 This is Southern Postural Fund. Research suggests that people reach peak brain health at around age 22. By 37, memory begins to decline, and it's estimated that around 22% of people age 71 and older have mild cognitive impairment. But what's really interesting is that people don't typically begin taking brain supplements until they're late 50s. This is exactly the conversation that today's guest, Patrick Schwarzenegger had with his mom, Maria Shriver, when he moved back in with her during the pandemic lockdowns. He noticed that Maria kicked off every morning with a variety of supplements and a protein bar. This got him thinking, why not combine the supplements with the bar that she was already eating? Thus, Mosh was born. Mosh is tasty, adaptogen-powered brain fuel for all ages. In today's episode, we talk with Patrick about what it's like launching a nutritional bar, which is notoriously one of the most competitive CPG categories. Why his dad would tell him and his siblings to sleep faster and how being an early investor in Blaise Pizza showed him the signs of what was to come. All right, welcome to the podcast on today's show. We're talking to Patrick, co-founder of Mosh. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. People don't know. What is Mosh? What does the company do? Mosh is a mission-driven company aimed to educate consumers about what they eat impacts their brain health. Our first product right here is our brain bar. It's kind of an on-the-go, superfood, nutrient-dense protein bar with a bunch of brain-healthy nutrients in it, and every purchase helps fund Alzheimer's research. What I love about your story is you... Are you investing? Maybe. We'll see. We'll see. Are you raising? Yeah, we actually are about to. You're always raising. We're not always raising, but we are about to raise. Well, maybe. Maybe. What I love about your story is, one, I know you were an investor. You started off investing in different companies. And I think most people have the trajectory of they start their own companies if they get lucky and make some capital. They become an investor, and that informs them of how to run a business even better than they originally thought. And what I like about it is you're coming at it from a point of, here you are having invested in some companies, and so you can kind of get a sense of what works, what doesn't work, and then you decide to jump into the pool and sort of do this. But why this company? Well, I know, obviously, it tugs out some heartstrings for you personally, but just give people a window into the mission. Well, I guess I'll backtrack a little bit about starting of how I kind of started as an investor and why I started as investing versus starting my own company. I mean, I really had no idea what I was doing. As an investor? As an investor. Whereas what I was doing in my life, I mean, I started this when I was 15 in high school. I had started another clothing company called Project 360 that I sold, and I made a little bit of money, and I got really into exercising and working out, and then going to the grocery store. I was obsessed with going to the grocery store and just looking at the aisles and seeing what was new. But I got really obsessed with nutritional labels and what was in my products that I was eating, and I was always looking for the healthier alternative, more protein, less sugar, more transparent ingredients, and I couldn't really find them. This was 15 years ago. A lot's changed in the last decade with the food and beverage sector. So I was like, you know what? I made a little bit of money on this clothing company. I'm gonna go out and try to find some companies that are tackling this better for you health and wellness industry. What year was this? This was 2000, I mean, this was, I was in high school, so I'm 29 now, 14 years ago. Okay, so kind of early for the better for you market, we'll say, yeah. Yeah, this was like vitamin water was popping off, and like. Which has a ton of sugar in it. Yeah, which is exactly. And so I met this guy, I was doing an internship for this guy, John Davis, and he had just sold out of a company called Wetzel's Pretzels, and the team from Wetzel's Pretzels was making a company called Blaze Pizza. And I was in on the meeting and they were positioning it as this more transparent pizza company and allowed the customers to customize their pizza and know where the ingredients were from. And it was under $10, it was like Chipotle for pizza. And I was like, this is brilliant. You know, here I have like a little bit of money, I'm gonna put it in. And that was kind of in the ideation phase. And. Let me ask you this, let me ask you this. When you invested with them, what was the thing, like why? Why did you? They just said Chipotle for pizza. And you got it. Yeah, and I was like that makes perfect sense. And you liked them. You believe that they were crazy enough or. No, at that time, I didn't know what to really look for in an entrepreneur. Okay. And I got a lot of money on Wetzel's pretzels. I was like, yeah, they know what they're doing. Victory life. Yeah, I got you. And they took me to another concept at the time called 800 degrees, which was about a $22 checkout. And they were like, this is kind of what we wanna do, but cut it in half. We want it to be like $10 for your pizza, your soda pop in a bag of chips or whatever. And I was like, okay, great. Long story short, that company grew from zero stores to close to 400. I opened a couple of my own franchises, wild success, never raised capital again because it was a franchise model and we all made a boatload of money. Congrats, congrats, by the way. That's a big story. