9 minutes of eComm Wisdom: James of JIBBY

So welcome James, founder of Jibby Coffee, big fan. Maybe we could start with a quick overview of, who you are and what are you actually selling, on the internet?

Sure. Yeah. Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. I'm James co founder at Jibby. We are an intersection between a health and wellness brand and a food and beverage brand. So we take coffee and tea and we infuse them with superfoods with adaptogens, functional mushrooms, collagen, protein, things like that. Sort of the basis of the idea revolves around small habit changes, like anchoring wellness into ritual to basically improve Yourself, your wellbeing, your mind and body over time.

I've been running Jibby now for 2 years or maybe even 3 years now, but gone through many different iterations of the brand, many different pivots. And we finally found our foothold of where our customers are happiest and where we're able to grow and find scale.

Maybe we could go back to that moment taking the first step [00:01:00] into entrepreneurship, was that something that, came gradually or was it a very conscious decision from your, whatever you were doing previously into starting Jibby?

It was a really natural progression for me. Both my parents are small business owners. So I grew up with themworking since I was old enough to pick up the phone and help them work. So that's been in my blood. My first business, when I was about 17 or 18 was a pop up cafe. My mom is really into coffee. So I've been roasting coffee with her since I was a kid, like stovetop popcorn machine. And, in between semesters of school, I started a cafe with a buddy of mine, got a full restaurant license in New York. And that was the start of my entrepreneurial journey and also into the coffee business.

And so does Jibby replace coffee or does it also replace tea? Is it a combination of the two? Like, how does it fit into somebody's daily routine?

So it's a good question because we have sort of two core SKUs. One is one is actually a [00:02:00] coffee with mushrooms with it. So it's actually a low caffeine, low acidity coffee. So it's better for your gut, but it has all of those extra things in it. So when we were starting the brand, I looked atcompanies like MUD/WTR, right? I think what MUD/WTR is doing is awesome. We share a lot of the same ethos and customer base too. But what MUD/WTR is offering is actually not a coffee, like they're strictly a coffee alternative.

And a lot of their branding language is around like creating an enemy out of coffee. Some of their branding is like 'fuck coffee' for us: I thought that there was something missing there because two thirds of Americans drink coffee, like America's built on coffee. It's so ingrained into our culture and worldwide too, but.

I thought we could do a lot of what MUD/WTR was doing and offer like healthy alternatives or better for your gut or better for brain fog and things like this, but actually still have it be coffee because that's such an important daily ritual for a lot of people. And sure, there's a huge market of people who want to give it up, but there's [00:03:00] equally a huge market of people who don't want to give up coffee, but they still want all of those benefits.

So that's the field in which we play.

Tell me cause you highlighted this already a little bit, but over the last 2 years, there's been some iterations in the business and you I'm sure had many insights along the way. When it comes to acquisition, which is one of the most important things to crack in DTC specifically, do you feel like you've had any breakthroughs in the last two years and you feel like you've got a system in place that really works?

And if so, what does that look like?

When I felt like we finally started cracking acquisition is only when we fully understood retention and our actual LTV, because maybe you have a high CAC in acquisition and maybe that's not first order profitable, but once you really understand your cohort math.

And you're pegging that towards retention, then you can understand that you're actually acquiring great customers, albeit maybe expensive in the beginning. You just have to make it through your cohort payback period [00:04:00] and trust the process and trust that you have a good product that people are coming back and purchasing.

So you, you really feel like, as a brand owner today you don't necessarily need to be first order profitable as if you have enough data, like you guys have at this point on what a true customer journey looks like all the way through.

Yeah, I think that's part of it. I just think one, you can't talk about acquisition without considering retention, but specifically for CPG brands and very specifically for ritual brands like Jibby. It is all about the LTV because we want people consuming this product every day. And in fact, it works better when you consume it every day.

It's all about these like small habit changes. And, that's what creates the rippling long term effects. And so like the business model is inherently,linked to the way that the product actually works and the way that we market and communicate the benefits.

Have there been like, when you think about conversion rate optimization: Have there been any wins from you, recently [00:05:00] that, that reflect that focus on the retention piece?

Shout out to Replo. We were talking about this before the podcast started but, my site is almost entirely built on a Replo because it's just so great to tweak and do things yourself and make small changes to your website and just building off of that like looking at our data, doing A/B testing using Intelligems, changing things on Replo has been huge for unlocking incremental conversion rate lifts but more than that,

I think in the beginning before we were like really running traffic to Jibby, we were focused almost too much on CRO and not necessarily on the input of CRO, which is traffic quality and like traffic quality is going to come from how good your ads are, how good your creative is, how much of a a bridge there is between the ad and your offer and your product. And so focusing on those actually before CRO are probably more meaningful than changing the font weight of your buttons. That that stuff only works once you [00:06:00] really are driving true amounts of like volume.

So

how are you getting, the algorithms to pick up on those longterm user types as opposed to those first order types?

it's really hard to know until your cohort has run its course, which is a little bit frustrating.

a lot of it though, will come down to like offer quality. So if you're running really aggressive first order discounts, you're probably going to have lower quality customers. Like we've run, and actually we're still running the background as test, like a free sample into subscription flow. And this is like an age old. DTC subscription classic of just pay shipping first order', and then we'll put you into a subscription flow that, renews 14 days later, 30 days later, whatever: that has really low CAC Acquisition costs, but it has shitty customers.

And the ones that do stay, you have to make sure that math checks out on those, But you're balancing lower LTV and lower CAC with [00:07:00] poor quality customers from something like that versus spending $80-$100 CAC on acquiring a customer that's actually going to stay for a long period of time.

Have there been any skills that you're surprised that you've had to acquire in order to make Jibby successful?

I feel like sometimes, as a founder/operator like you have to do everything in the beginning, right?

And then things that you're not so good at, you usually try to delegate away or hire somebody who is really good at those things. What I'm enjoying and I don't, I can't say that I'm great at it: I am enjoying learning the cohort math and being data focused. That's something that's been relatively new to Jibby which is something that I regret not doing right from the start, it's like really basing the entire business model in the numbers and in the data, like we use, Lifetimely for cohort analysis, for LTV tracking, etc. It's a fantastic tool. And so just really trying to understand how the cohort map makes sense has been integral to like actually building a sustainable business [00:08:00] model.Like on that note, something that I've gotten better at is we raised some money a year or two years ago and then we went through a bit of a pivot and we went through the pivot because we were struggling. And, because of that, because we were struggling and had less money in the bank, it forced us to be smarter and make better actual business decisions, pegged to the data. So I think that's almost something that I've appreciated more, like being a little bit constrained makes for smarter, smarter, at least more sustainable business practices.

Yeah, that's a really good insight. That's cool to hear. nice. Okay. last question for me is, what do you wish you knew today that you didn't know then when it comes to running Jibby?

Maybe one of them would be actually like removing myself as a founder, co founder more from the business. And like I said, like focusing more on the data, because there's this balance that you have to strike between [00:09:00] your brand being an extension of you and something that you wake up and love to do in a product that you deeply believe in, but also listening to your customer base and like who they are and what they want, because ultimately, like that's the data, they're the people who should be making the decisions. So there's a fine balance to decouple your emotional response to the business and the way that it looks and the way that it feels and what you want it to represent. If it's an extension of you versus what's actually making the metrics to go up and to the right.

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