The Startup CPG Podcast

00:10
Tal Moore
We experienced a lot of pain because were under capitalized, you know. So if you're going out to market, be very careful and have a real understanding of what your budget is, where your expenditures are, and expect them to go over and make sure that you're well capitalized. Because it is not fun to chase money when you need it. So you really want to be able to accept money when you don't need it or you're in less of a needy position. To be in a needy position where you know you have to raise more money for the sake of survival, it's really unpleasant place. So I would suggest people to kind of like stagger their approach when it comes to spending money because you run out of money, you run out of a business.

00:50
Hannah Dittman
Hey everybody. I'm Hannah Dittman, operations and Finance host of the Startup CPG podcast and today I'm joined by Tal Moore, founder and CEO of Popsmith, for another Founder Fundraising Journey episode. Popsmith is bringing movie night nostalgia into the modern home with beautifully designed popcorn poppers and popcorn kernels that deliver incredible popcorn in just minutes. Combining timeless functionality with elevated design, Popsmith has transformed a simple kitchen appliance into a countertop worthy centerpiece. Paired with premium kernels grown on American family farms and thoughtfully crafted ingredients, the brand has built an experience that's as memorable as the popcorn itself, earning industry awards, Oprah's stamp of approval, and devoted customer following. In this Founder Fundraising Journey episode, we dive into Tal's entrepreneurial journey as a serial e commerce founder who has built, scaled and successfully exited multiple businesses before launching Popsmith.

01:45
Hannah Dittman
Tal also takes us inside the world of equity crowdfunding, breaking down how it works, when it makes sense for consumer brands, and the key ingredients that separate successful campaigns from the rest. Along the way, he shares practical and candid advice on managing cash, building capital, efficient businesses, and leveraging an engaged customer community to fuel long term growth. Whether you're considering fundraising, curious about equity crowdfunding, or simply looking to build a stronger consumer brand, this episode is packed with practical insights from a founder who successfully built companies and continues to find innovative ways to grow. Go grab a bowl of Popsmith popcorn and enjoy. Hey everybody. Welcome back to the startup CPG podcast. This is Hannah and today we're back for an awesome Founder Fundraising Journey episode with Tal Moore of Popsmith. Tal, welcome to the show.

02:39
Tal Moore
Hey, thanks for having me. Happy to be here.

02:41
Hannah Dittman
We're super happy you're here. I'd love to kick us straight into a brief background of your career journey and the path that led you to Popsmith.

02:50
Tal Moore
Yeah. Well, I'll take you way back to when I was 12 years old and I had. I was selling gumballs and baggies of popcorn in like sandwich bags full of popcorn and gumballs and lollipops in elementary school. So packed up candy, I was like, did all drug dealer style with like bags inside my coat and built up a little clientele of 10 year olds and 12 year olds and was making 8 to $10 a day. So that was my first experience in like entrepreneurship. And that led to a bubble gum machine vending route. When I was 16 years old. I bought those big five foot spiral gumball machines and I set up a vending route and putting those gumball machines in high schools and arcades and restaurants throughout western Washington. And I ran that for a few years.

03:36
Tal Moore
And then in the year 2000, I bought the domain gumballs.com and I developed a bubblegum machine store, a virtual store online selling gumball machines and candy machines and cream machines. And so that was my first foray into e Commerce. That was 2000, 2001 eBay and then my e commerce store. And then from there I branched out into other niches. So I started chocolate.com, wickr.com, selling chocolate and wicker furniture. I had Barber Poles Direct, which is selling barber poles. I had World Globes Direct selling World Globes. But one of my other earliest stores was a popcorn store called popcornmachinesdirect.com, where I was selling the big movie theater kind of cabinet poppers and the antique push carts. And yes, I've been in e.com for 25 years. I'm like a relative dinosaur in the space.

04:29
Tal Moore
And then I've been in popcorn for 23 years and I've ran a variety of e comm businesses along the way. But in 2020, I decided to divest myself. All of my brands sold off everything, including Athrasio, which is an Amazon aggregator, sold everything all off. So I can go all in on popcorn. And that's why I started working on Popsmith alongside my business partner, Dave.