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, I can't attribute anything really to it. It was really luck. But the best thing was I got to learn a lot from that. I opened a couple of my own franchise stores and what I saw was kind of the macro economic side of our customers looking for different alternatives. They wanted different pizza cruts. They wanted different cheese options. They wanted these, you know, vegan meats and stuff like that. They no longer wanted just Dasani water. They wanted smart water. They no longer wanted just laced chips. They wanted kettled or baked and all these different things. So I was like, you know what, I'm gonna take, I'm gonna sell out, I'm gonna take this money and go and find a bunch of different entrepreneurs that are tackling this better for you health and wellness space. And that's what I did. I went out there and my thesis was very simple to go out that had products that had really total addressable markets that were very big and that were offering the customer the better version. So Super Coffee is the low sugar Starbucks Frappuccino. Liquid IV is the low sugar Gatorade. Oli pop, poppies, low sugar soda. Better bagels, a low carb bread, you know, so on and so forth. Sure, sure, that was the thesis there. Yeah, and then have you learned anything from investing in these companies that you sort of really apply to your day-to-day at Mosh? Yeah, so number one was that when I sold out of some of these companies I realized, wow, this is really awesome but I own 1% of a company. And not to toot my horn but I was able to help these companies in the early stages bring other financial money in, help to track other celeb investors like we did with Super Coffee or with Cubcoats or Blaze even. I could help them with different retail and kind of growth on that side. So I was like, you know, I think I deserve more than a percent or something. And the largest discrepancies and valuations for companies were in the proof of concept to the actual, or from ideation into proof of concept, which is basically like, hey, I have an idea to start this water company and then versus going out and getting into your first store and selling and showing that it works a little bit. All of a sudden was a $10 million delta, you know? And companies were going out with these large safe numbers. So I was like, you know what? Why don't we start companies in-house? That's gonna be the next kind of space for me to start them in-house. You know, I'll put up the capital up front. It's like a VC almost a little bit different, yeah. Sure, yeah. And we'll be able to tell it, does this product work or does it not? And I was always looking for kind of the right idea to start and what happened was during COVID, I moved back home with my mom. And my mom's background, she's a journalist by trade. She used to do NBC and she does the Today show still. But really, I mean, she's dedicated her life towards Alzheimer's research, brain health research ever since her father was diagnosed 20 years ago with Alzheimer's. And at that time, there was really no research done on women at all. I mean, all the research was done on male brains, white male brains. When it came to actual animal studies, it was done on male rats and stuff. So she kind of wanted to figure out why that was and women were two thirds of the cases of Alzheimer's. They were disproportionately involved with Alzheimer's brain related diseases and so on and so forth. And so she started the women's Alzheimer's movement which funded gender-based research and she had done coloring books for people with Alzheimer's. She'd done a normal book called What's Wrong with Grandpa. She did a documentary. She did a movie called Still Alice where Julia Moore won the best actress for all centered around brain health and Alzheimer's. And so when I was at home with her during COVID, I was like, you know, cause I get Spins data and retail data and stuff like that. And I was like, you know, cognitive functionality and brain health are growing tremendously, like double digits during COVID. People are searching it online. It was the third fastest growing segment that year. AARP put out that the top three worry with people that were like 50 and above was cognitive decline. And I was like, there's no one is really speaking towards this audience when it comes to food and beverage. You're the perfect person to do it. Women are majority of the purchasers, people that are your age have way more purchasing power and they're interested in this and no one's talking to it. So why don't we start