Jake Karls, Mid-Day Squares
Today's guest is Jake Karls, a co-founder at chocolate factory & DTC brand Mid-Day Squares.
Jake's job goal is to grow their brand by building genuine relationships – with investors, buyers, journalists, and their 80-person team. He's done that with a content marketing approach that he describes as "starring in our own reality TV show" that includes real life therapy sessions and inspiring others to be unapologetically themselves.
Though Jake was recognized as an EY Entrepreneur of the Year Finalist this year, his self-proclaimed “greatest accomplishment” was learning how to be confident in himself.
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
9/6/2022
Kurt Elster: Today, on The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, we are going to be talking about one of my favorite buzzwords, being authentic. Well, being authentic at storytelling. Brand storytelling, which really is like use narratives to help sell more of your stuff more often to more people. Sounds easy. Harder than you would think. Until you have sat down and tried to copywrite a non-cringey story about your brand, then you will know how hard this is to do. I have someone with me today who has done it, seems to be good at it, and certainly has opinions on it. We are joined today by Jake Karls, Co-Founder and Chief Rainmaker at Mid-Day Squares. You know, I’m a fellow rainmaker these days. As the rainmaker, Jake focuses on growth through the business of building genuine relationships with investors, buyers, journalists, and building out an internal team.
All right, so what is so important about this, he is unapologetically himself, recognized as entrepreneur of the year finalist this year, and his greatest accomplishment according to him, learning to be confident. That is a deeply important skill. I’m your host, Kurt Elster.
Ezra Firestone Sound Board Clip: Tech Nasty!
Kurt Elster: This is The Unofficial Shopify Podcast. Jake Karls, Mid-Day Squares, thanks for joining us.
Jake Karls: That was I think the best intro I’ve ever received to date, to be honest with you. I think… No, it was like the music, like you know in a thing, the opera, they’re doing the whole thing with the acoustics and all that stuff. Yeah, I appreciate being here, Kurt, and I think that something interesting today we’re gonna talk about is authenticity. I believe it’s become a buzzword and I think that’s dangerous. I think it’s becoming a word that’s being diluted, unfortunately, and I want to get deep into it because I think that brands can really utilize the idea of being authentic and having some sort of genuineness and realness to their company to actually excel forward in the next decade.
Kurt Elster: Okay. All of that is important. I want to unpack authenticity a little bit and then we’ll do a little top of the show housekeeping. We’ll walk through the Mid-Day Squares story, because I don’t know anything about it, but it sounds good, and it looks good. It looks delicious, actually. And then we’re gonna get into your content marketing, which seems on point. You even have a podcast. Authenticity is a word that we’re hearing a lot. It’s like creator economy, which we’ve rebranded influencers as creators, and portrait video is like the number one eCommerce play right now. Where does authenticity fit in there?
Jake Karls: I think you’re right. I think where you feel the most attached or the biggest relatability, let’s call it, is when someone or a brand is truly being themselves. And what that means is not feeling that cringe feeling of someone trying to put on a show or write a narrative that isn’t true to them. I think brands often put on this perception of perfection so that everything is always smooth sailing, they’re always talking about the product benefits, the features, but they’re never really showing you what’s actually going on or what’s going on behind the scenes. For us, something that we do that I think is quite unique, especially when we started in August 2018, was we wanted to document the entire journey of building this company to $100 million revenue plus. And what that meant was showing the good, the bad, and the ugly of actually building this business. So, that means the breakdowns, the therapy sessions that we go to once a week, the hard conversations we’re having, the fires that we have to do, the raising the money. Everything that you don’t get to see the actual stuff that’s going on, we wanted to show that, and we believed, we bet the farm on investing in that and that would turn community on.
And what I meant by community is just people that get behind something that they can actually agree on, right? And I think that if you’re not being yourself every day at what you’re doing in terms of business or your personal life, then what are you doing? In all seriousness, what is it with this idea of putting on something that isn’t you? And I think with social media you’re seeing it a lot, and I don’t think social media was meant to have that but that’s the outcomes that we’re seeing now.
Kurt Elster: I 100% agree with all of this. Slight aside. As a reaction to this idea that social media is everybody’s highlight reel and influencers and brands and everyone are putting on a show for us, a performance, that can feel inauthentic. In response to that, have you seen the buzz around this app BeReal?
Jake Karls: No, I have never. I don’t even know what that means but it sounds interesting. BeReal.
Kurt Elster: Okay. BeReal. I heard about this recently and I’ve seen it mentioned a few times. It’s sort of like the way Snapchat used to be like, “All right, you gotta post today. You gotta post every day.” Except what it does, it picks a random time. I’ve not used this. I could butcher this. It picks a random time and goes, “All right, you’ve got five minutes to post.” And it just takes a photo front and back from your phone and sends that and that’s it. So, it’s an attempt to force you into only posting what you’re actually up to as opposed to like the edited, polished, face tuned version.
