Uncover the Secrets of eCommerce Success from Speakeasy Co-Founders!

Welcome to Thirsty Thursdays @3PM EST! 👏

📢I talk🎙️with Michael Bowen, Co-founder and COO, and Josh Jacobs, Co-founder and CEO of the Speakeasy Company.👏🍷 🎇 🎉 ✨ 👏 🥂  😁

Watch On YouTube!
https://youtu.be/fJTmh_o8YJU

We discuss their journey in the alcohol industry and the evolution of their business model. They started with a craft cocktail subscription box and later pivoted to a platform that empowers brands to sell their products online as well as a direct-to-consumer e-commerce platform for specialty and high-end spirits.

Their key competency is to create unique experiences for consumers.

The company focuses on premium spirits but works with various brands large and small in and out of the industry. Despite the challenges and risks involved, both founders are grateful for the decision to go all-in and enjoy the journey.

Their current model empowers brands with additional consumer access to their products which in turn, provides data, a crucial component to brand owners in a new channel. They control the fulfillment process and warehousing. They also work with distributor partners in the market.

They tell us about the motivation behind starting their own business and the challenges they faced in the alcohol industry. We explore the process of building a prototype and getting feedback and how crucial that is when pivoting and evolving to find the unique need in the market.

They also highlight the importance of mentors and the support they received from Goat Rodeo Capital https://www.goatrodeocapital.com/. They emphasize the value of building a network of resources and collaborating with peers in the industry as well as building their Speakeasy Community.

Finally, they share their passions outside of work and the importance of spreading the word and educating others about their business.

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Host Jessie Ott's Profile on LinkedIn

Chapters

• 0:15 Welcome
• 1:12 Where They are Calling in From
• 3:26 How it all Began

Transcript

Jessie (00:02.336)
Hello everybody, I have Michael Bowen here, Co-founder and COO at Speakeasy Company and Josh Jacobs, Co-founder and CEO at Speakeasy Company. Welcome you two. I'm super, super excited to have you on board. And we've struggled, haven't we, the last month and a half to get the date in the calendar. Some unfortunate things I think kind of pushed us back, but here we are, finally.

Josh Jacobs (00:28.546)
Thanks for having us, Jessie.

Michael Bowen (00:28.799)
Made it. Very excited to be here.

Jessie (00:31.456)
Oh, that's awesome. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. I'm super intrigued with what y'all are doing for our industry. And, you know, I think I was thinking about as I was, you know, going back over your website again today, how many people in that I've had on the podcast that could really benefit from what you guys are doing. So I can't wait to dig in and go see where it goes. You know, it'll be really fun. So.

Josh Jacobs (00:57.558)
We appreciate the opportunity to spread the good word.

Jessie (01:00.8)
Awesome. As you could tell, I get giddy because I'm so excited to meet new people, learn people's stories and share them with people, other people. So, um, we usually start out with, uh, asking where you're from. So, or where you're calling from. So Josh, do you want to start?

Josh Jacobs (01:21.026)
Sure, we're both calling in from HQ in San Diego.

Jessie (01:25.36)
Oh, okay. Nice San Diego, sunny San Diego. You've got a sweater on. Yeah. And I can see, yeah. Oh, have you guys been getting a lot of rain?

Josh Jacobs (01:29.203)
Except today.

Michael Bowen (01:30.114)
Yeah.

Josh Jacobs (01:36.622)
Oh yeah, Southern Cup, big time.

Michael Bowen (01:37.015)
A little bit.

Jessie (01:37.628)
Yeah. Yeah, it rained all weekend.

Michael Bowen (01:40.011)
And you know, the Southern California way, like a little bit of rain means nobody can drive anymore and it's just a cluster everywhere. So, good times.

Jessie (01:49.724)
Uh, uh, that's so unfortunate. Such a beautiful state. But yeah, I feel like the infrastructure needs to be re-looked at and, you know, you don't really need, you don't really want to be in a situation where homes are falling off cliffs. That's not good.

Michael Bowen (02:05.031)
No, I was just reading about that actually, where they were showing some photos of homes that look as though they're ready to fall off the cliff, but they are in no imminent danger because they're actually bolted to the bedrock. So even if the dirt moves, the home won't move. Blooming area, I'd still be afraid. I have a fear of heights, so it still freaked me out. No, mm-mm. The windows were cool where they would like.

