. It’s a very well protected trade secret, proprietary type of creation that these companies or these manufacturers make.
So, it was a disadvantage at first. I will be completely transparent. Especially as someone who has very little skill cooking something other than steak or chicken at the time, learning how to make gummies was an entirely different… That was an entirely different skillset that I didn’t think I needed to learn, but being a little overconfident, and being optimistic and delusional at the same time, I spent an entire year learning how to make gummies. And I did this with the help of edible chemists, actual experts in the confectionery field, people that worked for some of the bigger brands out there, and it was the pandemic, so people were actively… They were online. They were engaged. They were trying to create content.
I think a lot of these individuals that I ended up working with, they thought that maybe this would be something they’d talk about on their YouTube channel, or there was some tradeoff in working with me. They were just doing it out of the love for the trade. They wanted to share knowledge. They wanted to educate. These guys, they have a very, very… They have a well of depth when it comes to the knowhow, and having someone like me reach out saying, “Hey, I want to do something different. I really want to make something great here. Can you help me?” They were very, very ready to jump on board.
But I also… I had a lot of people in my ear, and I had a lot of different sectors of the trade that differentiated in one way or the other. So, we’ve got CBD and THC. We’ve got pure sugar, more candy type products. I had experts from all fields. So, I really had to cherry pick what would be used in my own experiments, so it did take an entire year before I finally settled on a product that I thought was really going to make a change and really going to convert at checkout just based off the pure experience. It’s experiential trying our gummies. It’s not just a wonderful supplement. The gummy itself is a work of art.
When you see it for the first time, you wonder. I’m sure it crosses a lot of people’s minds. Is this the best gummy I’m ever going to eat? Because it sure as heck looks like it. And that goes-
Kurt Elster: No way. No way!
Dylan Menter: Kurt-
Kurt Elster: It’s a gummy. I’ve never unpackaged a Snickers bar and been like, “Is this the greatest Snickers bar I’m ever about to eat?” You know, maybe I have done that. Now that… As the words came out of my mouth I was like, “Okay, maybe.”
Dylan Menter: Every time I open a Snickers that happens, so I have to disagree with you. But I am… You know, the optimism and the delusion dealing, I’m sure there’s some of that baked into that statement, but in all seriousness, we’ve done everything we could to make it the best, aesthetically pleasing gummy. I mean, the mold itself took a lot of work, a lot of iterations. We were Bear. We were a gummy bear. We were just an average gummy bear. We actually had to outsource and get some molds made back when I really didn’t have the money to just make it more appealing. We used certain organic materials that enabled us to not only make the label claims that are more consumer friendly, but it took a lot of testing to get colors that actually worked, because under heat a lot of things break down and you just don’t get a beautiful product at the end of the day.
I mean, when I looked at these, it literally looked like almost jewelry, and that’s when I knew this is the final version 1.0 of the product. But the path it took to get there was a long, and hard, and I don’t think I could do it again. You can only put so much… You’ve only got so many shots like that you could take. I think I might be able to… I don’t think I’d be able to do it from square one ever again.
Kurt Elster: I’m looking at the gummy now and you’re right. It’s very good looking. It’s quite the color and it’s got kind of like a clover shape to it.
Dylan Menter: Triple Venn diagram.
Kurt Elster: Oh. You’re right. That is what it is.
Dylan Menter: Oh yeah. There’s a reason for that too.
Kurt Elster: So, when you reach out to these people to get their assistance, what does that pitch look like? Because I’m sure that was an unsung part of your success here, is that initial cold outreach pitch to people you’re trying to get to help you.
Dylan Menter: Absolutely. And you don’t want to come off… You want to provide value, right? When you’re reaching out, you want to be personable, you want to communicate that hey, I am asking you for mentorship or help because I do want to make this product, and I’m not dangling association with the name of the person that helped provide influence that got me through R&D. I made it a point to just be upfront with everyone and let them know, one, I’ve gone through some of your work, I watched some of your YouTube videos, I read some of… Some of these people have actual confectionery R&D published. I’ve read your work. I’ve seen your YouTube stuff. I know that you’re really good at your job. I know that you’re gonna be beneficial, if you’ll allow yourself to, in order for me to do something equally as cool and equally as elevated in the confectionery trade.
