w/ Jake Mellman & Stephanie Moyal
When the world turned upside down, Jake Mellman and Stephanie Moyal found resilience in an unexpected place: the humble mushroom. Their spirited discussion with us captures the essence of their company, Troop, which crafts delightful functional mushroom gummies. Through their narrative, we learn how the global shift in health consciousness and Jake's personal aftermath of a ski accident converged with Stephanie's entrepreneurial spirit, leading to the birth of a brand that's not just about supplements but about seizing opportunity in the face of adversity.
Timestamps
(00:00) The Rise of Mushroom Supplements
(06:43) From Mushroom Enthusiasts to Business Owners
(17:22) Sourcing and Extracting Quality Mushrooms
(30:21) Strategies for Shopify Store Success
(45:20) Mastering Social Media Marketing and Troop
00:00 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Heads up. Friends, the unofficial Shopify podcast is made by indie entrepreneurs or indie entrepreneurs and may contain material not suitable for all audiences, like swearing or economics. Listener discretion is advised. My friends, welcome back to the unofficial Shopify podcast. Today we are going to talk about mushrooms. Yes, we're talking about mushrooms. We're talking about supplements. We've got another supplement episode.
00:44
But here's what's interesting If you go on Google Trends and you do a search for mushroom, you see the Google give it a score of 0 to 100, and it'll go from mid-30s up to 75-80 by this year. It happens over the last three years. And then if you do a mushroom supplement, the change becomes even more dramatic. So clearly, we're Google Trends as identifying a trend here, and that's a little bit of what I want to get into is how do these things happen, how do people get interested in a particular category and then how do they make it a supplement? Well, to figure that out, we have a couple who has done just that. We've got Jake Melman and Stephanie Moyal from Troup Tritroupcom and I want to hear that story. We're going to go over it with them. I'm your host, kurt Elster, jack Masty and Jake Stephanie. Thank you for joining me. Yeah, thank you for having us. Thanks for having us.
01:47
So okay, the website is Tritroupcom. What does it sell?
01:52 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
We are functional mushroom gummies. We have three products. We have a lion's mane, a reishi and a six-mushroom blend called the Super Troup.
02:04 - Kurt Elster (Host)
And I like the name, but I saw in the footer of the website Troup is what.
02:11 - Jake Mellman (Interviewee)
Troup means a group of mushrooms is the name for Troup. So that's how we came up with that, because we really wanted to build community into the ethos of our company. So Troup is a group of mushrooms, it's a troop of mushrooms. So we like to say we're all one big Troup.
02:30 - Kurt Elster (Host)
So a murder of crows, a troop of mushrooms.
02:33 - Jake Mellman (Interviewee)
Yes.
02:35 - Kurt Elster (Host)
When did you start?
02:36 - Jake Mellman (Interviewee)
Troup. We launched Troup at the beginning of 2022. But we started working on it about a year and a half before that. During the pandemic is a time that our collective consciousness really was shifted towards health and wellness. It was forcibly shifted there, because health and wellness was all we had during that time. So, yeah, that really got us thinking about it. It got a lot of people thinking about it and mushrooms kind of had this resurgence during that time.
03:13 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Yeah, it feels truthy. It feels like, if I'm remembering that correctly, that was the case. I remember there were a lot of supplements, a lot of just health-focused stuff at that time, for sure. And okay, how did the two of you cross paths?
03:31 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
Jake and I are cousins, so we crossed paths a long time ago.
03:36 - Kurt Elster (Host)
At Thanksgiving yeah.
03:39 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
Thanksgiving, you know Friday night dinners. But yeah, the story starts because at the very beginning of COVID, Jake got into a ski accident and broke his knee and Ouch yes, yeah, I know it's really bad.
03:57 - Jake Mellman (Interviewee)
It was a total leg break, shatter whole thing.
04:01 - Kurt Elster (Host)
How much hardware is in your leg?
04:03 - Jake Mellman (Interviewee)
A good amount actually. Yeah, I got a scar that goes halfway up my leg.
04:11 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Okay, so you were in a skiing accident and then mushrooms.
04:16 - Jake Mellman (Interviewee)
Yep skiing accident led to just my whole life collapsing. From the ski accident I was running another business that totally collapsed at that moment and I moved in with my parents because I couldn't take care of myself. My leg was broken. My business was going under. It was a whole terrible situation. Stephanie moved in with my parents to help take care of me. She was in the hospitality industry that also was shut down, so moved in to my parents' house and for a number of weeks we just watched Netflix like everyone else.