Jessie (02:25.889)
It, it, uh, me either. Yeah. That stark, that stark house. No way. I don't want it.

Michael Bowen (02:34.327)
turn off and on or see through it clear. That'd be cool, but where it was, no.

Jessie (02:35.88)
Yeah. That would be cool. Yeah. I would be a nervous wreck all the time. It's like, well, is it today?

Josh Jacobs (02:44.45)
But if you've had that house, you could sell it and buy a very nice one somewhere a little safer.

Michael Bowen (02:44.69)
Ha ha

Jessie (02:52.141)
I wouldn't trust the bedrock, man. I wouldn't be able to do it. I'd be like, no, you can't pay me to live in a house like that.

Michael Bowen (02:54.433)
No.

Michael Bowen (02:58.571)
Yeah. Throw earthquakes in on top of that. I mean, that shakes the bedrock, right? Like that's, that's one thing if dirt slides off, but also I feel like we're now in geology as opposed to talking about alcohol industry.

Jessie (03:05.248)
Yeah!

Jessie (03:13.728)
Booze. We went to science. Geology. Fun. So how did you all meet? Where would you like to start with your brand story?

Josh Jacobs (03:27.85)
We can roll the clock back all the way till then. Actually, we were in operation with a different concept even before Michael and I met. So it might make sense to roll the clock back to the beginning days and then Michael and I meeting and how we got to where we are today.

Jessie (03:40.947)
Yeah.

Jessie (03:46.856)
Yeah, let's do it. Let's roll. I love that.

Josh Jacobs (03:48.766)
Yeah, so back in 2015, we were racking our brains on the next big subscription box idea. So really on the heels of successes of companies like Blue Apron and Birchbox were two in particular that were particularly inspirational.

Blue Apron democratizing such an intimidating industry. And what we loved about Birchbox was this sample, the full size element. And we really thought at the time, Blue Apron was missing this e-commerce component. So we were looking for the intersection of these two big ideas. And back in 2015, craft cocktails were booming, becoming an integral facet of restaurant menus, speakeasies and cocktail bars were popping up left and right.

When we talked to friends and family, no one knew how to make anything beyond a tequila shot with salt and lime. And the ingredients are expensive and there wasn't a centralized hub to learn and to purchase all these pieces. And so we said, all right, we don't know anything about the alcohol industry. Maybe there's a good idea here. And so the initial concept was a craft cocktail subscription box where we would work with bartenders to curate.

very unique recipes, work with craft brands to source the most important ingredient in cocktail to spirits, and work with all these different craft providers from tinctures and syrups, and we were even including fruit at the beginning, which was a whole nother mess that we experienced and had to work through. But that was the initial idea that brought us into the alcohol industry.

Michael Bowen (05:21.771)
it

Jessie (05:30.008)
Wow, that's cool. So how did you two meet? Through that then.

Josh Jacobs (05:37.106)
Yeah, so we were starting to scale the business and it went from just a couple of friends and coworkers that were buying the boxes to all of a sudden random people that we had never met or had no connection to were starting to order the boxes from all over the country. And V1 of the subscription box that was delivered, we literally printed a logo and double sided sticky taped it to a brown box. And so it was not the...

most proud concept, most proud, let's say product that we'd ever created, but we're really trying to embrace this idea of a minimal viable product, just get to market. And V4 still didn't really look much better. And we said, okay, if we're really going to grow up.

Jessie (06:15.992)
You're doing it though. Yeah.

Jessie (06:24.3)
Hahaha!

Michael Bowen (06:25.738)
For the record, I wasn't involved in any of the ugly stuff. I want to make sure that is very clear.

Jessie (06:29.784)
Okay. It has now been documented.

Josh Jacobs (06:31.97)
That's exactly where I was going. And so we realized that, hey, if we're really going to scale this into a big national business, we're gonna have to mature as a business. We're gonna have to make some real investments, both digitally and physically, into the unboxing experience. And that was an area that we had somewhat intentionally avoided. We just lacked the skill sets internally. And so we started putting out feelers.

for a marketer that could really help professionalize the company. And my wife's old colleague had a relationship with Michael. And what I knew about him was that he grew up in the digital marketing world, and he also ran beer conferences. And so we ended up getting connected through my wife's old colleague. And then Michael, I can throw it over to you for your side.

