Hello and welcome back to the eCommerce Impact Podcast. So this episode is a little bit different. I wanted to shine a light on entrepreneurship in its early stages. I think a lot of podcasts focus on people that have already succeeded. And you know, they're telling you all about the ways in which they've, they've won, won the game.

But actually, we don't often talk to entrepreneurs who are really still in the thick of it in those early stages. And I think it's a fascinating stage. So this week I interviewed Hassan, Muah. And he launched his high protein cereal brand Yus just a few short months ago, but he has actually already made some awesome progress with his brand.

He's attracted an in team, some great investors, and he's created a brand that's really gaining a lot of attention already. So listen in to hear why Hasan focused on building a strong marketing team before hiring any agencies, why his approach to brand has been central to his success. The importance of a clear vision from the start.

We hear, you'll hear about Hassan's approach to product development, which is really interesting cause he has a lot of experience in the food space. So food entrepreneurs listen up. We talked about how Hassan went about getting investment in the early stages. So lots of great insight there and why building in public can attract investors.

I was actually first made aware of her son and his journey through his LinkedIn. He posted some really honest. Posts about what it was like to be in these early stages, and I found it really inspiring and started following him and eventually reached out and got him on the pod. So without further ado, let's jump into the episode.

Hi Hassan, Welcome to the podcast. Hi Jessie. Thanks for having me. No worries. Can you maybe introduce Yummos to the world and to our listeners and let us know what you've been up to lately and what you're excited about. Sure. So, so Ys is in a nutshell, a high protein, low sugar plant powered nutrition brand.

At the moment we do high protein, low sugar cereal, which is also low carb and tastes pretty darn good as well. What we're excited about Oh, the whole, the whole future. We've got some new products coming up, which uh, you know, can't wait to get launched. We're just making steps into retail markets as well as dtc and yeah, we, we are very early stage.

Excited for everything that the future's gonna throw out us really.

And so you launched the brand to the world four months ago, how long it had, had it been in the making, and what's been your process to get, to get to that point? Sure. So, so we were probably about, I would say probably about 12 months of product development,

Most of the people I speak to that's pretty quick in terms of sort of ideations, two products on the shelf. Think probably that's probably helped by sort of my background. It wasn't a new industry for me. So I've worked in the nutrition industry for nearly 15 years.

What made you pull the trigger and like ultimately, was it the idea finally came to you or. The time was right or what made you kind of take that leap of faith?

It was it was only ever gonna be a, a plant-based business for me. I used to work for a meat whole sailor. That's probably enough to turn a lot of people off, off meat and stuff. Yeah, I think it, it was just when I had kids and went out into the field one day and.

We were looking at cow and it just looked at me like my, my daughter who was like, one looked at me at the time. And that was, that was the end of that. And and then it was about, okay, I want, wouldn't it be great to map kind of what you do with something you enjoy, but also something you believe in.

So yeah, it was only ever gonna be this way. It's also an underserved area of. When I say the nutrition industry high protein, low sugar kind of brands. It's overlooked so often laser tagged on I would say with a lot of other brands.

And if you can give them something that's where there's no compromise on, on taste, on Nutri. To the animal products that they're used to.

So I've got sort of D2C experience from a previous life, but also sort of more recently been doing the physical distribution into retail. So it kind of makes sense to bring those two things together, hence why we've got a plant-based nutrition brand.

I think I've got a pretty good understanding of the consumers and the opportunity. And also from the consultancy work I've done space on retail shelves, what buyers are looking for, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Yeah. Awesome. I'd love to know, I'm fascinated because as a marketer and an agency owner, I never get involved in that process of product development.

So I'd love to know what does that look like? So you did it really quickly cuz you had experience in contacts in the space, but mm-hmm. , how does one go about coming up with a food products? Yeah. Plenty of ways of doing it. There'll be manufacturers out there who, who can do the stuff. I've got a background in nutrition myself, which helps, but there's also people who can help you with that, with recipes, with formula. Mm. So then it's about if you don't know them directly, it's about doing the rounds and, and, and sounding out the manufacturer.

