 This is Start-to-Store Front. We've all encountered instant foods. The trend of convenience took over American society after World War II and dominated the consumer market with a big assist from the microwave oven. You could eat instant oatmeal in the morning, a cup of noodles for lunch, and a TV dinner at night, all ready to eat with the touch of a few buttons on your microwave. Eventually, consumers realized that the tradeoff of convenience for nutrition was not in their overall best interest. And thus, the better-for-you market was born. There are many brands within this new market that have shunned the instant label, not wanting to be associated with the unhealthy connotations that the label brings with it. Our guest today is Kevin Lee, co-founder of IME, a brand that has innovated its way into becoming a healthier instant ramen option. So listen in as we cover everything from not knowing how to ask for help and why that's a cultural problem, why starting a company has involved equal parts, personal and professional development, and why you shouldn't overthink which social media platform you use to reach your audience. Now, on to the episode. All right, welcome to the podcast on today's show. We're talking to Kaylee, founder of IME. Thanks so much for joining. Thanks so much for having me. What made you want to start this amazing ramen company? Yeah, I have a very non-traditional CPG background. Maybe some of your guests have as well. I actually spent the past 10 years in the tech industry. So, you know, was a product manager in tech, was actually an early stage investor at a few like very tech focused VCs, but most recently was leading food and beverage investing at a firm called Paraventures. And that really happened, you know, kind of, I would say randomly in a way. The long story short is my co-founder and I actually grew up in Asian food families. My grandparents are produce farmers in Taiwan. And when my parents immigrated here from Taiwan, one thing that immigrant parents do is they'll leave the kids back with the grandparents while they're trying to build a life in America because they have, you know, no financial or social capital. And so, a lot of my childhood was actually like, literally in the fields with my grandparents, like picking, stemming, packaging this fruit called a rose apple. And it's funny cause that experience, people think like, oh, well, from there you must have been influenced to like go into food. But actually it's like running a farm is like totally different than, you know, doing a CPG business. But I do think that because it's like in my family lineage in my blood, there's something there where it's like, it's hard to escape that circle. And I think it's a, you know, it's an interesting thing that I've just come to realize over time. But my co-founder and I, you know, his grandmother also was running like a hawker egg noodle stand in Thailand. His dad was running like a Thai restaurant in LA selling noodles. And both of us, after a decade in tech, I think naturally when you get older you start to care a lot more about your personal health. And also you just see your family getting older. So both of my parents, for example, have very high blood pressure. They've taken medication for years. My grandmother's pre-diabetic. My co-founder, Kchan, his family also has very high rates of diabetes and high blood pressure. And so when we got together a few years ago, we said, well, you know, one of the best ways to tackle health issues is not post the fact, but it's, you know, pre during the nutrition phase with what their people are consuming. And we knew we wanted to work on a better for you food and beverage brand, but we didn't want to just start like, you know, another, you know, American flavored like protein bar company. Like we want to do things that we really were uniquely suited to do. And because we grew up in Asian food families, that's what we've eaten our whole lives. We said, well, you know, let's take a look at the American landscape. Asian food is the number one, like fastest growing cuisine in the U.S. It's the number two takeout food after pizza. Yet, you know, when you think about most Asian food in America, there isn't like a single brand that's trying to be a better for you Asian American food brand. And so Amy started really out of that quote unquote thesis, but really it was just like, Hey, we're, we're two friends. We have a long history like working together. We knew we'd have a lot of fun doing this and we knew that it was like something that we were uniquely suited to do. So that was the Genesis behind Amy and then instant ramen. I wish I could tell you that I did a lot of like category research with my co-founder, but the truth is that we grew up eating this stuff. It's the first thing that like we learned to make when our parents were at work, then, you know, we didn't have anything to eat at home. I think you ask any stranger on the street, they'll probably tell you, oh yeah, I've had instant ramen probably in college is like, you know, whether it was the drunk food or the cheap food and then like I stopped eating it because you realize how bad it is for you. Oh yeah. And so we didn't really like do that much research, but we said, hey, let's, let's just try reinventing this stuff. I think we both at the time really cared about the low carb value prop because of our family's diabetes history. We knew we wanted to reduce obviously like the sodium, which was a big concern for customers. The high plant-based proteins and being plant-based was something that came actually just like, I think that was also part of our research, but for example, like both of our families now are actually primarily plant-based. Or I think Ross McKay calls it plant forward or something, it was the term. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Shout out to Ross. Yeah, shout out to Ross. But yeah, that was the idea. And I think, you know, after the fact, we came to realize like, holy crap, this is a $46 billion industry. It's a massive industry. It's dominated by pretty much like three Asian conglomerates who own like 91% of the market share and they haven't changed their formula in the past 60 years. When you first started, I know at least in like the Latino culture, there's this thing where as soon as you tell someone, they're going to remove sugar and add like Stevie or like a monk fruit extract or anything like that, they freak out. They go, no, I don't want it. Totally. And so when you're saying this point around like, you wanted to go ahead and highlight that it was like healthier for you. Is that something that your community, the people that eat ramen are like, oh yeah, that's good? Or were they like, no, it's going to taste like crap because that's a real barrier because I know what ends up happening. A lot of coffee shops here will do healthier desserts. So they'll make very traditional Latino focused desserts. So they post it on Instagram knowing that the grandchild sees it, but the grandmother doesn't because she doesn't have an Instagram account. And then it's like the world's little secret which is really interesting from like a marketing perspective. That is really interesting. You know, for us very quickly early on, we realized that like for someone who has grown up eating a certain cuisine, convincing them that there's, you know, this better for you premium option is going to be something that they should eat because it's actually healthier for them. That's very difficult. You're always the most critical of your own cuisine because you grew up eating the good stuff. Well, that's from your families, your grandparents. So we knew early on that like our Asian communities, for example, who, you know, were very familiar with instant ramen, likely they were not going to be the early adopters. And we actually knew this from talking with like some of our investors and advisors, like the, one of the co-founders of Boba guys, for example, I don't know if you heard this, but you know, it's like a very modern Boba like cafe in a way and Boba used to be reserved just for like, it was like a very niche like Asian thing. And now they've really modernized it for a broader audience. And they said in the beginning, like Asians were super critical of their product because they're like, look, you guys are trying to like modernize this. It is very expensive. Like what the hell are you guys doing? And now you walk in any one of their stores and it's like, you see every single race, every single ethnicity, their Asians included. So I think this is a barrier that we knew going into it and it was honestly a dream of ours where one day, you know, people like my parents, my grandparents would eat this and be like, I can't even tell it's different. So, you know, there's a long story behind this, but we actually launched like a first version of Emmy last January. How did you do that? And so you ended up, so you're here, you are your product manager at a tech company, which means you can speak to basically anyone. You can speak to salespeople. You can speak to your VC groups and also obviously your engineers. And so having that skill set is drastically, I mean, it's really important. And so when you decided to embark on food, are you working with chefs? Did you go to a lab and all of a sudden just start trying new things? What was the first step in getting the first iteration of the product? Yeah, it's funny, my co-founder and I don't have any like chef or food science backgrounds at all. And people were like, well, how did you create, you know, this new type of ramen? And the first thing we did was what like anyone would do when they're trying to learn something, which is we went straight on YouTube and we literally typed in how do you make ramen? And we would watch like these like home chefs make ramen, we'd watch like factories and try to analyze like how did their machines work? And the first 200 versions of Amy, actually we made ourselves in our own kitchens. So I think this is not a like uncommon story like some of our investors like Peter Rahall at RX Bar did the same thing with his co-founder. I think it is good to have to take that first principles approach of, hey, we don't know what we don't know, but let's just try to imagine like, hey, we're creating this ourselves. We really want these types of macros, this type of texture. We are like, we have very high standards for instant ramen because we grew up eating all the best kinds. So we knew the taste was there, like our taste for it was there, but getting to that point was very difficult. So the first 100 versions, like it was crazy. We would just go on Amazon and buy like Bob's Red Mill ingredients and we would just like mix together things, produce noodles at home. Like literally mixing it, like literally making it on you in your apartment. It was like, it was like making pasta in a way. Like we had a pasta roller and then at a certain point you do hit like a local maximum of your quote unquote food science knowledge. And that's really where we did end up engaging with a chef of food science, PhD, some nutritionists. We got their advice and I think what's interesting is in tech, you know, if you're like coding a project and you learn and someone tells you like, Hey, you spent like a month using this programming language. You could have used this programming language and you could have cut that time down by like 2x. That's basically what the food science PhD and like the chef did for us was they came in and they were like, they watched us make, you know, these are ramen. They were like, you know, you guys are doing like all sorts of weird things that like you're adding in all these extra steps that are totally unnecessary. Like if you cut this and this, your throughput will double or it'll triple. And so we used to be able to only make like one recipe per hour maybe. And like when the food science PhD study did our process, he was like, I can actually triple your output. And then the chef in the other, on the other hand was like, you guys are using these like random ingredients from Amazon. Did you know that if you contact the suppliers, tell them you're a new food brand, they'll give you samples of like all their ingredients for free. And at the time we were like, wait, what? Like we've just been buying everything. And so they increased like the encyclopedia of all the ingredients. So when you increase the range of ingredients in your like toolbox and you increase the throughput, all of a sudden your experiment velocity just like increases dramatically. And that allowed us to then ramp up to the 200 versions very quickly and get us to like, you know, quote unquote or V one of what we were able to launch with our manufacturer. One of the more interesting things I came across when I was looking into your developmental phase was I think it was on your Instagram. It was something that Kchan delved into all this research that existed about ramen from all over Asia. But because they weren't all different languages, he had to translate them using like Google translate or whatever. And I think for, I speak for everyone who's ever used Google translate. It's fine in short