05:04 - Kurt Elster (Host)
What was the show we all watched? Tiger King.
05:06 - Jake Mellman (Interviewee)
Yeah, we did.
05:07 - Kurt Elster (Host)
We did it outside.
05:10 - Jake Mellman (Interviewee)
Yeah, we watched all of the. We went through all of the phases, the baking phase Stephanie went through that a bit.
05:18 - Kurt Elster (Host)
I learned to bake pizza. That was my baking phase. I still make my own dough.
05:23 - Jake Mellman (Interviewee)
Sorry I was going to say one day. Stephanie just said hey, do you want to grow some mushrooms with me? I said, sure, I didn't know all that much about mushrooms. That's what really got us started. We started growing mushrooms in the closet like any traditional mushroom story.
05:46
Yeah, exactly, we really discovered this whole universe, this fungi verse, which has been incredible to learn about, and all of these health benefits and functions that can heal your brain and your body, and all these different things. We just found so much passion in it and Stephanie could tell you more of her side of the story here, but yeah, it just really took off from there.
06:17 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Stephanie, let's hear your half.
06:18 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
Yeah, I just remember asking Jake if he wanted to grow mushrooms and he said yes, and then we started and we taught ourselves pretty much everything. Reddit was a really big resource and just random blogs, because there's really not that much information out there when it comes to this, or at the time there wasn't as much. So, yeah, it was just really fun and it just really organically changed our lives. We didn't start this with the intention of creating a company. We just did it because it sounded really interesting and cool and fun. And then we started sharing what we were learning and loving with our community, and everyone wanted some, and so we were like, how do we share this in a way that really resonates with us?
07:02
And when we went to our local Erwan Whole Foods stores, we saw that everything was very mystical and ceremonial when it came to mushrooms and it was almost like not approachable, because you would see these elixirs and these potions and all of this stuff and it just kind of felt like, okay, I'm not ready for this or I don't want this gross tasting tincture or whatever. So we just decided, or Jake had the idea of doing gummies and we started making our own gummies and failed miserably. Yeah, we made horrible, horrible gummies and kept trying and then ended up hiring a gummy scientist to actually create our product for us and then, yeah, the rest is kind of history.
07:50 - Kurt Elster (Host)
So we've talked to probably two other people on the show who've made manufactured gummy supplements. And yeah, getting gummy supplements it seems like a good idea, but you're just adding so much complexity to that supplement process. You know, on top of like first you're going to get supplement right, but putting it in a capsule, like that's just a manufactured thing. I buy and I get powder and put it in a capsule versus like gummy, and we're just really stepping up complexity here.
08:19 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
Oh yeah.
08:21 - Kurt Elster (Host)
To your point earlier. I heard this before, but I googled it and there are several studies that say neuroplasticity and psychedelics correlate and so silo si-sibin in mushrooms will can potentially promote synaptic plasticity. So you mentioned neuroplasticity before. What is it?
08:47 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
It's basically your brain creating new connections and new ways of thinking, and that's with silo-sibin mushrooms, which is the magic mushrooms. So we're on the functional side, so no psychoactive compounds, but on the silo-sibin side we find it really interesting because we do think it's part of the future of medicine. For sure, when you look at depression and anxiety addiction, your brain is thinking in these patterns, in these same ways of thinking, so you're just repeating these thought patterns over and over and over, and doing silo-sibin enables you to think of things differently. The best metaphor I ever heard was if you imagine a mountain and you're skiing down the mountain and you're creating these grooves. Those are the grooves that your brain is thinking. So when you do mushrooms, it's a new snowfall on the mountain and you're able to create a new path down the mountain.
09:46 - Kurt Elster (Host)
From what I've read, that's an accurate analogy.
09:53
Unknowingly, you get stuck in these thought loops and oftentimes that's what depression and anxiety could be, and being able to break those can get you out of these familiar patterns that you didn't even know were causing you these issues. But that's a psychoactive version of mushrooms. Those are magic mushrooms. I take those and my curtains turn into a beautiful rainbow pattern. It's pretty consistent that my curtains do this. These are like some curtains when you're on mushrooms. Very fun to those curtains. But that's not what you sell. You're selling non-psychoactive. So think like THC versus CBD.
10:30 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
You've got the CBD version of mushrooms.