And there’s sort of that trade off where they get to be a part of it. You let them know ahead of time that I need help, I want your help because you’re awesome at what you do, and I want to make an awesome product, and a lot of people, they’re excited by that. They want to help. They want to educate. They want the cool side quest. And I think that’s what really allowed for the possibility of me working with these experts and these individuals as someone who had no say-so in the field. I’d made gelatin gummies once and I was like, “Okay, we’re switching to pectin based. It’s officially chemistry. I need some help.” So, you know, I had no grounds to do so, but they were more than willing to, and I think it’s because there was that trade off there and they wanted to do something cool.
Kurt Elster: And so, you were able to get these people excited about your vision and happy to help. And that helped with product development, manufacturing, ingredients, as well?
Dylan Menter: Oh, yeah.
Kurt Elster: Like sourcing the correct formula here?
Dylan Menter: Absolutely. At the end of the day, there’s a million different types of sugars out there. There’s a million different percentages of which heats you should cook them at. Everyone has their own professional opinion on how it should be done. So, you really just… You take in as much information, you go wide, and you narrow it down. You have to make it real Bear Balanced specific at the end of the day, and I think that’s why I took an entire year. Because I was taking in so much information.
You take the scientific approach, and the scientific method, and you just start… You ask the question, and you ask it again, and you get your answer, you iterate, you ask again, and yeah, it could have taken longer if I had let it. Believe me. And at the end of the day, you’re never… It’s your baby, so you’re never truly done iterating on it. I don’t think our product is… It’s not done being iterated on. We’ll find a way to make it better. And once we do that, we’ll do it again.
Kurt Elster: So, once you’ve got… So, it took you a year to develop this. What were some of the challenges that you dealt with?
Dylan Menter: Time. And I think the endurance to kind of get through it. Because we’d spent, or excuse me, I’d spent so much money on ingredients, and so much time outside of work while I was still pursuing a master’s in education, it’s just… It’s really… It’s do you want to sleep, or do you want to figure out this entrepreneurial thing of yours? Just the time that it took, the time it took to dedicate in order to sort of allow myself to fail, and keep failing, and keep failing, and keep failing, and having minor successes, and building off of that, and then only to fail 100 more times, that was sort of where I was at.
Kurt Elster: Changing gears a little bit, it’s hard to name a brand, especially a consumer packaged good. How’d you come up with the name Bear Balanced?
Dylan Menter: You know, interesting enough, I had multiple names, so I think of Bear Strength Supplements, that was the first one, because we thought we were gonna start with the creatine gummy, and we want to leave room for expansion. We don’t want to pigeonhole ourselves. So, at least if we use the word Bear, it’s broad enough to branch off into other gummy bear products. So, Bear Balanced sort of catered to the… what now is the triple Venn diagram gummy shape, the balance being that we know that creatine, it helps with fitness. We know it helps with general health. And we know that that trickles into wellness and well-being. Having those two boxes checked and those two categories or areas satisfied, you are better off from a well-being aspect. So, balanced sort of is what defines that.
The bear, we’ve segued out of bears. We transitioned from the bear. But it’s our roots, it’s our foundation, it’s what started this company, it more or less speaks to the authenticity and us as a brand, so that is there to stay. We could have rebranded the name when we changed the gummy and we thought it would be… We’d be cheating ourselves if we did that. We put so much into Bear Balanced.
Kurt Elster: Did you have any issues with IP? Creatine gummies, I see registered trademark. Any issues there with-
Dylan Menter: Absolutely. You know, yeah. Oh no, I’d say I barged into the office myself and sort of threw a fit. But no, I think just as someone with no background in IP law, or just even getting IP published, and as someone that really couldn’t afford the attorneys that it would take to file everything, and I kind of need to preface it by saying you should learn how to do as much as you can by yourself. It’s great to… Not everything, but you know, the 10%, if you can learn 100% of something and it’s not gonna take away from the other stuff you have going on, by all means. But I also wanted to publish the first bits of IP.