it? And does she have a routine that you would see her do already? Yes, exactly. So like all of us, we have our own little routine. She has this routine and her routine and people always say to me, why would you ever start with a snack bar? It's the worst category to go into. Especially during COVID, it had double digit decline year over year. And I was like, you're totally right. But it was what was most authentic to my mom. Every morning she started her day by eating a bar with her vitamins, her brain health vitamins. Together, yeah, okay. And so much so that she gives it up every year for Lent. That's her thing that she gives up because she's addicted to protein bars. Is there a specific kind that she likes? Obviously it's Mosh now. Yeah, now it's Mosh. Mosh and only Mosh. But she had, no, she was so like crazy with her bar. She would be trying all these different ones and this one would give her a headache because of the sugar. This one would give her a stomach ache because of the ingredients. This one, she started to make some at home. Like all these different things. And I said, you know what? Why don't we start by just taking the vitamins that you take, the vitamin D3, your B12, your Lyonsman, your Ashwagandha, your Omega-3s and sixes. Let's just put that into a bar that is suited for you and that follows a brain healthy lifestyle. Which was high in protein, low in sugar and high healthy nutrient fats. And let's just put that together. We'll see how it tastes. In the beginning it tasted awful. I can imagine it's not good. It was so bad. I can imagine. That's a hard thing to get right. And we just worked so on so forth and that's kind of where we came up with Mosh. I mean, Mosh is my mom's initials. Maria Owing Shriver Health in our first product is our brain bar. We like to position it as a bar made for your brain. What was your first, like the first flavor you guys had? Our first one, well, actually the first flavors that we worked on at home aren't ones that actually came out. Because once we kind of were working on it at home and going into R and D and everything like that, then to commercialize it and work with a co-man is a different process. So our first bars that we came out with were chocolate, peanut butter, chocolate chip and peanut butter. And then now we've got cookie dough and we're launching a lemon white chocolate next week. And we also got a blueberry almond. And so what was your first step in at least? So once you, I guess had family buy-in, right? So everyone, in terms of flavor, like, all right, this is the concept, you know the numbers from the spins data and sort of the retail sector. Cool, we see that going, that makes sense. And then as your first thought, go online, try e-commerce, right? And the subscription and then your company's a little bit more valuable and then you can keep some more margin. It wasn't even that it was more valuable. I mean, you have to remember, we started this during the thick of COVID. I mean, we started to work on this literally the week that everything shut down and I moved home with her. So at that time, like, we didn't even know what retail was. It was like, everyone was going for toilet paper and paper towels and that was really it. So we were like, okay, let's work on this and yeah, let's just launch a direct consumer because we can get customer feedback. We can find out do people really even care about this? Do they care about Alzheimer's and eating for brain health? We wanna get feedback before we even try to go to retail and we need to improve, we're gonna need to improve a lot of things, margins and just flavor, texture, all these different variables. So that's what we did. We just launched kind of direct consumer and it's been amazing. What's the hard part? And so there's a couple of things where it's hard enough but then you're adding these ingredients that aren't necessarily like the nutrients or the vitamins, right, are a little bit more expensive. And so the hard part is, do I come to market with this? You can't call it a protein bar because then you're locked into this weird pricing narrative that people are gonna kill. And so what was that part of it like where you're trying to get the cost down but the aim is not, it's not a cost, you know, it's not the goal of it. The goal of it is to help. Yeah, it's really tough because, you know, my mom wants to make this accessible towards everybody, right? But I mean, if you reverse engineer it, we're going with pretty great ingredients. I mean, you have the grass-fed whey, that is expensive whey protein has gone absolutely astronomical the last two years. You've got these different vitamins like you pointed out. Almonds are the base. I mean, that's the first ingredient, almond or almond butter. That's more expensive than just peanuts or other nuts. That plus we donate a percentage to charity. We're building, you know, making these in very small amounts. So it's a premium bar by all means. I mean, this bar is, you know, three, if you're subscribing, 333 a bar, which isn't insane because there are bars out there that are in lieu with that