So you want, you know, once you've nailed a recipe, it's which manufacturer is. Big enough and competent enough to bring this to life, but small enough and flexible enough to deal it with startup minimum order quantities.

And yeah, you go from there, you nail the recipe. You Work on that side of things. Do do a production trial, make sure you're happy with it. Sign off and then you've got The fun stuff, which is the sort of visual design element of the branding and the packaging and all that side. Yeah. And then you have the less fun stuff, which is the technical specs and all the Italy piddly bits, which are obviously very important.

So, yeah. Yeah. So, and you mentioned that you did the, you created the brand in house, which is really interesting. I mean, I think the branding looks great. So what was that process like? And you must have used a designer or are you a designer yourself? How did that work? Yeah, I, I've always been interested particularly more, more recently in, in brands.

You know, I think there's one thing that I think can really help a product in this space or in any busy space is, is the visual sort of appearance of it. Let's be honest, we are in, you know, in, in the protein space. Yes. It's growing like that. Yes, it's growing market. There's plenty of space for lots of people, but it is competi.

Mm. There's a lot of brands out there that are nothing wrong with it. But their thing is, is maybe science or, or perhaps, you know overly masculine or that, for example mm-hmm. or the opposite, overly feminine and like stick, stick a pink color on equally shape pink color and Yeah. Yeah, yeah. The kind of diet product Yeah.

Vibe. , I wanted something completely different so that, you know, be on a shelf or be it online on a Facebook ad or whatever, or with, in an influencer's hand, whatever it might be. It just really stands out. Something playful, fun and different. Yes. You know, we've got serious nutrition that, that that's what we are, but we don't have to package it in a scary way.

you know, I mean you see brands, I dunno Liquid Death for example, have done in water. They've got this really cool, just almost from another world like brand. But it stands out and it allows you to get fun with personality. Mm, more fun to work with. I've always admired brands that are a little bit more on the playful side.

That's just kind of me and the brands I can relate to. And it's easy, I suppose, easier for me to create a brand. I that you relate to, you want to be a customer as well. And then, and then from the technical side I don't have the technical design skills but I got a friend who lives locally who does, who I've worked with the previous businesses.

And yeah, I spoke, spoke with him, didn't have a lot of cash at the beginning, so it was a case of, you know, are, are you up for this? Would you like to come in for some equity? And, you know, let's, let's kind of build this together. And yeah, between the two of us, we we got there and, and it's one thing I don't regret is, you know, I, I really love the brand and it's, we, we haven't nailed anything.

But if it's one thing we've been close to nailing, I, I would say it's that, that's, that's the area of the business that we're constantly getting, you know? Really positive feedback and you know, people just, nothing to do with it. Just coming out of the blue and sending messages saying, I love, I love looking for what you've done.

No ulterior motive. And that's, yeah, that's pretty, pretty cool thing. Yeah. And that's awesome. I mean, it's the power of a good brand. Like I always say to founders, you know, you've got to get those fundamentals right because especially for D2C, like you're persuading a stranger off the internet to buy from you.

It's got to be. A convincing brand that resonates with them and stands out and is unique. If it's another me too brand, you are, you're definitely in trouble today where it's becomes so hyper competitive. Awesome. So you got the branding together, so that part of it, you were bootstrapping. At what point did you go and seek investment and what did that process like and what did you learn along the way?

Always feel like the, probably the, the businessy aspect I feel slightly more comfortable with than the fundraising, to be honest. Cause it's new territory. It was super daunting at the start. Yeah, now I've done, you know, I've got a little bit further along with it.

It, it daunts me a lot less Yeah. Can get used to it. You've gotta get used to rejection. Once you've had a few of those, it becomes easier to deal with. You don't take them personally and you're never gonna. Everyone at all. Yeah. So what did we do? We started off initially with a friends and family around mm-hmm.

Which was enough for us to get the product made and, and, and get moving.

Yeah, and that was really helpful. And we actually managed to sort of through I suppose connections, but I wouldn't say I knew that the people personally very well at all. Managed to get a couple of early stage sort of micro VCs on board as well as part of that friends and family round.

