w/ Isaac Medeiros, MiniKatana / Kanpai Koods
Also available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/DFUi5Cq8Yuo
We're slicing deep into the world of e-commerce with Isaac Medeiros, the man behind MiniKatana and Kanpai Foods. After using TikTok to sell out of his swords, he's become bearish on the platform and gone all in on YouTube Shorts. Isaac's ingenious marketing on YouTube Shorts has racked up a billion views and millions of subscribers. More recently, Isaac has built a manufacturing facility in LA and begun producing his own line of candy called Kanpai Foods. It's a tale of adaptability, understanding market dynamics, and seizing opportunities that others might miss. Get ready to unwrap layers of insights, from viral content creation to the real pains of launching a consumer goods brand.
Kurt Elster (01:28):
This is an interesting episode. I recently came into possession of a long sword, a large gold, very sharp, very real katana unusual purchase, and our guest today recently came into possession of a Tesla cyber truck. One of my more unusual guest intros for sure, but we're talking to Isaac Mederos, who known for Mini Katana, easily one of the most successful YouTube shorts, content creators who also happens to sell totally awesome and has started up a new brand Canned Pie Foods, which is just these great freeze dried candies that I really enjoyed. Not as much as my kids. They totally, totally stole my candy stash. But yeah, we are joined today by Isaac Eros from Mini Katana and Canned Pie Foods. I'm your host, Kurt Elster, Jack Nasty, and this is the unofficial Shopify podcast. Your two Shopify online stores, you've got Mini Katana and canned Pie foods, right?
Isaac Medeiros (02:39):
Yeah, mini Katana is the real DTC brand. K Pie is like nine 9% on shelves retail.
Kurt Elster (02:47):
I saw it last weekend. I was at Box lunch and I saw Canned Pie Foods.
Isaac Medeiros (02:52):
Oh really? That's very early. We're four months, five months in, so that's awesome.
Kurt Elster (02:58):
I took photo of it, it was one on a shelf, but I immediately recognized it.
Isaac Medeiros (03:04):
Beyond Shelves is a totally different game. A year ago when I was, before I started this brand, I was doing a lot of market research and I was kind of going to different stores and I went through this phase where every single brand I picked up on a shelf, I would look them up online, I would look up their Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and just get an idea of their follower account and their viewership presence. And I'd discover it is kind of crazy how there's different laws here because most of them have no online following whatsoever. You have these brands that nobody online knows they exist, but on shelves they're absolutely ripping it with huge numbers.
Kurt Elster (03:42):
So let's go backwards mini Katana. Well, when did you get into e-Comm
Isaac Medeiros (03:48):
Mini Katana started in early 2021. That was kind of the first brand I launched that was successful. Before that. I had a drop shipping start when I was a teenager, if that counts, but I don't think that's a real success story there.
Kurt Elster (04:05):
So you weren't entirely new to it. And what was your background before you started mini KA marketing experience at all?
Isaac Medeiros (04:13):
I was a digital marketing specialist, a startup, and unfortunately I just wasn't making a lot of money and it was during the pandemic, so I was just desperate to do something and make a ton, ended up being a happy result from that. But I was always launching brands or projects before that, so I'm a real tinker.
Kurt Elster (04:35):
I think that's such a valuable skill to just be willing to play and try things and have hobbies and interests turn into passions and projects and businesses. Now I have one of your katanas. It is full size. It is very much not many. The name of the brand is Mini Katana. Tell me about what's the origin and of all things, why sell Katanas? How did this happen?
Isaac Medeiros (04:56):
It's not on purpose mean. So the vision for the brand was letter openers and the story goes, I was in Little Tokyo here in la, I ran into a cute little letter opener that was Samurai themed. I bought it for 50 bucks. It fell apart when I got home and I was just like, wow, I'm an idiot for buying this thing, but there's obviously a little bit of a niche market for this. Lemme just make a better version. So that was step one. I got a small version of it. Essentially, I lied to manufacturer in China. I said I was bigger than I was, convinced people to send over samples and maxed out my credit cards. And we launched them on meta at the time, meta works for everyone basically still. And I was like, this is the easiest way to go to market. And Meta banned us within a month of that launch. I already reordered inventory, so absolutely maxed out on everything I had. I even took out a small love from a friend.
