The Startup CPG Podcast

03:48 Jessi - Hi Hannah, hi Behzad. So good to have you on the show today. How are you both?

03:43 Hannah - Pretty good.

03:54 Behzad - Awesome to be here.

03:55 Jessi - Great, awesome. It's really nice to have you both here and I would love if you could start us off by telling us a little bit about each of yourselves and about Tend.

04:03 Hannah - My name is Hannah. I am actually a visual artist. That's my background and training. So I studied painting and drawing and traveled the world. Always thought I would live overseas. I'm originally from the DC area but now living in Los Angeles. Behzad and I met at my best friend's wedding in New York City and because of that I'm now in LA.

04:21 Behzad - Sorry but yeah I did bring to LA. It was never my plan to be Californian either. I grew up in the Midwest in Green Bay Wisconsin until I became lactose intolerant and then I moved to the East Coast where it's less about cheese and more about just type A personality. Go, go, go. Did all my schooling out there on the East Coast and then looked for a job in academia. I have a PhD in human nutrition and I wanted to be a professor of nutrition probably about 10, 12 years ago now. Was single at the time. Could go anywhere in the country. California and LA were compelling as a single person and so moved out to California to work. Got married to Hannah a few years after that and a few years after that got into this crazy entrepreneurship journey.

05:06 Jessi - That's amazing. Awesome. So tell us a little bit about the Tend products. You know what are the flavors? What are a little bit about the products and where people can find them that may be listening and haven't heard. We'll also make sure there's links at the end but just so the people kind of know where they're available and then we'll dig more into how you got started but I just want to make sure people know what the products are.

05:27 Hannah - So Tend is a prenatal supplement that's in the form of a bar and what I had to take previous to you know Behzad and I founding Tend was a handful of prenatal pills that is very rare. You cannot actually get all of your prenatal nutrition in one pill and for me I have a huge aversion to pills and I could never swallow pills since I was a kid. So when it came time we were talking about kids start on prenatal pills it was just really difficult for me.

05:58 Behzad - Yeah I'm watching Hannah struggle taking all these prenatal vitamins and I wanted her to enjoy that process. It's already hard enough to try to get pregnant you know sustain that pregnancy with all the symptoms and the nausea that go along with it and just the stress and uncertainty and wanted to turn her pill struggle with the prenatal vitamins into something that she would look forward to and based on all my research wanted to also give her nutrients and vitamins from foods as opposed to ones that were synthetically made in a lab like all those pills and gummies are. So that struggle and some of my research brought us to a place where we wanted to reinvent the prenatal vitamin as a snackable supplement. So Tend is now available as a small 30 gram bar, Lemonberry which is our best seller, peanut butter chocolate and chocolate sea salt are our three signature flavors. We're also releasing seasonal flavors on our regular basis. Actually we're releasing a seasonal flavor, first time we're saying it is on this podcast in about a month. So really looking forward to that flavor and customers have wanted to see us expand flavors and we've released seasonals in the past and we really want to release fun seasonal flavors that people look forward to taking in the pregnancy and not just a bunch of pills like Hannah was struggling with or gummies that we find really sugary. Just wanted to snackify that prenatal vitamin experience.

07:14 Jessi - Yeah oh I love that and it was so fun to get to try the project originally as when you were a backpack brand at Expo West earlier this year and I was like what an awesome idea like because yeah so many people taking pills is not a pleasant experience you have to take so many. I'm like I wish that this product existed a few years ago for friends when they were going through the process of having to you know take all of those pills and you have awesome flavors and I got to try the formulation you know your formulation again this week and you sent me some more product and so it's just really fun the lemon berry I just love it it makes the it totally changes the game of the experience. So I'm wondering if you can talk us through like you know really early days what it looked like to be like okay are we really gonna do this like did you first was it first just being like okay let's make something at home you know for Hannah and then deciding okay maybe we should make this available for other people or did you always know that you wanted to to make it available for other people I'm curious about what the very early conversations looked like for you both.

08:15 Hannah - It started yeah in our in our kitchen and Behzad was inspired by the fact that I could not swallow my pills I'd have to concentrate say a prayer drink a huge glass of orange juice which I don't usually drink and he had this idea.