Little did I know that things other than the brand name are a little harder to do. So, when we initially filed for a series of IP, because again, the business, the industry, it was… No one was in the space. No one was doing anything with the product, with the IP. Just like we filed the patents, we were like, “We need to protect the product, so we’ll go out and file the IP that we need to associate with the brand.”
And when we went for creatine gummies, the product itself, if you see the bag, you see the gummies, you see it on a shelf, that is creatine gummies. So, the term applies to the product, not the individual gummies themselves, and this is something that I’ve interviewed… A little bit of background here. I think their name is Pickle Power. This is another company. They sell pickle juice. It’s an international product. It does very well. They were the first pickle juice product. They created their category very similar to how we’ve created ours.
And they took the same approach. You can form this formed IP around the product and when other brands came into the space, it made them very difficult to use certain marketing material and advertise as such, and actually sort of cemented them as a globalized or globally recognized brand. So, that’s what we intended on doing, having that sort of… The luck of having a conversation with Pickle Power earlier on, they sort of helped facilitate that general or that initial thought to go out and do that.
But there’s a lot of back and forth, and to be honest, I can’t even… I think I’ve probably spoken to that examiner maybe 100 times before we really figured it out. But they’re willing to help. Everyone at the USPTO is not a bad guy. They’re not trying to slam the door in your face. But you know, there’s definitely rules and regulations around certain IP, and I think everyone wanting to learn it 100% needs to do their own due diligence and background searching into that sort of stuff, or hire someone that really knows what they’re doing, because some of that stuff can… You know, there’s a lot of mixed signals and wires that get crossed.
Kurt Elster: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. That dealing with USPTO is not for me.
Dylan Menter: Me neither.
Kurt Elster: Seems frightening.
Dylan Menter: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: It’s intense.
Dylan Menter: And it’s a long battle. It’s like some of these, it took us… Some IP can take about a year to get published just if it goes the right way, so you can really, really extend that length of time.
Kurt Elster: You’ve got the product. You’ve got the IP. Now you have to secure an audience for the first time. You gotta sell to somebody. That’s the hard part. Like, oh, you developed a product? That sounds difficult. Not as difficult as selling it for the first time. So, how did that go?
Dylan Menter: Yeah. I’ve been selling things… As a kid, I sold a ton of stuff. I didn’t sell the kitchen sink. I didn’t sell my mom’s TV. But anything that wasn’t nailed down, they used to joke around and say, “He’ll sell it.” And I’ve always sort of had this inclination to just appease people and cater to wants and needs as opposed to being real salesy. So, the first thing we had to do was, and this… We got this question asked so many times earlier on, was who are you selling this to. Who is your audience?
And no one could understand the answer to this question. We’d say it was for any and everyone and we truly meant that, because creatine is proven to enhance, or the studies are concluded to show efficacy in the broadest spectrum of spectrums, and that’s everywhere from adolescents to senior citizens, so it’s literally everyone across the board. So, we say who would take it? Anyone that takes a vitamin. Who takes vitamins? Anybody. Every and anybody.
So, going out and finding any and everybody, it’s a big bucket, so we leaned into the path less traveled. We took creatine and decided to lead with more of a wellness front. And we made it the opposite of the traditional age old sort of vibe or stigmatized fitness jacked guy in the little tank tops, and we didn’t want it to be associated with how I think the bodybuilding community sort of created it to be. And I think it wasn’t intentional, and if you talk to anyone in the fitness industry, they’ll tell you that creatine alone doesn’t give you the huge, jacked, tiny tank top body. There’s a lot of work that goes into those physiques. But we did take the wellness approach, so we knew that we were gonna have to get in front of these people.