price, but it's definitely premium. I mean, you can go buy a Chewy Bar or Nature Valley Bar Fruender, you know, 99 cents easily at a store. But why would you? There's nothing good in it, right? I agree, I agree. And then in terms of like the, just the daily values of everything that's in it, like the Lyons, maybe Omega, what are the numbers there? Well, so you have to remember, we're a food product. We're not a supplement. So there are a lot of regulations, which is what I've learned about what you can say, number one, number two, the amounts of certain ingredients in it. Yeah, oh, I mean, we're at the maximum amount for a vitamin D in a food product, for example. Yeah, what is that? And you can just see on the back of our thing, we're at 15%. So that's the max. That's the max you can have. Wow. Otherwise you become a supplement. Oh, no, no, if you're a supplement, you can do whatever the hell you want. It's not regulated. That's why sometimes you'll go and you'll see in a grocery store, vitamin D, where it's like 1,000 ICUs, 2,500 or like 100, you know, different people have, or like you get a pre-workout and you see like, you have like, wait, you have 25,000% of your daily value of B12 in there, you know? They can do whatever they want. But in food, you can't. I mean, I guess you can, but you'd get regulated. Yeah. So of the B12 of the D3, and then in Lion's Mane, Ashwagandha, you know, those types of things, there's not a regulation amount. So you go towards kind of like, what is the daily value that is supported by, you know, doctors, nutritionists, et cetera? Omega-3s, you have to have 250 MCGs to have it so that you can promote that it's. That you have enough of it. Well, that it's good for brain health, you know? And that was like a huge lawsuit with Horizon milk that they have it. I don't know if you know Horizon milk. Yeah, I remember the red. I think it supports the healthy brain, the yellow tagline on their red cartons. And so they were sued because they didn't have enough? Well, they did, that was the whole thing. And then they went back and forth and fought and that's what it was. It was like 250 MCGs of Omega's have to be in there in order to qualify to be. Wow. Yeah. I mean, they're very conscious of what you can and can't say. And then during COVID, since you can't go to the grocery store and like give people little amounts to try, how are you sort of getting the name out there? I imagine social media, marketing. Yeah, so we did something, we started by creating a landing page about 90 days before launch. And we used my social media, my moms, and we built an email list and we did a campaign. So basically what we found out was that CAC's, you know, customer acquisition costs were rising tremendously. And that's to go out there and acquire a customer. But what wasn't that expensive was to acquire an email. And so what we did was we created this landing page and we would go out and acquire as many emails as we can to give you the chance to win a free year supply of Mosh. And if you told Joe Schmo and Joe Schmo's friend and so on and so forth, you would get more entries into winning a free supply. And so we started with that and we racked in like maybe 20, something thousand emails in the first month or something like that. And our thesis was, okay, if we can get these emails for so cheap and people for so cheap, then we can convert them through our own email marketing at a way more efficient rate. So what we did was we did that and we allowed them to try all the bars at a way discount rate before going and launching to the public. And that's how we were able to honestly sell out and do six figures in our first week without having to go and market. That's really smart. Were you always an entrepreneur? Like even as a kid, did your parents sort of guide you? Yeah, yeah, I was. You seem with it, like you seem with it, which is really, it's really cool to talk to you in that way. Cause you, like the story of you being in the kitchen with your mom and the way you analyzed that experience is exactly like an entrepreneur's brain, right? It's so natural. But I feel like you, I don't think that's something, I don't know if this is true, but I think you're born with it is what I'm saying. But for you, like what was the growing up? Yeah, it's funny you say that because like growing up before like going to school or when we would go on vacations as a family, my dad would have us do this, this like mathematics problem. He called it the ladder and he would choose a random number and you would have to do that random number times one and put the answer then times two, put the answer times three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine and then you had to divide each number by that again and see if it equals the same number, if that makes sense. I got it. And I became so weirdly obsessed with numbers. Okay. And so he started to, I think he must have like picked up on that or, you know, something. And I always started to get interested in business. And so he had me do lemonade stands, him and my mom. Okay. How old are you? Oh, this is like your first