Jake Karls: Listen, I think that’s crazy to force people to be real. It sounds backwards, does it not? It sounds like we’re going backwards in time.
Kurt Elster: Yes. You know, and I don’t know about the ongoing success of BeReal, but the fact that that exists and there’s buzz around it tells you that this desire for just give me something real and authentic is genuine. It’s out there. And I think the advantage to it is you build an audience, a community, fans, those people become brand evangelists, customers, word of mouth, and ultimately that’s what gets the brand off the ground.
You had mentioned like hey, what makes it authentic is we share everything, so it sounds like you have to get out of your comfort zone, do what may feel like oversharing, but like where’s the line? How do you know I’m sharing everything, too much, not enough? How do you find that balance?
Jake Karls: So, there’s no balance, and what I like to say is we just don’t get involved with world events, or politics, or things like that, because again, we’re a team of 80 people here. Everyone has different opinions and-
Kurt Elster: Whoa. 80? Eight zero?
Jake Karls: Yeah. Eight zero, but we’re a manufacturer, so we actually self-manufacture. We have our own chocolate factory like Willy Wonka.
Kurt Elster: He’s wearing Willy Wonka glasses, not that anyone could tell, but for real Willy Wonka glasses like Johnny Depp.
Jake Karls: Oh, shit. Listen, so I think that what’s important is there’s no line, and when we started in day one, my agreement with my two partners who are my brother-in-law and my sister, it’s a family business, was we are going to show everything. That’s gonna be the only opportunity we have at succeeding at grocery. Because we had the product market fit. We had a great product that was data driven. We built it with data. We knew it would work and people would like it. The problem was in the grocery game, it’s such an old school game. It’s 40,000 products on a shelf. How are you actually supposed to stick out in the store? And it’s very hard because you can’t just go get unlimited space. It’s physically limited.
There’s not enough room. And we’re refrigerated, so it’s a lot harder. There’s less space for it. So, I said to them, I said, “Imagine we can show everything, which would mean that the customer would be on the journey with us at all times. The good, the bad, the ugly. Feeling that roller coaster of emotions. Making them actually know who we are as individuals.” So, when they see the chocolate bar in the grocery store, they now see Jake, Nick, Lezlie, and the Mid-Day Squares team and what we stand for rather than just, “Oh, this is a good vegan chocolate bar that tastes delicious.”
And that allowed us to have this rocket ship of initial success, and what I mean, rocket ship, is just high growth at a very early stage without spending on it. And the reason being was because people were like, “Okay, oh my God, I haven’t seen a company ever show this much…” Some people say uncomfortable things. We would show literally therapy sessions between my partners and I talking about how we’re gonna make it through this, like talking about literally how their marriage is, my partners’ marriage is, and how it’s affecting the business, and our therapist would actually allow us to film it and actually show it, obviously with the permission of… There’s legal permission on that and stuff like that.
But that created this sense of relatability, which led to what you said earlier. Fandom. When you can relate, you feel closer. You feel more attached. Emotionally connected. When you have that type of emotional connection, you’re no longer building a customer base. You’re building that fan base that’s gonna go out there, shout out their dinner table, buy your product, yell it to everybody, and then go acquire you new customers.
Kurt Elster: Oh, man. This is great. All right, so you said you make yourself vulnerable in a real way, where you filmed therapy. I often joke like part of… 15% of what I do is business therapy, talking to business owners who are emotionally distraught at times, and talking through like, “Okay, this is what’s going on in the business. This is where we’re getting stuck. This is how it makes me feel.” You turned that, and there’s this idea of work-life balance. We want to maintain that but it’s not always realistic to be like all right, there’s an iron curtain between what I do at work and what I do at home. You’re still one person, right?
And so, you rolled all that up and made it just open and honest and accessible to people. That doesn’t turn them into fans. It turns them into friends. Yeah, it’s one sided. But you built what to the recipient is a very real relationship because by being vulnerable, you’re real now.
Jake Karls: I’ve had investors come to us and say, “Why would you guys post that?” And it’s really uncomfortable. It’s really uncomfortable. And we would tell them-
Kurt Elster: That’s what makes it work.
Jake Karls: Exactly. And that’s what makes us closer, like you said, friends with our customers. When you’re friends with your customers you can A, learn a lot. B, you’re doing something right. And C, you’re building something long term. For us, our thesis day one was can we build the next Hershey’s? And what I mean by that is not the products that Hershey’s makes. I mean the impact of the size of the chocolate company. And the only way to do it is to truly build a legacy. It’s not to just do things for short term. It’s not things to just do quick sell, in and out. It's okay, how do we build a community that will be here, and we will have a staple in their households for their kids one day over time? And that was through building the friendships. Friendships allow us to feel like we can actually understand each other, that we are not just a corporation that is yes, doing… We are capitalists at heart and all that stuff, but at the end of the day when we even DM our customers, when you see our DMs, and I could show it to you right now, it’s we send video messages. We send face messages that say their name every time.
