22 minutes of eComm Wisdom: Joe from Oshun

okay. We're in. so JoeI'm a big fan of what you're building with Oshun and can't wait to learn more. For the audience that doesn't necessarily know what you've been working on, could you tell us what you're selling on the internet?

Yeah.

Thanks, Tim. Oshun is a brand that we launched just three months ago and essentially we sell, so you know, the feeling when you're really well hydrated, you know the feeling when you like you wake up. Like maybe you're on holiday and you're not stressed and just feel like really good. Like hopefully that's the, that's what we selland we do that by selling a liquid electrolyte concentrate. So it's just a super, super easy product to use. doesn't have any flavor added, no sweeteners, just liquid electrolyte concentrate on natural. You just add a pump into your glass or your bottle and you're good to go and do that a few times a day.

the, hydration space is quite crowded one. But your approach has been so unique and it immediately stood out to me. I first heard about it via X and and I just thought it was a genius application of, something that I actually use every day. I use a lot, I consume a lot of the hydration tablets and I thought this pump idea was super, super clever.

so yeah, tell me a bit about like that aha moment.

When did you. When did you come up with that idea and, and then how quickly did you go from that aha moment to, to the first sale?

So this sort of product is something that I've been using for quite a while. and over the last, like probably 3-4 years, I noticed this overall increasing interest in hydration and electrolytes, like more and more awareness from the consumers, more and more brands entering the space, Google trends, like super easy to see, like up into the right nonstop for the last 10 years. So you combine all those things and I was like, this is really interesting space.

And at the same time, all the brands that are entering it and all the brands that exist are pretty much exclusively focused on sports, endurance, maybe biohacking, and nobody's going after like people that don't necessarily see that in the mirror, but just see like somebody who wants to feel good.

Somebody who wants to be in generally a good mood. Somebody who wants to manage their stress better. Somebody who just needs like mental clarity, that kind of thing. Like none of those brands appeal to somebody like that, who doesn't see themselves as like an Ironman type athlete. So that was really like the thinking behind it.

And then, the second part of the thinking was: Can we make this like unbelievably easy to use and just really easy to understand. And I mean that in a way that's literally physical, like adding one pump to your glass or two pumps to your bottle, super easy, really habit forming and just really convenient, that was the whole thing behind it.

And then we got validation, even before we launched that people would be interested in it. and then just grew it from there, started with our small, relatively small audience, and it's grown really well over the last 3 months. so I honestly am really pleased because we're in a really good place right now.

Yeah, that's incredible and, and amazing how much you've been able to cover in such a short amount of time. So I want to go back to your background, because I know you've had some relevant experience in D2C.with Motion Nutrition and then you also have some media experience with Knowjack Media.

Like when you were working in those companies prior to starting Oshun, did you always have the dream of starting your own D2C brand? Like a year ago: could you have predicted that this would be what you'd be working on right now full time?Motion Nutrition nutrition is a brand that I started in, I co founded in 2016 and we sold in 2022. So I, I had already founded a supplement brand. But after selling that I was like pretty determined that I wouldn't launch like a CPG brand for a really long time. And it basically lasted like a year and a half. So no, I didn't see myself in this position a year ago. But I suppose like the experience of having had a supplement brand before and being in the health space for seven or eight years. Combined with the experience of running a media production company where we service some great brands like Aston Martin, North Face, National Geographic, like some really big brands got to do some cool projects. We also worked with like really early stage startups. And so we, especially in the kind of health and wellbeing space. And so we saw like repeatedly, like over and over again, how people are starting, where they may be are lacking, skills or experience and what they're doing really well. So we were exposed to that quite a bit. I suppose what we realized is that, through our experience of previously having a supplement brand, and then the production media production experience, we actually had a really good combination of skill sets and experience to build a brand in a very different way to what's usually been done.

And we really can leverage our skill sets and experiences to our advantage. And so that, that's why With, Oshun, although it's like relatively new, not even 4 months old, we've managed to get good traction, good success. A lot of that, thanks to the fact that we've got sort of 10 years of experience in supplements and media production, sort of organic media production.

Yeah. you've gotten to market so quickly from a product standpoint, but then also, that, that's one thing to get the product out there. This next bit is to get people excited about it. And from a content standpoint,you've cut through the noise so well.