Awesome. And they came in a lot earlier than they normally would. Cuz like the product, like the brand, like the space. And that helped. And then more recently to take it to the next level. We've gone to institutional investors that that was enough to sort of absolute minimum viable product. Let's, let's get launched.

But then it's, okay, how do we take this to market? How do we fund the team? How do we fund the overheads, et cetera. And that's where, you know, more significant sums of investment had to come in. We've pulled that in from a couple of different places. One was sort of contacted a contact who was interested in the space, few conversations and, and we hit it off which was great.

The other, quite interestingly, was a customer who was, it just happened to be a customer that happened to be an investor. Then, I dunno, he saw a poster man on LinkedIn just mentioning that we were raising and got in touch and said, Well, you know what, I'm actually a customer. But it was also, Pretty prolific investor in this space as well.

So yeah. Yeah, and, and sort of that came, came through as well. So, Yeah. It's been interesting, but it's, the other thing I've learned is that you never stop doing it. So yeah, we, we have a lot of interest, have a lot of, let's say positives. You have a lot of people who might like the idea, but it's too early for them.

You might have a lot of people who, it's just the wrong space. You have a lot of people who just. You know, a couple of people who really don't like the brand or whatever, but I will say that's generally people who are not part of our target audience and wouldn't get it, but it happens. So yeah, you just have to be very resilient.

Not take too things too personally and but also believe in yourself. And the more and more you do it, the more confident you get same with business, really. Any obstacles that you come up against, or objections you, you kind of try and fix them, plug the holes and come back and more and be more confident and more chance of success the next time around.

Yeah. Yeah. So was it like dragon's den, like, you know, are you showing up and there's these kind of scary people asking you really hard questions and putting on the spot? Or is it often casual? It's nowhere near as dramatic and scary as they make it out to be. So yeah. Dragons then dramatize and quite significantly and sensationalized they're not well that certainly the ones I've spoken to are not scary people there. Yeah. Nice people. They're intelligent people who know the stuff and, you know, clearly want to invest in things where they, they think they're gonna get a good.

Yeah. But it's really not that scary. And again, I'll say any presenting or anything, the more confident you are in what you're presenting and the more you believe in it the easier it becomes. Yeah. And yeah. Yeah. I, I used to first couple, you know, sort overly admit, I used to get very, and I'm, I don't particularly like presenting.

I used to get very nervous. By now I go in there, I don't really get. . If if, if they like it, great. If they don't, that's okay. Yeah, we move on. Yeah.

Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Yeah. I know it means an expert and let's say it's, it's always on, like we've got big aspirations here and it's you kind of have, well, there was three choices. One is you bootstrap and you go slowly. Two is. You take outside money and you, you go very fast, but you, you potentially with a big reward.

Yeah. The third one is you sort of bootstrap and then you take the investment. My concern we're doing that in this space is I think there's, there's early mover advantage for us to take by moving in in spaces that the categories so didn't want to miss out on that. Yeah. There's also the other option of you're basically borrowing against your run rate, so that's another option too. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think investment really helps. And we were discussing off air before we jumped on about how in the food and drink space, what the cha, the unique challenge you guys have is low average order value, but potentially very high lifetime value. So if someone decides this is the breakfast they wanna have, they might have, I've had the same breakfast for.

Probably three quarters of my life, . So my lifetime value, One thing you kinda purchase hard to convince people to switch over, but if they're you and they like it, you've potentially got a customer for a very long time. Yeah. Yeah, so exactly. So that's, so that means that the, the mechanics are that you have to potentially lose money on that first transaction because the average order value might be similar to the cost of acquiring the customer.

So that doesn't leave you anything to cover the actual cost of goods sold and all the other costs of running the business. But then if you can make sure that you retain that customer and that they keep repeat buying, then you've got a great business model. But you've gotta have someone willing to invest in that will give you the funds.

To fund that initial stage of acquisition. And then if you're wanting to keep growing quite fast, that has to keep happening, doesn't it? So, yeah. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Awesome. So, and then, so you got the investment and you, what was the next thing you did? So you started running ads. At what point did you start?