And I don’t care how long it takes. The reason why we do it is because that is true authenticity. You get to see who we are, who’s behind this, what our voices are, what our tone is, what we are as a personality, and you can either choose to like it or not. It’s like a rock band. You either like one of the rockers or not, or you like all of them, or you like one and that will make you like the band. It’s the same concept here.
Kurt Elster: All right, there’s like… If you take away one thing from this episode to apply to your business, it was right there. Grab that idea. Just use face-to-video content, just that snack size quick content, to reply to people. It’s so easy to do it on your phone, like why wouldn’t you? And it immediately makes you real, and relatable, and it tells the person this was not a copy and paste template, right? This was not a chat bot. This was very much a real human with a face. And that… It sounds silly, but it makes all the difference. So, I absolutely get how that’s… All those things put together kind of supercharge building a community where it’s more than just…
Because ultimately it’s like, “All right, you’re selling a packaged good.” Here is chocolate to put in your mouth. All right. I like chocolate and I do want to put it in my mouth. But it’s not… I’m gonna eat it and move on with my life. When you’ve combined it with like, “Hey, these are these people that I know that sometimes make me a little uncomfortable,” it creates tension. That’s memorable, right? Good music, good storytelling, good movies, books, there will always be moments of tension. That’s what makes it work.
Okay, I’m getting the difference in why your stuff lands and hits and works versus the super polished, everybody feels good content that the investors wanted. But that’s the stuff you just swipe past and forget about. It’s fine, but this has lasting impact, doesn’t it?
Jake Karls: And it also impacts every aspect of life, so like for example, the other day my partner was writing the Q2 for the board. He was writing the entire like… We do similar to a public reporting, so very in-depth reporting for our board to see. And then he said, “You know what? We’re gonna open it up to all 72 investors we have,” and some of these are just family and friends that put in early on, but there’s like quite… There’s a lot of information there that shouldn’t be for everybody, you know? It’s not the recipes, how we make our product, but it's everything but that.
And I said to him, I said, “Dude, why are we sending this to all 72 investors?” It’s very tight information and should be censored to a certain extent. And he said, “Well, if we can’t be ourselves and show the truth to these people, how can we expect them to want to invest long term, continuously, into the company?” And as he sent it out to the 72 investors, the responses from these investors was, “Thank you for being so transparent, vulnerable, and honest. This is why we believe in you guys to the end. This is why we are here on this journey.” And it was just one after another flowing through.
And I said to my partner, “Holy shit. This type of authenticity and vulnerability builds trust.” It builds trust in the consumer. It builds trust in the investor. It builds trust in your partners. So, why not do it every single day, apply it to all aspects of your business or your personal life, your relationships, your friendships, et cetera?
Kurt Elster: This really… So, your bio, you had this line. You said you focus on achieving growth through the business of building genuine relationships with investors, buyers, journalists, and building out the internal team. All right, we heard investors and buyers. I’m sure you’re inspirational to your team. How does this work with journalists? Certainly, because they’re getting hit with stupid pitches all day. They’re either gonna breathe a sigh of relief, thank God, something real, or they’re gonna be suspicious of it. How does this play?
Jake Karls: Journalists is the hardest one because ethics, and sometimes they can’t really be so close, and bias, and all that stuff, so for me, how I do it is I actually look to build a friendship first with these people without actually agenda. So, like you know, I have a couple friends that write for very great publications, and we built that friendship and I share them stories as it goes on, and not to get these stories written up but to keep them up to date on what’s going on with our business.
And when I’m ever in the city that they live in, which I often travel around, and I’ll explain to you why I travel around every week in a minute, but I go and I reach out to them and say, “Hey, you want to do coffee? I have something cool for you. I have a good story for you.” Because journalists can’t always do all the research themselves. You have to imagine, put yourself in their shoes. Do you know how much information there is out in the world at every given millisecond? If you can help them find that great information, that absolute phenomenal content, you are helping them do their job. Yes, it might be coming from your company, but it might be a very interesting story for their readers, so you gotta offer your value but also focus on building friendship that is continuously planted without an agenda.
So, actually I go for coffee with my best friends all the time to talk about absolutely chaos. Nothing. Stupidity. Do the same thing. There’s no difference. And I think people have this preconception, this square box of, “Oh my God, you gotta pitch this. You gotta do that. You gotta do this act. You can’t be this type of person.” And they’re always worried. And that’s when everything just doesn’t get through. No one cares about that. No one wants perfection. They want… It just, again, comes back to authenticity and being yourself. And if you’re a good person and you’re a fun person to be around, then why wouldn’t a journalist want to be around you?