04:50
Hannah Dittman
Wow, you have had a colorful and fun journey with a lot of categories that belong in a movie theater along the way. And eight to $10 a day as a kid is no joke. That is some serious dough back then. You acquired a taste for the good life early on. And how fun to be in such a exciting business that is so nostalgic and that everyone has a lot of affin for and very enterprising clearly that you were on that early E Com wave. I'm sure you've seen and learned a lot that you can now apply into this next chapter of popcorn. I'd love to dive in and also learn a little bit more about Popsmith, what your mission is, what you guys are all about, and what the real pull and passion was for diving into this new business.

05:33
Tal Moore
You know, I've been in popcorn a long time and I always had a real affinity for popcorn and really goes back to my childhood where we would have movie nights at home and mom would make stovetop popcorn or Jiffy Popcorn. And it wasn't just about like making delicious popcorn at home. It was about the nostalgic kind of like part of eating and making and consuming popcorn alongside loved ones. And there's just like a real, there's a real nostalgic component to popcorn. And we realize that, you know, when you look at the popcorn landscape, like there was no brand that was really speaking to that, you know, not just like delicious popcorn, but actually making it in this experience, experiential, joyous, nostalgic way with friends and loved ones. And so we wanted to become that brand.

06:17
Tal Moore
We wanted to launch with a novel way of making popcorn what we believe is a superior way to make popcorn. Like if you look at the popcorn landscape, you've got microwave popcorn, which everybody agrees is kind of mid, and then you've got bagged popcorn which isn't very fresh but convenient. And then you have stovetop like kettle popped popcorn. And that's what you know, you enjoy at the movie theater, which I think everybody agrees, like movie theater popcorn is the very best popcorn out there. Well, why? It's because it's cooked the way that popcorn ought to be cooked before microwaves existed, which is in a kettle and frying the kernels with the salt and the seasonings and really good quality oil. And so we wanted to replicate that and give people the opportunity to make popcorn the Popsmith way at home and stovetop pop.

07:02
Tal Moore
We didn't invent stovetop popping. There were other stovetop poppers out there, but they weren't like built very well. We wanted something that looked nostalgic that was really built and made like an heirloom quality cookware, something you would find at a William Sonoma shelf. And nothing like that existed. And so that's what we set out to create, to invent. And so we hired Branch Creative out of San Francisco, this really high end industrial designer and an engineering firm also in Palo Alto. And we tasked them with creating like an heirloom quality, beautiful, functional stovetop popper that would not only make delicious, consistent popcorn, but it's so beautiful that you want to actually leave out, you know, and like show off.

07:42
Tal Moore
And it becomes this like show when you have people coming over and are gathering around in the kitchen, like watching you in anticipation of making this like delicious popcorn. And so that's what we set out to create and that was in 2020 and then we launched in 2023.

07:57
Hannah Dittman
So exciting and makes a ton of sense. I think the products you've made are so beautiful and I love the branding you have going on elsewhere in the company as well. It's so true. It's such a nostalgic, just joy bringing activity to kind of gather around and have that fresh, warm popcorn. And it does taste totally different. I feel like everyone can devour like a giant bucket of popcorn at the movie theaters for a reason. What was the kind of startup experience like for you, pivoting from your old businesses to this new one? Obviously you got the design built with a firm. What was kind of the journey? Was it just you working on this? What was the funding position at the time and how did you go about going from day zero to where you are today?

08:41
Tal Moore
Yeah, it was a long and arduous process. I mean, startup life is not for the squeamish. I think we like sorely underestimated, like how difficult and how expensive it would be. When you're bringing a new brand and a new product to market, it takes a lot longer than you might anticipate and it's a lot, it's far costlier than you might anticipate. So in our case it was Dave, my partner, Dave Stickland, who's been with me for 13 years. We started together the earlier iteration of another popcorn brand that we've since sold. And we decided to, you know, go at it together.