And I, that's, that's something that jumped out at me. And, And I'd love to dig into that a little bit more to understand what exactly have you done? Is there formula or did it happen organically? Is it just like a sort of like a shared soup of insights that Have been accumulated over the years But even before we go into the content side of things want to go back to to Motion Nutrition which I feel like is so so relevant to what you're doing now what was that journey like in building that business and exiting it and is there a couple of lessons, like key lessons that you draw, like that you're drawing from when starting Oshun?

Yeah. honestly, like this, hopefully this comes across, not in a sort of pompous way, but in a very honest way, like the second time around building a CPG brand feels like superpowers, like it honestly feels so good because it's not necessary that I know exactly what we should be doing. It's more that I know.

A lot of the stuff that we shouldn't be doing. I know you go through a lot of mistakes and you go through a lot of like first times and working things out and figuring out like in hindsight what was actually useless or what was a waste of time, what was a waste of money. So the second time around it's great because you have all of that learning and all those hindsights to go back to.

And that's why we're able to move quite fast and with confidence because we avoid the really obvious pitfalls that the first time around are not obvious because you just don't know what you're doing. I think the, probably the biggest learning really like very broadly speaking is with Motion Nutrition we had quite a few products and, this time around. It's one beautiful product and that is beautiful because it's not easy, but it's very simple.You can really narrow down who you're trying to talk to and what you should be saying to them and make sure that everything like comes together visually, aesthetically with the words, with the communication channels, like everything ties the story really neatly all together

And because it seems like you guys do have limited resources. Now you're, you haven't fundraised, right?

You're bootstrapping this business. Is that fair to say? Yes. And yet you've, you're cutting through the clutter. you're achieving things, not even by spending on Facebook or Meta, as I understand it, it's a lot on just producing really great content. So talk me through a little bit about that because that's where so many brand founders struggle is to get the word out there. And you guys are doing it on a shoestring budget. What are some of the things that you've done that you feel others could replicate or could learn from?there's some things that we've done, which not everybody's going to be comfortable with in the sense that the way that we've gone about this is very like personal, like people really get access to like me as a person and Jack, my, my co founder as an individual. So we're really open to stuff. And I think that if you are not like in a place where you're very comfortable with getting criticism, that would be quite dangerous. So not everybody's going to be willing to do that.

So that's one thing. But that thing I should say is probably one of the key reasons why we've had so much success on X and got a lot of traction and attention on Twitter, because we're like really open about what we're up to, who we are, what we're doing, that kind of thing.

But I suppose like before in other areas, more broadly on the content and on the branded content, before you talk about that, like my take is that all comes downstream from like the brand strategy and the brand strategy needs to incorporate like what the product is and if you have a good product, everything else is going to be more efficient.

If you have a bad product, everything else in terms of marketing is going to be less efficient and therefore more expensive. And so my view is if you can make something that's not boring everything else is going to work a lot better.

So we've basically tried to build in as many sort of social triggers into the brand as possible so that when we do go out and talk to people about it or just show people, it triggers some kind of a reaction in them. And an extreme would be a brand like liquid death, right? that's really visual and visible that you understand that it's like, they're really pushing your heart to get an emotional reaction out of you. It's sort of an easy way because it's very like provocative. The way that we've done it is more, it's trickier to balance. I think, because this. It's more elevated and sort of aesthetic. So like marrying that with triggering that word of mouth is quite difficult, but we've managed to do that by building in just a very unique type of packaging: the delivery method, the pump, like it's very different to anything that's been done in this space, across all the products that haven't seen any product that looks like this before.

So right off the bat, like that gives us an advantage. So then go out and post on X and suddenly we've had venture capitalists across the U S. That we've never heard of before that we've never spoken to before start bundling us in with three or four other brands that are doing something special in the CPG space.

And honestly, like we had no right to be a part of that in the sense that like we're a tiny little startup out of the UK: they should not know us. You know what I mean? if you look at the other brands that were in that list, like they were all probably quite heavily funded, distributed, like in a lot of like retail points across the U.S

and we're just like, 'Hey, it's Jack and Joe got a cool product'. So hacked it a little bit to our advantage.

Yeah, and I can imagine some of the other folks in that category that they've bundled you into could be the likes of Graza, I imagine, in the olive oil space. Exactly, exactly. The squeezable bottle.

And so I want to talk about the growth of the business now and what your mindset is. You obviously have big aspirations and you've done it in the past as well in growing Motion Nutrition.

Now you've got some great traction, here with Oshun. Are you thinking about scale, or do you think about growth slightly differently now that it's your second time around on this business and you're trying to do things more slowly, or, yeah, like, how do you look ahead to the next nine months, for example?