And going out to… Going to yoga studios, or YMCAs, or gyms, and trying to find these people, it’s really… It’s hard to cover a lot of ground in a short matter of time. So, we let Google do a lot of the work for us. We did not hop on Facebook. We didn’t start running Facebook ads for a long time. We let Google sort of help us identify those people online with search campaigns, shopping campaigns. We were identifying our brand or using keywords that were very similar to other supplements in the wellness industry because we knew that those were the people we wanted to focus on early on. And people that were in the fitness industry already taking creatine, we were going to populate in those searches either way.
So, we were having the not so active approach on the fitness side of things that coincidentally was more reared in the wellness side of things with the branding. So, Google got us our first 10,000 customers.
Kurt Elster: Whoa.
Dylan Menter: Yeah. And learning Google ads was a feat in itself. Having not known any digital advertising or having the background, never… I didn’t mentor in internet and agency like some people do earlier on to sort of learn the ropes, so I’ve done my 10,000 hours. I’d like to think I’m somewhat of a ninja when it comes to Google. Maybe not Facebook yet, but yeah, Google’s a lot smarter than we think. I know that there’s a story out there where they knew a girl was pregnant before she did. They were already trying to sell her infant formula or medicine or something, and she had no idea what was going on, and a week later found out she was pregnant. Google knows your audience maybe better than you do, or at least where they live and their credit card information.
Kurt Elster: And with Google ads, it sounds like you taught yourself and then figured it out, were successful at it, enough so to launch this business. Where do you think people go wrong when they first get into Google ads?
Dylan Menter: Yeah. I think it’s they don’t take the scientific approach because there’s a lot of gurus online and you know, there’s a lot of good information everywhere, and being on YouTube and finding those two or three people that are not trying to get you to sign up for a course. Maybe they are much later down the road, but that’s definitely not during the ad breaks in their videos. You’re not getting retargeted with that sort of stuff, but finding the right people to dedicate your time to listen to, and not… You need to get to know these individuals. Anyone that has an online presence and you’re not able to directly speak with them, or you’re not able to at least attempt a master class with them, or something along the lines of that, I would say there’s a good chance that it’s a product that they’re building, and they’re more interested in maybe selling it than taking time out of their day to educate people.
And you really want to be able to discern between the two. Who are the people that are actively helping entrepreneurs and business owners learn this trade and who are the people that are maybe overly concerned with turning a profit on the material that they put out? Because more often than not, that material is… You’re not being inundated with the things that you really need to be inundated. There’s a lot of maybe… There’s more of a volume play there with their own material, so they’re just trying to get as much stuff in front of you as possible to create the most content. It’s not as solidified, and concentrated, and there’s a lot of noise baked into all that. You just gotta find the right people.
Kurt Elster: So, who are your favorite Google ads gurus?
Dylan Menter: There’s two that I would consider… I’d put them up against anyone, anywhere, and that’s John and Kasim of Solutions 8. Those guys are probably doing the most on YouTube. I know that they’ve got one other really big competitor in the space, and I see their ads all the time because I’ve been on Solutions 8 YouTube so much, but there’s only a couple on there, and Solutions 8, John and Kasim, I’ve watched those guys give so much to their community. They’ve invested so much time and energy into the people that genuinely want to grow their businesses, learn the ropes, and they’re more than willing to take it off your hands for you, and they’re very reasonably priced for the job that they do and the results that they yield for these people. But most importantly, they’re available.
So, they have lives. YouTube live. I think they charge a subscription now. It’s like 5 bucks a month. But it’s worth its weight in gold. If you need any questions answered, they’ll have an hour long live, it’ll go two hours if the Q&A… They’ll let the Q&A dictate the length. But those guys are a wealth of knowledge and together, like I mentioned earlier, I’d put them against anyone on the planet when it comes to Google ads.
Kurt Elster: And so, all right, Solutions 8 YouTube channel, so I linked to that in the show notes. Circling back to the beginning, did your SpaceX experience prepare you for any of your entrepreneurial adventure?