Kurt Elster: It’s interesting. A few episodes ago we talked to Chuck from Nomad Goods who took a similar approach. He’s like, “Look, if you want PR, if you want press, you need to just be an actual friend to these journalists and build a relationship with them. That’s it.” There’s the hack is stop trying to use hacks. Just build an actual relationship. And to do that, you have to be the one to put in the effort.
Jake Karls: I have this thing called milk runs. Basically, what I’ll do is I’ll book a trip, New York, Chicago, whatever city it is, and what I’ll do is I’ll plan all my friends that I’ve met via online, so whether that’s investors, buyers, managers, store clerks, whatever it is. I don’t care what they do for a living. I actually don’t give a shit. What I care about is that I’ve had an interaction with these people in the past via some sort of online platform and I’ll say, “Let’s do coffee. Let’s hang out. Let’s go for a walk. Let’s go for dinner. Let’s go party.” And what I’ll do is I’ll schedule about 30 different people in 3 days and then I’ll go to the next city, and I’ll go to the next city, and by me showing up, booking the flight, the hotels, spending the thousands of dollars it costs to go on these trips, my return on the investment always come out 10 times. Whether that be a buyer opening up the store for me, whether that be a manager giving me 10 placements in the store, whether me gaining just a friend for life that is just helping me in my own life struggles, I always say get on the road, show up, and just be yourself. And when you do it, something will come from it. Don’t have agendas. Build that network.
And that’s what the rainmaking comes down to full circle for what my nickname is or my title, I guess, if you want to call it, is yeah, eventually all these things typically come back down to Mid-Day Squares. The relationships eventually say, “Oh, my sales team needs a relationship.” But let’s just say XYZ Retailer. It’s like, “Oh, I hung out with that person four months ago. We went partying. I’ll connect you.” And guess what? There’s a bias now that that person already likes me, so guess what? If they liked me, they’re most likely gonna give the attention back to the company for respect reasons.
So, it’s just a game of just being yourself and showing up in my opinion of how you build relationships.
Kurt Elster: It’s good advice. It’s straightforward. It’s easy if you’re confident. If you have social anxiety, you’ve just described most people’s worst nightmare. Were you always this way? Did you learn to be confident? How did you get here?
Jake Karls: Great question. I learned. And I’m of that schooling in my sense that you could learn it, and here’s why. When I was in high school I was the class clown and I loved it. Don’t get me wrong. I was the class clown because I couldn’t perform academically. I wasn’t strong academically, so I needed to get attention and do it in the way that was authentic to Jake, and what I did was I would start pranking people, prank the teachers, all that stuff. And I was a hero, right? Everyone thought I was funny.
Then, when high school came, I barely graduated and I was like, “Oh, shit. I’m not the hero anymore. Everyone’s moving on to what we have in Quebec,” where I’m from, is right after high school you have something called CEGEP, which is grade 11. Grade 12 and 13, sorry. Right before college, university. And I remember, I’ll never forget, the principal told me at the high school, “Jake, you might not graduate.” And I was like, “Why?” He’s like, “You’re not passing.” And I was like, “Oh my God.” It hit me at that moment that even though I’m the hero here, I’m gonna be no hero in life just because that’s what society says. It’s not what’s true, but it’s like everyone’s moving forward but I’m moving backwards.
And I had this theory that I was so insecure about, and I started to lose my confidence of being like, “Oh my God, I’m actually dumb. I’m uneducated.” You don’t need to take the school path, but what happened was as I went through the CEGEP, I tried to prove that I was good at grades. Again, now I was doing what everyone else was doing. I was following the herd. Basically, just trying to get good marks, get a good job after, go to college, do whatever you gotta do, and that’s what I did, and I was so miserable. I was so miserable and actually insecure that I then went to go apply to the hardest program in college to prove to everybody in the world, my parents, my family who I love, my friends, that I could actually accomplish this. I could become an actuary, an investment banker, whatever you want to call it.
And I did it, and I was failing in college, and again, suppressing all that stuff, and I was becoming more insecure and less confident, actually. So, what I did was after third year of college I said, “Fuck it.” I said, “I’m gonna do what I want to do now.” I said, “This strategy isn’t working, trying to prove for everyone else but myself,” and that’s when I realized. I said, “Screw actuarial science. I’m gonna do economics, graduate just to get it over with, and then I’m gonna start entrepreneurship. I’m gonna launch a business and I’m gonna give it my all because my gut’s telling me to do me and I’m not doing me right now.” The moment I let go of all that pressure, threw it off my shoulders, I felt this liberation, this freedom that I can’t even explain in words. It was the greatest thing that’s happened to me.
