The Startup CPG Podcast

Daniel Herz
So when we're looking at what creators to partner with, we kind of take that analytics and those datas that we have on those creators and we'll plug it into ChatGPT or other platforms to help us analyze what the right outcome might be or who we should partner with. So we've been using it from that. We can use it for copywriting. But really, even if there's a question that we don't know how to answer, it's there to be that tool for us. So what we've seen is it's become, you know, our cmo, our coo, everything helping run our back office, but most importantly, kind of this partner that we can balance, you know, all these fun, creative and different ideas off of too.

00:44
Ben Bacon
I live in Colorado. I've never stepped foot in Hannaford. But Claude said, hey, Hannaford's is really focused on sustainability. They're trying to get 100% of their stores, renewable energy, blah, blah. And so sure enough, at the booth, these two buyers from Hannaford, you know, walk by and they're about to walk away. I said, hey, Hannaford, I'd love to tell you about our new fully compostable, plastic free cups, because I know you guys are really super focused on sustainability. Their eyes lit up, they came back in, we had a conversation. And now that conversation is going. I never would have known this stuff if it wasn't for these AI tools that helped me understand this stuff in a fraction of time it would take to research.

01:23
Daniel Scharff
AI for CPG is here. Guys, if you're like me, AI is actually very scary. I feel like I knew how to do things well before and I kind of want them to stay the same, but they're not going to. AI is here. It's disrupting how we work. People who know how to use it well are getting ahead. They're skyrocketing their productivity, their capabilities. They're doing so much more than us. We need to learn about it and catch up to them. So I asked two brands that I talked to who seemed like they really had gotten a good early start on it to share with us. How are they using AI for their CPG brands? I learned so much on this episode. They're using it for not just marketing copy, but fundraising, prospecting, product development, so much more.

02:08
Daniel Scharff
And this won't be the end of our learning. If you have a good story about how you're using AI, please click in the show notes to submit for a future call in episode or going to be doing peer share groups about this I want all of us to try to help each other as we all figure it out. It's going to be important. Enjoy this episode. This is one of my favorites. All right, here we go. Ben from Lentiful. How are you using AI in cpg?

02:37
Ben Bacon
I actually just started using it a couple months ago and to the point where now I feel like it's a pretty frequent part of every day. You know, I did the whole dabblet first and then the more use cases I kind of got wrapped up in, I just kind of kept thinking of more and more ideas. So I've got five different ways that we could talk about how I use AI. If you want to go for it.

02:57
Daniel Scharff
Let'S get into it.

02:58
Ben Bacon
Okay. The first one is probably the most, like, maybe the most straightforward, which is writing and email marketing. So this Black Friday, I was sitting down, like I always do, to. To kind of come up with our email. This AI tool that I use, his name is Claude, could do this in a fraction of time. And let's take a step back. So I use this. This tool called Claude. It is similar to ChatGPT. However, it's unique where you can kind of put together a project. And so what you can do is you can say, hey, Claude, you are the Leniful marketing strategist, right? And you can actually upload a couple of files. You can upload your brand books, sell sheets, website, all your customer reviews.

03:33
Ben Bacon
It can kind of take a look at everything and then kind of wrap its head around how to approach it from a marketing lens. Right. And so this year we actually had Claude write our Black Friday email, which actually outperformed the one I wrote the previous year. And it took about five minutes as opposed to a half hour of my time.

03:50
Daniel Scharff
What did it look like? How did Claude beat you? Is. Was Claude quicker to a hook? Just didn't like, care about all the stuff you think people should care about and went right to the things that actually make them buy. What's the secret?

04:02
Ben Bacon
You have to give it a couple clues, right? So it's like, all right, here's our Black Friday deal. 30% off, you know, if you buy more than one case, et cetera. Make it fun, make it about 200 words, follow the brand tone, which we have in the. The brand guidelines. And then also we've uploaded customer demographics as well. So cloud synthesizes all of this and then comes up with a few different subject lines. And every time it does it and I read it, I'm like, you know, it's pretty Damn good. It's like 80 to 90% there. And then I put the Ben Bacon polish on it to make sure that's not like completely robotic. But it does know my tone. And the cool thing about this market, this project in cloud is that it gets smarter the more you interact with it.