Michael Bowen (07:27.635)
Yeah, no, I mean, from that standpoint, I remember we met together or we met for the first time in a coffee shop, kind of in between the two buildings we lived in. We both live in the little Italy area and had a great meeting and Josh was like, Hey, can you just put together a rebranding deck of everything? And I'm like, okay, asking for some free work. I got it. They told me a lot about what I was getting myself into. Put together this deck, this deck from a branding standpoint.

Josh was like, this is amazing. This is exactly what we're looking to do. We'll get back to you. And then this is when I was officially ghosted for a little bit, because as Josh had mentioned, a couple brands were giving a lot of direction with regards to how Speakeasy could actually better empower the brands overall in their experience. And so Josh hits me up, he's like, hey, crazy idea. What if we were to pivot and we did this and this? I was like, funny enough, if that's what you wanted to do, I know all of these platforms and everything that we can do. And

From that point on, we really just hit the ground running. Most friends and family have moved on from this point. And it was really just Josh and I and a developer out of Texas. And that kind of built everything from the ground up from that standpoint. And it's one of those things where we learned a lot working together. And I think one of the biggest things even today, Josh and I are very complimentary to one another. We both enjoy doing things that the other one does not like to do.

which has worked out really, really well for us. Yeah. So as you can imagine, when he said creating a much more professional brand and things of that nature, I was exactly who he was picturing in his mind of somebody that would take over the role. But fortunately my work is definitely a little better and more appealing to the public than necessarily me and my t-shirts all the time.

Jessie (08:53.848)
That's perfect. Yeah.

Jessie (09:19.537)
Okay. I like your t-shirt green noise records. That's it. Yeah. You can't miss it. I've got mine on too. Thursday, Thursday. Yeah. I got to get those for sale on the website. Got to get that merge. Just kidding. And I have this.

Michael Bowen (09:22.667)
That's it? Thank you. There's small record label in Portland. I know that's why I always wear it. A lot, a lot like my personality. Oh, there we go.

Michael Bowen (09:40.195)
Well, if you need somebody to ship it for you, I know some people we can recommend. Oh, is that a water bottle?

Jessie (09:45.616)
Yeah, it's got Thursday, Thursday. And these are Christmas gifts from my wife. Yeah. She's one of her old coworkers has a, has his own little ET account. And so we now get branded t-shirts for holidays and stuff. It's fun. No, I love it. Yeah. If people send me merch, which it's only been like one company outside of just some stickers. I wear it on the podcast. It's fun. Love it.

Josh Jacobs (09:50.37)
Very cool.

Michael Bowen (09:51.214)
Oh nice!

Josh Jacobs (10:02.85)
Can't ever have enough merch.

Michael Bowen (10:05.704)
No.

Michael Bowen (10:13.877)
Noted.

Jessie (10:15.188)
Yeah. Awesome. Okay. So what, what kind of has evolved since then?

Josh Jacobs (10:23.084)
Well...

Leading up to Michael and I meeting, we went through a series of iterations and then since then as well. So V1 was the subscription box. But as I mentioned, we were incorporating craft spirits into the subscription box. It was really a mission of ours to not just introduce subscribers to new cocktail recipes, but the most important ingredient. And so we really wanted to focus on the spirits themselves. And it was the craft distilleries that were educating us.

on the confines of the three-tier system. We neither of us outside of Michael's beer conferences really had any experience in the alcohol industry or understood.

all of the nuances of the three tier system, but essentially the brands were conveying to us that our subscription box was the best marketing vehicle that existed in the industry where they could curate an experience specifically designed for their target demographic, enter consumers' home, and it controlled experience to get liquid to lips. And that was really shocking to us when these distilleries, they wanted to give us product, they wanted to partner with us.

and they wanted to help us grow and scale. And that was the first lesson learned. We really challenged ourselves from that point on to think of creative ways to fuel the brand's growth, the suppliers' growth, because we knew at the end of the day, if suppliers were happy and if suppliers were seeing value, then our subscription box had longevity.