08:31 Behzad -  And at first I was just taking Hannah's typical prenatal pills and grinding them up and trying to put it into a smoothie or a cookie or whatever I could and it just tasted like what you'd expect to ground up vitamin pills taste like it was chalky it was sour it was metallic and I was just sort of like why can't we just give people what they need from foods oh I know because you'd have to buy a pile of fruits and vegetables and eat that every day so we started to get fruit and vegetable powders that were dried down and concentrated so kale broccoli sweet potato sunflower seeds giving all the same vitamins and minerals you'd find in a prenatal pill or gummy all from foods which a lot of the research that I'd worked on showed were better absorbed you don't necessarily need a phd to understand that foods absorb nutrients better than from pills like if you've ever had a vitamin and then gone to the restroom and noticed your urine is brightly colored I think a lot of people resonate with that or have had that experience you've never had a salad or a really healthy meal right and then gone to the bathroom and noticed that your pee is bright yellow like why is that because our bodies are absorbing those nutrients they're not just passing through us so that concept really inspired me to want to not only redefine what the experience of taking a prenatal vitamin was but just the ingredient panel the sourcing so we started to source from different places on the internet I mean I started by google searching I don't know where you could find this stuff on the ingredients and put them into different forms that were more enjoyable than Hannah's pill routine.

09:54 Hannah - And also happened to be shortly after the pandemic hit so we were stuck in our apartment and you know here is Behzad experimenting really you know trying different things and that we had the time and space to do that.

10:11 Jessi - Oh yeah wow so what was the experience like for you Hannah like immediately where like did you were you able to switch away from pills pretty quickly and I'm curious about your feedback like were there were you working on more iterations of all right like let's figure that out and then Behzad were you doing the you know the math or you know making sure that there's the right nutrients in there like it sounds very technical to make sure that everything's in there so I'm curious what the back and forth looked like of Hannah you being like this is actually tastes good for me to actually eat and Behzad you being like well maybe this version doesn't have the right nutrients in it or something.

10:44 Hannah - Yeah that's all of that it was it was um Behzad bring me product and not just me but we'd bring it to our friends places and you know when we'd have dinner parties we'd be like hey guys tasting we're gonna have a tasting right now and so um we tried so many different forms so many different types of ingredients different textures I mean both Behzad and I love food you know I love baking he's really you know he's kind of a foodie very sensitive palette Behzad has and so we were trying all sorts of things and for you yeah you were trying to source the nutrients of course for me I was mostly concerned with the taste and I mean our friends were telling us hey this is a great idea we want you to actually try to make this.

11:22 Behzad - If I can step back at first it tasted horrible at first it didn't give that to anybody it tasted like because what you're doing is you're having ground up spinach and kale and like chard and you're giving that to someone and you can't hide those flavors easily so I ended up finding through connection someone who had a culinary background and experience actually making snacks in the cpg space who I worked with who gave me some really good advice on how to hide and mask flavors I'm and it turns out that certain flavors can hide other flavors and certain textures can even hide certain flavors so we worked um I worked with this individual for a decent amount of time and brought her a lot of stuff to taste and at the same time Hannah let us have taste and I probably couldn't stomach what I was making I don't think Hannah could either I think she's being generous maybe at the first six months to a year it was horrible but it got better which indicated to me maybe we can get this to a point where it's not only tolerable but it's something that's enjoyable and you'd look forward to and that probably took a year and a half it probably took so many spreadsheets shout out to google spreadsheets and it probably took jesse like you sort of hinted at a lot of iterations and testing so I would test levels of ingredients and nutrients and I'd give Hannah a batch of eight different tests in one and she would pick the optimal for that variable and then I'd go test another variable but of course these variables all interact so it took a lot of back and forth um even though my background is as a scientist I'm not a formulator or a chef so it took a lot of but you have food science experience yeah yeah that was handy it was it was it was like more like mad science than real science took a lot of experimentation the first day we'd make it it would taste good and then three days later it would taste like you were sucking on a copper penny so it was a lot of learning about just what it meant to formulate something from scratch

13:21 Hannah - Yeah in a nutshell I was not you know it took years it took years to create this product and kind of in parallel you know we were trying to build our family and we did have a kind of a long pregnancy journey with a couple losses along the way so it was kind of this parallel journey of birthing business and birthing our own baby who you know is actually now 14 months we have a baby girl but it was a long process so I was not able to make the switch right away because it took a long time to create from the technical point of view this product that actually has 25 micronutrients plus protein and fiber.