04:35
Ben Bacon
And that was just one of the first ways that we used it.

04:38
Daniel Scharff
Okay, so you have a program that's called Claude. You have a subscription to this. It's like there's chatgpt, then there's some other bots or whatever out there. Claude is one of them that I've heard about from other people as well who say it's a really good marketing oriented one. You have a subscription to Claude and you have fed it a bunch of things. You just like upload a file of customer demographics and say, eat this, like memorize this, like how does that work?

05:04
Ben Bacon
So a couple of big things, right? You want to give them some context and say, hey, I'm Ben Bacon, I'm the founder of Leniful, right? And here's our URL. So we have 2,500 customer reviews that really talk a lot about customers and how they use our products. It gives a glimpse into how they're using in their everyday lives. That gives Claude a lot of context. Then there's other things like our brand guidelines which gives it more around like tone, target, customer, like demographics. We have an older customer target that it kind of knows to and not be too edgy. And all of these things kind of wrap together.

05:32
Ben Bacon
And so when you say, hey, I need to write a Black Friday email and here's the deal and kind of make it 200 words, let's make it a little bit fun, come up with a couple of different subject lines. It can very quickly, and I'm talking within seconds, generate something that's 80% of the way there.

05:45
Daniel Scharff
Do you always know why? It's good because Claude has probably read a lot more than you have of those customer reviews just because there are so many of them and remembers them all. Because Claude doesn't need to push things out of its short term memory or whatever. Like it knows all of it. It knows all. It can write something. Would you know why Claude is writing something? Like, oh, actually that is really interest because of this insight.

06:06
Ben Bacon
So on to customer review specifically. So there's 2,500, there's a lot to go through. I uploaded all of them. And so Leniful. We're a little bit of like a Swiss army knife, right where it's on the go it's plant based, it's high protein, it's high fiber, it cooks in a minute. And sometimes I never know like what to leave with. Right. Because there's so many different benefits. So I actually had Claude analyze 2,500 of the reviews that we have. All 2500, what should I be focused on? And it came back and it said very clearly, 65% of your reviews mention convenience. Quick and easy is the most commonly used phrase. 45% mention taste and how great it tastes. And then 30% mention the health benefits. Right.

06:43
Ben Bacon
So that in my mind always makes me think we need to focus on how easy and convenient this is for customers.

06:48
Daniel Scharff
Okay, that's a really interesting insight. I feel like it's the kind of thing where you as a founder have all of these things that you believe about your brand that you want everybody to say about your brand and that you might write about your brand when you have a long winded email or a lot of space on packaging or a marketing email, and then you'll show it to somebody who's like a friend and they'll be like, oh, so like basically this is a quick and easy thing. So it's almost like taking your bias out of it and telling you what it actually is.

07:16
Ben Bacon
So there's a couple other things too. So I uploaded a customer database or just our Excel file of like 30. I think we're up to 40,000 customers in our email database. So I upload the names, the hometowns, you know, the addresses and things like that. And I said, hey, tell me some interesting things about our customer database. And so a few more things like when you typically start a premium vegan brand, you're thinking it's going to be 80 to 90% female, which kind of follows the rates of vegan eating out there. Well, Claude came back and said, Hey, 65% are female, but you've got a pretty good base of male customers based on customer names. And so you got 35 to 40% that are male that buy from you. So that's one thing. There's all sorts of interesting applications.

07:51
Ben Bacon
I think we talked about this the other day where I said, hey, Claude, can you tell me if there's any notable or celebrity customers that we have based on those names or hometown locations? And it came back and said, hey, here's a Golden Globe award winner that lives in Brooklyn, that's probably a match. And here's a basis for one of the most famous rock bands in the world that lives in la. And that's probably A match. And here are three buyers in Target who bought to the headquarters in Minneapolis. And that's probably a match. So all of those things, it just, it really makes it interesting trying to think of, like, how I would do this in the past.