(06:00):
So I just got all this inventory and I was like, you got to do something, you're stuck with it. I was a user of TikTok through the Pandemic, so I knew about the app and I ended up making some TikTok videos. And it wasn't at first to market on TikTok. It was more like, this is a great video platform, lemme make videos to use on Snapchat or Pinterest because I was trying every marketing channel I could think of at the time, but the first video sold a single unit and I was like, oh, what's going on here? This is interesting. I didn't expect this. And then the third video sold me out and we were just shocked at the time. So
Kurt Elster (06:41):
You're like, let's just try TikTok. It's got a decent interface and editor and we can use the content elsewhere. And you ended up making sales off of it. One sale, you're like something here, three say. And then by the third video, you cleared out the inventory all you needed to solve a problem, which was Facebook told you to go away.
Isaac Medeiros (06:59):
But again, I knew it was a good product because Facebook worked a good product to work across multiple channels. Typically, it's just that one channel is more suited for it. And that's a core lesson with Compai. We've tried, we tried launching everywhere. It's just that retail grows the fastest. But what happened is, is because I was making all these videos myself, you get a lot of feedback from the community directly and the community was like, you guys need to make big sorts. So we grew very quickly or one to over 2 million revenue by just pre-ordering large swords basically. That was a crazy ride, but it worked out. And then year two, we kind of pivoted full time to the big sword thing, but kept the name. Year two, we also launched on YouTube. That was at the time, I was like, TikTok is a really stupid platform. I still maintain that, by the way, to anyone out there. Everyone thinks I'm crazy for saying it, but I think TikTok is a stupid platform and it'll die. So then we went, okay, let's launch on YouTube because that's where the real creators are and where the real money is or where the real audience is. And now we're about to hit 10 million subs two years later, and it's been an incredible journey.
Kurt Elster (08:18):
10 million subscribers on YouTube. On YouTube.
Isaac Medeiros (08:22):
Yeah.
Kurt Elster (08:23):
Well you said something we can't skip over. You were really dumping on TikTok.
Isaac Medeiros (08:29):
Yeah, no, it's like the worst platform for creators.
Kurt Elster (08:33):
Are you on TikTok shop?
Isaac Medeiros (08:36):
So I have it for the candy brand, and I think it's the worst customer base I've ever seen.
Kurt Elster (08:42):
Why? What's wrong with them?
Isaac Medeiros (08:44):
I think the way they launched it, just too much of a coupon. They just want the team with strategy and it's like, no, you're trying to build sustainability and value. Everyone bragging about crushing right now. And I don't mean to anyone. I'll ask you how much of your sales or coupons and incentives from TikTok for the last 12 months? I bet half. So that's a big red flag to me. And I think that just attracts the wrong type of customer. We see a lot higher repeat, a lot more value from retail.
Kurt Elster (09:13):
A similar thing happened with Groupon where it was like, oh, you could get, people were really excited about it, big trend. Everybody's got to get on it, but the customers you got from it weren't sticky. And then on top of that, they were bad customers and it often wasn't profitable for whatever physical store because they were so reliant on discounting to make it work. And so you're right, when I hear you explain it, it's like, oh, TikTok shop ends up being Groupon all over again.
Isaac Medeiros (09:43):
And I think it's the best mobile app ever built. And the second point to why I don't like it very much is I think it completely destroys that experience. I have a lot of creator friends. I think a lot of DTC consumer people have a lot of consumer friends and they don't realize how hostile TikTok is to creators. It's a small thing. YouTube, you get to a hundred k subs, they send you an award. I have seven of them.
Kurt Elster (10:07):
Yeah, I see a couple back in the background.
Isaac Medeiros (10:08):
They really love you and they give you access to real time support. You can reach a person there really easily. TikTok, it's like, you don't matter. We don't care. I know people with 10 million followers on TikTok who haven't been verified and they've never really been treated like a human being by the platform. So that's when you carry that mentality. I don't see how you succeed against YouTube
Kurt Elster (10:31):
Because YouTube shorts, IG reels very similar, same format, similar idea as TikTok. It's not like that same thing can't exist outside of TikTok. You are seeing the success on YouTube shorts. Run me through it. Let's hear those metrics. My jaw dropped the first time I heard these.
