 Are you a good cook? No. I'm glad that I can pour a bowl of cereal. Ben Pasternet, CEO and founder of Simulate & Nugs. Are you ready to answer some questions? Let's do it. We've all heard of entrepreneurs dropping out of college, but I've never heard of one dropping out of middle school. Is that a badge of honor? Yeah, you know, I'm not complaining. Did you ever attend a prom? I did not. Do you want to attend a prom? I'm down, yeah. It'd be an interesting experience for sure. Can we set it up? You're 21 years old, and this is your third company. What made you switch from tech to food? Well, it's still tech. It's just a different type of tech. And after I sold my previous company, I had a seventh or eighth life crisis about what I wanted to work on for the rest of my life. It was fascinating to me how anti-technology food was, and it felt like a good opportunity to create a techno-optimistic nutrition company. What's the biggest difference between a tech startup and a food CPG one? They're actually super similar, right? I mean, generally all you have to do is create a really great product and scale that product. I think coming from software, the scalability aspect is much easier than scaling a physical product, so that would be the hottest thing, I think. Are you a genius? No. What's the Nug's elevator pitch? Nug's elevator pitch is just that it's a chicken nugget simulation made out of pom proteins and, you know, it tastes exactly like chicken, but it's better in every single way. Simulate's elevator pitch is essentially a techno-optimistic nutrition company. From a brand standpoint, were you ever concerned that although so much of our food is processed and uses technology that consumers don't necessarily want to eat technology? Yeah, totally. I mean, it's kind of like the bet we're willing to take, and initially, you know, it seems like we were very wrong, and when we first released the product, it was kind of like a bit of a negative reaction, but over time people have really come around to it. You don't find there's any odd of mixing tech and food? There's definitely an odd of mixing tech and food. I think historically food as a space is pretty anti-technology. When the integration of technology is generally rejected, like genetic modification, even food processing is essentially turning food A into food B, and that's been looked down upon quite a lot too. I think that as a result, our brand does look kind of weird, and it's doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing. Does good packaging make food taste better? No, there's a lot of terrible, I mean, really nice packaging with terrible food. How much of the success would you credit to your packaging? The packaging was initially done by this artist Ryder Rips. The core thesis was that we wouldn't use any green. I think definitely our branding has carried us a long way, and we've noticed our sales directly improve every time our product improves. What was the reason to put a live chicken on the front? It's kind of interesting because for whatever reason, all these other plant-based companies haven't done it, but by having a photo of the animal you're trying to simulate on the box, the first thing people think when they see the box is this is what they're about to eat, so it's kind of like, I guess, psychology. What's been the biggest difference between grocery and DTC? The biggest difference is with DTC you have a much greater opportunity to educate users on the product. Through our website, we have lots of information, versus in retail, all we have is our super weird packaging. I think actually the day before we shipped it to retail, someone noted that we have no product highlights on the box, and we're like, huh, that could be an issue. But it turned out that's made us really stand out on shelf and has gotten us a lot of attention on the retail level. Besides sales, what metrics do you look at to determine the health of your brand? NPS, I mean, we really look at all the product stuff, and in general, we're getting constant flow of feedback on our product every day through whether it's social or, you know, we have different tools that we've built as well. So really just seeing what people say about the product is what's most important. All right, we are on the Flow Code Flow Card. So Flow Code is our sponsor for the season. They've created a next-gen QR technology with mobile flow landing pages. And they will design a flow code for you that's appearing on screen now for people. Anyone could just take their phone out and instantly the camera will recognize it, bring it to a flow page. It could be content, coupons, whatever you'd want to do to help you connect the boxed CPG world as it's in a retail space to your brand experience. So knowing that that's going to happen, what would you love to have your flow code linked to? I'd love them to replicate Simulate.com's landing page. What's been the best day in company history and what's been the worst? Best day in company history, I think probably in Q1 2020, we were going from doing, you know, selling a couple boxes a day to hundreds of boxes a day really quickly and it seemed like every day we were beating out sales records. So that period of time felt really great. And the worst day in company history, in the early days, you know, everything sucks. So I think for the first year, probably a year in, things were really fuzzy and we had shipped our first version of the product and no one liked it because it wasn't that great and I also personally didn't feel like great. So it just everything was just not great. What acquisition channel has been the most successful for you? We were really, really good at Facebook ads in like, I guess the middle days and now what's best for us is basically everything. You have TikTok, still Facebook, Instagram. So we've gotten pretty good at all the social stuff. If you had $1 to spend where we just spend it. TikTok. What's your kryptonite? I think like, you know, imagine people, it's like, you're never good at it, right? You can always get better and better. So I always want to be better at that. Work from home or office? Office. I've learned a lot of brands have certain tribe that really helps them fuel their success. What's your tribe? We have this like, weirdly, we've grown this community. I think there's a lot of early followers that tried the product that wasn't great and have followed along with each version. And as a result, they feel like they've made some contributions to the product and I guess they have over time. We've gathered this community of people that were really passionate about the product and then additionally are so passionate about the memes and the Instagram and lots of excitement there. Who's your target audience? Lay monster, but everyone. I think that right now our core demographic is Gen Z and Millennials. How do you make sure your brand resonates and doesn't just check boxes? We never check boxes. I mean, we just do what's aligned for our vision and, you know, sometimes that may not, you know, resonate with consumers. And, you know, so far it seems like it has, but yeah, we're generally just kind of creating a visual identity for our vision. What's the biggest lesson you've learned so far? I think like, you know, throughout this whole process, I had to learn how to build a team and manage people and that was really hard for me. Did you not have to do that in your other tech companies? I did, but it was much smaller scale. So, you know, things kind of like work themselves out, but when it's larger, things break and it's like up to me to fix them. Are your parents proud? My parents are proud, yeah. Who do you aspire to be? I aspire to be me. Are you a good cook? No, I'm glad that I can pour a bowl of cereal. What keeps you up at night and what time do you wake up in the morning? Just ensuring that our product is getting better and better at a really rapid pace. That's the most important thing to me and ensuring that we have the talent to enable that. And I wake up at about 6.30. If you could control Z, one decision you've made at Nugs, what would it be? It's a tough question. It'd be more stuff internally than externally. Externally, you know, like we've definitely made mistakes, but you know, mistakes is how you get the learning. So I'm not sure if there's anything that we control Z. Ben Pasternak, CEO and founder of Simulink and Nugs. Thank you so much for coming on and answering some questions. Thanks for having me. I'm Ian Wishengrad and I'll see you next time on I'm With the Brand.