Josh Jacobs (11:58.374)
And so that was V1. We were just trying to highlight the craft spirit companies and we said, okay, let's go back to the initial inspiration with Birchbox, the sample to full size. And we were including the 50 ml airplane size bottles in the subscription boxes. Why not provide another platform for consumers to purchase 750s, the full size bottles. Hey, you enjoy ABC distilleries product in your subscription box, come back and order the full size bottle.

on the website. So that was V2. We started selling the full-size bottles and we saw some success there, but after, let's say, six months of being live, only having six SKUs in the store wasn't a very exciting, wasn't a very compelling marketplace. So we said, okay, let's not limit ourselves by past partners. Let's build out and flesh out a craft spirit store.

Michael Bowen (12:36.195)
Thank you.

Josh Jacobs (12:51.594)
We ended up getting 50, 60 SKUs in there, highlighting partners in San Diego and ones we were planning on incorporating into our box in the future, and all of a sudden had a mini online liquor store, had a mini online marketplace. We were really excited and we went back to the brands and we said, all right, what do you think we can do together? What synergies exist here? And we had the idea and proposed to the brands, to the suppliers,

what if we could engage in quasi e-commerce for the first time really in the alcohol industry or what we thought was and the brands could drive traffic to our marketplace. We thought it was absolutely genius and the brands completely crushed our dreams and said you're no better than Drizzly, RIP Drizzly, you're no better than any of these online marketplaces. We have no control over the consumer journey and you're highlighting all these other competitive products on our own

Jessie (13:36.722)
Yes.

Josh Jacobs (13:47.672)
would we invest in driving traffic to your marketplace or any marketplace for that matter, knowing that we could be generating sales for a competitor. And even if we generate sales with one of our own products, we have no visibility into that data or ownership over the customer. And that was a really big learning moment for us around how we could continue to shape the evolution of the platform.

Jessie (14:06.23)
Yeah.

Josh Jacobs (14:15.146)
So what we did from there, we said, all right, how can we improve upon the marketplace model? That's really the standard that's existed at this point for a number of years. So we came up with what we thought was a clever idea building these landing pages on our website.

Michael Bowen (14:29.098)
Hehehehe.

Josh Jacobs (14:32.774)
So we hid the navigation, we provided this blank canvas for brands to tell their stories. So they felt as though they had a brand home on the Speakeasy website, but really masks that was on the Speakeasy website. So we tried to skin it so it looked and felt like their website. And as I mentioned, there were no other links or references to other brands. And brands said, you know what, this is a real genuine improvement based on the status quo. We're interested in this.

This was, I wouldn't call it the pivot that Michael has already highlighted and foreshadowed, but this was a major iteration from being a direct to consumer B2C model to all of a sudden we're really starting to offer a B2B product, truly B2B2C, but this was a major step in a different direction for the business. And truth be told, Jessie.

we were out there pitching these dedicated landing pages on our website and I was talking with a brand and they said, hey Josh, rather than a page on your website, and this was such a revelation and this was a eureka moment which seems so obvious in hindsight, but he said, hey Josh, rather than a page on your website, what if we just rebuilt the experience on our website?

But at that time, we were so focused on, Speakeasy at that point was actually a different company name. We were so focused on our own brand that it never dawned on us that really what we were starting to build and really the exciting opportunity that we stumbled upon was empowering suppliers. And so this is back in summer 2017 and this is right around when we met Michael where.

The subscription boxes were starting to take off, but we had this whole new idea to experiment with. And we got a pilot off the ground and within a few months, it was generating similar revenue as our subscription boxes that we had been working on for two years. Yes. Yeah, we got really lucky that some of our first partners.

Michael Bowen (16:24.939)
Hehehe

Jessie (16:25.184)
Jeez, a couple of months? That's impressive. Whoa.

Josh Jacobs (16:33.974)
We're big believers in e-commerce, had digital backgrounds, and were willing to make those investments. They are 99% of brands, if we had worked with them first, we wouldn't have tasted that success, and we probably wouldn't have had the data or the motivation to continue in that direction.

Michael Bowen (16:50.697)
Okay.

Jessie (16:54.62)
Interesting. So keep talking. This is so fun. Yeah. Keep going.

Josh Jacobs (16:57.994)
Yeah, of course. Yeah, and so by the end of 2017, this is when Michael and I had been connected and we were really chatting about it. And what was going through our minds was, okay, we have this subscription box idea and me in particular has so much love and passion and blood, sweat and tears poured into it. But at the same time, this is a direct to consumer.