Isaac Medeiros (10:53):
Well, I want to preface by saying YouTube is a much bigger platform for video than Meta and TikTok, so that's why the metrics are so big because we go all in on the largest most valuable platform and you have the biggest outcome across our channel network, we get about 500 through a billion views a month. It varies a
Kurt Elster (11:12):
Billion.
Isaac Medeiros (11:13):
Yeah, that's scaled over time. So sometimes we think it's going to be double that next year. The last 30 days we've added 800,000 subscribers to the main channel and we dub in Spanish and French just a lot our reach on that platform.
Kurt Elster (11:27):
With your experience, what are the differences between if I'm posted portrait video, TikTok reels or YouTube shorts? Or does the same content realistically translate?
Isaac Medeiros (11:37):
No, not anymore. It's interesting. I think a lot of people think that shorts is just reposts from TikTok. I think Yadi oss are very different. Name and point, TikTok is banned in India. So if you have any success on shorts, you're going to have 10% of your audience is going to be Indian automatically. Interesting. But I think the audience on YouTube actually seems to be much older on average, and you could just reach a very wide birth of people. Shorts are also shown on TV now, so I think that's going to be a very big difference long term as well because again, hits older people, but I don't think you basically have to now make content for the platform, the low hanging fruit of just crossposting and performing everywhere. That opportunity has been arbitraged away by people marketing on the platforms creators.
Kurt Elster (12:25):
I agree. I think that, yeah, the day of you could make one piece of content and then just shotgun it to everything with whatever automation tool. It doesn't work anymore because each platform has its own idiosyncrasies in format and expectations. And so when you're not fulfilling that, they could see the people who are always online could see right through it. They know exactly what you did. And generative AI tools just make it much easier to try and format everything for a specific social media platform. Me, I'm doing less with video. It's like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, but even there it's like they expect and want different things
Isaac Medeiros (13:04):
Internally. We test everything or we try to. And automation tools just get you dinged by algorithms.
Kurt Elster (13:10):
Yeah, because you didn't post it natively. We're already starting out minus one point from the algorithm.
Isaac Medeiros (13:16):
Yeah, I mean we tested two Facebook accounts. One of them in Spanish has several hundred thousand followers and the other one was automated. And I guess which one blew up? So we've seen it on Facebook, we've seen it on Instagram and we've seen it on TikTok.
Kurt Elster (13:32):
So when creating a video in your head, there's got to be a checklist. It's like, all right, these are the marks we got to hit or here's the approach, what works, what doesn't give me the crash course.
Isaac Medeiros (13:44):
Yeah, I mean I think everyone's kind of talked about hooks and watch time and swipe rate. Those are the classic, just a crash course though. Hook is the first three seconds of your video. Typically on TikTok, a user only watches one or two seconds of a video before they make a decision of whether they want to see the whole think through. So those first three seconds are extremely crucial. You have to make them interesting to the user. If you can get a hook rate of 70, 80%, you almost always go viral because people are invested now and they'll watch some of the video afterwards. The second element of that is watch time. And that really depends on the video length. You're going to the shorter the video length, let's say under 10 seconds, you have to get 150%, 200% watch time. Many people are actually rewatching the video. If it's over 30 seconds, you could get 80%, 70%, 90% still getting views. But from the platform perspective, what they're really looking at is watch time, A, k, A. How many average hours are people watching your video when you combine all those metrics. So just keep that in mind when making a video. You can actually get a low swipe rate 50%, but if you have a 58 seconds short, it'll still get a lot of views because 58 seconds is a lot of time to return to attention.
Kurt Elster (15:01):
I need the hook. I think we've all figured that out is like that's what's going to make or break you initially going longer or shorter is riskier.
Isaac Medeiros (15:11):
Again, I said all these caveats because it really depends. I think it's easier to go longer at this point. And the other thing I'll say is nobody wants to do long short form content. So we find that our videos that are 40 seconds long plus outperform just because there's not a lot of competition for that and we're able to retain people throughout the whole length. But if you're doing shorter, you need to make sure people rewatch it. And that's where it gets really hard. But if you were to summarize our playbook and checklists, it's like hook. We'll edit it, but it has to be top quality, top notch. Does it grab everyone's attention in the first three seconds? Maybe we're on it through a committee in that case. And then after that it's like, does it go over 30 seconds? And then we look through the video and our editing process is literally at any moment in this video, is anyone getting bored for longer than two seconds? And if that's the case, then we do another shot or we change the angle and that usually fixes that problem. But if you look at our editing, it's all very fast paced to fill out motion movement. That makes a huge difference for us
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Isaac Medeiros (17:27):
Yeah, people just rewatched that video and shared it with their friends like crazy. What's driving that?