13:54 Jessi - Yeah I was I was going to ask I was like I feel like you were building a family at the same time and you know the pandemic was in there but I I assume you weren't able to jump in on this like full time so you're doing this on the side this these experiments and everything and so that's amazing that you went through all of those iterations to get to the product today like that's just incredible all the work that you did.

14:19 Behzad - Yeah I think the coolest thing now is seeing that a lot of people that taste it and don't understand that it's a prenatal just tastes like a normal snack bar then I didn't know that we could ever get to that point and then just the feedback has been just a lot of fun to hear from people of course mom specifically about what this has done for them and how it's helped them so it's been really rewarding not only to see it sort of pay off quote unquote in our own family and to make Hannah's journey a little bit more enjoyable but to see it play out for so many others has been just amazing.

14:46 Jessi - Yeah I'm wondering about kind of then like commercializing it a little bit like you have beautiful branding and packaging now like product size it's just so cool like I just I love all of it what was it like to kind of determine the brand and then I assume working in either a commercial kitchen or a co-manufactured to do like a production run what did that process look like can you tell us a little bit about that?

15:10 Hannah - Brand has always been central to tend even when we didn't know that we were building a brand we just feel really indebted to our community we have a great network of friends and family who are really talented so actually the branding was designed by a friend of ours who has experiences in cpg and so she got the idea and she you know she understood exactly what needed to be communicated this kind of warm maternal energy that is also fun and and will peak your interest while not being because the supplement space is a rather kind of sterile impersonal space so we hit it big because she she did the branding and from when we started been the same but the manufacturing has been a whole other challenge.

15:53 Behzad - Yeah I wish that for the manufacturing we could have just brought someone to check like we did for our friend for branding and it sort of worked out since day one but we were self-manufacturing from the beginning to about a few months ago and self-manufacturing of course means we were in a commercial kitchen at first not one that we owned but one that a friend was letting us use on the weekends oh yeah and because of different reasons we couldn't hold all of our ingredients at that commercial kitchen space so everything was at home and we would load up our car early on Saturday morning with all of the raw ingredients and materials drive it all to the kitchen unload it mind you this is the height of the pandemic so we're wearing our n95 masks in the commercial kitchen space summer of 2020 we would make batches of bars 2021 2021 yeah make batches of bars leave with all the finished goods packaged raw materials have to clean out the whole kitchen we were there from nothing left behind 8 a.m. 8 or 9 a.m. to about 10 p.m. every night we'd have lunch and dinner in our vehicle because there was no space that we couldn't eat food in the commercial kitchen and so that was just insane but really all that happened because we weren't at that point making it for just Hannah anymore we had demand and that demand started when one of our friends gifted it to her boss who had about two million followers on Instagram posted one story about us and the number of dms we got on Instagram that day was insane and so it took us about two or three months in that commercial kitchen on the weekends to fulfill orders from that first day that we launched because of that one Instagram story that was the signal that told us maybe there's something before that it was really all for Hannah and some of our friends who were like Venmoing us money on the side and I was making them bars out of our apartment but that signal told us maybe there's something here let's get in the commercial kitchen and then eventually we got our own commercial kitchen space and started making them and at that point couldn't make it fast enough even with four or five employees moved to a contract manufacturer in the early part of this year 2023.

17:59 Jessi - That's amazing and I was curious about how you kind of got initial data from everyone so wow to have it be posted to all those followers and then get all those dms and have to catch up on all those orders that's incredible wow and I'm curious from like uh I think I saw something an interview or something with Behzad where you talked about kind of digging into the consumer data and I'm curious as you've built out the e-commerce and just from the you know from that that post that gained all that information like how have you looked at data that you've learned you know from consumers has that informed the process going forward and you know how have you thought about the data that you've collected so far and how you can you know use that to kind of shape the journey of the company?