Michael Bowen (16:58.296)
you

Josh Jacobs (17:25.058)
very capital resource intensive subscription box model, where these subscription boxes, it's all about the lifetime value of the consumer. So you are acquiring customers at a loss and you're banking on them holding on to the subscription for let's say six, 12 months where you eventually turn profitable. And so it's very difficult and we were bootstrapped at the time to continue scaling and feeding that machine. And we have this brand new idea

with one brand that was live, but we had gone to everyone we had met in the industry and we were talking to them about this new idea, and that was integrating white label shopping carts into suppliers' websites, so they could own the digital journey, and not just the front-end digital journey, but all of the backend data as well, and truly be transformed into an e-commerce company while remaining three-tier compliant. So they have e-commerce on their website,

to the tools, capabilities, and analytics at their disposal. But as I mentioned, it's three tier compliance, so they're not actually selling the product. A liquor store is still selling the product. So it's still that drizzly online liquor store, online marketplace model.

but it's significantly improving the front end experience and empowering the brands to actually own the data and the customer relationship so it's sustainable. If you're constantly just driving traffic to another marketplace and you don't own the data, you don't own that email address to continue to monetize the lifetime value of that consumer and continue to build up your digital ecosystem.

And this idea was so intoxicating, but it was very difficult at the time, just given all of the sunk costs in the subscription box to make that decision. But Michael and I, we just, we kept chatting about it and chatting about it. And at the time, we made what seemed like the difficult decision to sunset the subscription boxes and go all in with this new idea with the integrated white label shopping carts.

Jessie (19:28.512)
Wow, that's a big decision. Is that when, yeah, is that when you changed the name then also?

Josh Jacobs (19:31.123)
It was a big decision.

Josh Jacobs (19:37.854)
I think we had changed the name just before. So as Michael was coming on board, Michael pointed out, hey, this name is very odd. The spelling included numbers and it was a number, but part of it was spelled out, part of it was a number. And then the other thing that Michael pointed out was that Disney, and Michael, do you wanna jump in here?

Michael Bowen (20:01.155)
I mean, Disney owns the Club 33 and 33 Club and things of that nature. And so it opened us up for a lot of scrutiny and comparison potentially. And so it was definitely a easy decision to sell of, let's change the name and, you know, Speakeasy Co happened to be available and it worked out really well for us, especially from a branding standpoint, right? Everything that we're doing to try and help brands connect with, you know, their...

brand advocates and their customers and things of that nature all really do speak to like that speakeasy concept of getting them in Early and giving them sneak peeks at LTOs and things of that nature So I think we're pretty fortuitous to stick with that branding in the name overall

Josh Jacobs (20:46.026)
Yeah, and so original name, Jessie, was 33 Club. And not being a SoCal native myself, I'd never been to Disneyland and known that they had Club 33. And I hadn't noticed that since the spelling of our name was so odd. And so we knew we were never gonna win the SEO game. And we knew that there might be even a lawsuit waiting for us if we ever got big enough. It would be a good problem to have. And funny little sidebar story. So we were researching different names

Michael Bowen (20:47.971)
Thanks for watching!

Josh Jacobs (21:15.98)
sites, we were trying to find something that would really speak to our branding and the company that we were trying to build. And we really loved this idea of Speakeasy. And then speakeasy.com was taken, but we found Speakeasy Co. And we noticed that the information...

wasn't private, it was public, they hadn't paid to master information. And so the email address was searchable. And so I reached out to the owner of speakeasyco.com and I said, hey, I noticed that you don't have a website built, is this something that you'd be willing to part with? And they said, get out of town, I live in San Diego just like you, and I've been trying to build a craft cocktail subscription box idea.

And this was before we had pivoted, at least externally. And she said, the woman that I connected with, she was like, you know what? There's no way we're gonna have two successful subscription bot companies. How about I sell it to you? And I said, we'll give you three months free of our subscription in exchange for the domain.

Jessie (22:04.189)
hahahaha

Josh Jacobs (22:23.854)
And she accepted. And that was how we acquired Speakeasy Co. And thereafter, we became Speakeasy. And at this point, we still had the subscription boxes. And as we started deciding to transition and ultimately pivot into the new model, Speakeasy still was a great name that we absolutely love.

Jessie (22:25.292)
Wow.