09:13
Tal Moore
And so we needed seed capital because were engineering industrial design, very expensive, especially when you want to, you know, we really had the aspiration to come out of the gate looking and feeling like a hundred million dollar brand, even though were a startup. And so that meant a lot of intentionality into the branding, the design of the website, the logo. We really wanted to do extensive market research before we launch so that we can. And that market research is what helped guide the decision making process when it came to before, when to pen to paper and started like fleshing out the branding. We really wanted to have a good understanding of who our target market is, what they're looking for and how to speak to them.

09:55
Tal Moore
And so that we did six months of market research, we did test groups and then started the industrial design process and it was very expensive. So I personally, I put initially 1.2 million and then another million dollars of my own personal money. And then we ended up doing a friends and family raise which was 1.6 million when we launched, when it was just nothing more than a PDF and we ended up spending all that and more taking the product to market. Not only was it very expensive to develop it, but then marketing new brand, a new concept when nobody's ever heard of it before is just very expensive when you're like the market maker. So yeah, it was definitely not. It was very costly, not without its challenges early on.

10:38
Hannah Dittman
Yeah, I feel like there's so much that goes into product design, especially something that's a little bit more durable with expensive materials and that needs to like be interacting with heat and all of these things. Like there's so much thought and care that goes into every decision you make in business. I have a lot of respect and admiration for founders that are so passionate about their vision and their product. And being a real product first mentality is the way to win consumers hearts because it is about, at the end of the day is making sure that the North Star is delivering an amazing product to the people that are interested in your brand. It seems like you guys have put a ton of thought and work and capital and energy and resources behind all of this.

11:17
Hannah Dittman
So no surprise that you've come up with something as beautiful and as awesome as you have. When you went through that early days, what were the milestones that you were looking to reach or thinking about and the milestone paths as you've moved through the business that you anchored on?

11:34
Tal Moore
Yeah, I think the most significant milestones that were looking at was revenue, merchant and ultimately profit. There was a lot of learning on the finance side. You know that were very green. You know when you have a fast growing business and you have an ever increasing need inventory, that becomes a capital that gobbles up capital. And if you don't get your inventory right. For instance, when we launched were ended up, you know what we thought were purchasing three months worth of inventory. We ended up sitting on over a year's worth of inventory. That nearly like sunk our business because we had so much money tied up inventory. And so getting inventory right early on is like very difficult. Before you like understand like demand, I mean it almost sunk our business.

12:17
Tal Moore
By the next year, in 2024, we got an Oprah's Favorite Things, which like totally saved the business. We were at that point sitting on seven months worth of inventory. And then we made Oprah's Favorite Things and we wiped out of everything that holiday season within three weeks. Like, just like everything just saved our company. So we're a lot smarter about our metrics when it comes to cash conversion cycle. We have a very now accurate understanding of what our true cost of goods are. You know, that's something that's also very easy to screw up for kind of more green founders where you look at cost of product, but you're not necessarily taking into consideration like all the costs along the way. You have import fees, you have tariffs, perhaps you have shipping, you have logistics, you have a returns allowance.

13:03
Tal Moore
And so there are a number of factors that go into cost of goods so that you can truly understand, like where your profitability lines are. So a lot of learning on the finance side. But right now we have our mer tightened up, how much we're spending on advertising as a portion of our revenue projections. We've gotten very good at our demand planning to really understand what our growth curve looks like. And we're definitely outpacing our expectations for 2026. And that's leading right up into another raise that we're about to launch. We've done two raises so far. We did our friends and family round when we first launched and then we did an equity crowdfunding raise on StartEngine which went a lot better than we expected. That was last year on StartEngine and were looking at both StartEngine and we funder.

13:50
Tal Moore
We ended up deciding to go with StartEngine just because they're more selective with the projects that they take on. And we ended up raising a little over a million dollars that round. And were oversubscribed. And so we've now waited a year and we're about to launch our next Start Engine round, which will be our last Start engine. That will be our last fundraising round which will get us to profitability and beyond. And the reason for the raise is because we're growing. We're now on pace to do over 150,000. 150%. We're on pace to do 150% year over year growth. And so it's staggering growth. And we just were raising capital in order to fund inventory going into our busiest time of year and a holiday and then to fund the marketing efforts. Like we figured out what's working.