10:36 - Jake Mellman (Interviewee)
So the reason we say it's different than that is that you have the cannabis plant and you are pulling out different compounds from it. These are completely different mushrooms altogether. We're not taking the psychoactive mushrooms and taking one compound and leaving out the others. These are totally different mushrooms. So mushrooms are actually not plants. This is a common misconception that people think mushrooms are plants. Mushrooms are part of the fungi kingdom, which is its own kingdom entirely. There's the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom and the mushroom fungi kingdom. Yeah, exactly.
11:15 - Kurt Elster (Host)
I made a whole movie about it with Chris Pratt. It was great.
11:17 - Jake Mellman (Interviewee)
I know we're trying to ride the hype of all the different mushroom content out there like that because it gets it, powers you up. It literally does Taking the mushroom. Yeah, these are completely separate mushrooms than psychoactive mushrooms. So, for instance, like Lyonsmane Lyonsmane is a mushroom that it actually looks kind of like a brain, it's shaped like a brain which and it's been used for thousands of years actually in medicines all around the world to reduce inflammation of the body, to improve focus, to improve gut health, all these different things that people have used these mushrooms for that are not psychoactive but they are really powerful in these powerful medicines and, yeah, they're completely separate from the psychoactive mushrooms.
12:08 - Kurt Elster (Host)
All right, let's go back. You're both at home in your own mushrooms, in your parents' closet. How do we get to business out of this? Like it, you're like all right, then you're like we should put these in gummies. And is the business decision occur Before by the time you're putting them in gummies? I have to think this is we're starting to try and build a product here.
12:28 - Jake Mellman (Interviewee)
Yeah, we were building a product, but we never thought about it in terms of a business. Honestly, we just wanted to have a product to share with our community because a lot of people wanted them.
12:39 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
Yeah, I remember the turning point actually. So Jake and I were just kind of continuing these steps, just serving our community, our friends and family with these gummies, and Jake actually was still working on his other company. And I went to go see one of my friends and his dad is a very successful entrepreneur and I was telling him about what we were doing and just you know we were. I said we were taking things really slow and just seeing what happened. And he said to me you guys have a really incredible opportunity right now and you have a really incredible product and you need to run, don't walk, you need to run. And I remember leaving his house and calling Jake in the car and I was like, jake, we need to run, we need to write a business plan and get this going and we need to run. And he's like, oh shit, okay, let's do it. And so that was kind of the catalyst, honestly, of us really getting things together and making this more of a professional undertaking.
13:42 - Kurt Elster (Host)
You needed that external validation. Oftentimes it takes like you can have a thought, but we all second guess ourselves. We're all our own worst enemy. It took having someone it sounded like a sub-year, respected, who was a business person, saying, yes, you should do this. And when you have someone you know who's done the thing you're trying to do, go, yeah, do that. Suddenly, you know that it lights a fire, doesn't it? Yeah, now, once you've said, all right, we're going to do this, let's make this a business. Where do you go from there? Right, and then you've got. You've got the mushroom experience belief in thoughts. You're trying to figure out gummies when do we? And you've got someone you respect who believes in you.
14:22 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
Yeah.
14:23 - Kurt Elster (Host)
What's next?
14:25 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
So we wrote a business plan and then we started working on how do we bring this product to life. So there's so many different components to this. There's the ingredients of the products itself. They're sourcing the mushrooms itself. We ended up going with a custom formulation because we wanted complete control and quality over all of our ingredients, and that proved to be extremely difficult. However, we did it regardless.
14:54
I think, looking back, we chose the path of most resistance. Honestly, most companies wouldn't do what we did. We got a custom mold. We sourced all of our ingredients ourselves. We sourced our mushroom products ourselves. We researched pretty much every single mushroom farm in America, every wholesale mushroom extractor, and we did testing on everything to make sure that we got the best product. And then there's, you know, the bottle. We wanted our bottle. We wanted everything to be sustainable and no virgin plastics. So we sourced 100% recycled plastic bottles, 100% recycled plastic caps. We wanted to make sure they were printed with sustainable inks the whole nine yards. All of our boxes are made from recycled cardboard. We really just wanted to put out a product that we could stand behind and did do with integrity. So it was all of the pieces. And then you know, you have to find your fulfillment center and all of those things. So it was just basically taking it one step at a time and then doing each step or finding the best partner for each step.