08:20
Ben Bacon
I'd probably hire one of my kids or some sort of like VA or someone, like, go through those thousands of entries to look at, like, what are some interesting things. And like, let's start kind of quantifying some of this data. And literally these AI tools can do it within seconds.

08:33
Daniel Scharff
That's fantastic. So anybody who has a big customer list could ask Claude to go through and pick out, hey, identify anybody who might be a high value person we should try to build a relationship with. Maybe they're an influencer, maybe they're a buyer. Yeah. So what did you do with that info? Okay, now you know you have two celebrities buying your product and some buyers. How do you act on that?

08:53
Ben Bacon
I personally, I'm not the kind of founder that would resell. I, I know some that would. So for me it was just more interesting data than anything else. Let me see if I can think of an example where it's a little bit more actionable. Okay, so were at Fancy food this week, right? And last week I reached out to the fancy food people. I said, hey, can you send me a list of all the attending companies? Because sometimes they'll do that, the retailers. But they sent back all the attending companies, right? And so that list was actually several thousand and included vendors and all sorts of consultants and things like that. And I was like, oh, man, it's going to take me forever to go through and see which are the retailers I really want to focus on.

09:23
Ben Bacon
Well, then I remembered I have a spreadsheet from Unifi which breaks down their DCs and their key retailers by DC. And so what I did was I uploaded that into Claude along with the Fancy Food list of thousands of company names. I said, what are the matches? Right. So it came up with like 20, 25 companies that are key retailers in unified DCs. We're going nationwide with Unified this spring, right? So these are the ones that I really want to focus on. I said, okay, for these 25 retailers, and some of them I knew, some of them I didn't. I said, come up with like one interesting fact about each of these retailers and then one reason why Lenifold might be good for this retailer. And I remember reading through the list and one of them was Hannaford's. I live in Colorado.

10:00
Ben Bacon
I've Never stepped foot in Hannaford. But Claude said, hey, Hannafords is really focused on sustainability. They're trying to get a hundred percent of their stores, renewable energy, blah, blah. And so, sure enough, at the booth, these two buyers from Hannafords walked by and they're about to walk away. I said, hey, Hannaford, I'd love to tell you about our new fully compostable, plastic free cups, because I know you guys are really super focused on sustainability. Their eyes lit up, they came back in, we had a conversation. And now that conversation is going, I never would have known this stuff if it wasn't for these AI tools that help me understand the stuff in a fraction of time it would take to research.

10:33
Daniel Scharff
Well, that's fantastic. And probably like everybody who's listening right now, I'm just trying to think about all the things that I should have been doing in Claude right now. And like, oh, what couldn't do with my email list. Gosh, that's so interesting. Okay, so that was one of the things that you say you do with it. Let's go to number two, product development.

10:50
Ben Bacon
Right? So. So we have instant lentil meals that are, you know, in all these global flavors. We have French maripois and Thai coconut curry, and we have nine different flavors. And we're always looking for new and up and coming flavors. Well, AI can help you think of that. Right? So, Claude, it's like, hey, based on our current flavors, what are some new flavors out there that are really hot right now that we should consider making? Right? So it'll come back and say, have you considered, like, Korean or Japanese barbecue? Okay, well, that makes a lot of sense. And we could prob. Probably do that. And then it's like, okay, what color could we make that cup that fits our palette? Because it knows our color palette from the brand guideline book.

11:24
Ben Bacon
And so Vinic is really interesting where it's like, yeah, you might want to consider a maroon, and here's why. And like, so there's some mean behind it. But then it also, like, so all of these things, like you would typically pay product developer, graphic designer, all of that stuff. Clock gives you a pretty good starting point that you can kind of go and then maybe engage, you know, someone at a fraction of that work whether. Where they're not starting out from scratch.