18:41 Hannah - Yeah I think it's been amazing to launch D2C with so much interest even before we you know we had a website like she posted before our website website was really live and so we always make decisions based on customer insight that is like our bedrock that's the reason why we're here like I am you know the ideal customer we built this product because I had a problem and so we're always interviewing customers we're always looking at the data we recently made a couple changes to our product after you know the first year year and a half of really gathering insight from customers on like what they thought about our product so previously our original bar which we launched in 2021 was a larger 57 gram bar that was refrigerated and and it still you know has all the same nutrients that we offer right now but it was a little bit bigger so people were saying oh I it's a little bit hard for me to eat I mean I eat them every day and so like I was happy to do it because it's like it's kind of like a breakfast or like a nice afternoon snack or an after dinner dessert but people were saying oh it's a little bit big it's a little bit hard for me to eat and like you know I'm feeling nauseated because I'm pregnant and so there's that concern we also ran some surveys with all the we have direct lines of communication with our customers which is how we just gain all these insights people are saying you know the price point is a little bit of a barrier and so you know a couple of those data points kind of led us to reformulating and releasing this newer version of our product which we just released about a month ago.

20:16 Behzad - And part of it was also talking to not just customers but stores and retailers like Whole Foods who we had a conversation with last fall asked us where we envisioned this to be on the store shelf and that was back when we were a refrigerated product and that is a great question because women who are pregnant who are looking for prenatal vitamins and Whole Foods aren't looking next to the refrigerated protein bar section they're looking where the prenatal vitamins are so that told us a year ago almost that we need to be a shelf stable product that took a lot of r&d to make it shelf stable as opposed to a refrigerated product but since we want to go retail and so we have had those conversations with Whole Foods and we were in the target accelerator to a dream retailer for us for sure we want to be where customers expect to find us next to the other supplements so it's been a combination like Hannah said of Hannah's done so many customer interviews it's my favorite thing that it's her favorite thing to do if she could just do that I love it yeah yeah I've been on a few and it's always really revealing and really fun to hear from that person who's on the subscription but then even just talking to retailers I think we needed to be not only shelf stable but a smaller form factor because of how much shelf space the old bar would take up and then even a price point that's a little bit more palatable at retail people are comparing prices on retail shelf all the time that's what drives a lot of consumer behavior is just that price threshold that they have in their mind so we want it to be a little bit closer to a few dollar a day max so now it's about three dollars a day per serving of the prenatal vitamin and people are people using as a snack some of the supplements so we're learning a lot how people are using it how they expect to find us where they expect to find us and what we can do as a result of being small to pivot and change even the form factor and formulation and the price to respond to those customer desires.

21:57 Jessi - That's amazing you mentioned the target accelerator whatever which I wanted to ask about because that was the target forward founders accelerator I think and then I believe you've gone through the SKU accelerator I'm curious at what stage did you start applying to accelerators and I'd love to hear a little bit about your experience going through either or both of those programs and how it was helpful or things that you learned?

22:22 Hannah - Yeah so we about maybe six months after we kind of soft launch we saw these opportunities that actually our friends sent our way so we thought okay let's try it let's try it out because you know I'm an artist as well as a scientist I do I worked in several startups before so I do have experience on the business side but we've never created a brand before we've never tried to get into retail and so SKU and a target were really at a pivotal point of our business like when we were so early on we had only like been really in operation for a few months so we did the experiences almost back to back.

22:57 Behzad - They were at the same time so we would have some days where we had a SKU class in the morning and then the target session in the afternoon so we were on calls for these accelerators for like five or six hours which was kind of a lot I do wish that they were maybe more spread out and I was pregnant at the time and you were pregnant so it was a lot but I think the biggest takeaways for us weren't necessarily although some of the content from the programs were outstanding the biggest takeaway was connecting to other founders because as those who are in the journey or thinking about it understand it's very isolating most of your friends with quote-unquote normal jobs will have no idea what you're doing they'll have no idea why you're working all the time yeah it's just it can be really isolating to be on this journey especially early on so to be running the race with others alongside us that were also at the very early stage so target for founders was companies under a mill revenue SKU had a little more variation as far as revenue but it was still pretty early stage companies just to connect with other founders and we had founder meetups those were as good if not you know more rich than the sessions from target and students because we would just learn from people that were one step one and a half steps ahead of us how do you solve this problem how do you run your finances like how do you make a po for this type of retailer like there's just so much that we learned just from talking to people that were just kind of quote-unquote at our level that was super valuable I can't imagine where we'd be today without those experiences mostly because the founders that we've met in those accelerators are still close to us to this day.

