Crushing Conferences and Collabs with Joe Rogan Carnivore Snax

Announcer:

Hey, welcome to the Nerd Marketing Podcast. Join co-hosts and ecomm OGs, Drew Sanocki and Michael Epstein. Get ready as they'll bring you trusted tactics and strategies for boosting your brand's revenue, operations, and profitability.

Drew Sanocki:

Hey everybody. Today's guest on the Nerd Marketing Podcast is Mark Ritz from Carnivore Snax. Mark grew Carnivore Snax from $3 million to $12 million in about a year, just an incredible growth rate. All the influencers in the carnivore and paleo space are into Carnivore Snax. He's got Joe Rogan interested. He'll tell you that story. He also will tell you how he's mastered events and uses events and trade shows to really get in front of the right people and grow his brand. So without further ado, Mark from Carnivore Snax. How long have you guys been in business? What's the story of Carnivore Snax?

Mark Ritz:

We started in 2019. We did a Kickstarter. Myself and my co-founder, Sylvia Tabor, we went out to White Oak Pastures who we started the source from and shot our Kickstarter video and threw up a campaign and in 30 days we did $200,000, which that included some of the post-purchase upsells that are available to you after the campaign. So that was April of 2019 and we launched our website, I think it was December of 2019. It's an

Michael Epstein:

Amazing Kickstarter campaign. How'd you get so much traction on Kickstarter? 

Mark Ritz:

We had a very successful Kickstarter because we executed on rule number one and that is to have an audience to sell to. My co-founder did the carnivore diet for nearly three years, literally just salt and water, meat, salt and water, just hardcore. So she was kind of one of the first names, I guess, in that space, and so she became very close with the other big names and as people were following her journey on social, all of those followers became our emails for this product that she created really for herself during a time where it was just really hard for her to find snacking options on the carnivore diet. So she basically sent me a message one day on Instagram, said, Hey Mark, do you know anybody that can make a website? I said, why do you ask? She said, I think I figured out a product.

I said, why don't you send it my way? Let me try some. Long story short, I asked to be a partner. She was excited about that, and it just made it really easy for me to start to build a business. I had built a business and prior to that, that failed. I didn't have an audience, so I really leveraged her audience and we ran some ads before the Kickstarter and sent a whole bunch of product to influencers and they all shared it and that's what made it a success. Who's your partner? Her name is Sylvia Tabor. She's been kind of known on social media. She started off kind of in the biohacking space and then she found the carnivore diet and that was really what cured a lot of different ailments that she was dealing with.

Drew Sanocki:

Got it. Yeah, I know a little bit about the space. Just having done a carnivore diet myself for a couple years, lost 30 pounds, changed my life. Hell yeah, man, I love it, but I also know that it's become a very competitive space like liver crisps or rib eye crisps. There are a lot of providers now. There were a lot of supply chain issues. How do you differentiate, I don't want to say it's a commodity product now. There seem to be a lot of providers of liver crisps, right? But some of them can't get product. You guys can. How do you think about differentiating?

Mark Ritz:

You've definitely touched on one of the things that has allowed us to grow and kind of separate ourselves, I think from our competitors and we have a really good grip on the supply chain. We're very involved in the regenerative space. We know a lot of people that know a lot of people and it's really helped tremendously in terms of the differentiation with the product. It's one of those things that I tell everybody, you got to try 'em all, and the answer is very clear. Our texture is just very different than the competitors out there. A lot of people kind of think about Carnivore Snax being like a meat chip or a jerky, and when they try it, they quickly realize it's really none of those. It's very airy, crispy and it really melts in your mouth because we keep the fat. We use a lot of the premium cuts that jerky manufacturers do not, and it's, it's a very different experience, and so people always touch on the texture. And then I go back and I look at brand. I've been in the e-commerce space now for seven years, and I'm very humbled day to day by everybody who compliments the look, the feel and the messaging behind Carnivore Snax. If I would put it up against any of the competitors any day.