Kurt Elster (17:32):
Does this guy cut a bullet in half? Yeah. Or is it salt
Isaac Medeiros (17:36):
Or That's an actually a BB gun.
Kurt Elster (17:38):
Yeah. Alright, so there's a video of a samurai cutting a bolt, a BB shut out of a BB gun in half. That's insane.
Isaac Medeiros (17:47):
Yeah, our most successful video has, I think it's like 800 million views at this point and it's like a 52nd long video and people are literally rewatching it. So if you look at the watch time metrics, actually lemme pull them up and just read 'em off to you
Kurt Elster (18:00):
And kind of ball bearing in half. That's insane.
Isaac Medeiros (18:02):
So if you look at our most viewed, viewed video, sorry, give me a second. Just pull up analytics. Cool. So it's 35 seconds long, 819 million views, and the watch time on it is 93.3%. So people are literally watching 31.2 seconds of that 32 seconds. The swipe rate on that is 72%
Kurt Elster (18:25):
Some high quality content.
Isaac Medeiros (18:27):
And it's like the fact that it's shown to that many people and they all watch it that long. The platform loves that.
Kurt Elster (18:32):
So what's your favorite video here? Or one you're proud of
Isaac Medeiros (18:36):
That bullet slice one because Mr. B ended up doing his own take of that and he hired the same guy.
Kurt Elster (18:42):
That's pretty cool.
Isaac Medeiros (18:43):
Yeah. Yeah. Jimmy's a cool guy. I think the most recent one that I love the most, oh, you just posted it today. I think actually it's about candy. Can we use candy as seasoning?
Kurt Elster (18:52):
Yeah. What's the verdict?
Isaac Medeiros (18:53):
It's crushing. I mean we've been testing candy content on the channel to see if we can use it as a billboard for other brands. And the answer is yes. The audience really resonates with content as long as it's done well.
Kurt Elster (19:04):
So even though it's like the mini Katana channel still, you're posting about the candy.
Isaac Medeiros (19:08):
Yeah, I think what's weird about us is we've approached the critical mass where there's not a lot of people that buy swords and there's not a lot of people that are interested in swords at the 2 million sub count. We probably have them all. That's it in the world. So what happened that we were able to expand beyond that so much is we started thinking more and more like a creator. At a certain point we were just like, you know what? We're going to hit a wall, we're starting to see it. Let's just start trying to make the best possible video and maybe future sorts in there if it makes sense. So that's how we've grown so much. And I mean that's why we'll get to 20 million subs this year because we really are, if we weren't many gaana, we'd just be a creator. But because we are this e-commerce store, people conflate the two.
Kurt Elster (19:52):
So you view it as like this is creator led brand?
Isaac Medeiros (19:54):
Yeah, absolutely. And I think we'll be the biggest short channel on YouTube given another year or two.
Kurt Elster (20:01):
Wouldn't you already be top a hundred top? I would imagine you're pretty close.
Isaac Medeiros (20:05):
Social Blades says overall for YouTube, we're 284 and the US and I think my guess is this, the top short channel is probably the top a hundred there.
Kurt Elster (20:15):
Just remarkable. Look back on it from when you started with YouTube shorts to now, how has your approach to content creation changed?
Isaac Medeiros (20:22):
Yeah, I kind of described it earlier where we're now making the best possible video and you can really see that if you scroll a video. Some of them don't even make sense if you like, oh, they're selling swords. Why are they posting this video? The biggest hack of content creator has, or the first biggest hack is editing. As soon as they hire editors and they get that down to a T, it frees up so much of their time. So with the same creators, very talented people on our team, we can pump out 90 videos a month as opposed to 60 because we just nailed editing so well and we built so many systems around that and the creators can focus more on just ideation and shooting content. So that was the second biggest change. And I think the third biggest change was just launching the candy brand because we did TAM out on the Sword brand rather quickly. In the first two years
Kurt Elster (21:14):
You think you're like, look, everybody who could buy a sword has heard of us. There's only so many.