24:25 Jessi - Oh that's amazing and with the target accelerator I'm curious does that mean that like when you're maybe ready someday to be in target like are those are there some overlap that maybe that will help you someday since it sounds like it's a it's a dream retailer for you eventually like do you think those connections will help with that eventually or is it kind of a separate program than a lot of their retail work?

24:44 Behzad - Yeah it's an early program where they're identifying brands that are promising we did get at the end a meeting with a buyer we presented the way that any brand that wants to get into target would to a buyer they gave us feedback on the good and the bad and everything in between that was helpful because it's not necessarily easy from our understanding just to get a meeting with a target buyer so that was a huge payout for us target helped us understand retail and retail is a beast that's very different from d2c and so there's just things you have to be aware of as far as margins distribution like size preparedness as far as marketing that you don't have to think about at the same level of your d2c of course you can grow d2c and be huge and stay d2c and i think we have a lot of room to grow on d2c too but retail is a different beast so that opened our eyes to what it looks like to become ready for retail so that we could start taking steps one year six months in to one day get ready for retail SKU was sort of more about accelerating and scaling so how do you scale a company from zero to a million great network of founders and investors so that when we started investing or for investors for our friends and family we went to the SKU network first and SKU is based out of Austin, Texas and there's some really deep roots for cpg and health and wellness i.e like you know whole foods based in Austin, Texas and a lot of other brands coming out of that space so that took us to Austin a few times and it was a great opportunity just to network with not only other founders but people that were living and breathing everything cpg.

26:10 Jessi - Yeah that's so cool to those lasting connections sound so valuable and we hear that a lot even with a Startup CPG it's often very lonely to be on this startup's journey and connecting with other people that are at the same stage or just a step ahead is so incredible so that's so cool that you had those experiences. And on the note of Startup CPG since you were a backpack brand at Expo West i'm wondering if you can tell us a little bit about your Expo West experience what was that like how was the backpack brand experience you know what what did you learn through that experience or anything that yeah that you found that you wanted to share from that time?

28:01 Hannah - Well Expo West is always always an interesting place to to just walk the floor so that's what we were doing for the past two years we literally have a backpack full of product and just talk to people and see what they thought on the spot the ability to be part of the backpack brand event was really helpful because we we knew we were going to be at a certain place at a certain time we invited everybody we knew to the event and yeah it was incredible like we there are so many buyers at that event i basically went around and talked to people some really impressive retailers some really impressive like investors were there so we made quite a few connections through that event and through the backpack brand especially we also met a couple other cool brands which was really fun.

28:43 Jessi - That's awesome yeah that's so cool that you've walked the show for multiple years too as well have you had a strategy walking the show to go to certain areas or there's just so much ground to cover so i'm always curious to hear other people's strategies when they're walking the show.

28:58 Behzad - Yeah we sort of had a game plan of booths that we wanted to hit up for sure but the first year that we walked the show we did have a very specific strategy and that was find people who were pregnant and this paid off at least once big time where we found two ladies one who was pregnant one who was not and as we approached them and had this conversation with them about 10 and you know we gave them samples i was like i think i've seen yeah we walked away and i was like that was nice and Hannah was like do you know who that was and it ended up being two influencers yeah um who have big followings on social media both for like health and wellness lifestyle one of them who does a bunch of like debunking ingredients and like talking about things that are unhealthy and you know inflammatory oils and all the rage nowadays which is you know in part true so those folks both restoried about us and we saw them in expo west last year again walking the floor and we're like oh my gosh you guys so we looked for of course people in our target demographic but also like Hannah said we look for investors and buyers and often you want to look at the name tag of the person and if their name tags flip backwards they're often a buyer they're trying to hide and everyone sort of thinks up on that and i remember seeing a group you know sort of a pretty well known cpg investment group city capital and i was like i've always wanted to talk to these guys were way too small for them but there were five or six of them floating around and i just took a bunch of bars and i just jumped in front of them like a cartoon character and i was like hey guys city capital my name is Behzad i co-founded Tend with my wife Hannah i gave him like the 90 second pitch and asked at what stage they start to invest in cpg brands and it was much larger than where we were at at the time but my goal was just to make an impression and just to sort of go for it and i think what things like backpack brand and even expo west i don't want to say they force you to do what they encourage you to do just to go for it and just to extend yourself out of your comfort zone throw your hand out there and try to get that connection made because you never know what's going to happen crazy things happen at expo west right this is how people get on certain buyers and investors radar and you just have to get caffeinated get hype just remember kind of why you exist in this space and try to get a little excited about your ideas and the fact that you could just walk up to investors at city capital or a whole foods buyer like the playing field is level and you know the spoils go in some ways to those that are just going to put themselves out there and take that chance so i always have to hype myself up on those mornings because some days i'm like exhausted by day three we try to gamify it and just try to make it fun and help people see really who we are and how passionate we are about our products.