I don't think slowly is the right word, but it's more, and I don't know if it's my experience it being the second time around, or, As much as the ecosystem is just so different to like 2017, 18, 19, where the whole, like the whole mood was just like grow at all costs. Don't worry if your top line revenue is going to the right and up, like you're going to keep getting funding, like who cares just grow, grow, grow.

And that's just not the landscape anymore. And I'm quite happy about that. I think it's very good to build a business that is structurally sound from the beginning. And so that's it really like structurally sound. You know, essentially profitable month on month,and within that ecosystem, grow as fast as you can.

So that's the sort of parameters is we don't want to lose money. we want to make money every month and that money is going to allow us to keep growing. So like our job then becomes how far can we push every single month. So that we're not in the hole, but we're growing positively every single month.

and like how hard at that, how hard can we go at that basically?

And do you, and when you think about that to, to take things bit by bit, does that involve, a strategy across channels and geographies, or are you just going with the flow and

you're just following demand, as it comes.

So this is one of the drawbacks of being like up until now been fully organic sales. So you have, you can't really take control when you're doing organic sales, like you're basically producing a lot of content, writing a lot of stuff, doing a lot of talking, getting in front of people a lot and a lot.

So it's not free, right? This is this takes a lot of time and energy. but that does mean that the onus becomes on others rather than. it's very easy if you met to say, I want to target, 35 to 45 year olds in London. that's cool. That's easy. When you start pushing stuff out there and you got CPG like commentators that are, have got 2 million followers that start talking about your product.

That's out of your hands, right? So it's great, but it's completely out of your hands. So like geographically, it's been out of our control. Um, next steps, I'd say, just for now, we're logistically based in the UK. So it makes sense to, at least from like paid acquisition standpoint to focus on that country because just operations are much less costly.

But what we found is that we get a lot of word of mouth. So,we inevitably end up having orders to Australia multiple times a week, New Zealand, across the U S pretty much every day, Canada, like every country in Europe. so that's really cool. Cause it shows that like people are enjoying the product enough to talk about it to their friends and family that might listen somewhere else.

and that's great. If we can essentially focus our paid. Acquisition efforts in a place where we have more room for margin. So we can embed that into like our unit economics much better. And then that percolates to the orders across the U S where of course, like our shipping costs are going to be higher, there's a bit more logistics, a bit more paperwork is all that stuff to take into account, but we don't have any acquisition costs.

Like that's fantastic. I'm very happy with that. And it's also a very good sign that, we're getting good word of mouth.

Yeah. So essentially what you're suggesting is you might continue to focus on the UK if it's more about investing in growth, but that leads to more and more people sharing the product worldwide and you getting organic orders elsewhere, which will give you the right signals to then one day, maybe establish a bigger push somewhere else.

And that could be Australia. It could be the US. yeah, absolutely.

Okay. cool. Any, any other learnings that you have on the, on the e commerce front more from like a tactical side of things. And this could be around, it could be about content production,to turn out assets faster than others.

It could be about, CRO, I know that you've probably put some thought into what, how your website operates as a single SKU based website, or even maybe on an operation side of things. Have there been other things that you've set up very mindfully,on the Oshun first launch?

Yeah. so first of all, before we even launched, we got some validation by, Essentially just asking our network to help us, at first it was pick a name. we had four options for a name for this brand. Oshun was one of them. Oh, it's Oshun, O S H U N. and we just asked people, on Twitter, on LinkedIn, on TikTok, to say, 'Hey, can you come and vote for one of these four names?'

And we had, a couple hundred people vote. So,that was, like, a first indicator that, Okay, if they're willing to put in that much time, even if it's only a minute, like there is enough interest that like that validates the sort of first bit, then we did it again for picking sort of art direction of the brand. And thankfully, we knew what we wanted to do. Every time, it was the name, or the name, or the direction that we wanted that was picked. there's an extra validation. But the real thing was, like, are people going to invest a little bit of time, and therefore tell us that they're interested in this? We've got that. And then we did pretty much, The smallest production we could do to get the first batch of product out. And then the validation question becomes are people going to get their credit card out and actually spend money on this? So that was answered positively. And then you just iterate and grow each time from there.

I think like beyond that, some of the stuff that I found surprising is, when you're really going for like organic sales and pushing content. across different platforms. It's really funny to discover that people use different platforms very differently. So you might think that if you keep posting reels on Instagram, for example, all your followers are going to see it, right?