Isaac Medeiros (21:20):
Yeah, absolutely. And that became really apparent towards the end of year two when we just stopped growing month over month, year three, we were flat. And that surprises people. But I'm honest, the views don't translate into sales. The attention doesn't translate into sales. If the product doesn't meet the audience, it doesn't meet the temp.
Kurt Elster (21:42):
And so is that what drove you to start this new venture KPI Foods?
Isaac Medeiros (21:48):
Yeah, I was looking for a while for a year and a half as to what was next. I actually started two other brands before KPI that flopped again, going back to that tinkering. But KPI really took off and that's what we ended up doubling down on very quickly.
Kurt Elster (22:03):
Alright, tell me about KPI food. What's it sell?
Isaac Medeiros (22:06):
It sells free dry candy. It's a new category, a confectionary, so most people don't know what that is. That's a good thing because we can educate the masses. And I ran into it originally two years on TikTok because a lot of s and b started on selling it and going viral, producing the product. So we've been watching it for a while. We just didn't want to go into it without being sure it wasn't a fad.
Kurt Elster (22:27):
And I've had these, it's like it's freeze dry, it's light, it's puffy, it's crunchy. What you're making is sour, which sour is delicious. Why'd you go with sour as a flavor?
Isaac Medeiros (22:37):
We're picking, so we're picking viral verticals. Sour candy is very viral and people love sour challenges. Spicy is incredibly viral and people love gimmicky viral challenges.
Kurt Elster (22:48):
Like the one chip challenge.
Isaac Medeiros (22:50):
Exactly. Also, it's easy to make content with because it's like you can just kind of film yourself making it. We just picked what we thought people would resonate with on a viral level basically. And it's translated well to shelves.
Kurt Elster (23:05):
You've got this mini Katana experience really quite incredible, but you hit a wall with it. How did that influence what you're doing with kpi?
Isaac Medeiros (23:15):
Yeah, I mean the first mistake entrepreneurs make is before they start a business and that's like product. And that was me. I'll be straight up going to swords probably not the best idea. I'm infinitely grateful I did it and I'm infinitely grateful for my team and the experience, but also it really, we have the best team in the world at this. We're not being properly rewarded for inventing a playbook. And that just frustrates me personally. So for Compai, we picked the most mass market thing we could think of where we could corner the attention of that market very quickly. And because there's no one else marketing this properly, that's what we can do.
Kurt Elster (23:49):
You say, all right, it's this very broad category. It's photogenic, it's colorful, it lends itself to the challenges. You can make content around it and it'll be attractive. It can get it on store shelves. It's not age restricted. There are a lot of advantage to this. And then total addressable market, TAM a thousand times larger, at least it's huge. Everybody likes candy. I get why you diversified into this food industry could super packaged goods. This seems hard. What surprised you about it?
Isaac Medeiros (24:22):
The biggest problem with it is that there's no manufacturing set up for it. So we are the manufacturer.
Kurt Elster (24:28):
It had to spin up your own manufacturing operation.
Isaac Medeiros (24:31):
Yes, which is I don't think an operator has felt true pain until they've set up their own manufacturing operation. That's what was most surprising. The cashflow required just the opex investment to get started and it just blew away whatever projections I first put on the paper in terms of cost. But also I know the opportunity size, so it's like let's just do it. Let's get out of the way. If anybody listens to this, it's considering going to manufacturing, especially for food, it's going to cost more than you think. Way more.
Kurt Elster (25:00):
Why did it cost more than you think? What were those challenges you ran into in standing that up?
Isaac Medeiros (25:06):
It's just the most regulated space. It's food. So you have to do everything very cleanly and buy the book. So my sword rent for example, you can start that. You can have the inventory in your apartment, you can ship it out yourself. There's no equivalent to that for food. You have to really have all your ducks in the row from the beginning. So even if you're not manufacturing, it's capital intensive because there's a huge upfront investment with manufacturer it and that sense, it's completely different for most DCC brands because they can find a way to start it with 5K basically like I did, which is not feasible and food in my opinion.
Kurt Elster (25:41):
The other thing you mentioned at the start was that the packaging is designed to stand out on shelves. And I've heard this about this is a critical thing for consumer packaged goods. Tell me about researching that and your package design.