sentences, but I don't have any confidence that it would be like word for word verbatim on a long document like that. Like were you guys concerned that or did you find out that you lost anything in translation? That's a great question. So we found Japanese and Chinese research papers. We did use Google translate. I actually had to ask my dad for help for he speaks. He's obviously fluent in Mandarin. And so he would like help translate, but he would also sometimes get on calls with us when we would call like these noodle experts from Taiwan. So we spoke with like a bunch of noodle experts. Him, one of my friends, older brothers would hop on the call and then they would just like literally be our translator. And that was actually one of the funniest things because when we, my co-founder and I first started this business, we did not know how to ask for help. That's the honest truth. I think most first time founders don't know how to do that. And it was only after that experience. Why is that? Is it because you were doing something so different from what you were doing before? Or is it just like a ego thing or you were just like blinders on focused? I actually think it's a cultural thing. I actually talk about this a lot, but you know, especially with immigrant parents, I don't know how it is in other cultures and Asian culture, things like humility and like not bothering other people, having that self agency to take care of things yourself. I think maybe there's probably definitely a lot of ego and pride in that. And I think that was ingrained at a very young age and frankly the journey of becoming a founder has been this process of unlearning a lot of these cultural values, knowing which to retain. Like there's a difference between thriftiness and knowing how to conserve cash versus like literally saving every freaking dollar to a point where you're like scared to invest and invest in your growth. So like in my previous business, I was running like an education media company. I never ran a single Facebook ad and I was so proud of that. I said, oh, for six years, I grew this business using SEO to multiple six figures and then people look at me and be like, you're stupid. Like you started that business in like Facebook prime, golden years, but I now know it was because of my cultural background where I was like to me running a Facebook ad is like being in debt. It's like I'm paying something out. I don't know if I'm going to get it back and we're really taught not to not to use debt in I think in a lot of Asian culture. And so now I'm trying to just unlearn all of that and it's a very, very difficult process. Do you still struggle with that? Do you feel find yourself in moments still having that mentality? I do. I'll share a couple stories. So we started a company. There was three people. They were all from mainland China. And so it was me and these Chinese guys that came here to go to MIT basically. And so we're all living together and we're getting to know each other super well. And one of the things I keep like hitting with them is that it's clear to me in their culture to say you're not good at something means you're lazy. And so it was this thing where if you were the CEO and you know nothing about sales it's almost like you want to learn everything and coding you want to learn anything and marketing you want to learn everything because it's lazy if you're not the expert. And so what ends up happening is every time we would hire someone for that role to be the expert in that thing there wouldn't be any trust. There would be a tremendous amount of friction there. I remember one day we had like this we had a bunch of beers and stuff and we had a long chat and I was like why do you do that? You know, because I don't think it's your intent to create this culture of toxicity where nobody trusts you. But what's happening is it's a symptom of your inability to trust. And what is that? And there was two parts of it. One part was like education and so if the person didn't go to like Harvard or MIT he didn't trust them. The second part of it is he didn't value sales skills like he valued engineering skills. It was like it's binary if you don't know how to code. You go I don't know how to code. Done. But talking to people all of a sudden everybody thinks they're good at that which is a skill that I would say not everybody is good at. And so over time it was this thing of exactly what you're saying. He had to unlearn. I'll say this but I think he's still unlearning. I think it's very, very difficult for some people. I think it's so and it's actually one of the reasons why I think a lot of first-time founders like we're scared to pay for even things like a coach an executive coach. But sometimes the purpose of an executive coach is to label hey this is an insecurity of yours or like this is something that's actually holding you back from evolving to the next level of where you need to be and if the co-founders are not evolving the company's not going to evolve. So what you said is exactly right. Like you know for the first year or so I think my co-founder and I we said we want to like before we hire for anything before we outsource anything we have to do ourselves and we have to learn it properly. And that's a huge flaw. That's not that's exactly the opposite way of scaling a company fast, right? You want to hire experts to take care of the things that you're weak at. Yeah, I think yeah. That's basically that's a great story. It's hard. It's really difficult. I think even like I'll say Nick is learning this now to some extent my buddy over here. Yeah, it's it's this thing where like when we started the podcast we did maybe six episodes and quickly realized like I think I've learned you have to hire the team. You know to think like people look at my social media they might be like oh he's pretty good at it but it's clear to me when you hire a pro it's clear that you're an amateur when you're watching a pro and you and that distinction can be made if you're watching tennis or sports it's like oh obviously I'm not LeBron look how clear this is but there are people in every business world that are similar right that there's like somebody who's way better at creating YouTube clips than me and social media than me and so our job is to identify them and hire them and we've seen what happens like us investing and I like quote investing in our podcast by hiring people when we were making no money was absolutely the right move because it led to the revenue it led to the collaborations it led to us talking to more you know amazing people like yourself