11:47
Daniel Scharff
All right? And right here I'm holding this homestyle chili, which is kind of a maroon, which is delicious. I've just got your microwavable cup here. I heated it for a minute 15 on the truth. Mmm. It Tastes on the go. Easy, convenient, delicious, healthy, protein packed. It's great. And it's very, you know, it's very clean. I think when you have stuff like this that's microwavable, you sort of expect it to be overly salty and kind of make you regret eating it. And this does not have that. It doesn't taste super salty. It tastes really healthy. I definitely get the chili kick from it also. And I notice it has 12 grams of protein, which is 24% of my daily recommended value. I did not know that. It's good to know. And yeah, really nice. I mean, amazing. I can just microwave this up.

12:35
Daniel Scharff
So I would really like that Korean barbecue flavor. So go Claude. I mean, who would have thought of that except Claude?

12:41
Ben Bacon
And then also related to formulations. Right. So when you upload all those reviews, 2500. There's a lot of bad reviews in there too. Not a lot. I mean, our average score is like 4.8 or 9 out of 5. But I said, hey, Claude, let's focus on those bad reviews. What are some improvements we can make to these flavors? And one thing you might want to focus on is a lot of customers. For the bad reviews mentioned, there's too much fennel. And I personally like fennel. Right. But for a lot of people, it kind of tastes like licorice or they have some sort of reaction to it.

13:07
Ben Bacon
And so that's a formulation change we're about to make in one or two of our skis where we're going to pull back on the fennel a little bit and maybe use something like oregano or something that's a little bit more of a crowd pleaser. And so again, it's using all of these smart tools to figure out how to get better every day.

13:21
Daniel Scharff
Well, that's amazing. That could have gone one of two ways. Like, Claude, look at these bad reviews and find out where they live by looking them up in. Claude cannot be used for evil. Not probably. Claude can. Well, that's super interesting as well. Okay, so really to improve your product and come up with new flavors, product development. Got it. Okay, what's number three?

13:40
Ben Bacon
Just general, like I would say administrative tasks that chip away at your day. And so I was speaking at a conference a couple months ago in Minneapolis and said, hey, can you send over a bio? And can you also send over a headshot of which I don't really have either. And so for that one, I actually use this tool called Perplexity. And so Perplexity is another AI tool. It's kind of Like Google on steroids, where you can ask it a question. Typically Google will just give you the list of search results and maybe a couple pages and you have to click through each one. Perplexity. It will automatically go into all of those pages, summarize the data across those pages, and then put it in a very, you know, succinct response. And so that was a great tool for generating my bio.

14:19
Ben Bacon
I read it and I was like, I can't write this any better. Then it just didn't about 5 seconds. I maybe tweaked a couple things, but it was accurate and it was good. I used another AI tool, I can't remember which one, for headshot where I was like, you know, let's get a better headshot where maybe I'm standing, you know, because I'm a. We're a lentil company. We work with USA Lynn Farms. Maybe I'm standing in the middle of a farm field and, you know, I've got like a T shirt and jeans on. And this, it keep this like amazing like headshot photo that I ended up using. And my wife, who we've been married 25 years, she's like, when did you take this photo? I mean, it was really realistic, right?

14:50
Ben Bacon
And so there's little things like that just kind of like save you time, save you money. Think about all the onboarding tasks that you have to do, right? So we're onboarding right now with good X. And they said, hey, we need some copy for landing page. Just like three or four paragraphs about the brand, the backstory and things like that. And I didn't really have something just like it, but they sent over an example of one that they really liked, another brand. And I just copy and pasted that into cloud. I said, hey, make this for leniful. And it is. Just spit it right out.

15:15
Daniel Scharff
This is amazing.

15:16
Ben Bacon
Think about all. And you know this, right? As a founder, you have an inbox full of things that this one's going to take five minutes or 10 minutes or an hour. And these AI tools take it from 10 minutes to one or an hour to 10. And you're just buying back time in your day.

15:33
Daniel Scharff
I think what I want is an AI coach. I want someone to sit here and watch me doing things and then be like, that's AI use AI for that. Like, and you know, to like help me get the muscle memory up for how and when to use it and what I'm not even thinking of that. I could be dealing with it. So if anyone else if anyone out there can do that, let me know.