14:35
Tal Moore
And now we really want to pour the nitro fuel onto the marketing efforts to really fast track growth.

14:40
Hannah Dittman
My gosh, huge kudos and congrats for navigating those waves and waters and just the resilience and the emotional regulation it takes to get through some of that stuff. I mean, you're talking big numbers and a lot of stress. I'm sure at the time to be sitting on seven months of inventory of then to boom, have your opportunity happen and then be getting through it in three weeks is. That's huge. I mean, I can't even imagine what the emotional roller coaster of some of this stuff has been like and how exciting where you're at right now and the journey you're on now is.

15:13
Hannah Dittman
I'd love to learn a little bit more about crowdfunding and your approach to that and what made you think that the business you were building would be a good fit for that avenue and versus maybe a more traditional institutional path of fundraising and any kind of nuance or color you could shed light on for founders out there that might be interested in exploring crowdfunding or what that entails.

15:34
Tal Moore
Yeah, it's something that actually when I speak to, I mean, I'm very involved in like e commerce communities and not a lot of people have crowdfunding on their radar and they ought to. I think it's a very interesting and compelling option, right? Like if you're, if you need money for your business, you have only a handful of options. You could do a friends and family round. If you have a good network of people that know you and trust you, like that's a good option. You could do debt, right? You could borrow against a, from a bank and put up your own personal assets, the business assets to secure that debt. You could do the venture private equity round, but that's typically challenging early on because not a lot of private equity companies are willing to invest in true startups.

16:17
Tal Moore
Like, they want to see companies are at a certain level before they invest. And you know, that's typically north of $10 million in revenue and perhaps seeing some EBITDA. And then there's the crowdfunding option. And I think that the crowdfunding option is really interesting. So it came about during the Obama administration. Up until then, investment opportunities like this were limited to what's known as accredited investors, basically people that are at a certain level of wealth that's defined by the U.S. government that, you know, gives companies the opportunity to market to people that are accredited investors. Well, with equity crowdfunding, when that came about. This reg CF is what it's called. It now gives every Joe and John, you know, and Sally the opportunity to invest in startup companies that they would previously not have access to. And so it was very interesting.

17:08
Tal Moore
And it's still relatively new and relatively unknown, but there's actually a very large and active community of investors. The check size is smaller. It might average like 500 to $1,000. But there's a huge community of prospective investors that are following these opportunities and investing alongside these larger brands. And there's a lot of marketplaces that do equity crowdfunding. I would say the two largest are We Funder and StartEngine. And I looked at both of them and that took me really down a journey. I didn't know if that was the right fit for us because were kind of in that in between stage. You know, were sub 10 million in revenue. We had already done a friends and family round, so we'd done that before we launched. We launched, were showing traction, but were still a little too small to go the venture path.

17:54
Tal Moore
Maybe we could have, but I think we probably would have gotten really beaten up on valuation. And so equity crowdfunding seemed to be like a viable option. So I really dug into it and learned quite a bit about it before I jumped into it and I looked at the two platforms. I ended up going with StartEngine over We Funder because they have just as many people that are following their campaigns, but they're also more selective. You have fewer deals that go in front of more people on StartEngine, so you get more exposure. And so I started that process and I had pretty low expectations of what, you know, we might yield in terms of results on StartEngine. And to my surprise, the interest was just a lot higher and a lot more aggressive on our first round when we launched it.

18:35
Tal Moore
I mean, very quickly, we oversubscribed and ended up raising a little, almost $1.2 million in the first round. We which just kind of like blew our minds. Like, there was just so much demand. And so now that I've gone through it and then we're now starting another StartEngine round, I think my lessons, you know, when I think back to like, why were we successful, I think it comes down to a handful of things. And I think that any brand that matches most, if not all of what I'm about to say, I think could stand a pretty good chance of being successful in StartEngine. Number one, don't be a startup, you know, have some sort of revenue have some sort of attraction. I think somewhere between two to $10 million is probably the sweet spot. Number two, have an email list.