and I think that's it's the switch of you need to start realizing what's required and I think a lot of people and I'll say some of its culture but I think another part of it is just everybody wakes up or who's born without let's say a tremendous amount of money has in a relationship with money that is totally unhealthy and if you want to become a startup founder that needs to die you need to start and I explained to people like if you and I were going to go to San Francisco right now we would never talk about gas right we wouldn't talk about it if we were going to take a flight we wouldn't talk about jet fuel and that to me is money right you're going to get there once you've identified what are we going to do in San Francisco oh cool go to this vineyard this place well okay cool but no one will talk about gas and money's very much the same way it's just like an energy resource that's required but it's required for sure so I appreciate you opening up I mean I think that's something that it's good to share with our listeners because I think that's like what we want to talk about on our podcast is the realities of unlearning some things the things that hold you back and that's I'm sure it wasn't easy for you to identify that for sure there's a lot of this whole journey of starting the company has been as much personal development as it has been professional and just understanding that and I think even with our team you know when I do one-on-ones with them I do treat part of these one-on-ones as almost like a mini therapy session we'll say hey man let's analyze what you got done this week and you know what's the thing that you created the most problems for you this week and you'll start to see patterns where you say like hey notice that you're getting stuck in this mid funnel like what's the mindset that's holding you back here and you just like you find these things like you said these insecurities that maybe they're scared to admit but once you help them label it they're like oh shit like you're totally right you're able to objectively see this pattern as an external party that I couldn't see and literally the next week there they've like solved that problem and they've like scaled themselves so it is a is an interesting because you don't default to thinking about those when you're like working on a business I guess there are some pros of the Asian culture that I will say like at some point you you really understand that you want to make your parents proud so and so raising capital is like the moment of doing it right right getting getting the article I've seen it it's like that's the thing you've done it now it's funny yeah you're I think I might have gone a little bit more jaded to that because I had spent time in venture before and when you're in venture you yeah you know what it means you know just you're actually trained to basically know like hey this is just one piece of the milestone and in fact most founders may not even be that happy that they had to fundraise like for them a lot of founders the best founders I know are like you know I'd rather be great at operating a good profitable business like if I had to fundraise them and I had to give a piece of my company away and sometimes it's necessary for rapid scale and like when you see a massive market you want to take over I think makes a ton of sense but again like most of the best founders you speak to like you know Ross McKay over at a daring like we all kind of just say like look it's just one piece it's not really what's going to make or break our business totally true when did you guys raise once you had a couple prototypes that you liked yeah so we spent about I was in my co-founder and I spent around eight months like nights and weekends at our full-time jobs we quit we spent another maybe like six to eight months bootstrapping and just building a prototype when we felt comfortable that we had a product we could show to investors we went out and we raised our pre-seed round we did that primarily because the MOQs in our industry for instant ramen it's not like there's actually no really no American manufacturers for this stuff we luckily found one and that's like there's actually a crazy story behind this at some point but the MOQs are massive they're like six figures okay wow so pallets it's not like other industries where you can get away with like a $30,000 MOQ run so we knew pretty quickly that there was no way we could self-finance this thing which is unfortunate it's a big risk but that's why we went out we raised when you were raising what was the people get it were you like here's the market it's massive and then you say this is the better for you category of that they go oh it makes sense yeah and then you go that's it I think raising money for this business may not have worked maybe five three to five years ago I think there are a lot has changed in the in the world frankly with what's going on with media what's going on with like music there's just a lot more awareness it's crazy sometimes during the pandemic we were calling a bunch of our customers and our beta in our like private community and we're like hey we did a user interview we just want it's like very tech like of us we just want to be like hey how did you hear about us like why why do you need this product and when we was talking to this this very nice Caucasian like older lady who's a teacher in the Midwest and I was like how did you hear about Amy and she said oh well you know it's a pandemic right now I've been stuck at home and Netflix recommended this Korean drama and I've never watched a Korean drama in my life is called like crash landing on you and she was like I watch it and I got really hooked on it and like in the show I just watched these like Korean people like eating ramen and she can't eat like unhealthy stuff so she was like so I just typed like healthy ramen I found you guys and I was like well that's crazy to me that like there's a direct correlation between like media and like you discovering our product and then you being interested in it that's a great journey and it's a really cool journey and honestly that's how most things in life work is like you see it on TV or you know see in media like right I grew up you know I grew up but you can't manufacture that funnel you can't manufacture that funnel like you know I grew up as a 90s kid and my parents didn't speak English that well I was an only child and so what did I watch on TV I watched like Fresh Prince of Bel Air and that's what got me into like hip hop and like so it's like these are the things you see them on TV and