15:52
Ben Bacon
They say I've got four kids, right. And I'm trying to think of like what skill, like what careers I'm trying to like steer them away from. But like being a lawyer or copywriter or all these things like AI I think is going to really change drastically in the future. If nothing else, it's just like how in my son's high school they now have a whole course around AI prompting. Right. So it's teaching you how to use these AI tools and ask good questions to be more efficient with your time.

16:17
Daniel Scharff
It's really interesting. I mean it makes me think just like, yeah, critical thinking is going to be the thing that helps somebody like you know what questions to ask it to do. And I mean, yeah, that there's an actual course to learn that as well. Sounds really incredible. So who knows? I feel like everything can be automated in the future. I mean like, yeah, I guess everyone just needs to know how to use this. So everybody listening, panic and just start catching up. And I think that this episode is going to be a really good start to it. So to continue on our education, what is the next point?

16:48
Ben Bacon
I think one that I really like is an idea around content calendars and just general like touch points. Right. So I had Claude give me, hey, you know we typically only send out emails around like if we have a sale, something like that. Can you give me like 15 or 20 like non sale emails that I could send to customers? It would be really interesting. Okay, can you think of, you know, five or six ideas we can do around the upcoming Valentine's Day? Can you look at the calendar for the year and pull any notable, you know, food celebration days or like heart healthy month and then come up with a couple ideas around each one. And this is one that I think would take a bigger block of time.

17:23
Ben Bacon
But you could do this, you know, at the beginning of the year, spend an hour or two and then before you know it you've got a pretty full content calendar for at least the next couple quarters. And then what you could do is you get approach those dates. You kind of go back into cloud and say, okay, Valentine's Day is coming. You came up with this good idea around, you know, heart, health and loved ones. Let's write this email. Right, you can even do that as well.

17:45
Daniel Scharff
Okay, so when it's giving you these emails, is it just like interface, it's giving it to in text or is it giving you this like an Excel with the calendar and all the emails pre Written. How does that work?

17:58
Ben Bacon
I'll give you the exact question and a little bit of the response. I'm like, hey, I'm trying to send more emails to our customers with 10 or 20 ideas to get customers excited about the brand and engaged. And then it says, based on analyzing reviews and all the other things, here's some ideas. A day in the life of a Leno behind the scenes look at the farms that Lentil partners with and how they process their lentils. Lentiful travel tales. There's a lot of customer stories about taking Lenifol camping on flights, on road trips. So it just gives you. It's literally like a list of like 10.

18:24
Daniel Scharff
Okay, I see. So it's giving you topics at this point, like, hey, here's some concepts for emails. And then later you would go in and actually write the email with Claude.

18:32
Ben Bacon
It's a numbered list. And it will say, do you like any of these? And I'll say, I like 1, 2, 8, 9. And then it will also ask, do you want me to like start writing any of these as well?

18:40
Daniel Scharff
Okay. And then probably at that point, once it writes the email, you're going to go. And then making it up a little bit, 100%.

18:47
Ben Bacon
And again, if you do a good job of uploading that brand guidelines and the tone, and it learns your tone over time based on what you're feeding it. Yeah, I think it just gets smarter and smarter.

18:59
Daniel Scharff
And what are those extra emails doing for you as a brand? So now you're sending out some additional emails not just around sales periods. Are they getting you more sales? Are they getting you more engagement? What do you think?

19:11
Ben Bacon
Yeah, it's definitely just a kind of a quick reminder, like, oh, yeah, this brand. I like this brand. Or if it's around travel, like, oh, yeah, I've got a trip coming up and this would be good to eat on the plane. You know, this is just email marketing best practices that I look at other companies like Graza or Fish Life or, you know, companies that have probably bigger teams. You know, I'm a team of, you know, essentially one and a couple contractors. Like, I have to just be more efficient. And so this is a way for me to punch above my weight where I'm able to pull in a little bit more of a professional email marketing program for a brand that might be at that 10 or $20 million mark instead of at the $2 million mark.