Jessie (22:43.828)
Yeah, I mean, it matches your concept too with the craft cocktails and craft spirits and whatnot. So yeah, totally fits, fits exactly what you're doing. Yeah. Good call. I didn't know that about club 33, but that is pretty funny. I mean, I'm surprised. Yeah. I mean, imagine what is the, what is it? Is, is it a kid's club or?

Michael Bowen (22:47.139)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Bowen (23:07.043)
It was originally the only place you could drink inside of Disneyland. And so it's off of New Orleans Square. There's a small little door. It's membership only. I want to say to get on the waiting list, it's $10,000 and the waiting list is about five years long. Yeah. And so, but what you can do is you can find some people that are willing to give up a day or something for X amount, but I've yet to go. You know, if we can.

Jessie (23:13.592)
Shaking

Jessie (23:22.11)
Oh, good grief.

Michael Bowen (23:34.659)
do really well with speakeas, he made me one day. Well, oddly enough, the main reason why I knew, my fiance and I are big Disney people, and so we are Disney adults, and so we do go regularly taking her next Wednesday for her birthday and things of that nature. And so, it's a proud badge we love to wear.

Jessie (23:34.708)
Yeah, I don't think that'd be on my bucket list.

Jessie (23:51.034)
Have fun!

Jessie (23:55.788)
Do you trade pins?

Michael Bowen (23:58.595)
We did trade pins. We have so many pins that we had to stop the pin addiction. And every once in a while, we'll look around and there's, I don't know how many people know, there's a huge counterfeit market for the pins as well. So there's certain weights and stamps you need to look for. And I was like, this is too much. Let me just deal with alcohol.

Jessie (24:11.41)
Oh

Jessie (24:16.048)
Oh, I did. That's funny. So we had our cousins in town from Japan this last a couple of weeks ago, and we went to Disney for four days to do the different theme parks. And her friend, she's a Disney nerd and her friends are. And when she lived in Tokyo, they just not go to they take time off work and just go. So fun. They have Disney, Disney Sea there or something. But they've.

Michael Bowen (24:42.124)
Yep, yep.

Jessie (24:43.088)
Her and her husband have traveled all over the world going to different Disney parks. And my point is, is that she had all these pins. And so the, her friends had mapped out where all the posts are with the pins. Cause they're the Mickey ears with the felt thing in the back and you can only trade two. Oh, it's really cool. It made it fun.

Michael Bowen (24:55.913)
Yeah.

Michael Bowen (25:00.159)
Yep, yep. So pick and choose. Yeah, no, what's actually interesting, my fiance and I just came back from Japan and along with snowboarding, going to Disney was very high on our to-do list. It's always been a lot of time at Disney Sea. So I can definitely relate to your cousin from that standpoint.

Jessie (25:19.584)
That's awesome. Yeah. The, we, we went last summer and the girls went to Disney Sea and then the boys and my wife and I, we bar hopped and ate our way through different neighborhoods. It was so fun.

Michael Bowen (25:28.599)
Hahaha.

Josh Jacobs (25:32.11)
That's much more what I'm at.

Michael Bowen (25:32.691)
Oh, that definitely happened as well. Yeah, that definitely happened as well. We were there for, I want to say close to 12 days, so we had plenty of bar hopping, eating, drinking, and other fun activities. So for anybody, I strongly recommend going to Japan. It is an amazing country.

Jessie (25:40.069)
Oh, nice. Yeah.

Jessie (25:46.876)
Oh, Japan's great. Yeah. But you know, if you use Google, you're going to get all the gringo cocktail bars, which is kind of, eh, okay.

Michael Bowen (25:54.287)
Yeah, 100%. Did you guys make it to Golden Guy?

Oh, so a very fun bar area in Shinjuku. If you decide to go back, we should exchange notes, for sure.

Jessie (26:06.268)
Okay, we'll do. Yeah, we were only in Tokyo for like three or four days. And then they are, our cousins live, she was living in Tokyo at the time for her work, but then she's since moved back. But we, we ended up spending like 10 days in Osaka and then did day trips from there. So it's great.

Michael Bowen (26:21.075)
Oh, I heard it's beautiful in Osaka.

Josh Jacobs (26:26.698)
I'm so jealous of both of you. My wife and I were supposed to go in 2020, and of course, everyone's travel plans got ruined that year.

Jessie (26:36.412)
I'm still scarred from that too. We were supposed to go to the Amalfi Coast.