then it's like that's what influences a lot of your life so going back to your your question I think when we went out and we raised we made a conscious effort I think like over 50% of our cap table is like a API or female investors but the other 50% that are not even they kind of just understood the story like when we told them we said look you know the same trends I mentioned where it's like Asian food is the fast growing cuisine American part of that is because I think in Asian culture when you try the the the range of taste and textures I think they're more willing to like pair certain things that maybe you weren't aren't traditional quote-unquote traditional and so when you have like people in the US who try these Asian flavors they're almost always like whoa this is like so different than my the typical American palette and once you try that and you have that flavor explosion you're like I don't really want to go back and I think that's like a very standard thing that happens and so for example like Palm Tree Crew which is Kaigo's team you know it's all like it's it's a there's definitely a lot of like Caucasian men but they all love Asian food like all of them actually they know ramen they eat it it wasn't actually that hard to explain to them and so I think I'm very fortunate to be born in a time where people had of me have paved the way in culture it's also one of the reasons why we make a conscious effort to raise from people who you know like are in the music industry or you know actors and actresses like people who we think can help bring Amy into mainstream culture because that is going to be what propels more mainstream adoption of a better for you ramen that's true was the carb thing always part of the plan like the low carb option yeah it was that was the number one thing we really wanted because especially in Asian culture it's all like starches like refined like refined carbs and so that is what leads to a lot of the diabetes and so again diabetes not something we talk about publicly like you don't want to be labeled like the diabetic food but when we were creating this product for example we like we were wearing like levels continuous glucose glucose monitors we were like metabolic health is very important I think especially post-COVID it's it's even more important now and so we want to make sure for example that like Amy did not spike your blood sugar and it doesn't but yeah I think that was a very important thing for us the plant-based proteins again it was because like my parents once they switched to a plant-based diet naturally you're also just like using you're using less sauces and stuff and so I think their blood pressure dramatically decreased my co-founder actually eats crazy stories like he used to train to be like a Buddhist monk like a long time ago it's like part of Thai culture and that's like a very plant-forward diet that's a career change yeah so well he did it for like it wasn't like a very long period of time but it was important to us and then the high protein is just like very natural it's just like consumers honestly the mainstream consumer audience does not even understand frankly like low carb that much but they understand like high protein and plant-based is interesting I think it's we spent about two years in R&D trying to get the low carb noodle that's actually like where the bulk of the work went but now when now that we've launched PR our investors like their LPs introduced us as like these are the plant-based ramen guys oh no way which is hilarious because it's like the plant-based like the noodles are obviously always plant-based it's actually the seasoning packet most traditional ramen brands all have meat-based ingredients and we've found a way to recreate the flavors but I do think the low carb came first before the plant-based when you guys are raising what's is it a valuation of like 5x your revenues like for CPG what's the normal CPG so the ranges that I've seen are anywhere from 3 to 8x at the like you know call it pre-seed seed I think series A becomes a lot more data-driven so it really varies and are you guys in stores now or what was your go-to-market strategy from the jump was it try to get the people to go to the consumer or was it go to stores what was that because my governor I kind of came from the tech world we felt we we don't have like marketing background spying anyway I've kind of become the de facto CMO as my co-founder does product ops and finance we focus a lot on community and what that means is like prior to building Amy I had built the world's first and largest product management community it was called product manager HQ my co-founder Kchan was a lead product manager at Facebook leading their social video team and he was building products for creators to manage their communities so both of us when we came into this business we said look we want to take a community-driven approach and that's not that doesn't mean like build a newsletter like that's an audience it's not a community we built a private Facebook group we chose Facebook because when we did demand testing we actually ran like a series of ad tests to test what our target audience would be what the value props would be for them it sounds very scientific it's not it's just like we just did it to do some basic demand testing but we realized that our initial core audience was definitely more female heavy like and generally between like as the buyer or the as the consumer as a consumer okay yeah it was it leaned that way in the beginning and it was like a 35 plus audience and we knew from our tech days that that's an audience that lives heavily on Facebook so for anyone listening like don't overthink your medium like people was like do you have to do discord circle like Facebook what's up just pick where your audience lives for us it was Facebook so we did a Facebook group and we built that up to around 4,000 members that did eventually like they spread the word we built an email list around 35,000 people and this was all prior to our launch but I think that community was really powerful because people are in there even today sharing recipes they're like talking to each other they're connecting with each other and that's really where an audience becomes a community right is when the members are talking to each other versus just like the brand to the audience so I think that really helped kickstart our launch pretty dramatically it's it's why a lot of people heard about our launch now we are D2C Amazon Gopov like talking to drive markets of the world we have one big retailer that we're very excited