one. Six or five, something like that. And I remember one of my first birthday gifts I can really remember was one of those cars that you like little kids can sit in and you can like, and it goes maybe like five miles an hour or something like that. And he got me like a truck version so I could put my lemonade stand table into the back and he would walk with me and I would drive it down to the street corner and we would set up this lemonade stand and my parents taught me like what profit was, right? How you take lemons, you squeeze them, how much a lemon is, how many cups of water you get from that. Okay, that's your cost. Now you have to double it to make a profit. What is revenue? That kind of stuff. And that's kind of where I got. Did they take the tax money away? Yeah, no, they didn't teach me the tax yet. That came up later in life and that really hit hard. That's funny. It was just like the basics understanding. And you enjoyed the math of it. You enjoyed like the ingredients. And so then when I was in middle school, I started this company called Project 360, which was kind of like a clothing company that raised money for different charities. And my first product that I did was this, I don't know if you remember those Livestrong bracelets? Sure, yeah. So they were like little skinny yellow braces with words. Of course. And so I got these really thick ones. I got them from China with this girl, Jack Vanick at the time. And they were like this thick. They were like maybe inch and a half. And what I did was my mom, when she was first lady, she had these conferences for women, women's conference. And as you know, women are majority of the buyers of everything. So I was like, you know what? I'm gonna go and take all these different words, like empower, love, women, exclamation marks, stuff like that and put it onto these bracelets and I'm gonna go and walk around the conference center and sell these. And so I bought a bunch of pillows at a store and I took the pillows out and there were like clear pillowcases and I put them all with the different bracelets in it. And then me, my brother and two friends walked around selling these things and I did like $20,000 of bracelets in a day. That's what's up. And I was like, oh my God, business is so fun. And I just went from one business to the next and so on and so forth. And I just became kind of obsessed with always, you know. Tinkering. Yeah, tinkering with businesses. That's really amazing. All the businesses I did and the same thing with Mosh, it was always very much about, you know, can I create a mission-driven company? Could there be a B Corp in there? Could there be a way to give back, to also profit, but to find ways to give back? Which is hard to do. And that's what we always do with all of our businesses that I've been a part of is found a way to give back and last year we raised $50,000 for women's Alzheimer's movement. So it's pretty cool. Kudos to you. So you mentioned this earlier, but your buyer's like 40 years old on the low end and then let's just say 40 plus. So when it comes to finding them, like that's one thing I asked my mom. I was like, cause my mom, for people who don't know the story, my mom comes in and she had ordered your product and had it delivered to here, to my office. Oh really? And so then I brought it to her and I was like, this was maybe like three months ago, not that long ago. And then I brought it to her and I was like, what is this? And she started explaining it to me. You know, and she was really compelled by your mother's story actually. And like the tie-in. And I was like, oh wow, it's really interesting. And then I started thinking, kind of like the entrepreneur. I was like, how did my mom find the product? You know? And so I forget, I think she told me Facebook. I think she told me Facebook, but it made me interested in sort of your world view on that, right? It was like, okay, so if I have this product, it's for 40 plus. It's a totally different marketing exercise. Totally different marketing, yep. And so give people a window into how you market this. And obviously it translate, it worked. Whatever you're doing is working. Yeah, yeah, no, it is not gone wood. Honestly, we're just super authentic with our storytelling of my mom and I. I mean, our ads that we run or videos that we make all cost a dollar max. I mean, we do everything, selfie style on our phones, just in the office, chopping it up. And we just, we edit them together and we have another guy in our team, Cameron, that helps with it. And it's really just the storytelling about why we started the company. People that are 40 above, they really resonate with, like you said, my mom's story, her relationship to her father and being a caregiver and her father having Alzheimer's. They really resonate with the idea that it's a mother-son company that we started together and that there are things that I can do today that will help my brain health tomorrow. And there are things that my mom wanna do now when she's 65 before it's quote unquote, too late or something like that. And we're just really authentic with that. But