19:14
Tal Moore
The people that are following you, that have your product, that like your tribe. Right. Because you're going to be marketing to those people. These are people that have already been exposed to your brand. They've already tried your product or service. They presumably like your product service, are coming back and buying more. And now you can market to them and say, look, you've tried the product, you love the brand, now you can own a piece of it for as little as 300 or $500. You set the minimum. We're doing a minimum of $500 in order to make it inclusive. So anybody that might be interested that owns a Popsmith, they can now become an equity holder, right? So and then what happens is you have a large enough email list, then that creates a swell of interest when you first launch.

19:57
Tal Moore
And then when you reach certain raised thresholds in, you know, within StartEngine, then they start promoting within their campaign to people that follow StartEngine campaigns have never necessarily heard of your brand. And then it just becomes kind of symbiotic. And so I think that's very important. I think that consumer brands like us where you don't really have to do a lot of explaining. Like people understand popcorn and popcorn popping. So have a brand that you can really explain rather simply and then have, you know, you want to be able to sell the future. You know, you want to be able to talk about like where you're at and where you're headed. In our case, what's really exciting about this new campaign is that we're, we've grown 150% year over year. We launched a bunch of new consumables.

20:39
Tal Moore
Our average order value is up by 30%. We have subscription revenue that's growing by 20%. That's just the subscribe and save. And people are subscribing and spending and buying consumables every single month. We've launched a handful of new popcorn popper colors. And so we're finding that previous popcorn Popsmith buyers are coming back and buying more colorways because they're just interested in more colors. And then we also are launching Williams Sonoma nationwide this year in all Williams Sonoma stores nationw. So we have just tremendous tailwind like going into this raise and it's very exciting. I think it's going to lend itself to yet another very successful raise.

21:19
Hannah Dittman
Huge congrats. So much to Unpack there. And you took the question right out of my mouth of like what makes a successful brand on StartEngine or in crowd equity. And I love the way you broke that down. And what an exciting time. I mean, the dream of Williams Sonoma at the beginning when you were really ideating and creating this concept and working through the engineering and the design to now being in William Sonoma and achieving that and the whole journey in between, the consumables, the growth. I mean, this is such an exciting, happy story for where you've gone through all the different phases of the business and now are kind of onto this next chapter.

21:53
Hannah Dittman
I love the way you said getting your customers involved into the equity ownership of your business, that's unique and I think something that's so compelling, you know, you sometimes see it with employees, but honestly not even all the times with employees and CPG are they offered equity in a company. And I think the customers and the employees are the ones who make these brands so successful. And for them to get to be a part of the business side of it in that way I think is really exciting and cool. And I love when founders lean into their strengths. You know, it's like you were early E Comm and you know, so much of the mechanics of that and so much of this seems very similar. The way you're doing crowdfunding is very similar to that.

22:31
Hannah Dittman
And it just seems like sometimes the best thing you can do as a founder is to really double down on what you know well and what you're strong at and drive it to success. So that's super exciting. So you raised a little over a million in your last round. Hopefully this will be your final round. What are you guys hoping to achieve with this raise in terms of dollar amount and what specifically is that money going to be used for? To fuel growth for the next milestone and chapter.

22:56
Tal Moore
Yeah. So last round we raised over a million dollars rather quickly. I have similar expectations. I expect to for us to raise around a million dollars and I expect us to be oversubscribed like fairly quickly in this round as well. There's people have been doing like pre launch reservations which there was. There's already like really strong demand for this round. So I expect we'll probably be over subscribed this round as well. And I'm very excited for that. In terms of what we're going to be doing with the money, I mean it's all going to be going towards inventory and marketing and we're growing this last. We just closed out June which is historically a slow month for us.

23:30
Tal Moore
But June 2026 we did almost three times revenue of June 2025, which is really interesting for us because we thought that, you know, summer has historically been a slow period for us and just to see it was a record non holiday month for us. And so that to me is a canary in the coal mine that we're going to just have a holiday season which is kind of our super bowl that's going to far exceed our revenue projections, which is very exciting, a little nerve wracking. And so we expect to close the start engine round before holiday and all that money is going to go directly into inventory and marketing. And I think we're going to need every dollar because we're going to have record breaking November, December this year.