I knew there was a lot of uncertainty ahead but that’s when my confidence started to gain. When I started to finally be Jake, who I actually was supposed to be. The kid I was, the class clown, was me. When I started to be that 10 years later, 14 years later, that’s when I finally felt empowered, and that’s when the confidence started coming, and then I started to use it for my business. I launched two other businesses, they both failed. This one, I’m applying full throttle confidence and conviction, and it’s working. It’s actually working and it’s real. I’m not doing anything for anyone else. And that’s why I wrote in my bio I try to show the world that I can be unapologetically myself every day and still win.
Kurt Elster: There’s so much pressure that there’s like the one right path is you go to school, you graduate high school, you graduate college, you pay all this money because just higher education is extraordinarily expensive. You have to do well at it. And then guess what? You know how many people have ever asked me for a transcript, my GPA, any of that? Exactly zero. Nobody cares, right? Absolutely nobody. And I struggled. It was so tough. I got through by the skin of my teeth and was just in constant stress, and had ulcers, and canker sores, all that stuff was stress. I mean, I brute forced it, but it was not for me.
And later, discovering entrepreneurship, and both the freedom of it but also the responsibility of it, where it’s like you are entirely reliant on yourself and responsible for everything, your entire situation, that was what I needed and that’s where I succeeded. So, just figuring out where you thrive and then embracing it regardless of what you think you’re supposed to do according to external forces, that seems to be the smart path forward. But having the wherewithal, the mindset, the self-awareness to figure that out, that’s the hard part, right?
And then once you do get there, giving yourself permission to do it. And it sounds corny when I say, “Oh, you gotta give yourself permission to do whatever you want.” It’s so much harder than it actually sounds, right?
Jake Karls: Oh, man. I think that it’s a continuous battle for… It’s gonna be a continuous battle for the rest of all of our lives to continuously improve on that. Because still, when I did join Mid-Day Squares as the third founder, I thought because I owned 30% of the company I had to be a manager. This is a crazy story and at first I was like, “You know what? I’m gonna be the CMO.” Because I wanted a title. I wanted to be a chief this. Blah, blah, blah.
And I thought that because I own a company, I must have that. That’s what I thought the perception, or the world looks at you lower if you’re not in terms of an ownership. And I tried eight months, the first eight months of being the CMO, managing some people in marketing, and I was failing, bro. I was depressed. I was failing. I was miserable. I almost wanted to give up all my shares because I was like, “I can’t do this.” And what I realized was management isn’t my strength. And the moment I realized that I finally told my partners eight months in. I said, “Guys, I’m done with this. I’m no longer gonna be a manager.” I said, “I need to be managed by somebody.” And my ego took a beating at that moment, and I was like, “Fuck it. This is okay. This is what’s best for me.”
My strength is not management. My strength was to be with people, make them feel something, spread that energy, and then bring them into the company. I can’t go do that by following what society in quotations, that pressure, offers you to go do. You have to be this manager. And that was one of the best feelings. I’d say second best after getting rid of that pressure of college level. I think this was the second best feeling, was letting go and understanding that I no longer need to play to my weaknesses. I need to continuously play to my strengths. And if you don’t have that identified then really work on identifying your strengths because if you don’t have that, I promise you, if you don’t know your strengths and you’re not playing there, you’re missing out on a lot of opportunity of success in your own life.
Kurt Elster: So, you mentioned you’re the third co-founder of Mid-Day Squares. How did you find Mid-Day Squares? How did you get started and join?
Jake Karls: In May 2018, my sister and my brother-in-law, they’re entrepreneurs, as well. They had other businesses too. Some have worked, some have failed. They always wanted to work together on something and basically when my brother-in-law sold out of his software company, he had a two year non-compete in what he was doing, and my sister was a die hard foodie and she was making him this snack for the afternoon because he was consistently craving chocolate at like 2:00 PM, and she told him, “I can make you something that’s clean. Clean label, good ingredients, that tastes delicious, that’s darker chocolate, that will also keep you full.”
And what he did was he started eating this snack that she was making at home and was freaking for it, like he was giving it to everybody. Everyone was loving it. And then they realized they wanted to join the food world. They’re like, “Hey, if we’re gonna start a business, we’re both passionate about food.” He was passionate about software and technology. She was more passionate about fashion. But the commonality was food. And I’ll never forget, they were looking for other products to do, so morning oats they tried to do. They tried to do another category. But they couldn’t make something better than what was on the market. And then they read a report that said that real chocolate was growing at very high numbers, like double digit growth year over year. It’s a saturated stat but high growth, and that vegan protein was on a tear, as well. And it clicked in my brother-in-law’s head, as well. “Oh my God, Lezlie, you’re making a baby of these two massive growth categories.”