Isaac Medeiros (25:58):
Yeah, I think when you're doing DT C, it's very data driven and it's very numbers game. You can optimize your ads, you can optimize CVR, you can optimize your pop-up subscription rates with consumer, especially when you're launching is so different because you're taking best guesses a lot of the time. There's not a lot of data to back it up and you can do a lot of research, but still at the end of the day when you make decisions on your packaging, you're going based off your gut, right? I'll explain how we thought about it. We looked at the competitive landscape, we realized nobody looks like candy. So our position was we are going to look extremely like candy. And also then we looked at who's buying this and it's children. Children, they love mascots. So we added a mascot as a part of the process afterwards. And the third step to that was we, and this is where actually we might have gone wrong, we don't know yet. 60 to 80% of generation Z loves Japanese stuff. They love anime, they consume it like a crazy volumes. So we decided, okay, let's add a Japanese theme to it and see how that goes. So that was a gamble, but those were the three elements and we meshed together. We just got great designers and got concepts in the door.
(27:13):
But I think the mistakes people make are they just don't do enough research. And it's weird because it's so easy. Go to Target and look at your category. I saw this coffee brand launch, what is it? Yeah, happy Coffee. Who's Robert Duney Jr.
Kurt Elster (27:27):
Robert Doni Jr. Is a coffee brand.
Isaac Medeiros (27:29):
That's the other thing. I'm like, when is this going to get oversaturated? Every celebrity is going to have their own brand.
Kurt Elster (27:34):
Well, I Googled celebrity coffee brand and there was an article from a month ago, the 18 Best Celebrity Coffee Brands 18. And they all want to get on that Ryan Reynolds train.
Isaac Medeiros (27:47):
When I look at this, I'm like, how do you get it so wrong? This looks like band-aids or
Kurt Elster (27:52):
It's an end cap display that does, you're right, it does not look at all like coffee. The branding and this thing screams multivitamins.
Isaac Medeiros (28:01):
Yeah, exactly. So that's what I'm talking about. How can you get that so wrong when all you have to do is look at your shelf, your category and engineer that backwards is just stand out within that category. This is like, I would walk by this and be like, that's not coffee, which is a bad sign.
Kurt Elster (28:19):
They have to write coffee on it for you to know they didn't even have a picture of the beans.
Isaac Medeiros (28:23):
I think what I love about retail though is that it is very vibe driven, it's very relationship driven and I think that's also where a lot of people get it wrong. No buyers will take a lot of risks with you if you are just a good person. If you're genuinely a good human being. And people in DTC are very used to meta and data, those aren't human beings. You need to go actually interact with somebody, meet them at a trade show floor and text them pictures of your kids and say happy birthday when it's their birthday. And really manage that. And that's how we've had a lot of success. So fast.
Kurt Elster (28:57):
You're out there building relationships with retail buyers.
Isaac Medeiros (29:00):
Yeah, real people. Being viral is not enough. Having a great product is not enough. It's a people business.
Kurt Elster (29:06):
What other misconceptions do you think are out there? If I'm like, I've only lived in online selling D two C and then I start, I'm moving toward retail, what's going to surprise me?
Isaac Medeiros (29:16):
How slow it is to on meta you can ramp up really quickly and I see it happen all the time where brand goes from zero to 50 to 200. If they can manage their cashflow properly, they could pull it off. And maybe with my marketing, which is viral, you can do the same thing as long as you can manage that attention with retail, they're going to do a sample order. And if it's a big retailer, they might be still a big order, but you got to be patient and build out that relationship and make sure it does well. So let's say a hot topic. They put in a $13,000 order. Maybe they don't put in a reorder for two months while they're gathering beta, but if you work that relationship, they'll come back at you with six figures and then they're going to start reordering at that pace every month. And I think a lot of these people just don't have that level of patience.
Kurt Elster (30:04):
It's old school, it's moving slower, it's network driven. It is quite a bit different, isn't it?
Isaac Medeiros (30:08):
But I think that's why it's so Moy too. Here's the unfortunate reality, but the fact of the matter is people can rip your ads, they can rip your landing pages, they can rip your emails, they cannot rip your relationships in retail, right? They can rip your packaging, but they can't rip your relationships and they can't just put their stuff on shelves. So I think it's old school, but it's much stronger in that sense too.