24:10
Hannah Dittman
I'm hoping for you too. I'm sure you guys will achieve your dreams and I feel like that's awesome that you're already seeing the glittering signs that's going to come to fruition when you reflect back on some of the challenging times or obstacles you've overcome of operating your business and funding it. Do you have any lessons you've learned that you think other founders can learn from specifically on capital management or funding in general?

24:35
Tal Moore
Yeah, I think that it was. We experienced a lot of pain because were under capitalized, you know, so if you're going out to market, be very careful and have a real understanding of what your budget is, where your expenditures are and expect them to go over and make sure that you're well capitalized. Because it is not fun to chase money when you need it. So you really want to be able to accept money when you don't need it or you're in less of a needy position. To be in a needy position where you know you have to raise more money for the sake of survival is just really unpleasant place. So make sure you're not under capitalized.

25:09
Tal Moore
I think that we tended to, we made several very costly mistakes where I think that we spent more than we should have before really proving the market like we didn't need best in class legal. That on the patent side and legal and documentation, it's important to have proper legal representation. But you know, I think that we spent more than we needed to. I think that we spent more than we needed to on branding and industrial design and packaging. Again, we created a killer brand and we're really proud of what we developed. And there's an argument that could be made that we probably wouldn't have gotten into Williams Sonoma and Crate and Barrel and Surl and Oprah's favorite things without like a really beautiful brand aesthetic. But that was very costly and very risky.

25:54
Tal Moore
So I would suggest people to kind of like stagger their approach when it comes to spending money because you run out of money, you run out of a business. So be very, very mindful of how much you need, how much you're spending and make sure that you are not under capitalized.

26:09
Hannah Dittman
Very wise words. And I think definitely easy to make mistakes early on in your founder journey, especially if you're calling yourself like a first time founder, a green founder in some way. If it's your first time going out and building a product yourself, it's so easy to not know all the kind of ways that you might be overshooting. And I think as a founder you're trying to think forward so much, you're trying to think like five steps ahead of where could this go wrong, where does it need to go right? Where can we insulate ourselves from problems? And I think sometimes it's easy to focus almost on too much on the long term plan and not enough on the short term plan.

26:44
Hannah Dittman
And I, I think you articulated that very well in terms of capital management, when you're thinking through the capital management of going forward. Now you're saying inventory and you're saying marketing. For other founders that are trying to figure out how exactly much to raise or how much money they might need, or where it might need to go and they're forecasting these things out, do you have any advice for them as they think through the future or state of their businesses?

27:11
Tal Moore
I think that there are some unavoidable buckets of spend that anybody, I mean, I'm specifically referring to a product business. I can't really speak to a service business, but when it comes to a product business, you're going to have money tied up in development of the product, you're going to have money tied up in the inventory of the product. You're going to have money tied up in the branding and website, the branding, the identity and the website development. You're going to have some money tied up in legal and then you're going to need a budget for employment and marketing. You know, we started on the scrappy side. It was just me and my co founder. When we initially started, I was not drawing a salary. Still, I'm not drawing a salary. My co founder was drawing a deferred salary.

27:54
Tal Moore
And then we had, you know, a very small lean team overseas. We made the mistake of hiring domestically for higher level kind of roles that were just a little bit too early. That was, that proved to be very wasteful. And then the marketing side, it depends on what you're, you know, developing the marketing. In our case, were developing a product that really hadn't existed. And so the marketing lift was a lot more expensive than we expected. So if you're coming out with a product, that's where the category already exists and people have awareness, like creatine gummies for instance. Like there's plenty of awareness. There are plenty of pioneers who've already created a lot of awareness in that category. And then you would be like a new player in that space.

28:33
Tal Moore
That's very different than if you're creating a new product that nobody's ever heard of or ever thought about. So the consideration phase might be a lot longer. You have to get in front of people a lot more often to get familiar and comfortable before they make the decision to purchase your product. And so really think through and give yourself a lot of latitude in terms of how much time you have to spend, how much money you have to spend on time and awareness of product when you launch. On the marketing side, Tal, you could.