Drew Sanocki:

Yeah, I got to say I love it. I've been a consumer of Carnivore Snax, a customer of Carnivore Snax for years and off and on whenever I get sort of anal about the diet, it's like my first move is order some Carnivore Snax. I want to eliminate the other crap I've got in my pantry. Hell yeah, man, and yeah, I

Michael Epstein:

Love it. I think you touched on something interesting too. You launched with somebody who is essentially an influencer in the space, but wouldn't be considered like a celebrity influencer, and yet you had a ton of success because those folks were highly engaged and bought in and this was a really credible person in the space. So there's a good lesson in there and that folks that are looking maybe to launch by getting involved with a celebrity influencer and you're seeing some of those even start to fizzle out now, they didn't always represent a level of authenticity and credibility with the product or the brand, but yeah, knocked it out of the park on Kickstarter by leveraging somebody with an audience that was highly engaged.

Mark Ritz:

Yeah, well said. It also kind of takes out some of the fear of how long people think it may take to start a business. Many times you do see that the recipe is to build an audience first, and that can be overwhelming, but it doesn't have to be you necessarily. That goes and builds the audience. You can leverage someone else, you can leverage your relationships and really kind of pinpoint opportunities that way.

Michael Epstein:

I mean, that really helped you initial traction and now going forward, now that you've sort of found this product market fit, have dialed things in, now you can go big and you get the Joe Rogans on it to start tasting the product and speaking about it, endorsing it publicly.

Mark Ritz:

Oh yeah, yeah. He found us through one of our Facebook ads.

Drew Sanocki:

This is Joe Rogan, the big podcaster has an affinity for Carnivore Snax. He's mentioned it a couple times on his podcast when he mentions you guys, do you see sales just go through the roof? 

Mark Ritz:

He shared a crinkled up bag at 2:00 AM of Carnivore Snax on Instagram and an Instagram post lives for 24 hours, right? I think we did $43,000 off that. 

Drew Sanocki:

That's awesome. Obviously you can't depend on it, but the business was successful before Rogan, but I think after Rogan, is it just taking it to another level? I would

Mark Ritz:

Say yes, because he has shared it now four or five times. He's a big customer of ours. He's built a ton of trust with his audience, so a lot of what he recommends, it just converts really well because of how authentic of a soul he is. But I do think it has definitely changed the business. We track some of the cohorts from those days from new customer acquisition to just really see how valuable they are, and there's no question that he is the absolute best person for our product in terms of the voice behind it

Michael Epstein:

And the first time he posts, do you even know, are you just looking at sales and all of a sudden things go through the roof and you're trying to figure out where it came from? He tags you and you figure it out and you're like high fiving around the office. What's that like?

Mark Ritz:

Well, because it happened at 2:00 AM somehow I just ended up, I think my kid woke me up crying or something in the middle of the night. So I come back to bed and I go to the dresser, grab the phone just to whatever, pop in, and I see it and I immediately message my co-founder and she gets up and we're pumped. This has kind of been a, we've talked about Joe for a while, being kind of our main guy and it happened and bigger things could happen moving forward. I don't know yet, but we stay in touch with Joe and it's been a really, really cool experience. There's no doubt.

Drew Sanocki:

Congratulations.

Mark Ritz:

Thanks man. 

Drew Sanocki:

I had a question about events because you've been posting a lot on Twitter about how you guys just dominate events, I guess. What do you mean dominate events? Is that important to your business and how do you go about dominating events? What is dominating events?

Mark Ritz:

What I have to go off of is my circle of very close e-commerce buddies who have bigger businesses than me, smaller businesses than me, and when I share what we do in terms of sales at an event, every one of their responses is really jaw dropping. Keto con, we did almost $25,000. We just did the biohacking conference. We did a little over $20,000 there, and we have a strategy where we bring coupons to handout and we will leave one of our top sellers behind, so we won't bring it. When people try the product and absolutely love it, we say, Hey, well you're going to want to take a coupon with you because we don't even have our top seller here or our number two seller, and then we track those coupon codes and see that it drives another, like for Keto Con, it drove another $9,000, and so really attributed to the event you're looking at $35,000 and for the biohacking event, it's amazing.