Yeah, doing paid media, paid market. Pretty much straight away. So I would say it was team partly through this process. And it also helps with getting investment, of course. The strongly Yeah. Early stage. Yes, they're investing in the, the proposition and stuff, but to be honest, that more than that, that generally the backing the team, like Yeah.

In their mind is this the team, the founder and founders founding team? Are gonna find a way, even if it may, might not be the initial way that that's been pitched to me. Do I back them to find a way to make it win? Yeah. And I knew that was key from an investment point of view, something. And regardless of the investment point of view, best chance of success as a business.

Was there anything? It's, you know, you are only as good as your team, so I wanted to get good people on straight away. A little bit of money helped with that of course, as well. But. I went and got people who are slightly different skill sets to me, but also very relevant to the sector, So, mm-hmm. , it's people from Grenade, people from hus, people from Water Drop, you know, Europe's fastest growing nutrition brand, but not my protein where I haven't experience.

Some might be in ops as opposed to mine, which is also the brand marketing and product side of things. So might be in heavy digital marketing, so it. Making sure I had a rock solid tea. Then going to market with ads, there's not a lot of margin in cereal. You wouldn't be, you won't be surprised to know

So retail will be slightly down the line, you know, if it's all for us yeah, with the cereal. So yeah, it was all about making sure we were as well. , you know, we, we had our best chance of success, put it that way. When we did, did launch ads and then, yeah, it was great into it without testing and learning and refining.

What have been your hardest moments so far? Yeah. There's been a few things. We've had our biggest trade order, our first trade order just go missing. We've had and never got found. Never got found.

Biggest door, some thousand pounds. There's been so much there. There's something. It feels like every day, or certainly every few days, but seems like a big deal at the time. And you soon get over it and look back and can, can contextualize it and it, it's not that big a deal.

So yeah, that, that's why I enjoy it. I liken it to said to my friends a few times, like I used to play digressing a bit here, but I used to play a computer game called football manager. Really addictive, but I would, or fifa and I would always start as a team right in the bottom division. who don't have a lot of skill, that have a lot of resources.

And I love the challenge of building them up. So interesting. Now in my head, I liken it to that. It's just a hobby of, okay, I'm starting right at the bottom. What are the pieces I need to put together? And I'm gonna have to go through a lot of struggling and cobbling it together with areas, resources that might not be optimal.

Yeah. But that's interesting for me to come and take that challenge on. And I try not, I've learned not to. The challenges personally, and I'm, I'm doing better with that, so, Yeah. You know? Yeah. But it doesn't start, well, it certainly hasn't stopped yet, whatever it is, four, five months in. Yeah. You, you tell me.

Does it stop? I dunno, , I mean, you can, you become more balanced, I think, or if you, because you've got kids as well. Like, you have to be, you have to make time for your family. There's always that guilt, I guess. But I ju my battle actually is always against my ambitions cuz my ambition is so strong and so consuming that actually telling it to sit down.

And just chill out for a while and go to the beach is quite hard. So that's my challenge because I, I've, I've never actually experienced full burnout, but I think I've been close because I just don't stop sometimes. Is that similar for you? Definitely something I, I noticed in the early days. First couple of months it was like, or I could think about yeah.

In a bad way it would be like, As soon as kids were in bed, I was like, back on it again. And, and it's unsustainable and it's, it's not good. I'm mean a much better head space, but it's still, you know, work hard and think about it. But I, I think I'm much better equipped and more actually I'm more balanced throughout the day and working at a better standard, even if it might be slightly less time.

Yeah, yeah, totally. Just but I guess in the early days, Soly, you need that little bit of an extra push or it helps to have that little bit of an extra push just to get things up and running and flowing and moving quickly. Yeah. Yeah. So marketing wise, what have been your kind of main, what's been your main focus in this early stage of getting the brand off the ground?

We've talked about paid ads, but what other channels? I mean, organic social influence of pr, What have you done in those spaces and what have you, what have you found that's worked best? So, Yeah. We haven't done too much pr. We have done a bit of, well, we are doing organic social feeling our way around the platforms.

There's no substitute for, you know, with the pay stuff, but it's the same with organic. It might be a slightly different approach, but slightly different output. But the approach is the same in that you need good quality content and that's the variable that matters.