16:00 - Kurt Elster (Host)
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17:36 - Jake Mellman (Interviewee)
It's like the Wild West of mushrooms right now, like people are just putting all kinds of stuff in and calling in mushrooms. So it is definitely important to know the difference and that's something that I've been looking for in my experience and that's something that we want to be educating people on. And since neither of us really came from E-Com marketing backgrounds, we didn't know how to do that in the beginning and now we're starting to find the word and actually doing that customer education. But basically, some major differences that you want to look for are what's called fruiting body versus mycelium. I would say this is the first major difference you want to look for in a mushroom product.
18:20
The fruiting body is the part of the mushroom that you would think of when you think of a mushroom Like it grows above the ground. You see it, it looks like a mushroom and then underneath that is called the mycelium and that is like the root structure of the mushroom and the fruiting body grows on that root structure. So in the wild that's usually underground. It's these massive, massive areas of mycelium that grow underground and that pop up these little fruiting body mushrooms. So what a lot of companies have done now is they will grow mushrooms.
19:00
Mushrooms need like something to eat, some kind of like grain or food some, let's say, rice they can grow it on. So they will grow the mycelium on this grain or rice and then from that you get the fruiting body. So the fruiting body grows, but the fruiting body is maybe like 10% of the mass of all the mycelium. So what they will do is they will take the entire block of mycelium with all the rice in it and maybe like one or two fruiting body mushrooms and they'll throw the whole thing in a blender and they'll blend it all up and then they'll call that mushrooms, because it's mycelium, mushroom blend.
19:39 - Kurt Elster (Host)
So what you're really getting they're putting their thumb on the scale.
19:43 - Jake Mellman (Interviewee)
Yeah, exactly yeah. So what you're really getting is a ton of rice and starch and stuff that has no bio available compounds or any health benefits whatsoever. But it's significantly cheaper. It's like 10x cheaper because the mass is so much versus what you get, versus the fruiting body. So when you get fruiting body you know that you're getting only the real mushrooms, like you're only getting mushrooms. There's no mycelium, there's no grain, there's no rice.
20:13
So that's the, I would say, the first and biggest thing to look for and that's what our company does is we use the whole fruiting body and then on top of that you need an extraction. So a lot of these mushrooms have these tough cell walls that hold in all of the bio available compounds. So what you actually can't digest a lot of the, a lot of the compounds from the mushrooms just by ingesting it straight. So if you were to eat like Ray sheep, for instance, some people would even get like a stomach ache because you can't digest it. So it needs to be extracted and there's multiple levels of extraction that are necessary to pull out all of the beneficial materials in the mushrooms. So we always recommend at least a two X, two times extraction, a double extraction, a hot water and alcohol extraction and we go even further into a triple extraction just to make it even more concentrated and to pull out even more active compounds from the mushrooms. So I would say those two are the most important to look for in a mushroom product.
21:33 - Kurt Elster (Host)
How are you doing the extract? You said a hot water and alcohol triple extraction.
21:38 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
Yeah. So each mushroom is, before the extraction, heated up to a temperature that has been proven by studies, which temperature it needs to be Like, all six mushrooms that we use have a different temperature. So they're heated up and then there's a hot water alcohol extraction to get the fat and water soluble compounds out, and then they do an ultrasonic process as well. Our extractors actually are getting a patent on their methods. They won't release it until their patent is out, but it is patent pending and proprietary. And not only are they getting out two of the most common bioavailable compounds known as beta-glucans, polysaccharides and triturbenes, but they're also getting hundreds of other compounds per each mushroom. So there's so much more to the mushroom than what we even know right now. The testing industry of mushrooms is evolving every day because we're constantly learning new things to test about mushrooms and all of these new bioavailable compounds.
22:42 - Kurt Elster (Host)
So we need we got a source of quality mushroom which also includes like we can't have filler with it. Because we need the core product, because we're interested in we're putting this into gummies, we need to extract the good stuff but we need to do a broad, full spectrum extraction of possible and without destroying the things we're extracting. So I mean hot water at 175 degrees Fahrenheit sounds about right.
23:09 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
Exactly.
23:10 - Kurt Elster (Host)
It's like water alcohol mix. Now, once we get that, aha, we have our active ingredients. Now you've got to get that into a gummy. How big a pain in the ass is that.
23:23 - Jake Mellman (Interviewee)
Huge.
23:23 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
It's a huge one actually.
23:26 - Jake Mellman (Interviewee)
Yeah, it would be much easier to just sell this straight, Like you said. You know, we just put this in a capsule, but they would be or sell it straight that it would be the tincture.