you're not on like TikTok. Are you guys on TikTok? No, we're actually just going there and actually the fastest increase in TikTok users is our hardcore demo. Oh, nice. So it's something that we're looking at, but as far as like actual tactics we use, of course we do generic Facebook, Instagram ads. We have our newsletter, we have our blog. And your email list. Email list is super successful. We have our Mosh pit, which is our online SEO blog. That's funny. About maybe 15 articles about brain health a month. Nothing to do with the product, just about what you can do, why ice baths could be good for brain health. You know, something like that. And then we just do a lot of organic stuff with my mom. Like we had one of our highest sale days yesterday in the last maybe six months or something like that. And it was just my mom and I going to Erwan where we just started. I saw that video. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was just like our first time going on shelf. And we just had one of the guys who worked for us, Santa Monica. And just coming in filming really was our first time going and seeing. And it was just a really, I think, you know, wholesome, cool video of just us seeing the product on for the first time. And we just chopped that up. And it just did, you know, really well. I mean, we had a huge spike in sales from that video. And it's just, it's also just really cool. Where did they put you at the grocery store? Just like, so how walking out Erwan, where is it going to be? Yeah, that's interesting to say that because that's one of our biggest like thought processes right now was what do we want to do in the future? Yeah. Right now they put it next to Erwan is, you know, exactly. It's not like everywhere else. It's not at all like everywhere else. So it's, you know, they put us with other bars, but their other bars are not like your quest bar or Lara bar or something like that. But that's a really interesting topic of where do we want to be placed when you go to Target or you go to a CVS and you go to these different places. And that's what we're figuring out. I mean, there are places like CVS that have now created the whole brain health section of the store. They're the first people to do that. Target is really interested in doing that as well. So we'll see. We're still a fully direct consumer. It's like NeuroGum as an example. We had them on the podcast and they're really great guys. They're like where you go pick up your drugs, like your prescription. They're like over there, but it's gum. Yeah. It's like- I mean Cash Register is where everyone wants to be, right? I mean, like whether you're a chocolate, you're a bar, you're a little shot, you know, Cash Register is great. But I remember like, because anytime we talked to a founder, I'm always like, okay, let me go find their product in the store. And then I'm like, oh, NeuroGum, interesting. I wonder where CVS puts them. It really informs you of how, let's say, macros, they're viewing this product as a phenomena still. And so I remember and I was like, it took me probably 15 minutes to find their product without asking anybody, you know? Right, right, right. And then I realized, okay, that's interesting. But that makes it really difficult for the entrepreneur, I think. Yeah. And we're still, you know, we still have time. I mean, we're 15, 16 months old right now. And for us, our main thing is continuing to do direct consumer and adding in Amazon thrive and other channels like that. But we still have the beauty of getting to explain to people what this is, you know? Or doing a podcast like this, I get to explain to people not only what this is or why we created this, what the story is behind that. When you're on a shelf, you can't, it's hard to do that. So that's gonna be a real significant hurdle for us as we go to cross that bridge, but I look forward to it. You mentioned the other flavors coming out, but are there anything else? This is always the CPG investor question, right? So he's like, what else is out there? What are you guys doing? You know? And it's like, is it drinks? Is it this? Is there anything on your- Definitely not drinks. Nope. I've been in that, I still am in that business. I'm not gonna do it anymore. No, we definitely are. I mean, we trademarked this thing right here called the Brain Brand. I explained before, Mosh is my mom's initials, but Brain Brand is really what we wanna run with and create other product lines that speak towards brain health. We've done probably close to 10,000 surveys now of our customers. And the number one reason they come to us is for the brain health benefits. The number one reason they return is the brain health benefits. Number two is the no sugar. And so really what we're thinking of doing is just creating different product lines that speak towards brain health that follow that low sugar diet, but that really become ritualistic. So things that you can do each and every day that can help your brain health tomorrow. That's really smart. I remember, I went to business school and I think the only thing I learned in there was do surveys. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I went to business school too. Yeah, that's the one thing. It's like don't think you know anything. And that's what I love about CPG in the sense of you just find out from your customer if it's good or not independent of how you and your taste buds react to whatever thing. 100%. That was my biggest learning experience when I launched this brand was stop trying to make everything perfect. Stop trying to perfect it. I went through at least 20 different more, maybe like 40 different versions of this bar before we launched it. We just kept tweaking and tweaking and tweaking and how did we want it? How did we want it? How did we want it? And we made a good product, but I mean the second we launched is when you get the most feedback. And those months and months and months of time that went by that we didn't get it out to the marketplace, it was flawed on my part of not getting as much feedback as we could because really those couple hundred people or a couple thousand people that are giving you feedback in the beginning those are your really hardcore consumers. I mean those are the ones that will ride and die with you and they continued to be there with us and have given us feedback and we've FaceTimed with them, we've Zoomed with them to get their feedback and why they hated the product, why they loved the product, what they would want different and it's been really interesting to see and we've continuously made little changes. I think people like that journey. I remember my first company, we had a bow tie company and we ordered a bunch of bow ties from China and the first iterations were like three inches and so it was basically like it's called the butterfly bow tie but it was a little bigger than it should have been and so it was more like a clown bow tie and I just remember like as we were mailing these things out I would write, you know, write letters like we know this is a little bit bigger, we were going for two and a half inches because they went an extra inch, we don't know why but on the next shipment we'll give you guys a freebie and so many people love that. Like the emails we would get were just so, people were like touched and they didn't mind it at all actually and we were like, oh they're here for us, they're here for the ride and there's a beauty in the transparency just like opening that door to them. There is a beauty of the transparency when we launched, again this was 2021, September, 2021 we sold out in a week and at that time, I don't know if you remember that was like when there was everyone and their mother was saying the word supply chain you know, and it was like there were, I remember there was literally like hundreds of boats out on the port that couldn't get in and stuff like that and I remember talking with our coman and trying to get the ingredients and they were like, sorry man it's not gonna be like four to six weeks it's gonna be like 12 to 16 weeks and we had sold subscriptions to people, you know and then having to communicate that to every person that was on subscription of like, hey you're not gonna get your product for the next two or three months and but really communicating it and this is why and we really broke it down. We had so many of them that stayed on when we did launch back in the first weeks of December and the other thing we did that was really cool was we had a flavor funk when we launched with our chocolate the chocolate, the fats interacted with the mushroom extracts in a very bizarre way with the heat that created this off flavor this is right when we launched and people started to message us that exact thing and so what we did was we did this win back campaign and we did handwritten letters to every single person that complained with the new chocolate flavor once we got it and a handwritten note in there and just saying here it is, this is on the house, this is free, if you like it now come back and reactivate your subscription or whatever and if not, thank you for giving us a shot and we had like a major, I think it was like 40 something percent win back which in percentages of a direct to consumers huge, that's great. I know you act a little bit too and I know I asked you this earlier but while we're on the thing for me when I, so I do real estate development and in real estate development it's a hurry up and wait game, right? It's like, okay, we submitted to the acting for you and so a part of me is like, man what am I gonna do with this free time? And it's part of why I tinker in investing and we have the podcast, we do other things and so I always think about it like maybe, maybe like you could, in my head the story goes I could run a company while I'm waiting for my shot. Is that accurate? Yeah, well, yes and no, right? I mean, I don't wanna say that I'm responsible for everything, I have an amazing three person team that is also responsible for the results. I'm responsible for getting the product off the ground and running it and creating the team that's responsible for the results but it's not all me, probably same thing here with you. 100% yeah, I