Yeah. So you know that will come but we've made good starts and good signs and, you know, we've seen enough that certainly, that some of the other businesses that some others have been involved in, there's enough there to. We've got something that people like and are interested in and yeah, that we really big with.

The PR and stuff like that. I, I've seen it. I'm not saying it doesn't work. I'm saying my experience of it with startups has not been good. I think it's more of a long term play and payback. And unless you've at the point where either you've got bucket loads of cash or you've got. Awareness, there's enough coming in. Yeah, I tend to think, yeah, there's probably sometimes it's worth doing like a bit of launch pr.

To get the logos, to get the credibility. But again, can I see that? I see that a hundred percent I, Yeah, do. And even for investment and talking to retailers, all of that can help. But then once you've got it, I mean, I'm biased cuz I'm a performance marketing person and no, I'm biased from, I'm an e-com sort of guy anyway.

Yeah, I think that track, you can track the return. Well there is, there's more impactful things that can be done. Yeah. Yeah. And what about influencer marketing? Cause that definitely is trackable and you know, we're seeing that be such an important part of the mix. Have you guys gone heavily into that yet, or you're still thinking about it or, Yeah, mainly micro you micro influences at the moment.

I'm in no rush to have expensive mistakes right now. So all in good time. We'll, we'll wrap that up. Yeah, and now we, we are doing bits with of micro and it's working. . Yeah. Awesome. Oh, I forgot to ask, are you doing the media buying like in-house with your in-house team or are you using agencies?

How have you decided to go about doing the paid media in-house for now? Because we're limiting it to small amount channels and because we got that expertise in the team, . But might not be the. going forward as we open up channels, markets, et cetera. So you we're gonna need to it, we're gonna need some help with that.

Yeah. I always say my preference is actually for brands at the very early stage to run the ads themselves so that the founder, the core team, really understand the mechanics of it, especially when it's so important and it's so it's. Every variable is gonna matter at that early stage. So, and then you might get to the point where you've, you've cracked it to an extent, but you're not getting, you know, you're not kind of able to scale it then.

That's a good point when an agency can come in and, but you can talk to the agencies having run it yourself, knowing the nuances of your account, knowing the nuances of paid media, and you're in a bit position to find the right agency that's a good fit rather than, you know. A lot of agencies will just kind of blow you away with their 10 row ass stories from three years ago.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's terribly disappointing when actually the average in the industry, as we were saying before, is like two and a half, and that's realistic, you know? So Yeah. That's cool. So you're running it in house, you're doing the creative in house. Is it the same creative person that you had at the beginning who's like working on the ads or, Yeah.

How's your creative process working for ads and, and organic social creative? Yeah, we've got that's few of us. So we've got fantastic copywriter who's, who's brilliant who looks after our organic as well.

Yeah. Then we have a couple of people who I mentioned sort of ex u that's water drop who get more involved with the page stuff. Yeah. And the technical aspect of sort of running the ads and, and tracking them and. deciding what tests we might want to run and yeah, between those heads we kind of get it done at the moment.

But it's you know you know, it's tough cause I'd love to explore more channels. I'd love to be doing more things. It's also one of the challenges of, I suppose it's start limited resources, both in terms of team and cash. , you've gotta go step by step and build it. Yeah. Well also attribution are real pain these days, so Yeah.

Yeah. One or two channels, at least we can pinpoint it to a degree. Exactly. I mean, it's actually really important. So although the message now, you know, that's being. Put out is that you need to diversify your channel mix because you know, you shouldn't be reliant on Facebook. Facebook can get disabled, which you experience, but also, you know, it's a bit of a tough channel at the moment.

So everyone's trying to do all the channels, Pinterest, TikTok, you know, other, other types of media, podcast, whatever it is. But actually the traditional model of a startup is, One channel, you know, nail it absolutely like max it out and then move on to the next channel because that ch you can truly see whether it's working.