23:36 - Kurt Elster (Host)
That would be a tincture that's like. That's intimidating. Yes, it's inconvenient to measure and dose.
23:42 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
Yeah, and it just doesn't taste very good.
23:45 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Probably not.
23:46 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
So we went through maybe six manufacturers within a year before we landed on the one that we're currently with. It almost crippled us. We almost went out of business with all of these different horror stories. We had our first company tell us that they were gonna be able to do it no problem, and then, you know, we were waiting for like six months and then they needed a special piece of equipment and then the equipment came and they still couldn't do it. So we left them and it's just a huge saga and we actually got it's how a lot of people's manufacturing experiences go.
24:23
I mean, you know heard similar stories of this show many times.
24:26 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Like it's so hard.
24:30 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
It's so hard cause. When you're small, these companies don't really care about you. And when you're doing a custom formula, you are, we're doing it on such low quantities that or we were doing it on such low quantities that it didn't, you know, incentivize these manufacturers to put us first, they didn't really care about us, unless you're ordering millions and millions of pieces, you're kind of nothing to these companies. So you have to find someone that actually believes in your vision and cares about your product, which is what we finally did. But at first, I mean, we got courted by a company. They wanted us to go to them. They found us and they ended up signing a huge mushroom competitor and completely taking us off their production queue without telling us. And we were waiting for a month, sold out of product, just waiting for them to make it, and they were meanwhile producing our competitors' products.
25:24 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Now, this is not an unusual like that sounds bad. It sounds bad, but it's not an unusual story for people who've worked, who've been in similar positions, working with manufacturers. How'd you finally find one? That's good. You said it was like number six.
25:39 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
So we didn't know this. But there's actually brokers in the industry that help you find manufacturers. So I had reached out to a friend who has a mushroom farm and he said he knew someone and he was acting as a broker. I didn't realize that he was trying to actually make money off of our deal. So he upsold us on the bottle cost. But then I forget oh yeah, we had another manufacturer it's so convoluted. But we had another manufacturer who wanted to help us but couldn't, and he said go to this company, they should be able to help you. And then that company was like oh, I just got your PO, your purchase order, on my desk. This is the price that I can give it to you for, and it was cheaper than my friend who had preferred us. So luckily we got to the source. But yeah, it's been good ever since. But we really worked for it.
26:36 - Kurt Elster (Host)
And that's the. So really, you had to go through just trials of hey, everything they say they could do it, we think they could do it. The samples look good, go, and then it's like, oh well, you got to wait. Oh, we missed that deadline again. Oh, we need this. Oh well, we have to manufacture some for someone bigger than you. So you just got bumped and you go through those. By the time the third round, you're already looking for the next manufacturer.
27:05 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
And not only that, but you're shipping all of your stuff everywhere.
27:09 - Jake Mellman (Interviewee)
All your ingredients? Yeah, because we also use all custom ingredients, which was also a nightmare, so we're shipping our custom ingredients back and forth across the country. Manufacturer, manufacturer or bottles and our stupid molds that we use.
27:26 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
Oh my God, yeah, how should the?
27:28 - Kurt Elster (Host)
molds cost to get made.
27:30 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
I'm in fear of saying that, oh, I'm gone with thousands.
27:32 - Jake Mellman (Interviewee)
Yeah, it was like $30,000. And we're the only company with molds in the entire industry, because it makes sense why it's so difficult. It's extremely difficult to have a custom shape of your gummy. So our gummies, you'll see, have this little mushroom stamp on them.
27:53 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
Yeah, it looks good yeah, thank you I appreciate that.
27:57 - Jake Mellman (Interviewee)
Yeah, it has cost us hell to get that. And you know what we really wanted at the beginning. Why we did that was because, like I said, it's the wild west of mushrooms and people are just putting garbage in their products. So we wanted a stamp a literal stamp on every gummy showing that, hey, if you see this stamp, it means there's quality mushrooms in here. So when you see this stamp, you know you're getting high quality, trusted, tested mushrooms.
28:28
And that was, yeah, an extreme challenge to do, because every manufacturer just wants to use their own molds that they already have that fit their setup and it's way cheaper and easier to just use the standard gummies that they already have and that's why everyone else has that. Basically, everyone else in the mushroom gummy industry right now has the same gummy. They're actually using almost all of them the exact same gummy, not even like a different formula, the actual same gummy, and they just brand it differently. And so we're like the one and only company. We have our own custom molds and flavors and everything. So we hope customers will will see that at some point here.