would say yeah. I would say I have the easy job, I just gotta talk to you like good. Yeah, exactly, so same, right? If you're a one person show and you don't have the proof of concept yet and you're really putting in all of your life savings and it's everything, you've gotta be 24 seven. I mean, it's a slug fest. So I don't wanna belittle the role of what it takes to do this but you for sure are, you are running a business. This is a business, right? So you are doing that. My dad always says to us kids, you have the same amount of time in a day that Albert Einstein did or that JFK did or Muhammad Ali, so don't ever say that you don't have enough time and his famous line that he always tells us to do is to sleep faster. What he always says. That's amazing. What's the best advice your mom's ever given you? My mom is, I mean, she is, they both have so much advice and I think my mom is, I think kind of going back to what I said before which is always finding a way to give back. She comes from a very fortunate upbringing and background. Her mother started the Special Olympics, her father started the Peace Corps and kind of her mom's side, the Kennedy family grew up in the idea of serving your country and your nation and finding ways to give back and that's always kind of been instilled in all of us kids that no matter what we do, we're in a very fortunate position in life, financially, health wise, just the platforms that we have, find ways to give back to others. I remember for me, so my family was in politics in Peru and growing up as a kid, we'd go to the grocery store anywhere we went with my grandparents who were heavily involved in politics and people would just come up to them and thank them and then they would tell me the story, me as like a five, six year old, and they would tell me the story about how my grandfather, grandmother gave them their first job or put them in position to do this thing and now their kids are in private school or whatever it was and these stories were endless and it was just like the coolest thing and for me it was always like, like for me personally the lesson there was, I want that, right? And I think when it comes to business, it's so cool but I think when it comes to business, it's like, and I tell people this, depending on their business, but you can in fact have a movement and a business. It's hard but I think if you just open that door, you can really impact people's life in a totally different way where it's like a win-win where you're gonna be successful as a business owner but you're also gonna create, and I think that's kind of what you're doing here, like the brain ban, you're creating a real awareness and you can do interesting things like 5Ks or public events or you can do things where it's not about your product. Right, right, that's the whole point of the mosh pit is like create educational information about brain health. Yeah, and I just love the marriage of those two things. So everything I do, I try to think about it like that where it's like, what are we doing for the community? Right. And the math and stuff, I think that'll take care of itself. Yeah, I mean I'm a huge believer that customers buy the why not the what. And if you have that real mission and you have that educational purpose behind it, that the product will go. And maybe we started with the wrong product. I don't know, that's what we'll learn but we have the right mission. You're open to it, yeah. I think that's smart. And what's on deck for this year? So more stores, you're in eight stores I think now, you said? Yeah, we just launched eight stores. That's our first store this last whatever week. But I mean our goal is not store growth right now, it will be in a year. What'd you say? I said smart. Yeah, well no, it is time to start growing into stores. I mean the direct consumer landscape has shifted a lot in the last 24 months. But we just haven't been ready for it, honestly. I mean we've improved our margins almost double this last year. Is that just by buying more? Like economies of scale? There's economies of scale. A lot of it was with the weight, the shipping to different people, our customers and optimizing that, optimizing our boxes for that, giving discounts once they buy three of them because that's where the weight shifts for packaging and pricing. How much is the box? You said it's like $36? Three something you said? Yeah, if you subscribe, yeah $37 or so. If you just buy it at Erwan right now, $349. Hopefully in the future we get that to be lower. But yeah, there are tons of levers that you can pull to change your product margin. The biggest question is just, how much do you wanna pull that versus sacrifice the integrity of it? That's the hard part. Yep, that is. That's our season scale. Anything else you should know, Patrick? About? About Mosh? No, man. About you, anything else you wanna share? No, no, man. You guys come and try it out. We're on Moshlife.com, we're on Amazon. Come and try us out and see what you think. I appreciate you coming on the podcast, brother. Thank you. 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