Josh Jacobs (26:40.58)
Oof.

Michael Bowen (26:41.392)
Oh.

Jessie (26:41.904)
Yeah. So I feel your pain, but there's no better time to go because the yen and the American dollar is crazy. I mean, we spent half of what we budgeted.

Josh Jacobs (26:46.352)
Yeah.

Michael Bowen (26:52.087)
Perfect.

Josh Jacobs (26:55.466)
Wow, Michael, same for you. I imagine that you just got twice as much fun.

Jessie (26:56.898)
Yeah.

Michael Bowen (26:59.295)
Yeah, 100%. Like the most expensive part was the flight. From there, everything was awesome.

Jessie (27:08.796)
Yeah, that's true. We used miles and points at Marriott, so it didn't cost us anything. So it was crazy. But yeah, I can't wait to go back. But yeah, Josh, you and your wife should definitely plan a trip. I mean, it's, it's just so amazing. The train systems are amazing. It's great.

Josh Jacobs (27:27.742)
Michael and I have been saying we need to find a brand partner in Japan, so we have a quote unquote business excuse to go to Japan.

Jessie (27:37.768)
Maybe the problem is, is that, um, it has to stay refrigerated. Is that a problem?

Josh Jacobs (27:45.322)
You broke up a little bit. What was that about needing to be refrigerated?

Jessie (27:48.644)
Oh, I have a sake. Well, you probably want to do spirits though. We haven't gotten into that, but there's a really cool, we went to the oldest sake house in, in Japan. It started in like 11th, 1140s. They're samurai warriors and they realized the rice crop was coming in. And they're like, yeah, I don't think the samurai warrior thing's going to last forever. So we need commerce. And they started, started.

Josh Jacobs (27:53.235)
Oh, it's not good.

Jessie (28:16.832)
Naked sake. It's unpasteurized, so that's why it has to be refrigerated.

Josh Jacobs (28:22.686)
What a cool backstory. Yeah, refrigeration is something we shy away from. I mentioned in the beginning, Jessie, how in our early days, so we launched our first boxes November 2015. So it was winter, so including fruits and vegetables wasn't an issue, but that first summer, we very quickly realized how quickly produce spoils in...

Jessie (28:28.076)
Yeah.

Jessie (28:42.013)
I'm sorry.

Josh Jacobs (28:47.062)
Texas in the middle of summer. And so we have shied away from fruits and vegetables and now even refrigerated spirits or temperature controlled wines. That's not an area that we wanna dive into right now. We got our hands full with everything else.

Jessie (28:49.164)
Yeah.

Jessie (28:56.501)
Yeah.

Jessie (29:03.528)
Yeah. Get your hands full. So when it comes to brands, what, what brands do you all represent? What, what, what types? Like wine, spirits, RTDs, everything?

Josh Jacobs (29:11.079)
We, it's...

Yeah, definitely spans the gamut. We work with predominantly Spirit players, but we do have a little bit of wine, we have some RTDs, we've worked with some Sake players in the past, but our focus and really our model is purpose-built for premium Spirits.

Jessie (29:35.988)
Okay. That makes sense. I mean, there's plenty of plenty out there. There's so many brands. I mean, and what a way to, um, you know, if you only have distribution say in one state or two states, you know, you now are giving them a platform to sell it anywhere, you know, which is huge. And

Josh Jacobs (29:53.154)
Absolutely. The mindset historically has really been about building brands at the bar.

and also trying to build your brand with hiring an army of ambassadors for liquid tulips programs at different liquor stores. It's exceptionally difficult to compete unless you've raised a boatload of money and you can deploy it at that scale. But for new brands, e-commerce really democratizes the space. You don't need a massive company, you don't need a massive team, you don't need a massive budget

to start running some ads. And that's what's so exciting. And initially, we were primarily partnering with small craft players because they saw that opportunity. And we believe in the future, a lot of brands, not all brands are built for e-commerce, but there will be and continue to be digital first brands and that a lot of companies will build online exclusively or at least online first.

Jessie (31:00.96)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, that makes total sense because it's way easier than, you know, trying to get distribution through the traditional three-tiered model. I mean, there's just so many brands out there right now that it's difficult to get that distribution and whatnot. So.