31:32 Hannah - Yeah i think it's just i really think that if the right people experience our product like that one trial can can amount to so much they're just there's so many customers that we've talked to that said when i found you i feel like i hit the jackpot and they say things like i feel like this is a miracle this has changed my life and it's really that kind of feedback that keeps us going like why are we doing this we're not trying to you know become millionaires like cp no one goes to cpg to do that so we really want to solve people's problems and so another thing that i forgot to mention at the backpack friends event we actually brought a pregnant suit so we brought a pregnant belly it's called an empathy belly that non-pregnant people can try on to feel like how it is to actually be pregnant and hold all that weight there's even like you know you you fill it with a warm bottle so they're like kind of like simulating like something something weighing down your kidney and and so we got the chance to connect with people at that level like hey our brand is really about humanizing elevating the mother and why don't you try what it feels like to be pregnant and so that that sparked some really interesting conversations and that's really what all this is about it's about connecting with people to to show like what the experience is about it's about creating a product that will actually inspire joy in the motherhood journey which is a really difficult journey at times and yeah like bringing something to market that hasn't been brought.

32:58 Jessi - Yeah i love all of that i had forgotten about the you called it the empathy empathy suit yeah empathy belly that i had forgotten about that that was so cool that you had that there and yeah i love that and i love just the mention of being able to kind of level the playing field and just talk to the people at city or what have you because even if your brand isn't ready like when we've had you know venture capitalists on the show and stuff they talk about how just because when you're ready it doesn't mean that they're going to be ready to write a check they want to write checks to people they have relationships with so building the relationships before you're ready so that they're people that you know and that they know you and then you just keep sharing how you're growing and then when when you're ready they're there so yeah the shows are a lot they're exhausting you got to get the caffeine the compression socks and just you know tackle tackle the day absolutely yeah i'm curious too for both of you like what does it look like to kind of ramp up into working on the brand more as it's grown like how are you splitting responsibilities between the two of you what is it kind of looking like to manage the business you know are you using some like contractors to help with certain areas i feel like in the early days there's always so much to do and there's only there's only two of you and so much time in the day so how are you kind of tackling what you need to do next and and what you're working on?

34:16 Behzad - Yeah i think you nailed it like the early days you have to do everything and the problem for us was that we were both doing everything so i was like kind of on the science side the product side but i found myself caring so much about every little marketing and social media thing that we put out like obsessively and that was really cramping Hannah's style because she was supposed to be and she was owning all the marketing all the outward facing part of the brand but yeah i was trying to poke my finger into everything and that was not great so we needed to sort of divide responsibilities where i have now someone that does our bookkeeping in a fractional CFO it's really not that expensive we can do it and i think we need to do it if we're really trying to grow i have somebody now who on also a fractional basis isn't a fractional co but it sort of helps us with some operations and ingredient sourcing on a fractional basis and then i formulate the bars and help get things where they need to move whether it's ingredients finished goods etc so i'm more of the operations person a little bit at this point Hannah is certainly much more of the CMO type person although she does a ton of operations as well where Hannah works with a fractional CMO some fractional help on social media yeah it kind of ebbs and flows depending on our needs and and yeah.