I mean, literally only three people came up and said they tried the product before they were customers of ours. Keto Con is a little bit different, so the customer acquisition is great. You just get so many people at the event because the product's so unique and it looks so different. They all pop onto Instagram and the amount of mentions during the event just goes haywire. And then people that aren't at the event get fomo and they're buying on the website and then you go and we run every expense, we track every expense of an event, and then we track the ROI and the fact that we're coming out ahead, even having six or seven people in all their travel expenses, it just makes a ton of sense for us and it's a good change of pace from being at the warehouse for some of our employees and it's great all around.

Drew Sanocki:

So for you guys, it's like a good opportunity to get in front of influencers within that community. They may become end customers too, but the people by nature who are going to those events, those biohacking events or paleo diet events or keto events are all so into it that they probably have their own blogs, their own Instagram accounts, their influencers themselves. Exactly. Doctors

Mark Ritz:

And our head of partnerships comes and she's just dialed in there building relationships, executing after the event, the repurchase rate there, people will buy on Friday, they'll come back to the booth, they'll buy again on Saturday, and then they'll buy again on Sunday before they leave to bring stuff home on the plane. So it really is just a really good experience for us. No shipping fees on any of that, so it's pretty

Drew Sanocki:

Cool. Do you aspire to be in brick and mortar retail at some point, or are you just, is it too complicated? 

Mark Ritz:

I get asked that probably I feel like five times a week. For me, it's like I never want to shoot down the possibility of it happening. I think it would be really cool to see that, but our core values as a brand sourcing only from regenerative farms in the US, from US ranchers, that's where it becomes very hard. If we wanted to go out to New Zealand, we could absolutely quadruple the business in probably no time and probably say 50% on raw material, but it's just not something that we want to do as a brand. Supply is what holds me back from wanting to entertain less profitable sales channels and to just continue to ride this wave of DTC. It continues to grow to a point where I’ve got to still spend tons of looking for supply. 

Drew Sanocki:

That's like a rarity right now. I see so many CPG brands feel like DTC has been tapped out. They’ve got to go brick and mortar to get volume up, and meanwhile you guys have built a good profitable business, just sort of blocking and tackling on D two C courting influencers as your main strategy. You guys do anything outside of that influencer event strategy? Are you doing paid or is everything built around the influencer strategy?

Mark Ritz:

Believe it or not, paid is by far our greatest acquisition. We probably should go even harder on influencer stuff, but again, the product really does a lot of that on its own just with the virality of it. But paid works so well because we've just been able to get content pieces of people pulling the product out of the bag, which will convert astronomically better than anything like lifestyle looking like if I put a picture up or somebody traveling with it, just like a bag hanging out of their backpack or something, it just doesn't do nearly what it does if somebody pulls it out and kind of just shows that texture and what it looks like. I mean, we're profitable on verse purchase, so we just continue to pour what we can in there and it works.

Michael Epstein:

What are some of the other goals aside from just essentially coming out ahead from a cost perspective? Is securing influencer content a goal there? You talked about not necessarily pushing into retail, so you're not courting retail buyers there. What's considered wins at the trade show aside from just sales?

Mark Ritz:

Definitely seeding affiliates. We run a successful affiliate program. We use Social Snowball for that. We don't necessarily look for tons of volume on the affiliate side. We really look to build relationships that we can maintain through hopping on quarterly calls, which our head of partnerships does. So we're definitely out there seeding affiliates. There's also other opportunities that come up that you just never even expect ending up in a couple documentaries. So there's a couple leads that we have there where they want to put us in documentaries. Some of it is just, I can't tell you there's any sort of genius tactics necessarily. It really is about being self-aware when you're at the event of the opportunities that kind of come up to the table and then going out and getting them. So yeah, I mean we're very aggressive and building relationships and it's panned out. Are

Michael Epstein:

You only focusing on some of those larger conferences or are you doing smaller events or even other tasting opportunities in local areas? I

Mark Ritz:

Would say it's kind of those smaller events. We haven't done Expo East or West. It's something we're looking into, but again, there's a lot of buyers there and they're going to see the product and they're going to be like, wow, this is different. They're not going to love the shelf life. We're six months unopened. A lot of what you find traditionally retails really anywhere from 12 months to 18 months of shelf life and they want to buy boatloads of it, so it's probably a good reason why you haven't seen a lot of companies come out with a product like this. It takes a lot of time to make it. I mean, there's a lot of companies out there that can spin up two or three batches in a day and that's just not how it works with us