28:59
Hannah Dittman
Teach a class in all of this. You're so well articulated and really have like a business degree in all of these things that I feel like a lot of these are hard won insights, I'm sure. But it sounds like you just really understand kind of the postmortem looking through your business in the past and the future. And I think that's one of the biggest strengths a founder can have is to really understand what they can learn from each piece of their business. What went right, what went wrong and what needs to go differently in the future or what needs to get doubled down on. And I love the way you articulate it. I could pepper you with a lot more questions about all of this, but I'd love to pass the floor over to a case study question from Slack.

29:35
Hannah Dittman
As you know, startup CBG has the largest Slack community in the industry with now over 35,000 members. I'd love to pull a question directly from our channel and have you answer it as a case study for any founder with a similar question. Today's question is a lot of investors talk about building relationships prior to investing, but it isn't clear what that means or how to do it. How should I think about that? I know obviously you focus more on crowdfunding, but curious if you have any thoughts on relationship management and the investor relationship long term?

30:05
Tal Moore
Yeah, I have a lot to say about that. I think, you know, as I mentioned earlier, like we raised 1.6 million friends and family before when Popsmith is nothing but a PDF. Like it was an extraordinary amount of money and it was a very humbling experience like to go out to market to friends and family to say, you know, not only here is my product, please believe in me, but also like cut me a check, like invest in me. It's a very humbling experience. And I think that and I would say 97% of the people that ended up investing that first round were my personal friends and family. And so how did that come about? I have been an entrepreneur for 25 years and I've been very involved in the E commerce and the entrepreneur various communities.

30:53
Tal Moore
So I've been a member of Entrepreneurs Organization which is a global network of entrepreneurs. I have chapters all around the world. I've been a member of that for 17 years. I'm part of E Commerce Fuel which is a community of e commerce 7, 8 and 9 figure e commerce owners. I volunteer, I talk to younger entrepreneurs, I volunteer my alma mater and spoke into business classes and business and entrepreneur students. And so I'm very involved in the community and very active in the various business communities. So people know me within kind of those small fiefdoms of business and entrepreneurship. They know me, they know my business, they know what I've built, they know what I've sold.

31:34
Tal Moore
And so I've built, you know, and this wasn't my intention, this is just me, part of me making an effort to be a part of a community that will have me of like minded individuals. But over time you really build a reputation. And I think that old adage is true that it can take a lifetime to build a reputation. You can ruin it in five minutes, you know, by saying the wrong thing or doing the wrong thing. But when it comes time to asking people to write you a check, like that's where the dividends start to pay back of any time and effort that you put into the community, to be a vanguard of a community, to provide help, to provide feedback, to provide advice, to be we're all life is scary and life is hard and it's lonely and it's difficult.

32:17
Tal Moore
And I think that when I started in E commerce it really wasn't much of an e commerce community. It was just kind of like everybody fending for themselves. And then I started to find Amazon communities of Amazon sellers and e commerce communities and they were so helpful and inclusive you know, it's so nice to be around people that are there to help you know, that have struggled in areas that you might be struggling in, that can give you a hand, that can give you advice to avoid pitfalls that they fell into. It's a really beautiful thing to be able to help and it encourages you to want to give back. So putting in that effort, I think is just good juju. You know, you're helping other human beings and there to help you back.

32:54
Tal Moore
And then, you know, when you do that and then you start a new business and you take it to your community, it becomes an easier decision for them to say, I know this guy, I love this guy, I trust this guy and I believe in him and I want to invest in him. And that's been my experience.

33:09
Hannah Dittman
So beautifully said. And what a nice sentiment. I think that really is a nice mental frame and reframes the way I think a lot of people think about trying to find capital for their business. When you think about it as a long term relationship and what that actually means and the ways that you can give and pay it forward in advance too. I think all really nicely said and definitely no surprise why you've been so successful with fundraising. I mean, huge feat to be able to command that much capital not once, not twice, but hopefully three times or more over. And I think every founder listening to this that has kind of struggled through the path of fundraising on their own or thinking about it, knows this is like a daunting task and a hard journey.