And that moment clicked where it was like, “Aha, we have product market fit because the data is showing that the consumer is gonna pull into this product. They want it. There’s just nothing available as a chocolate afternoon snack that is clean label and vegan.” And that’s when they approached me in May with this idea, saying, “We need a third partner.” And I was like, “Nah, this is boring. Food’s boring as hell. It’s old school.” I’m like, “I’m not even that passionate about it.”
And they tried to convince me for two or three months and then finally I got canned by my ex-girlfriend. She cut me. She broke up with me after four years. And I was in this sense of sadness, loneliness, depression I would call it, that I’ve never felt really that type of deep pain before, and I was like, “I need something to keep me busy.” So, I was like, “Okay, I’m ready to join this company.” And as I joined, they said, “We need you to build…” They’re like, “Your role is to make sure that you’re building the community and the brand noise. Build the network.”
And at the time, I was like, “Okay. Food is really boring.” Like if you go to the grocery store, the lighting is terrible. The this, the that. It’s just products, products, products, prices, commodities. And then I went, and I said, “Holy shit. We are going to create a reality show in entrepreneurship and that is gonna allow us to propel forward and build the community that will get us to have that pull effect.” And what was interesting was I showed my partners a PowerPoint with the ratings of Keeping up with the Kardashians, the TV ratings. The ratings of Shark Tank, and then the social media following growth from Elon Musk over the time, and what I said was humans love the drama from the Kardashians, that it’s a family drama. The humans love the idea of entrepreneurship at a very surface level from Shark Tank. They’re starting to celebritize entrepreneurship. So, I said, “What if we just go into depth with that?”
And then the third thing was the three of us, our own characters, we’re bold. Elon Musk is bold as hell. Half people like him, half people don’t. But he still has a massive community. I said, “If we combine all these three things with a great product market fit, we can win.” And that’s how we launched the company.
Kurt Elster: I think there’s a couple pieces there. It’s like you knew the success of these storytelling archetypes that reality TV shows use. And so, you recognized like all right, we have elements of Kardashians, Shark Tank, and we can put that together and get it on social media. All right, couple missing pieces there. How did you learn video production? How did you learn storytelling?
Jake Karls: Storytelling was always authentic to me. My two other businesses that failed previously was one was an outdoor fitness boot camp, and in Montreal where I live it’s very cold during the winter, so we would do it outside in the summer and people would love that. I was making like $45,000 cash a summer as a kid training people outside, and what I did was I used Snapchat at the time to tell the story. I’d always just document and show it in a very interesting format that made people want to be part of it, right?
Then I launched a company in clothing that was college parties. I would throw these college parties and then I’d use storytelling via Instagram to tell those stories and that built the community.
So, I knew that the storytelling aspect was a key factor in building… It was the vehicle to building community. It was the way to connect to the heart, right? And the video side of it, I said I wasn’t great at editing, but we had iPhones. I said, “We’re gonna show just raw.” At the beginning, it was just pure raw. As soon as it get too crazy to start making product every single day, delivering it, and taking content, I said, “The first hire we’re gonna do,” and this was a bold thing, was we’re gonna hire a videographer that could take the content and also slightly edit it.
And that was the first hire. I’ll never forget. And everyone thought we were out of our minds. They’re like, “You’re not hiring a food scientist, you’re not hiring a salesperson, you’re hiring a videographer.” And that was the greatest hire we did because that started to help the documentation be better. And we used Instagram, which was hot at the time, to tell the stories on day to day on the Instagram stories, so the everyday stories, and we were getting like crazy viewage, crazy engagement, because people were like, “I never get to see the behind the scenes of a company and the drama.”
And now we have an entire team. It’s no marketing here. It’s just creators, videographers, editors, and TV show people, show runners, producers, that guide the entire story every single day, and we’re seeing the success of it via the sales go up in the store, because when you’re a fan, there’s two ways to support a company or a person. Either you tell people about them, or you buy their product that represents them. And we’re seeing that growth happen, and it has to be due to the storytelling.
Kurt Elster: All right, so you’ve got a lot figured out here. What are the channels we’re using? How are we distributing this content and getting it in front of people? Where’s the audience today in 2022?
Jake Karls: So, because we started with Instagram, it’s still a lot there. We have 82,000 followers but they’re a very engaged following, so they know everything about us. They know my mother, they know everyone. Then we moved a little bit to LinkedIn, and I think this is the… I hope I could add value here to anybody listening to this. LinkedIn is a sleeping giant. And what I mean by that is people think it’s all corporate, it’s job resumes, looking for this, looking for that. It’s not. People are on there looking for that stuff, but their attention is so focused that if you give them a hint of fun, a hint of humanized content associated, and I say this clearly, associated with corporate, meaning a business, I promise you you’ll thrive. I made a post yesterday talking about Walmart, that we’re available in Walmart Canada and how it was a big milestone, and what I did was I didn’t talk about the product, where it was in the store, and stuff like that. What I did was I spoke on like how proud my niece and nephew were to go buy the product when they saw it on the shelf there, and I brought the emotional storytelling.