35:24 Hannah - So but it's really funny because i own the marketing Behzad owns product and operations but Behzad has a mind for marketing and i have a mind for operations so yeah we're doing it all wrong so we're a good team so we we basically help each other when you know when when needed so we're getting ready for our next production run i'm doing a lot of stuff on the operation side and then Behzad gives me all sorts of interesting tidbits of information and ideas for social media and other marketing things he's actually really good at marketing in his mind in my mind i execute it but it's been it's been an ongoing challenge a conversation like who does what who owns what and now we know how important it is just have to delegate because i delegate you can't do everything we're really trying to grow and the only way to grow is yeah we can't clone ourselves is to to delegate and so it's been it's been a journey especially being a married family and not having any work-life balance which is a different conversation but we're we're making work.

36:33 Jessi -  Yeah no i'm i'm glad that you mentioned all of that because a i think it's great that you're getting support early in the finance area because i feel like that's often one of the last areas people get some fractional support and it can be so helpful early on if you can find a way to do that so i love that and just the point about you know working together and i love that you're communicating about who's working on what and and those pieces because it's tough to sort out we we have a lot of community members and people that have come on the show that you know their business partners they're either married to them or family members and that just adds a different layer of figuring out like you said balance and working together and requires a lot of extra communication i think in most cases just to make sure that everybody is is feeling good about the direction of the business and the rest of your life do you have any tips or anything for other you know married founders or anything that anything that you've learned so far that you want to share with anybody?

37:27 Behzad - It depends on the day the week you ask me this some days i'm like don't do it some days i'm like this is the most fun thing i could imagine doing you know early on in this journey i heard on another podcast that married folks that you know found companies together you know they increased their rate of divorce it increases the rate of like the company like you know dying burning through cash running out of money and then i also read in a separate you know book that married couples who have kids report decreased satisfaction in their marriage so i was like okay so if you have a kid your satisfaction your marriage goes down and if you start a company with your spouse you're likely to getting separated it goes up so why don't we do both at the same time let's start a company have a baby at the same time and let's just try to be you know in that minority but you know there's good and bad of it the bad is of course it's hard to turn off so Hannah and i are unfortunately always talking about work the baby goes to sleep now at seven seven thirty and then Hannah and i start our second day of work because we'll work from seven thirty p.m to like one so we've worked like five or six hours during the day go home so we do not recommend this don't recommend it but i will say this even though i don't recommend it from a physical health or mental health standpoint it helps us get stuff done but i'm realizing now that you know it's so unsustainable and i need to balance that with rest with just times of quiet where i'm unplugged so i think pretend to continue to grow and flourish means that Hannah and i will have to continue to flourish as as humans and i think finding the balance is something that i'm always working on and certainly not an expert at but i know that it wears me down and i need to prioritize my time a bit more.

38:59 Hannah - One tip that somebody told us uh early on was to put on your calendar every two weeks a reminder to celebrate the wins because as a married couple as business owners you know we're so slot you know you're in the slug you're in the grind of every day every day has so many challenges you wake up you do it exactly the same and it's it's hard but we try to when possible to celebrate the wins and that helps give us perspective i think one of the big advantages we have as married couple and business owners is that we trust each other we already know how the other person operates so there's a communication there's a level of communication understanding that is already built in and i think that you know Behzad has said like despite all of the you know we're against the odds i think that our marriage and our relationship has not been stronger so it's been an interesting oxymoron because even though we're very sleep deprived and having a great time with our baby but who also you know needs a lot of care and attention it's been a really full season but i guess we're happy that it's worked out this way.

40:08 Jessi - Yeah oh i love all of that that's really cool i really appreciate you both sharing about that well what's coming up next for Tend what either later this year or even going into next year like what are you excited about you mentioned some seasonal flavors coming out so i'm very excited to stay tuned for that what other things are even if they're not like launches necessarily but what's top of mind for you and that's you're excited about within the business coming up.

40:31 Hannah - The seasonal flavor will be released in probably about six weeks it's a flavor that has been requested in the general sense and and we are really i think that it's like the best tasting flavor ever right that we've ever made we've made five we have three course cues and then we've created three additional seasonal flavors in the past and this is a brand new one that we're very excited to be launching.