Dylan Menter: Absolutely. You know, contrary to I guess a lot of people’s beliefs, there’s a lot of similarities in those respective fields. Working at SpaceX and then being an entrepreneur, I think the most consistency is seen in the 60 to 70-hour work weeks. So, coming out of the military, I was used to embracing the sucks, and working the weekends, and doing the long hours, and transitioning into SpaceX, it actually… It didn’t get any easier. It got longer. It got harder. It took a lot more brain energy to do that work. And it really built a different kind of mental endurance. I mean, I was building rockets at the end of the day, and fast forward a year or three years, I was making gummies. Completely different things. They were both very physical, too.
When I said I was building the rockets, I had hands on. There were days when I was one of the bigger guys at the time. I used to have about 25 pounds more muscle than I do now. And they needed… So, you’re on the production floor. They’re literally doing things for the first time. When things get broken, or stuck, or they need something pulled out of something, they’d call me over and I’d go out there and put 110% into pulling a piece of a rocket out of a bigger piece of the rocket, and it was a lot of sweat, and a lot of sweat equity, and a lot of mental endurance that went into that work, and that’s the exact same thing you see in entrepreneurship. People working 60, 70 hours a week. People breaking through mental barriers on a daily basis.
I remember being that kid in college that couldn’t study for more than two or three hours before literally having almost a migraine, and now I’ll work for 17 hours a day, and I’ll only stop because I have to go to sleep, and you know better than to get sick.
Kurt Elster: Sounds like you have a lot of skills you taught yourself to be able to do this and that’s something that’s important to you. What do you think are some of the must-know how-to skills that entrepreneurs need to have when they’re trying to build these eCommerce businesses?
Dylan Menter: Yeah. The must-knows. Like you mentioned, I didn’t have a background in web development, or graphic design, or digital advertising, or the confectionery trade. I think the theme there is… The skill is really to just be willing to do the work. If you’re not someone that has investors, or comes from money, or has a large nest egg, you’re gonna have to find out how to get the maximum output from the bare minimum input, and a lot of the time by bare minimum input I mean the investment, the money, so you’re gonna have to do a lot of the work, and I think the real skills that really help you succeed in that sense is the willingness to do so, having the mental endurance, being able to kind of leave your ego at the door when you maybe think you’re on the right track and a door gets slammed in your face, and you kind of want to refuse to believe that you’ve put so much time and energy into something that made no improvements on your business, but you need to go back and you need to relearn the way you’re doing things, and being able to set your ego aside and that willingness to learn. That’s what’s really gonna propel you forward and keep you moving through the upsets.
Kurt Elster: Fabulous advice. That’s probably gonna end up being the promo clip for this episode. So, looking to the future, then, what’s next for Bear Balanced?
Dylan Menter: Oh, there you go. We tried to get that IP earlier on. It didn’t exist. So, moving forward, the future, we’re looking forward to it. This year is gonna be an exciting year. I can’t say exactly what we’re doing, but we’ve got some exciting stuff planned. We’re finally rolling out into retailers. We’ve been in mom and pops pretty much since we first started. They found us one way or another. But we’ve been having a lot of conversations with a wide range of larger retail, big box chains, and we’re looking to be the first creatine product in a lot of these legacy grocers, natural grocers. We’re gonna be everywhere all at once. That’s sort of, I think, the main thing to take away from all this.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. That would help, getting on store shelves, but that’s its own adventure and new series of issues.
Dylan Menter: Very much so. Yeah. But we’re ready.
Kurt Elster: So, if someone wanted to check out these famous world’s first creatine gummies themselves, where would they go?
Dylan Menter: They would go to www dot Bear Balanced, that’s Bear as in the animal, Balanced, past tense with a D, dot com. You’ll know you’re there if you entered the URL correctly once it loads, believe me. We have an Instagram, as well. All of our socials, Bear Balanced, you’ll be able to find us, and if you happen to do a Google search, Bear Balanced or creatine gummies, we are on the first page of Google search results. There’s no way to miss us.
Kurt Elster: Excellent. We’ll check it out. And I’ve got links in the show notes to everything you mentioned. Dylan Menter, Bear Balanced, thank you so much.
Dylan Menter: Thank you, Kurt.