Right now, it’s already at 42,000 views organically and it’s just going up. Every hour I see it go up hundreds of views. And what’s happening is guess what, now these 40-plus thousand people, they know where to get the product. And I think that that’s something special. LinkedIn is a powerhouse. All I have to say is it’s a powerhouse. Go on there, post about your life, be personal on it. Don’t just associate it with the corporate.
I understand if you’re in a job, there’s limitations. Some companies have limitations. Still, you could still figure out the creative way to work within those limitations. If you own your own company, post whatever the hell you want. It’s your own consequence and responsibility afterwards. But I could tell you that every day I post on LinkedIn, the viewage is minimum 10,000. This is on my personal. To 175,000 views organically. And then on the business, it’s 10 to 30.
So, I think there’s something there.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. That’ll work. I will take that kind of engagement any day of the week.
Jake Karls: It’s crazy. But I started a year and a half ago. I didn’t believe it. I was like, “People only post jobs on this shit.” And then suddenly I start to watch it and I was posting me dancing, like with no shirt on, and it was working. And people like the human, the authenticity again, that was not on that platform previous. So, we use Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok as our current platforms.
Kurt Elster: So, LinkedIn is like starved. The LinkedIn audience is just starved for some not just utterly cardboard, stale business content.
Jake Karls: Yes. Exactly. Don’t be cardboard and you’ll kill it on there.
Kurt Elster: All right, so the other… Typically, we think of LinkedIn as B2B, and that’s where it tends to do well. At least that’s we thought until right now. The other one that you’ve got going that’s similar is podcasting. I saw there’s a Mid-Day Squares podcast. And podcasting, again, really works extremely well for B2B. Not necessarily as well for D2C. What’s your experience with podcasting been?
Jake Karls: So, we just hit our… Yeah, the podcast is something that we try to stay consistent with. It’s very hard. You know the hard work that goes into it. It’s a lot of work, especially run an entire chocolate company, as well, at the same time. But that has grown to about 1,000 listens, our recent episodes, per episode, which is exciting. But the idea is we just go… It’s a roundtable communication for me and my partners to actually just throw a topic out and go deep with each other, and what it does, it allows our buyers, our people that work with us, our partners, our investors, to get into our heads and see what we’re actually thinking at a deeper level, because it could be 30 to an hour in terms of timing.
But for us, it’s just a supplement to the fandom and to understanding us. That’s all it is. And it’s growing a lot, to be honest with you, but again, we don’t have the full resources, time, energy, and capacity to give it the love that it deserves. I believe if we could give it the love, we would get those consistent five-plus thousand views over time. Listens, sorry, per time.
And I think that again, you can’t spread yourself too thin, either. Running an Instagram reality slow/TikTok and LinkedIn, and a podcast, it’s already spreading thin.
Kurt Elster: I love that you view your social media strategy, your content marketing strategy really as our reality show. I think that’s such a great way to put it. I heard someone else a couple years ago say all brands, successful brands today, are viewing themselves like TV stations. They are producing the content and they are distributing the content themselves. And those are the brands online that really do well. And you have taken that approach and then kind of tweaked it a little bit. I like that idea, like you got your own reality show. What are you gonna do with it? That’s brilliant.
So, you’ve got all these wins. You’re doing all this exciting stuff. Tell me where you’ve screwed up. Where’s a fail? What marketing channel hasn’t worked? What’s blown up in your face? Give me something. You’re too good.
Jake Karls: So, YouTube has failed for us completely and that’s something that we’re very sad about. We want to build that. We’re just not there right now. We’re not there and we failed at that. TikTok, we have not optimized, and I’m proud that we haven’t optimized, and what I mean by that is we don’t focus on the trends. We don’t focus on the stuff. We focus on again, what our thesis was since day one is give added value, long-term content that builds fandom. And I think that it’s fun to dance and everything, and we do that. Don’t get me wrong. I do that every day. That’s my personality. But if we’re gonna get the content we’re putting out, we’re focused on really great storytelling, so we believe that if we give the great storytelling over time we’ll be rewarded. And that could be 10 years from now, that could be three years from now. And some people say, “Well, why don’t you just go get the views?”