29:14 - Kurt Elster (Host)
So the you'll hopefully yeah you never know. Well, it's like it's up to you to tell the story. What's so hard about it?
29:22 - Jake Mellman (Interviewee)
Yeah, we've not been very good at storytelling as of yet, but we're starting to really get into that and share our journey.
29:31 - Kurt Elster (Host)
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30:37 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
Yeah, we're on PUSH, which is Kourine Kordashian's platform. We are on a lot of different platforms like that. Lovecom is another one, chillcom there's so many marketplaces that we're on, and we're also sold on Amazon, and then we have some retail in Southern California as well.
30:58 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Oh, we got retail going on as well.
31:00 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
Yeah, we quickly learned not to expand that too fast.
31:04 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Yeah, what's the struggle with retail.
31:07 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
It's just such a volume play. You really have to be selling in such large quantities and you have to go into a big store like Whole Foods, for instance. You need brand recognition because they'll require you to sell a certain amount of product a month. So you need people going and looking for your product or having seen your product and having some sort of brand identity because you need to support a certain velocity, like people buying X-money products per month.
31:32 - Kurt Elster (Host)
So we decided yeah, they want that sell-through rate.
31:34 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
Yeah, and if you don't meet it?
31:35 - Kurt Elster (Host)
they're like, okay, get off the shelf.
31:37 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
Exactly, and so we actually never even tried to go into those larger stores because we wanted to be prepared. And you have to also give out so much free products when you go into those stores you have to free fill. So your first order usually you have to give for free in the stores.
31:56 - Jake Mellman (Interviewee)
Yeah, and there not going to be like hundreds of thousands of dollars of inventory free that you must fill their stores?
32:03 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Man.
32:04 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
Yeah, and then you have to pay for marketing as well. You have to pay a marketing budget to the stores. So we heard very early on that this has crippled other direct-to-consumer brands. So we decided we were just going to go to some strategic Southern California retailers, because that's where we are. We're both in LA and Jake and I have done so many in-store demos where we bring our setup to the stores and we talk to customers and we share our story, share about the product, and it's really impactful. However, it's very difficult to scale that and it's expensive to scale that, so we wanted to keep it very, very small. So then, as we scale digitally and our brand presence grows, then we can start to transfer that to in-store retail presence.
32:50 - Kurt Elster (Host)
I love when people get to go sell their products in-store Not in-store like at events usually.
32:57 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
Face-to-face.
32:58 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Yeah, what are some of the. Is there anything that has surprised you, that you learned when you get to talk to people one-on-one, face-to-face like that about your product?
33:08 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
Hmm, that's a good question.
33:11 - Jake Mellman (Interviewee)
I guess it wasn't really a surprise, but the amount of people who asked, are these psychedelic? And I was like, would I be giving this to you in a store on a Tuesday afternoon if they were psychedelic? I always found interesting. But yeah, that's the number one thing that people wonder like, oh, is this psychedelic mushrooms? I'm like, unfortunately not. I wish I could be, but not yet.
33:38 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Yeah, and on your homepage I see that is. That's an FAQ question, I believe.
33:43 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
Yeah, yeah.
33:44 - Kurt Elster (Host)
FAQ. Wait, these are mushrooms. They're not going to make me trip right. That's on the site. Yeah, I imagine you get that a lot.
33:51 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
Oh yeah.
33:51 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Yeah, so how did you? The hard part is going zero to 100. How do you get the first 100 orders Like where's the first order coming from Early on? How'd you get the word out?
34:06 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
I think it's a lot of the network effect. I mean, we have a huge family, so it was definitely our family really supporting us, especially at the beginning, buying the products, telling their friends, all that kind of stuff. We did a lot of events at the beginning of the company as well. Like Jake said, we did not come from E-com background, so we got to the online advertising game later Then, looking back, we probably would have done but yeah, yeah, focused all on E-com If we could go back, not to the in-person.
34:43 - Jake Mellman (Interviewee)
Stuff was great, it was fun and everything, but it just doesn't move the needle at all in terms of sales.