40:56 Behzad - Yeah regarding this seasonal flavor no prenatal should taste this good it makes no sense i think the future of Tend since Tend started with sort of our family struggle with prenatal vitamins and now we have almost one and a half year old baby i expect tend to grow as our family grows and i'm always thinking about what can i give our baby that's not out there that's a nutrition related product and so you know babies take gummy vitamins but they don't even chew gummies until they're at least two years old so we think there's gaps and further opportunities to develop nutrient dense snacks for kids very early once they start accepting solid food that will act vitamin like at a time in life where there are no vitamin options for kids so really excited to i'm always actually like hacking our baby's diet yeah yeah so i'm adding like and it's okay like i'm not doing anything too crazy it's based on the science but i'm adding drops of this ingredient or that that ingredient and i'm like she's still growing and you know the first year of life she was like 98 percentile height and weight so i was like okay i'm not you know she's not stunted or anything like she's very always hacking our baby's diet and i'm now trying to recently think about how to turn those hacks into something that other people can do in their homes and maybe deliver those hacks in the form of a packaged good or a product that we can sell again not necessarily because we have to grow the company and expand SKUs.

42:25 Hannah - I mean I would be looking for that sort of product you know we would be looking for that sort of product for our kid because we know that there's certain nutrients they need in this specific time of life that actually helps their cognition and their brain development and that sort of product does not exist so there's that and then you know women are always talking to us about they want something for after postpartum because you can actually eat Tend when you're trying to conceive when you're in the fertility stage when you're pregnant and postpartum as well so we have nutrients that are specific to each of these stages so i'm still breastfeeding you know the recommendation is now like breastfeed for two years if you can after the baby's born which is a long time i'm still breastfeeding a little bit and so still on this bar and people who are not pregnant not trying to get pregnant also eat this bar as a nutrient-dense snack so right now it says prenatal on this which i think gives people a certain conception but customers are also asking for can i you know can i have this for my something for my general health how about something for my husband so i think there's a lot of innovation that we have planned and the vision is really to bring this type of real food snackable supplementation to every member of the family that's the larger vision because we all we all deserve to have this type of 100% real food options.

43:40 Jessi - I love that i'm so excited to continue to follow your journey and i encourage everyone to go to tend so t-e-n-d prenatal.com also on instagram you can follow at tend prenatal and so make sure you can follow along order some of the products because yeah i'm very excited to continue to follow along and just see how you grow is there anything else that you wanted to share before we wrap up today?

44:08 Behzad - You know we're here not just to sell the prenatal products and bars but you know one of the most rewarding parts as we alluded to has been just talking to customers that are different points of their fertility and pregnancy journey so when a customer DMs us on instagram or emails us we're still small enough that that goes right to us so if there are folks that we can support even if they don't buy the product their tend is really here to help people feel nourished to grow not only their families but just to bring some joy and delight to what can sometimes be an isolating and long journey as it was for us trying to conceive having a baby and postpartum so we're here to be a resource that's what our social channels are about as well so if you message us still we're small enough that it's both Hannah and i will see the message and we love to talk to customers and learn what their needs are so that we can adjust appropriately and offer things that really add value.

45:00 Jessi - Awesome that's a great note to end on well thank you both so much for the time today and for sharing more with us i really appreciate it and yeah just excited to continue to stay in touch and follow the journey and we're so glad you're part of the Startup CPG community.

45:15 Hannah - thank you so much

45:18 Jessi - Thank you for listening in today i'm so honored you join me for this conversation and i love hearing from you all with feedback suggestions or if you just want to say hi at podcast at startupcpg.com or you can find me on LinkedIn if you liked this episode we'd love for you to share it with a friend or colleague subscribe so you don't miss future episodes and maybe even leave us a five-star review on apple podcasts if you aren't yet in our slack community of founders and experts we'd love to see you there you can get the free invite at startup cpg.com and find all our other awesome resources there like webinars databases the blog the magazine and virtual and in-person events and if you found yourself rocking out to our intro and outro music which i do every single time make sure to check out the Super Fantastics on Spotify it's the band of our Startup CPG Founder Daniel Scharff i'm Jessi Freitag your host and producer and on behalf of the whole team at Startup CPG thank you for being here and see you next week.