And it’s like, well, we don’t care to chase virality. It doesn’t benefit us to have someone watch our thing once and then walk away. We really want to have people here that want to be part of this journey. Because those people can go out there and get you lifetime customers. Another failure of ours in business is yeah, man. We struggle. Manufacturing, we struggle. Building a chocolate factory has been the hardest thing for us. We’ve gone over budget. We’re still not fully there three-and-a-half years later in terms of the fully automation, full automation, and it’s sucking out so much energy out of my two other partners that they can’t focus on what makes them great in terms of what actually they’re amazing at. And you know, like I said, we burn a ton of capital every single month. A ton of capital. We are still not profitable. And it makes it hard, like I think that people don’t talk about, like you said, the failures, and yeah, dude, we’ve hit a lot of failures. Probably… I’d like to say we’ve done more right than wrong, but we’re up there.
We’ve had heavy turnover in our company and that’s something we’re not upset about, because we’re looking to keep a strong company culture and if you don’t have the right fits, it could cancer your whole environment. So, yeah, we’re far from doing things perfectly and we’re far from experts at storytelling, either, by the way. We’re just having some sort of mini success in certain things that are helping us compound those little inches forward.
Kurt Elster: I like that approach to it, though. It’s you’re just looking for small incremental wins. The idea of like an overnight success, that’s like winning the lottery. It almost never happens. Everything you see, by the time the business is successful, and you’ve noticed it, it’s like there was 10 years of screwing around prior to then. Either building that business or failing at others and getting the experience to build the one that hits.
And so, I think there’s a lot of beneficial wisdom in viewing it the way you’re viewing it. With all that wisdom, because when you joined the business… It sounds like this has really been a trial by fire for you, where you’ve really figured out a lot both about marketing the business and yourself. If you had to go back in time and you’re starting this over, what would you do differently or what advice would you give yourself?
Jake Karls: I think two things. It took my time to appreciate therapy, so business therapy. Not just like how you speak about it, but with an actual therapist.
Kurt Elster: An actual therapist as opposed to me?
Jake Karls: Yeah. You’re a friendly therapist, though. And number two is every entrepreneur must block out the noise. You know, there’s a lot of noise out there. There’s a lot of awards. There’s a lot of press. There’s a lot of social media out there. And you can get caught up in comparing yourself, yard sticking yourself to everyone. Why does this person have that? Why does that company get this? Why are they on TV? Why are they winning at this retailer?
If you’re so focused on that, I could promise you 100% that you will break yourself down, and that’s what happened to me nine months ago. No, 12 months ago. I had an episode where I was too caught up as we were scaling this business. We were getting a lot of attention. The company was growing. We were entering the U.S. We were dominating Canada. And we were becoming like these popular characters in this show, right? This kind of mini show. And I’ll never forget, I was so focused on how do we get more noise, how do we get more attention, how do we do all this stuff? And it took me off what I was great at, which was making people feel something inside, spreading the good energy, and bringing them in. And I went through a sad part of my life, which I felt depressed for quite a while. Eight months. I couldn’t get my mojo.
And I worked with my therapist deeply to climb back up and now I realized you need horse blinders on. And your sole focus should be on what your strengths are, what makes you happy, what makes you great, and that’s it. And your customer base, your fanbase. And if you do that and you don’t worry about if you’re gonna win this award or that award, I promise you you will get everything you need in the long run. Everything comes. It’s a long game. Business is not a short game. The overnight successes are extremely rare. Most of them are 20, 30, 40 years, 10, 30, whatever it is. Good things take time.
Kurt Elster: Man, it’s great advice, and it’s just really refreshing to hear your approach, and hear someone say, “Hey, be yourself. Be confident and unapologetic about being yourself. Tell your story. Be real about it.” And give it enough time and experience, you will… Just because you keep showing up with it, you could be successful and happy at it.
And I think that it is just good, refreshing advice. I feel good. I am glad that I talked to you. I know this is part of your schtick, your persona, is getting people on board, hyped up, and to believe in you, and even being both a cynical individual and aware of what’s going on, I’m sold. I’m in. I need to get some of these chocolate bars. Where can I get them and where can I find you?
Jake Karls: Okay, well, I can always send you some, Kurt, but for anyone that wants to get, we’re located in the fridge of stores, so remember, we’re not where the bars typically are. We’re located in the refrigerated space. We’re available at Whole Foods, Sprouts, Wegmans, and then in Canada it’s in all the grocery stores here. And then on our website, so www.middaysquares.com. We have a store locator to find the stores, or you can order on our website or on Amazon.
And yeah, to find me personally, add me on LinkedIn. Jake Karls. Add me on Instagram, @JakeKarls. And add Mid-Day Squares on Instagram and LinkedIn as Mid-Day Squares. And TikTok.
Kurt Elster: Fabulous. Jake Karls, thank you so much.
Jake Karls: Thank you, Kurt. Appreciate you.