And the attribution's really clear an attribution now because of iOS 14 and data privacy is so hard to to know whether it was actually this channel or that channel that drove things. It was always hard, but it got way harder because of iOS 14. So, Yeah, I would say there's an argument for actually keeping it kind of simple, but also it gives you that focus, doesn't it?

To concentrate on this one channel and really get it working rather than spread your brain cells too thin across different channels. Cuz you know, even Tik to and Facebook are very similar on the face of it in terms of. You know, it looks the same when you go in there, but actually the nuances of the platform platforms are very different.

How the creative works, you know, how things kind of cycle through creative. So yeah, I think you're doing the right thing to not spread your focus too thin at this point. Time. Having, having said that, we're a very visual brand. Like people keep telling me I'm not just people who are trying to sell me their services about.

We're like not a perfect brand for TikTok. But haven't quite, haven't quite ventured there yet. Yeah, I don't know it myself as well, and not, not that should be scared. So are you on the organic, are you doing it organically though? We are still experimenting you know, we, we've got plans. We'll see. We'll see how it goes. Yeah, I think, I mean, no one's gonna nail it overnight. TikTok you've gotta figure out what your. Where your audience on TikTok is hiding and what they're looking for, what kind of content they want.

A question for you, so you've kind of decided very much to kind of build in public and share your highs and lows.

I, I discovered you through LinkedIn. Can you talk to me a bit about like why you decided to do that and what the pros and cons are and how, how, how you found that work for. Yeah, sure. So the first thing to say is it absolutely does not come naturally to me at all. I am more than most certainly the sort of person who likes to keep themselves and their thoughts to themselves.

I don't, I don't have, well, I don't have an Instagram account, for example. I haven't used Facebook. So it doesn't come naturally to me, but why haven't done it for the good of the business and to help other people in a similar situation.

It's easier for me to do with words than, let's say, presenting or on camera or with video, and LinkedIn allows you to do that. So, and, and you know, for me it's not. About positioning myself as a thought leader or anything like that. It's about giving you a kind of raw and honest kind of what's an all view of, of, to how it, how it goes.

Cuz yes, it's fun, but also it's not all rosy. And and I think people can relate to that and, and enjoy a bit of that too.

Yeah, that's it from a, you know, a genuine want to, to help people. And I think also just on a personal level, good to get slightly out of my comfort zone. And again, I used to sort of really agonize over what to write for the first few and. It's just complete second nature. I don't, I don't care. Yeah. In a nice way.

Like, like it is what it is and one's really that bothered in a nice way, you know what I mean? And and then partly it's been good for business, like the amount of interest. It's a good platform for organic reach in a slightly different way to the other ones. So. And for that reason, I will continue to do it.

How much do you think it was because of your values or what do you, what do you think was the secret source in attracting them to come and work with you? I, yeah, partly values and, and what we want to create and, and on that note that we're creating something different. They're experienced people. They've probably, you know, maybe not firsthand, but certainly. Been in and around a lot of, well, they've definitely been firsthand around some successes, but also seeing maybe some failures as well.

And things that haven't worked and they understand, I suppose, the importance of brand product and having something sort of pretty unique through a lot of the noise, which is, you know, in a very competitive space. I think that's interesting. And then I also think about how. How we run the business for a lot of these people.

The people who are sort had left the corporate world and wanted a bit more freedom, let's say. Yeah. How we run business. Probably helps with that.

And that they can be involved in building something. I think that is attractive to people. It's fun. It's, you know, it may not be for everyone, but certainly can be.

Yeah. It is. Yeah, building something and, and getting in on the ground up on something that they believe in.

Love it. Cool.

And what's the best place to follow you guys? Is it so you said your LinkedIn and I'll link that in the show notes.

And I know one wants to follow the journey. I try and post daily. It's not always daily. I post pretty often on there, so, you know, by all means give us a follow and hopefully that'll be interesting and, and useful. .

Yeah. But what about your website and everything? We'll put all of that in there, but is there particular social channel you want people to follow the brand on? Yeah, I'd say so website is eatyummos.com yeah, Instagram probably the one we're most active on at the moment. So yeah, we're at @eatyummos and yeah.

Well thank you so much for your time. It was great to have you on here. Thanks very much. Thanks having me.