Or like the sort of active, like the real fans are going to see it. Yeah. Then you post like a static image and it's like a completely different set of people that see it. And then you post a story. And again, it's a completely different set of people that see it. So this is how we've done it is basically okay, we've got, we're creating a bank content.

This is one of our skillsets. We're really going to leverage it. And then let's make sure that we push it across all the potential places that people will see it. And that also includes Pinterest. Of course, it includes TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn, but also sites like Pexels. we've got like some product, like Pexels.

Like anybody can download for free and use that as part of a presentation or whatever. So just like just allowing people, like just equipping people as much as possible to talk about us and to discover us in all kinds of different places.

Yeah, it comes quite naturally to you and your co founder. Um,you enjoy content production and therefore posting about it on pixels or Pinterest is something that you're excited to do. It doesn't feel like a drag. And I feel like for a lot of econ founders today, having that passion and that love for it. For content and media is a real asset because it just allows you to move faster and not to have not have to hire external resources to help you get the message out instead of you.

But also, it could be another skill,for us, that's what we have. But there's other founders who are just like unbelievable salespeople and they're, they will be better suited going after like partnerships, go after like big partnerships that you don't have any business to do, but you're able to exercise your skill to achieve that.

Like, that's great. I think it's just about finding like what your sort of secret tool is and, Using it to your advantage.

Well last question for me is I wanna know a little bit more about like your philosophy on work life balance because you strike me as somebody who, has found a really great, happy medium to, to do things from an entrepreneurial standpoint that,bring a lot of happiness and joy to you.

And also at the same time raise a family. I see you posting a lot about that,in the south of France. And then I see your co founder, taking surf trips and using that as an opportunity to film content for you guys with Oshun. So yeah, what are your thoughts on having a good work life balance as a founder, as a second time founder,for you at this stage?

It's honestly one of our biggest priorities and it's one of the reasons why we're gradually moving away from content production for media production company to Running our own brands is that, it gives us so much more freedom. We've got like great people who do a 3PL. We've got great people who do like our bottling, that kind of thing. Like fantastic. Okay, cool. We don't need to be on site. Now it's about. What makes us happy, what makes us able to do really good work. And so for Jack, my co founder, that's basically being somewhere sunny where he can surf and were very different, like we've got very different skills, but we've got the same, like the life philosophy of.

'You need to be in a good place mentally and eMotion Nutritionally to do good work'. And so for me, that meant going back to live in the south of France with my family. it's allowed us what certainly allowed me to have so much more time in the outdoors, so much more time with my kid. I'm not like commuting anywhere.

We've got a lovely house here, which was like, probably four times cheaper than maybe more times cheaper than it would have been in the south of England. Um, you know, why not? Like it's fantastic. And if that at the same time means I actually produce better work, yeah, it's awesome.

That's basically our priority is like, let's enjoy ourselves. And if you're in a good place, you're probably going to do better output for work.

Yeah, that's super inspiring. And, and I love that you're sharing that message out, because there's still a certain framework around how workis done and which is not necessarily always the right framework, but seeing examples of people like you who are thriving is, I think, real inspiration for a lot of founders out there who are, making decisions on how to structure their life around them, or their business around their life choices. So,maybe one last, one last point is can the audience help you in any way? I know you love getting people involved in the Oshun business. Is there something that listeners could be helpful to you with?

Yeah, first of all, go check it out. Go check out drinkOshun. co. again, Oshun is O S H U N. So drinkOshun. co. and just tell me what you think. you can find me on X at Joe Wellstead. And I really appreciate all feedback. And the way we've built this brand is like, It's extremely community driven, like I told you right from the start, like we help our community helped us pick the name, then the brand direction and so on. And I want to like, make sure that's, that remains like a key part of us moving forward. So if you can become part of like our community today, you're going to help us do things like what is our next flavor?

Like, what is our first flavored option going to be? Or what's our next sort of product variation going to be? That kind of thing. And I really want to people like take people on the journey with us on that, not in a cheesy, like marketing BS kind of way, but actually in a way that's no, this is a product that's meant to make you happier every single day.

Like our messaging is basically a clear skin, clear mind. So if you're well hydrated, you got clear skin, better hydration through your skin. You got a clear mind. So that's for you. Like, of course I benefit from it, but I want this to be like way more than just about me. So Be a part of the community from today.

And you'll be able to help us shape what that looks like in the next few years.

Awesome. Joe, thank you so much. Great to hear your insights and, yeah, stay in touch and congrats on the success so far.

Thanks Tim. Appreciate it.

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