Kurt Elster (30:30):
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(32:02):
Alright, looking backwards, you go back to 2020, what would you do differently the second, if you had a chance to go around again,
Isaac Medeiros (32:10):
I would have gone harder on short form video. And actually I think this advice applies to people listening today too. I meet a lot of people who have not taken the opportunity seriously. It's still there. There's still a deficit of content on platforms. There's especially good content because take a few hours, scroll to YouTube shorts or Instagram reels and look at the quality of content. Really look at it because you're going to realize 50% of it's garbage. And with a lot of practice and patience, you could probably be better than those people, right? That's the first thing. The second thing is I would've picked a higher 10 product. If you're a first time founder, you don't know that You dunno what to recognize that red flag. So I think the third thing though is I would be less hard on myself as well. Entrepreneurship is a long journey, and especially if you're young, you can really hedge risk as a concept if you're like, I'll say in your thirties or twenties, you should just be doing stuff because you can always take a step back and rebuild except if you have a family. But I would've taken more risk. I would've moved faster. I
Kurt Elster (33:13):
Think some of that though, I have those same feelings, but I think some of it is survivorship bias by virtue of making it this far and surviving, you're like, well, I should have just done the same thing, but faster, harder, better. And so to your earlier point, I think you're right. We should both be easier on ourselves.
Isaac Medeiros (33:27):
Yeah, I think survivorship bias is a real thing. And I mean ly lucky, but that's also why I'm realistic with people. Hey, I did a second business that's growing really fast and I have experience and I still failed twice before I started that third business.
Kurt Elster (33:41):
What were the other two that flopped?
Isaac Medeiros (33:44):
I started a figurine. I wanted to do figurines because Japanese swords, figurines, work, collectibles. And the second one was, it's not a flop, it's still ongoing, but it just hasn't grown as fast as compost. So I can't pay attention to it. It's just like an anime app basically. But the point I'm making there is I still have a fail rate. And when I first started manana, I failed seven times before starting that business and having a large success in a big way. So I think people are just hard on themselves in general, and it just takes perseverance and patience.
Kurt Elster (34:16):
It sounds like you're hungry for knowledge, experience. You've got all these side hustles and passion projects and multiple businesses. Now, where do you go to learn like books, podcasts, YouTube,
Isaac Medeiros (34:30):
YouTube, Twitter and podcasts? I unfortunately don't have a lot of time to read anymore. The podcasts, they can offer you a quick window into the same experience. Founder's podcast. Fantastic. Right? Gives you a high level summary of books. This podcast similar but YouTube free knowledge or repository for anything you want to look up. I looked up food manufacturing videos on YouTube. I didn't hire consultants, I just looked it up on YouTube. It's kind of crazy that all that information's free. And Twitter, I used to connect with people. It's just been such a, we connected via Twitter and I even put out this recent tweet, Hey, I'm very short of capital for com because we just keep getting appeals from retailers and how does to start turning 'em down? And I got a lot of people coming in just saying, hi, I have resources. Hey, I might want to invest and I recommend all three. Really? They have different uses.
Kurt Elster (35:22):
So I'm kind of curious, what's your typical day-to-day look like?
Isaac Medeiros (35:27):
There's two calls. One with leadership team at many Katana, leadership team at k. Many Kat is set and systems are set. That's my one interaction a day with many Katana at this point. That's great because the rest of the day I can focus on com. I goes to the kitchen. I'm a hundred percent managing operations. My co-founder is the one driving a lot of the sell throughout shelves and he's focused on that. But I'm unlike the sweaty ops guy right now, all of side, I'm doing marketing, but if the product is really good, marketing sometimes feels pointless. And what I mean by that is in hex cloud's case, remember at one point they just cut ad spend because they're selling out so fast. And I feel like we're early stage, but it's a similar scenario where it's like, yes, we could buy our market, but we're getting new pos and there's organic sell through on shelf because packaging and experience has been so great.
Kurt Elster (36:13):
Looking forward, what are your future goals here? Like mini Katana, you said you want to hit 20 million in subscribers, be number one on YouTube shorts. What other goals are on the horizon for you?
