Why the Hardest Part Starts After Launch: Operators Build (E5)

Matt Bertulli (0:00)

Welcome back to episode five, Operators Build.

We are now officially a month away from launch. It is July 24th, 2026, when we're recording this. We will launch in roughly a month. So when you see this episode, just know this is the timeline that we're on. Today, what we're gonna do is kind of catch you up on everything that's happened. And to do that, to start, Curtis, I'm gonna get you to kind of walk us through what's going on with manufacturing, coman, product formulation, everything, and we'll just kind of riff on that today.

Curtis Christopherson (0:31)

Lots has happened. It's been a year and it's been delayed and it's been a roller coaster of challenges and highlights, but let's take it back. Dr. Bourne referred us to a phenomenal coman. We thought it was gonna be smooth, easy, experienced coman, and then delay after delay after delay after delay. Everything from they got acquired, there were shift in resources and people. We got de-prioritized. I don't think they knew who they were dealing with.

We were the new guys on the block trying to launch a brand, and we were like the minions and the small guys that weren't any priority.

We had a shift of our account manager. The account manager that Ashley was introduced to us, got shifted off of our project and we got lost in the mix. But in the meantime, during that process, we had, obviously, they had to formulate our product. We had multiple tests, so they shipped us samples. They shipped us, Ashley, different flavor samples, different types of samples in terms of just, based on our feedback, whether it was color feedback, whether it was taste feedback, and so we had to go back and forth quite a bit.

Matt Bertulli (1:52)

Mike, you made a comment in one of our chats, like you didn't like how long the baby took to make, but the quality is good.

Mike Beckham (2:01)

I don't know that I like the duration of the labor, but I'm glad the baby's out. I mean, I'll rant for a little bit here.

This is probably, it's funny, we're supposed to be experienced and we're starting a business. This has been a disaster. We filmed a bunch of episodes where we thought we might launch this last year. We're almost nine months, 10 months off of our timeline and I think there's a lot of things we could learn from it.

One of them being that we decided to really lean in to this very, very highly tested branded ingredients kind of angle.

We did it without really knowing if that's going to matter in terms of how customers are going to respond to things and the things we can say. We hope it will, but I think if you'd gone back and told me a year ago, like, hey, it's going to delay you by almost a calendar year to do this, man, I don't think I would have said yes to it. And it's just a great example of like, you know, the longer I'm in the game, the more I feel like I learn. But we did it. And so like, it was crazy. I mean, that kind of from the outside, it was crazy how long this took. It's crazy that we got dropped as a client basically. I mean, I've seen that before in comands, that it's just like, they know, they think they know where their bread is buttered and they're going to pay attention to those accounts. And if you're not one of those accounts, like you can just kind of slip through the cracks. So, and then we, I think we spent a lot of time on packaging and like there were a ton of revisions on how do we get the wording exactly right. So we're probably not going to get sued, but you know, you also can't get sued if you're not selling anything. So that's, I guess, another way to not get sued. Anyway, I'm ready because I was kind of at the end of my... I kind of like been like, is this going to die? Like, is this going to happen? But we actually have physical product.

Curtis Christopherson (4:00)

Yeah, you have it. You have it in your possession.

Mike Beckham (4:02)

I have it in my possession because the 3PL we're using is Encore in Oklahoma City. And I ordered it and got it within 24 hours. I've used the product. I'm excited to talk about that.

But man, was it an odyssey getting to actually having the product.

Matt Bertulli (4:22)

Why did we choose to go so bloody high end in the input ingredients into the product?