about Whole Foods that we will roll out with in late April so that's coming up soon that's going to be the first foray and then after that I think the floodgates will open so we'll definitely want to push pretty heavily on retail after that one of the barriers that comes to my mind when you enter into a market like this is is price and I've I've thought about this from a different culture perspective like I know that Mexican food stems from a culture of street food same with Asian food you have street food vendors there and there's this idea that persists in people's minds that it has to be cheap and certainly the ramen market is not helped by companies like like Top Ramen who you know it's it's like thirty cents for a packet or whatever it is so how how do you overcome that barrier when you enter into the market as as a better for you product it's it's higher price but it is worlds away from from the bottom dollar Top Ramen of the market so yeah what is your strategy for dealing with that that's a great question that is the primary concern that we had that investors had everyone figured like hey better for you ramen like low carb high protein plant based lower sodium sounds great but how do you get around that price barrier when it's it's almost anchored in people's minds that this is like a cheap food so there's a couple of things one is we actually you know when we first started we thought that the majority of the US all ate instant ramen like you know maybe like the first time they had ramen was instant ramen that was like an assumption we had made because I think we grew up eating so much instant ramen but you quickly realize that actually there's a lot of people in the US their first entrance into ramen was actually a ramen restaurant which ramen restaurants are now popular all across the US and when you go to a ramen restaurant you're paying like 15 to 20 bucks a bowl for them when they all of a sudden they see like oh wait I can make this stuff at home and it's like delicious same texture like but it's healthy now that's six bucks with you know on our websites like 625 they're like that's a steal and so that was very interesting to us and luckily in the beginning before we even built the product we did because of that demand testing we had already built the landing page we were collecting pre-orders so we knew from the metrics that there wasn't there was demand for this but that was also just like it was great to see that happen I think the second thing is like most premium better for you brands this is almost inevitable inevitable like we have to launch for this price point we actually learned this one of our other investors Justin Mares who founded Kettle and Fire which is like the first like premium bone broth brand you know when he launched each box of bone broth it was like half the size of the next like you know broth company and it was like 1199 but it's the size you need it's the size you need that's the thing it doesn't go back in the fridge it's a one-time use exactly yeah but it was like 1199 and your next closest broth was like 299 and you know he said look you know you would think that's insane but when you launched the price point like that you very quickly find your core like evangelists the people who need your product it's a hair and fire problem for them frankly they're willing to pay anything because they just just doesn't exist for them and so he actually was the one that like initially when we launched we wanted to go even lower and just take a margin hit but he said no like launch it because you'll find that core audience you'll grow with them it'll allow you to then get to the economies of scale or then you can lower the price over time so I think that's a scary thing for most entrepreneurs is like you're like oh man I really don't want to like increase my price I'm kind of scared what it's going to do but if you really feel that you are solving a true need which we did feel we were there's a large percentage of America who for health reasons or lifestyle reasons cannot eat ramen anymore they are the ones that are super excited and you have to stick with them it's going to suck because you know for that first year you're going to get a lot of backlash a lot of our Facebook ads the comments are like oh man this is really expensive like how are you guys selling now I think that dialogue has really changed where people are more familiar with their brand we're able to message hey this is like a meal replacement you're getting 22 grams of protein 18 grams of fiber and only like five grams of net carbs like where are you going to find that in a meal for six bucks and so that I think has changed the conversation dramatically that's how I look at it so it's interesting when I think about it's almost like you graduated it's almost like when I think about an ad campaign you could do it's like you graduated right right it's like literally stop eating that totally right and so I think that's how do you guys go about the marketing side of it that's actually a great what you just said is exactly it's almost like like for example like Patrick Swartz and Nigger one of our investors he actually gave us a quote once for our website and it was something like you know I used to feel so guilty eating instant ramen and now I don't have to anymore because Imi is like delicious but what that has been like the best performing copy that we've been able to test and it's because it resonates with so many people it's where like you talk to anyone again like you talk to anyone on the street and they usually say like man I've like I love instant ramen tastes so good but I just feel so bad like I feel so guilty eating it I can't do this as an adult yeah it's like smoking cigarettes exactly so it's very much like the magic spoon approach right like Gabby and Greg are advisors to us and they have a very similar messaging which is like you know you probably feel guilty eating all this sugary cereal and it's not meant for adults but we created the cereal for adults and we've really created the ramen for adults so what's next for you guys what's on the horizon for this year besides whole foods obviously that's big yeah I think one thing we're definitely very proud of is because we didn't start with that with the food science backgrounds we were able to hire our first full-time food scientists this year that's been incredible and you know he's been really cranking on a lot of things behind the scenes so new flavors noodle improvements we aren't talking too much about our next product extension but you know I think the nice thing about Amy