Isaac Medeiros (36:25):
The comp is going to be a hundred million dollars plus brand. I think that's the trajectory. And mini Katana will be a massive media platform of a hundred million plus subs under five years.
Kurt Elster (36:37):
I have no doubt that you'll make both of those things happen.
Isaac Medeiros (36:39):
Yeah, I think so. And I think, I mean it's possible because I have really good team. That's the hidden unlock to every great entrepreneur, hiring the right people and having amazing loyal people.
Kurt Elster (36:50):
How do you find the right people?
Isaac Medeiros (36:52):
I find recent graduates and I just look for the smartest ones and then I just hire them and give them way too much responsibility. Half the time they crush. You'd be really surprised. So you look at many Ana's team, it's all young people. And that's not to say there's nothing wrong with hiring experienced people, but that's just the way I do things. Especially for creative roles though. I think that's the way to go. Young people who are super hungry, who know the platforms, they're going to crush it for you. And that's really key. It's that hunger.
Kurt Elster (37:20):
I love it. Where can we go to learn more about you?
Isaac Medeiros (37:22):
I tweet profusely. So it's just the Isaac med, the I-S-A-A-C-M-E-D.
Kurt Elster (37:29):
And of course I'll include that in the show notes. Oh, I love that. I just loaded up the food site and just the packaging, the product and then the weight photographs. Oh, it's good. Encourage people to check this out.
Isaac Medeiros (37:43):
It looks like candy. That's like
Kurt Elster (37:44):
Candy should look like candy.
Isaac Medeiros (37:46):
Exactly. And deodorant should look like deodorant. Coffee should look like coffee.
Kurt Elster (37:51):
Coffee for sure. I was offended by rd j's approach to coffee. I am.
Isaac Medeiros (37:57):
There you go. Yeah, we have a coffee skew. I should send you some. It's like unreleased.
Kurt Elster (38:02):
Oh my god. Unreleased the limited edition ultra secret VIP coffee.
Isaac Medeiros (38:06):
It's like freeze dry coffee balls.
Kurt Elster (38:09):
That sounds fabulous.
Isaac Medeiros (38:10):
That's how I reacted when I discovered that you could do that.
Kurt Elster (38:13):
Is there other random weird shit that you just freeze drying to see if you could do it?
Isaac Medeiros (38:17):
Dude, we're throwing everything in there daily is just like we're testing 24 new product, new items.
Kurt Elster (38:24):
How does freeze drying work?
Isaac Medeiros (38:26):
It's a process of sublimation in a vacuum chamber. And what that means is when there's a vacuum, things like physics change slightly and the way behaves in particular changes. So say you're heating up a gummy worm, it's just going to melt, but sugar eventually is going to melt and the water along with it. But in a vacuum gummy worm, the molecules react by puffing up. So that's why you're getting that crunchy texture and there's no moisture in it. Again, just a way to think about it's heating stuff up in a vacuum.
Kurt Elster (38:57):
Well, you know what? I could probably learn about it on YouTube.
Isaac Medeiros (39:00):
Absolutely. You can watch
Kurt Elster (39:01):
Feed videos.
Isaac Medeiros (39:02):
That's how I did it.
Kurt Elster (39:04):
That sounds like fun. I would definitely, if I had such access to such a thing, I'd be abusing it. Let's freeze dry a hard boiled egg. It really, really insane. That's the craziest thing I could come up with. Hard boiled egg.
Isaac Medeiros (39:15):
There's a ton of people originally survivalists, were buying these things because if you freeze strip stuff, it makes it shelf stable forever.
Kurt Elster (39:23):
Oh, interesting.
Isaac Medeiros (39:24):
So that's where it started really springing up outside of industrial uses. Right? But it's like cupcakes or croissants or whatever. You can make it at home, but then there's going to be guys like me who have a brand and make it on a commercial level. That's the way I see it.
Kurt Elster (39:37):
Isaac, this has been a lot of fun. Thank you for doing it. I appreciate it.
Isaac Medeiros (39:41):
Yeah, I hope it was a good show for the people listening.
Kurt Elster (39:45):
I'm sure it was. And if they can follow you on Twitter and of course, absolutely check out these two brands and what they're doing on social media. Absolutely worthwhile and inspirational. But yeah, again, thank you and this has been great. We'll edit it there.
(40:04):
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