33:50
Hannah Dittman
So a lot of respect and admiration for what you've been able to do and know how draining and straining that can be for a founder, for sure.

33:57
Tal Moore
Yeah. Thank you. And yes, it's been. I've had more nights than I care to admit where I was just kind of like rolled up in a ball, crying on the foot of my bed. Like, there have been some dark days and nights. But, you know, I think the key is you just can't give up. You just got to keep marching. And some days that March might be 5 inches forward, but it's progress.

34:17
Hannah Dittman
Yeah. And we hear on this podcast a lot like the characteristics of founders that investors look for that become the most successful. And it's often you hear it time and time again. Humility, perseverance, grit, being tenacious, being resilient. And this is why there are those hard nights. There's a million no's before there's a yes. There's things on fire and you have to be tackling that without letting everything else go crashing down. Your personal life is happening in the background during all of this that you know, it's easy to forget about that. But Tal, it's been such an amazing chat. I'm wishing you all the best. A huge fan of Popsmith and what you built. Everyone should go out and try it if you haven't already for sure. Check out the brand and wishing you all the best in this next raise.

35:00
Hannah Dittman
For founders, potential investors or anyone else that might want to reach out to you or follow along on their journey, what's the best way for them to get in touch or do so? And second part of my question, do you have any advice for anyone looking to join maybe your company if you're hiring or if not the industry? CPG industry in general.

35:18
Tal Moore
Yeah. So several things. So I hope I provided some value for your audience. If you love popcorn, go to popsimith.com and get a popper. You will not regret it. They make great Christmas gifts. If you're interested in following along as an equity holder like we would certainly invite you to participate in the StartEngine round. By the time this publishes, our StartEngine round will be officially live. You can go to startengine.com and do a search for Popsmith and you'll find our campaign. The investment, the minimum is either $500 or $350. So you will now officially become an equity holder in Popsmith. And what you get from that is you're now on our investor email list.

35:52
Tal Moore
You get access to new promotions, new products, investor only discounts and most importantly, most interesting I should say are you get the detailed quarterly investor updates that Dave and I send out. We've been doing it every single quarter for the past three years. So to really give you a behind the curtain scene of what it's like to run a DTC brand where we lay out all the details, the good, the bad, the ugly and you can follow along the ride and be a part of it as an equity holder alongside me and Dave. So that'll be an interesting opportunity with at a very we want to keep the barrier to entry very low for anybody that wants to be able to invest and own a small piece, they can. In terms of reaching out to me, best way is on Instagram.

36:32
Tal Moore
I'm @tal moore T A L M O O R E. You can give me a follow. I'm on LinkedIn, although I'm not as active there and I'm on x. But I. I'm just kind of a leecher there. I don't really post Instagram is probably the best way to reach me in terms of hiring. We are, yeah, we're actually, we're always looking for on the creative side. So really awesome editors that are really great at editing content for meta and then I would say on the creative strategies. So creative strategies that can put together briefs for our influencers and for our content. We're growing pretty aggressively in that department. So anybody that's really competent, please hit me up. We're interested.

37:16
Hannah Dittman
Hopefully we get those roles filled and some new customers to try out. Potsmith Like I said, really awesome brand and really exciting everything that you've achieved. Thank you so much for the words of wisdom and all the learnings today. Tal. Wishing you all the best and thank you so much for your time.

37:30
Tal Moore
Thank you Hannah. It was a real treat. Appreciate the time.

37:34
Hannah Dittman
Well friends, we've now arrived together at the end of another episode of the Startup CPG podcast, the top globally ranked podcast in cpg. And if you love this podcast, you'll love our Slack community even more. Here at Startup cpg, we're a community of brands and experts and you should just join. Sign up @startupcpg.com you'll then get an invite to our online Slack community of over 35,000 All Star CPG members, hear about amazing events near you and all our special opportunities to get you in front of buyers, investors, brands and more. It's a free community. So what are you waiting for? I'll catch you on the next episode and I'll see you on the Slack.