34:52 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
Yeah, we thought people would really want to try the product before buying it, so we really invested in sampling and in demos and events and things like that. However, the consumer mindset is shifting. People are buying perfumes online without smelling them. People are buying couches online without sitting on them, so people are really accustomed to buying things without trying them. And we do have a money back guarantee on our website, so if you don't like it for any reason, we'll refund you, so it's a risk-free purchase and so, yeah, we learned that. I mean, the thing that I will credit us to is that we failed a lot, but we feel fast, we learn fast and we just keep going and we iterate and we learn, and I think that is what ultimately makes someone successful is their ability to learn from their mistakes and just keep going.
35:44 - Kurt Elster (Host)
For sure, on the site you offer these with subscription right.
35:48 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
Yes.
35:50 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Have you found selling subscriptions to be harder than you thought Sometimes yeah, Sometimes no.
35:58 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
Yeah, I would say no, we really don't push so hard on the subscription aspect. People opt for it. We have a really great retention rate with our customers, which is showing us that customers love our product. They stay with us for over six months on average, which is huge for the industry. And, yeah, we just have a really—I think it's been more of a natural thing that we do want to push a little bit harder.
36:28 - Kurt Elster (Host)
It just represents such a larger commitment. So it's a much bigger ask of the customer. Subscription versus one-time purchase. So I think it's harder than people realize to sell subscriptions. But a consumable good that you like. For the right person the convenience of that subscription is like an absolute must have. Do you know what app you use for subscriptions, out of curiosity?
36:54 - Jake Mellman (Interviewee)
I use Recharge, recharge.
36:56 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Recharge the classic. That's a big one.
36:58 - Jake Mellman (Interviewee)
The classic yeah.
37:00 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Any other beneficial Shopify apps or tools. This site looks really good. Thank you, I built it oh really I assumed this was an agency that did it. It's an excellent job, just pick up and learn.
37:14 - Jake Mellman (Interviewee)
That's basically all this business is. You just literally pick something up, learn it and then do it. I think that's necessary. I think it was only until I actually learned how to build the website myself when the website started performing well. We did have an agency doing it before and it was not working. It was full of bugs and issues and everything. Then, when I started doing it, I was able to actually really learn what we needed and how the actual website funnel worked and all the different apps. There definitely are some incredible apps. I would say Rebuy is the single.
37:55 - Kurt Elster (Host)
I was going to say, yeah, I just added an item to cart, drawcart popped open and I know it well. I was like that's Rebuy Smart Cart.
38:01 - Jake Mellman (Interviewee)
Yeah, rebuy I would say, is for any listeners is the single essential tool that you must have on your Shopify store. It will significantly increase revenue and average order value and everything Other than that. I'm trying to think of any other ones that are really critical.
38:26 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
What about that one that texts the customers lively or lifetime-ly, or something like that?
38:33 - Jake Mellman (Interviewee)
Yeah, that one is pretty good. There are a number of solutions doing this now, but it's like an anonymous abandoned cart text message company called Live Recover. You know that.
38:49 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Yeah, I've not personally used it, but other people have been like oh, have you seen this? This is really good.
38:54 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
What does it do?
38:55 - Kurt Elster (Host)
exactly. Let's just go ahead and give them the free plug while we're here.
38:59 - Jake Mellman (Interviewee)
Sure, yeah, if they hear this, maybe they can give us a discount. They have a massive data set. They probably work with the data provider and they match. When someone comes with cookies on, they match their web presence to this other data provider and that allows them to get their phone number in a way that they've already consented to receive marketing on that phone number. They will then be able to send a text message to that person. If that person has anonymous visitors on your website, they go to checkout and then they abandon cart. It's not everyone, but it is some people. They will send them an SMS message and just say hey, this is Blake from Troop. Are you interested in this product? Let's see if we can get you a discount. It has a honestly a really good conversion rate. I think it's like 18% of the people that they message come back and convert. It's been really great. We're now trying out some new solutions for this. We apparently could send even more abandoned carts and we'll see. So far, the new solutions have not panned out. This one's been good.
40:22 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Yeah, it's a category called customer identity resolution where, through a data broker, they're able to figure out this is probably who this is. Retentioncom will do it with email. We've done that. It's been successful, so I would assume that live recover would be similarly successful. That makes sense. Currently, how do you market the products? What do you find are the general effective channels or strategies here?
40:54 - Jake Mellman (Interviewee)
Really, meta is the biggest channel, for sure.
40:59 - Kurt Elster (Host)
We all live and die by.