is because we're better for you Asian American food brand we can really expand into any category Ron under Asian American food and I think the theme really is like me and my co-founder we started this business also become like not just for our mission in the health but because we just wanted to have fun along the way I think it's important to have fun a lot of entrepreneurs take themselves super seriously it seems super stressful and I think for us it's like we just want to recreate these like nostalgic fun foods we grew up eating and we don't really need to follow the whole CPG playbook of you know only expand 5% left or right in your category that's the advice we get from old school CPG people but you know our mission at our company is like we create foods that embolden people to play by their own rules in life and that was a very deliberate wording because when we started people were like there's no you cannot invent this kind of instant ramen and we were like screw it let's just play around in our kitchens like we'll mess around and we invented it and I think if we really want to live by that mission that we tell our consumers and we have to be able to be bold and try totally different things in different categories that no one would think to reinvent under that kind of Asian American product landscape and it doesn't have to be directly tangential or like adjacent to instant ramen well in that vein there's a blog post on your website that talks about you or and Kchan's favorite Asian snack foods nice if I'm reading into it read the tea leaves I'm seeing the road map a market that's also ripe for innovation in the better for you brand totally any thoughts on maybe you know reinventing Pocky or or whatever the the next candy idea might be that is definitely and I you know we have a whole backlog yeah if you think about it right so he's hanging out with Ross he's hanging out with Dave yeah you're hanging out with all the right people you have a there's a there's an opportunity there to take over the dessert the Belfi dessert I will say like unlike maybe like the American food space the Asian food space is still very nascent and growing like I want to give a shout out to like a lot of brands like omsom is making like amazing Asian sauces you have fly by Jing who's doing like chili crisp sanzo which is making like sparkling water that's Asian flavors like nectar which is the first like Asian hard seltzer there's only so many of us and I think like when I first started in this industry it goes back to that personal development thing like it's easy to feel competitive it's easy to think like oh man like what have we all expanded each other's spaces but I think that's a very like they say especially with like minorities that's like a thing that happens where it's like you feel like you're competing for the same spot and therefore you're like you're you feel this like strange competition when they're really there's only so many you should be like helping each other grow the market and it took me a long time to realize like I want to approach like everyone with like a position of love and I know that sounds very like woo and hippie but like we do have to grow the market together and you know I remember talking with there's this guy in Oakland who runs Hodo tofu which is like the best tofu that every single like fine dining restaurant America uses and he was telling me like when he started his business he ran his own factories in Oakland and his competitors when their machines broke down he would literally be like hey just come to use my like manufacturing equipment and produce your own tofu and so his competitors would do that and then they would produce tofu using his machines and then they would go sell it and compete against him and I was like why would you do that and he said well look man like we have to grow the market together right like we're in this together you grow the was it the rising tide all ships rising rising tide like there's room for all of us and I think that has been an incredible lesson where everywhere I go now I'm trying to give shout outs to like everyone in our communities who are trying to like build their own brands because we have to lift each other's up and so and of course like I'm going to like you know I love all my like my other friends are doing like all the other products but I just want to shout that out for anyone listening I think that's important yeah in my chair too right it's like you guys can in some way accelerate each other's growth I think that's the other reality because you're all learning things on the fly like the guy who gave you the advice around your pricing like that's huge right right and so that saves you a lot of time helps you accelerate you get velocities faster and so everybody wins you were going to say you had a really good story around finding your supplier oh yeah our first manufacturer when we first started we actually wanted to manufacture internationally at first but there's a lot of like FDA laws like sure yeah and then covid obviously happened the border shut down and so we had to find like basically a manufacturer in the US and there aren't really any instant ramen manufacturers in the US there's maybe like a couple but they usually are with the huge giants or they're owned by the giants so we found one in California and everyone was saying like this is your only shot like you have to work with them and they're not even instant ramen manufacturers like they'll make noodles but you're going to have to work with them somehow and so we were like okay well there are only shot everyone's been recommending them to us like it's kind of a Hail Mary but let's reach out so my co-founder like emailed their VP of sales like once no response emails him again twice no response and like we're sitting at my kitchen table because that's where we work every day and he calls the guy and this VP of sales against the phone and was like I already saw both of your emails like this is a waste of my time and hung up on my co-founder and I was like listening because I could hear it through the speaker and I just got really like I was angry because I was like you don't need to disrespect people like you can say like politely like hey this is you know it's not going to work and so I immediately just like went on LinkedIn I like found I was like I looked at the company and I was like I got to find someone at this company and so I find someone and then I find a mutual connection that mutual connection is like someone I knew on Twitter so I DM the person on Twitter I was like hey do you know this