19:43
Ben Bacon
So again, it's just, how can you be most efficient with your time? And this is just one area.

19:48
Daniel Scharff
Okay, that is awesome. I think we've arrived to the fifth and final point, haven't we?

19:53
Ben Bacon
Yeah, let's talk about prospecting. Right. And so like we are, we have a lot of customers on Fair that buy us and they'll put us in these shopping shops. But I'm starting to see a couple of like these cafes that are doing it and they're reordering and especially there's been a couple like vegan cafes, like vegan coffee shops. Well, Claude can just say, hey, give me a list of a hundred vegan cafes across America. Right. It can generate that list and then it's like, all right, that's my list. And then I can give it to my 14 year old daughter Sloan and say, hey, let's start reaching out to these people and tell them about Leniful. And then she'll probably jump in to use Claude to write the email of why Lenifol would be good for their vegan coffee shop. Right.

20:29
Ben Bacon
And so again, this is something that traditionally you would hire someone and pay thousands of dollars a month to do. You can pull together prospecting lists and start going after them pretty quickly. I know as a founder and you probably too, like there's been probably a slight uptick in prospecting emails in the last year. So you have to be a little bit careful. You really kind of have to make it personalized. You can't just blast them out for that one. I'd probably take a little bit more care and feeding to make sure I'm really calling out maybe one or two things unique to their coffee shop. Let's say they're in Omaha, Nebraska. I'd mentioned that and a couple other things too. Right.

21:01
Ben Bacon
But I think that's a fantastic way for founders to use these AI tools to generate quick endurance 30 prospecting list based on who they want to sell into.

21:09
Daniel Scharff
That's super interesting. Does it actually get you the emails as well? Like the email addresses if you're looking for all those vegan cafes.

21:16
Ben Bacon
So for the vegan cafes, what I've learned is better to slide into their Instagram DMs. They're small enough where the owner or maybe the manager is probably managing that. And then they're one click away from going over to our Instagram account and being like a lot of people really like this brand and their cups are beautiful and this would probably be a good fit for our store as opposed to being in the email world where it's like you got to jump over to Internet and stuff like that.

21:35
Daniel Scharff
Is that something you can Automate the actual outreach over Instagram or.

21:39
Ben Bacon
No, I personally, my knowledge is limited. But there are these tools like Zapier and some other ones that you can plug into these AI platforms. And that's the next thing they call them, these AI agents. And they're coming. I mean, they're coming. And you're going to be able to program a couple of very simple steps for this all to happen in the background while you're sleeping, making your time even more efficient.

21:59
Daniel Scharff
Scary, promising, exciting. I don't know. All right, everyone do it. All right, so Ben, I think that just about covers the terrifying reality of the future being now. And I mean, it is very cool. The increases in productivity are incredible. I think for some of us who just have relied on being good at the tools that are out there for us, we're like, oh my God, like I have to learn all this stuff. It is a little bit of a wake up call.

22:26
Ben Bacon
I will say I used to be pretty intimidated by these tools and for the longest time I was like, I'm not gonna. It's almost like TikTok. I'm like, I'm too old for this or whatever. But I will say once I started playing around with these tools and you see how my initial reaction to everything I asked was pretty damn good, like you start seeing the value in it, you start using it more. It will also engage you and say it will ask you some follow up questions. Do you want me to look into this or that? All of a sudden you're in this conversation with this platform like a person and it kind of like really wraps you in. And then you start, the light bulbs start coming on these tools, the paid tools, it's the best $20 a month I spend.

23:01
Ben Bacon
When you think about the hours and hours, you know, each week that it saves me. So don't let cost be an issue. And I would say just dive in if you have any questions. You can always feel free to reach out to me too.

23:11
Daniel Scharff
All right, Ben, thank you. What's the best way for people to follow along with Ben Bacon and the lentiful journey? Oh, eat.

23:18
Ben Bacon
Leniful.com leniful on all the social platforms or just bentleniful.com? Love to hear from fellow founders out there.