Drew Sanocki:

Knowing the market a little bit. Right. You've got the trove kind of products. What are those like Bill tongs, you've got the Epic food guys have their meat bars. What makes yours different from a manufacturing point of view? So you're not outsourcing, that's the first thing, right? You guys do it? We

Mark Ritz:

Do everything. We got 30 employees or so. The biggest difference is just the two ingredients, and that's really what a lot of these people that are just conscious about what's going into their body are looking for is minimal ingredients. And we've seen a pivot to that over the last five to seven years. But it's just like, okay, when you see the front of packaging and you read minimal ingredients, you turn it over and it's still like six or seven, it's just not 80. And for us it's very shortlist. It's just meat and salt in every single one of our products. On the rare occasion we're asked, Hey, are you going to do any spices or anything? And that's just not who we are. People can add whatever they want to it if they choose, but every product we come out with is just going to be meat and salt and we're going to keep it in-house all the time so we can control a hundred percent of the customer experience. Doing our own fulfillment is vital to being able to personalize and take care of customers on the support side even better and just really double down on that customer experience, whether it's throwing something in the box in their shipment, a note or something. It's just worked really well.

Drew Sanocki:

You do this all in Ohio?

Mark Ritz:

Yep. We're just outside Columbus, Ohio. We got a 12,000 square foot facility.

Drew Sanocki:

So the actual raw materials come into that facility like the Oh yeah, you buy fresh beef liver and you're dehydrating it right there.

Mark Ritz:

We haven't actually got into organs yet, but yeah, we're buying all the meat and it's getting shipped to us and we're turning into Carnivore Snax. We got our own freezers and huge cooler where our team goes inside the cooler and works in there for a good portion of the day. USDA, everything. It's dialed in, brother. I dunno. 

Drew Sanocki:

I keep bringing up liver, but you guys are right. You don't carry liver ribeyes.

Mark Ritz:

That's right. Ribeye is by far the number one seller. Brisket is number two. What

Drew Sanocki:

About growth tips For anybody listening to this, we've got a lot of people who operate in D two C and fewer. Looking back at your journey, what are some top things you'd recommend that grew the business? I

Mark Ritz:

Think for us, really running lean for a long time helped. Our overhead was so low in the beginning that we were just able to put a lot of cash in the bank and then utilize that when we moved to Ohio and get a large facility to maximize a lot more product just to be able to make more product. So that was huge. And then being able to build a nice bank account gave us the opportunity pretty early on to lean on tools like Settle. We use Settle for all of our inventory purchases and we've just been able to grow that line of credit and increase it by building such a good relationship with them. And so we've just been able to really optimize the cash conversion cycle, which has allowed us to really be aggressive on the advertising front, play around with cool video deals with some influencers.

That's been absolute key is to get the pricing down from the beginning. That's one thing I think I'm probably most proud of is just running through a lot of different pricing models before launching and ultimately landing on an untraditional size bag. We only really sell five ounce bags. When you go into a retail store, typically you find somewhere like one ounce or one and a half ounce bags unless you go into Costco. And I worked for Costco for 12 years and I just really loved that model. So I told myself if I was going to get into this business, I wanted to have competitive pricing. It is an expensive product, but I wanted to have better pricing than some of the competitors, and my ultimate goal was to sell more of it than anybody. And that's kind of the Costco model. So people come to the website and they buy four or five bags at one time and having an average order value of $114 on a meat snack has been absolutely, absolutely incredible to just putting more cash into the bank. So that's been the biggest lever. I think

Michael Epstein:

That's how you get to first order profitable, right? Because you're not going to do it on a $25 AOV.

Mark Ritz:

Exactly. I mean I've seen some people just talking about all kinds of products on Twitter and stuff. It's just like, Hey, what would you do with a cookie? Or what would you do with this? I'm just thinking, yeah, you could go the bundle route obviously, but you could also just look at creating packages that just have more product and then go and look at competitors and beat 'em.

Michael Epstein:

So if you weren't doing Carnivore Snax today, what would you be doing? What's the business you'd start today?

Mark Ritz:

I think my buddy Chris Zaki and I would do, we'd probably start selling nicotine pouches.