person she happened to do like an undergraduate internship years ago with this person and I called the email this person and she works at the company she's like you know pretty senior position and she emails me back she's like why don't we get on a phone call so I pitch her on the phone she's like oh okay this is interesting like are you going to be in LA anytime we were an SF so she was like are you going to be in LA anytime like I love to have you like grab some coffee and I said oh yeah I'm actually planning to be there like next Monday it's like a Friday and I hang up on my stomach over and I'm like yo we're booking flights we got to go net like Monday so we just like made up an excuse Monday she actually is like she like an hour before the meeting she's like hey actually I want you to come by the office and luckily we were we were wearing like business casual and we showed up and like it was a full like board meeting like she had like her team there we had to do a full pitch we had like a presentation and turns out that the person was like the daughter of the CEO like she basically going to take over the company and she was like yeah I like I just really liked your like perseverance here and like the fact that you guys showed up and pitch and they that's how we land our relationship with our manufacturer I love that so I always tell people I'm like don't take that first note like sometimes you got to know when not to brute force through a door and like change directions like I'm guilty of that and my co-founder helps me but sometimes I just like to brute force and that was an instance where you just can't say no tell me the VP of sales was in that board room with his head down the entire time so the awkward thing is like when we showed up she said like oh he's not going to be joining she didn't give me a reason why but obviously it's kind of awkward so the director of sales was there and once we finished the pitch like she was so happy with the pitch that she came out she personally apologized she was like hey I want to let you know that I spoke with this VP of sales so that was like an unacceptable response and like that's not going to happen again but unfortunately we don't work with this manufacturer anymore because I think once code restrictions let up we wanted to go back to our original plan but very grateful they took a chance on us yeah that's a great story and yeah I think anyone listening to us to the VP of sales it could have been that the deal wouldn't have been big enough for his own commission and so there might have been a real logic to that there was a lot of logic not to the behavior but just to the response I agree with that I think to be fully empathetic he probably gets pitched hundreds of times a day from like random brands like us that are like don't end up amounting to anything and but I think it was important for that daughter of the CEO to see like hey well they found another in and for you and your journey to recognize sometimes it does work right sometimes going around is the best way of doing it and that's awesome I mean that's a really good story I love that yeah the good thing was for myself it definitely taught me like hey you know sometimes you do have to find that third door in but I think that has also come like to bite me in the ass sometimes because it's almost like you shoot the arrow without aiming at first or like it's like that George Washington story of like if you cut down a tree spend the first like 55 minutes sharpening the axe before you cut the tree my co-founder has definitely given me feedback he is like hey dude like you have a tendency to want to break down every single door is like sometimes it's okay to like step back reevaluate the door and just like open the right door versus like always trying to break down that door and so I think we're a good combination where I tend to be like the initiator or like the leaper and then he's really good at like maximizing the resources we have or like helping me realign so it's a great complimentary I've been asking everybody this so obviously NFT crypto it's the whole rage are you guys thinking about it how do you guys maybe interact with it what's the what's the mindset or just heads down focus on your product your launch I think having come from tech we are a lot more flexible and open-minded and I think when you have a lot of smart people in the world talking about something shying away from it or choosing to like just ignore it is probably not the smartest decision for us we personally have invested in the space quite a bit back just from our own days I think CPG there are a lot of interesting use cases for NFT I think some brands are really trying to force fit it a little bit too much and my concern is that the mainstream population you know your middle American customer you tell them what an NFT is you tell them how to open a metamask wallet they're going to have no idea what the hell you're talking about and if you launch them NFT and you say like oh but this will grant you access to special drops or like you know like a gated portion of our website it's like well you could just do that without saying the word NFT so maybe it's a rebranding thing but I do want to be sensitive to not having customers be super confused as to like why all of a sudden Amy is launching an NFT and what that means for them doesn't mean we don't want to be like a pioneer in the industry but until I see like a really solid use case for it I don't think that's going to be our core focus well thanks for coming on the podcast brother really appreciate it thanks for having me everyone where they can find you and your brand obviously Whole Foods in April yeah that's very exciting for us you can find us emyeats.com we could not get Emmy dot com because it's a very expensive domain so we attach the word eats and but you can find us there personally on Twitter you can always find me at Kevin Lee me and so yeah thanks for having me thanks for coming on pleasure that was our conversation with Kevin Lee co-founder of Emmy I think it's safe to assume that if you made it this far you've enjoyed the show so consider subscribing if you're not already or better yet leaving us a review on Apple podcast or Spotify it's one of the best and easiest ways you can support us and of course you can find us on social media platforms at start of the storefront or on our website start of the storefront dot com the team consists of Diego Torres Palma Natalia Capolini Lexi Jamison Owen Capolini and me Nick Conrad Music by Double Touch thank you for listening we'll see you next time