23:26
Daniel Scharff
All right, we expect a reply from Claude, not from Ben. So. All right, thank you, my friend.

23:32
Ben Bacon
All right, thank you, Daniel.

23:35
Daniel Scharff
All right, coming up, another segment on AI for cpg. So don't go anywhere or the machines will know. All right, Daniel from Focus Fuel. We're here to talk about how people are using AI for their businesses. So do you mind just quickly giving us a little bit of an intro into who is Daniel? What is Focus Fuel?

23:53
Daniel Herz
Yeah, of course. Thanks for letting me speak here, but my name is Daniel Herz. I'm the CEO and co founder of Focus Fuel. We're a better for you all natural caffeine gummy that's also delicious, providing the most delicious and easy convenient energy out there for non coffee drinkers and coffee drinkers who want that extra boost. We founded the company actually with creators in mind. So all of our other co founders are actually and investors are creators and influencers in the digital space. So a bunch of gaming influencers, some athletes. We've got multiple super bowl champions, Grammy winners and the, you know, the rest all kind of on our roster and helping support this. We've been around for about a year. But back to kind of the topic. We've been using AI to help fuel that growth of what we're building.

24:41
Daniel Herz
You know, my background's been more marketing strategy, brand strategy, helping these large brands, if it's Pepsi, Herman, Miller, Coors reach this hard to reach audience. But none of us have that kind of direct CPT background. So there's been a ton of learning as we've scaled this business that we really relied heavily on AI and used it to be kind of our partners in crime as we learn and build.

25:03
Daniel Scharff
Okay, so let's get tactical. Take me through a couple different tasks that you have or routinely do use AI for.

25:11
Daniel Herz
Yeah, I mean I think even coming back from the core of our brand, the name and the inspiration for our brand was actually derived from AI. So everything that you read from our marketing and email copy has all been built out of it. So it's become kind of our ghostwriter and the individual or the platform that's helping build and kind of test different content formats for us so we can quickly pump out a ton of different iterations of the content or themes we're trying to build. But really we see it as kind of this partner that we can bounce ideas off of.

25:41
Daniel Herz
So when we're looking at what creators to partner with, we kind of take that analytics and those datas that we have on those creators and we'll plug it into ChatGPT or other platforms to help us analyze what the right outcome might be or who we should partner with. So we've been using it from that, we've used it for copywriting, but really even if there's a question that we don't know how to answer, it's there to be that tool for us. So what we've seen is it's become our cmo, our CEO, everything helping run our back office, but most importantly, kind of this partner that we can balance all these fun, creative, and different ideas off of, too.

26:14
Daniel Scharff
Okay, so from the start, it was this. You logging into ChatGPT and being like, I want to start this caffeine gummy brand. What should I call it? Or like, how did you interact with the model? And it gave you a bunch of names. How did you actually do it? And what did you use?

26:28
Daniel Herz
Yeah, I think the thing that we've learned using ChatGPT and other platforms is it's really conversational. Right. No different than us sitting here and throwing ideas off of a whiteboard. It just becomes that partner that we can throw ideas off of. So we started to define. Define our brand, saying, who are we trying to build this brand for? Even putting in examples of other brands we love in the marketplace, from design, from copywriting, from name, and then say, hey, help us start to identify and build our brand from what should our name be? What should our packaging look like? And help even define our story. So what we've learned with ChatGPT is if you come with information, the more information you can, and again, make it into a conversation where it's not just, please, here's the information, now give me the solution.

27:11
Daniel Herz
But how do you ask questions together to refine kind of what's coming out of it? So, hey, here's what we want to do, but what are the questions you have for me? Ask me 10 questions on things I might be overlooking or that other brands might be doing, and then it continues to refine off of that and kind of build off it. So even for the name, we knew we could go two routes. It could abstract kind of this really fun, playful name, or it could be direct into what the actual use case of the product is. And since there aren't a lot of caffeine gummies out there, and you might be purchasing this at checkout or online or whatever it might be, we want to be very clear on what the benefits are. And that's kind of.