Drew Sanocki:

Dude, I'm with you on that. There's one or two players that have reinvented nicotine gum. Perfect subscription product. Exactly. Biohackers. Love it. You got guys, I don't think Asprey, but who's the guy in Colorado? Greenfield. He's written a lot about it. Just like performance enhancers.

Mark Ritz:

Yeah. Probably the most common brand out there is Zen and they come in those little plastic things and stuff and I would find a way to just double that size,

Drew Sanocki:

Just 10 x the amount of nicotine in one piece of gum, right? Just wire people up.

Mark Ritz:

Yeah, that would be what I would do, to be honest with you. Have

Drew Sanocki:

You heard of this, Mike? 

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Michael Epstein

I did not hear of that. 

Drew Sanocki:

Yeah, the idea is nicotine itself is not really dangerous. I mean this is not health advice. 

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Michael Epstein

Correct.

Mark Ritz:

I dunno. 

Drew Sanocki:

Check with your doctor, whatever I have to say, I think it's often the carcinogens in tobacco, correct that cause the problem when you're smoking is the theory as opposed to the nicotine, which is you slap a patch on, you're not getting the carcinogens that are in a cigarette, right? So nicotine can suppress appetite, increases focus. I played around with it. I mean my years in the Navy, everybody, this is going to gross everyone out, but everybody dipped in the Navy. This is what you did on a ship for six months. It's like you just sat around and dipped. So that was my foray and nicotine. It's great. I mean the downside, it is very addictive, so you crave it when you get off of it, but so is coffee, right?

Mark Ritz:

Very true.

Drew Sanocki:

Really helps when you're intermittent fasting, if you want to extend a fast. The days that I've tried to do dry fasting for probably three or four days, it's a tall order, but a little bit of nicotine.

Mark Ritz:

You got it.

Drew Sanocki:

Gets you right through. 

Mark Ritz:

Very true.

Drew Sanocki:

All right Mark, how big is Carnivore Snax?

Mark Ritz:

We are on a about $12 million run rate, so I think we could crack that by the end of the year. And we did 3.6 in 2021. So we're growing very quickly. Focus is just supply, supply supply working in terms of acquisition right now

Drew Sanocki:

And cash flow positive? Absolutely. You're not losing money. Yeah, I think if you look at Google trends, carnivore, diet, keto, metabolic health, these things are all up into the right. So it's like the future's bright for sure.

Mark Ritz:

And I mean the markets that have found us, it's been really cool. I mean I've learned a lot. I didn't really, we obviously leaned heavily into the carnivore diet community in the beginning, but we're getting a lot of the outdoors type market, the campers, the hikers, the hunters, the overlander people that are climbing cliffs with vehicles and stuff. It's pretty sweet. Through our post-purchase survey with no commerce, I just feel like I find something new every day, I learn something new about who the people are that are buying from us. And for us it's just like, it kind of makes it fairly easy to test stuff out and to figure out which audiences are going to be the most successful for us.

Drew Sanocki:

I think people are waking up to how important protein is in general. There's a lot of theories around protein adequacy. You've got to get the basic daily amount of protein. You're going to be hungry until you hit that. I represent another market in that. I like buying it for my kids because I don't think they get enough protein if you throw 'em in the lunchbox. It's a great way to kind of, it's

Mark Ritz:

A great point. 

Drew Sanocki:

Jam with protein a little bit.

Mark Ritz:

It's a great point. Kids, my kids love it. They love every cut that we've made. And protein. That was probably the biggest topic at the biohacking event. It does seem like the keto stuff is kind of, keto is probably not where it used to be. Carnivore seems to still be high up there, but everybody's just shifting to this instead of diet necessarily. Like let's get back to prioritizing protein as the macronutrient and man, we got a ton of protein.

Drew Sanocki:

That's awesome. Thanks man. 

Mark Ritz:

Absolutely.

Announcer:

On this season of the Nerd Marketing Podcast, you'll hear from the Wharton professor that literally wrote the book on customer centricity, along with Drew and Michael's experience in private equity and advice from VC firm partners on what they look for in investments. And you'll hear topics about brick and mortar retail strategies for CPG brands and much more. Alright, Drew and Michael, we'll be back very soon.

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