41:00 - Jake Mellman (Interviewee)
Zuckerberg yeah, he holds our lives in his hands for real. When the algorithm changes, the CPMs or the cost to reach 1,000 people goes up, our efficiency immediately decreases. It really is so just in the hands of the algorithm. Which is the worst part about this is that it is so much in the hands of the algorithm. That is another reason, actually, why we're going on all of these podcasts is to start getting word out to a different group of people educated listeners, who are willing to spend an hour listening and learning about something, versus the quick meta like take this and you'll feel this.
41:52
I do see, and it's across the industry, that the efficiency of Meta ads is declining all the time and it's getting harder and harder to be successful on Meta. If you can be successful on Meta, if you can crack the Meta code, you have basically limitless potential because the market is just so massive on Meta. If you can crack that, you can just literally one click jump from 100,000 a month to a million a month to 10 million a month. There's just so much available market. That's what we've been focusing Basically. Our entire efforts around lately is to cracking the Meta code.
42:37 - Kurt Elster (Host)
A lot of trial and error. How's it been going for you?
42:40 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
Trial and error.
42:41 - Jake Mellman (Interviewee)
Yeah, it's cruel. It's just like funnel, funnel, hocking and tweaks. You need the right landing page with the right message, with the right ad, with the right audience. There's like a million things to test for test. You just got to make your way through.
42:59 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
Keep going. When you do better on Meta, you do better on Amazon, you do better across all your different platforms. It really is the crown jewel.
43:12 - Kurt Elster (Host)
In five years from now. Where do you see this going?
43:16 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
We want to be the household name of mushroom products. We chose our branding very specifically because we wanted to be accessible. As I mentioned before, everything to us felt very earthy or ceremonial, but true. We wanted to be easy to relate to Somewhere in the middle that people wouldn't be scared to try delicious gummy. We want to be leaders in education. We see us having way more products, really expanding our gummy line In five years, maybe even branching out into other categories as well.
43:52 - Kurt Elster (Host)
I have faith. If you've gotten this far, this thing looks really, the product looks good, it sounds good. You faced quite a few challenges along the way that you were able to get through. I see no reason why you can't keep going. But for someone else who's listening and they're not as far along as you, maybe they're in the health space, maybe not, but what advice would you give them based on your experience so far?
44:24 - Jake Mellman (Interviewee)
Learn marketing. Learn it as early as you can. I would get Russell Bronson's book ClickFunnels the ClickFunnels Secrets. I would read that before you even start. I think that would have saved immense amounts of headache. And then I would say, yeah, meet people in your industry. Talk to people who are successful, take their advice and model what they did exactly. I mean, try to do exactly what they're doing. If they're not out doing live demos all the time, don't go out and do live demos all the time. If they're just focusing on marketing, focus on marketing. They have probably gone through hell to figure out what they're doing now. So I think you could learn a lot just by talking to people in the industry. Anything else, steph.
45:21 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
Yeah, I would say choose one thing and do it well. We try to do everything at the same time Organic Instagram, organic TikTok, paid TikTok, all these meta ads. Definitely pick one channel and master it and then move on to the next channel and also learn to do everything yourself, because we delegate it out a lot and when you don't have something mastered, I personally don't believe you should be delegating it out. So, pick one thing, do it well, master it yourself and then you can delegate it out and then move on to master the next channel.
46:00 - Kurt Elster (Host)
I love that advice because it's practical, it's applicable and it's real. The issue is you're like, well, I'll delegate this, but you don't know what you're talking about. It makes it really tough to communicate on it or to judge the result.
46:13 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
Exactly.
46:14 - Kurt Elster (Host)
When you're comfortable with it, then you could delegate it out, and then it works. You're comfortable with it, you understand it, you could speak to it, you could see that it just started. It makes sense.
46:24 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
Exactly.
46:25 - Kurt Elster (Host)
Yeah, no, that's good advice. If I wanted to try Troop, I wanted to experience in mushrooms, the hottest superfood for myself. Where do I go?
46:39 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
Trytroopcom, so T-R-Y-T-R-O-O-Pcom, and we actually have a package on its way to you, oh my gosh.
46:48 - Jake Mellman (Interviewee)
thank you yeah.
46:50 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
So for your listeners who would like to try, we're offering a 20% promotion on official 20 on trytroopcom.
46:59 - Kurt Elster (Host)
And I will include that in the show notes Excellent, perfect, stephanie. Do you have anything to add, or should we end it there?
47:06 - Stephanie Moyal (Interviewee)
No, I think that's great.