Josh Jacobs (31:18.69)
Difficult to get distribution and then even once you have distribution, the distributors represent so many companies, we're not blaming them. It's just impossible if you're a human distributor rep representing 30,000 skews to have the time to pitch all of them to different bar and restaurant owners and managers. And so the system...

Jessie (31:27.116)
Mm-hmm.

Josh Jacobs (31:43.586)
is really broken and we need to create other opportunities for a lot of craft brands and even the distributors agree they want the craft brands to be able to demonstrate some success and proof of concept before taking them on and making those investments. So there's really a happy dynamic between all of the tiers.

Jessie (31:56.077)
Yes.

Jessie (32:06.86)
So how long have you had this concept going then? How many, since when did you kind of pivot?

Josh Jacobs (32:14.738)
Yeah, so we pivoted at the end of 2017 and we really launched our first brand with this new model and the platform that Michael built at the beginning of 2018. So it's been, man, six years now.

long time in the making, but as I mentioned, we were bootstrapped initially. So Michael and I had full-time gigs. We were moonlighting working nights and weekends on speakeasy. And so 2018 and the first half of 2019 were pretty slow. And then Michael was the first to say, you know, what if I start.

Jessie (32:32.262)
Yeah.

Josh Jacobs (32:55.626)
trying to pull a little bit of a salary. There's definitely more of a side story there with what happened with that half a salary that he was supposed to be making, but that afforded him the confidence.

to go and allocate more of his time to Speakeasy. And at that time, I was in a sales position where I knew I was crushing my numbers. And so as long as I could continue hitting my targets, that I could start carving out some time during the day to hit the pound the pavement, call up suppliers around the country, and just push nonstop because we had so much belief in the idea.

but it hadn't just taken off. And Jessie, we were almost sitting back and waiting, or at least me personally, I kept reading about all these companies that had these lucky breaks and all of a sudden started taking off. And I kept asking myself, when are we gonna get our lucky break? And then I really realized that it's about creating your own luck.

by opening up enough doors until you finally find it. And it's a numbers game. And when I had that realization, it really changed my perspective. And at that point, it was spent every moment I possibly could calling up brands. And Michael was doing everything he could possibly do to build up the technology and fulfillment back ends. And by summer 2019, we really started.

Jessie (34:07.224)
It's a numbers game.

Josh Jacobs (34:27.762)
seeing some momentum and started taking off. We started closing a lot more brands. And that's when we started to feel the excitement. And two things happened. One, we ended up signing a deal for Tesla Tequila, which included some up from payment that afforded us the opportunity to start hiring our full time in first full time employees and start paying ourselves and jumping full time.

Jessie (34:55.792)
Amazing concept, isn't it? So great. Yes. That's awesome.

Josh Jacobs (34:57.718)
Yeah, amazing! Actually getting paid?

And funny story, I ended up going full time the last week of February, 2020, which three weeks later, of course we enter a global pandemic and I just couldn't believe it after working on speakeasy for five years, I finally go full time and I was like, you know what? That's it. The company's going to go under, but

Jessie (35:12.344)
Mm.

Josh Jacobs (35:26.594)
in hindsight, like so many other digital and e-commerce companies, it really propelled our business as up to 80% of business for these craft spirit companies evaporated overnight, who are disproportionately reliant upon bars and restaurants, where a lot of the major brands can survive just off retail sales. And there we were screaming from the rooftops about this new channel, this new opportunity, and one that could be successful during a pandemic.

And overnight, we started taking off.

Jessie (36:00.116)
Yeah, that's, you're, you know, thank goodness you were in that spot to be able to, you know, propel your business and then help those brands. I'm sure that was a really scary feeling to go, oh my gosh, I just quit this job. I just quit this job. And if this doesn't go, I'm in so much trouble because that's a, that's a big weight, you know, that's a big, big jump to go, you know, all in.

Josh Jacobs (36:30.066)
It's a big decision. Yeah. It's a, it's a huge risk and one that we thought we were both ready for. And I'm sure in those early days, didn't actually know what we were signing up for. But I know I can speak for, for myself. It's one of the best decisions I've ever made. And I hope you feel similarly, Michael.

Jessie (36:30.923)
So, yeah.

Michael Bowen (36:49.251)
That's up there. It's definitely up there. And what I would probably share, Jessie, is, you know, Josh and I had a couple of different point of views as we were kind of going through all of this. Well, you know, one of my main goals overall was the building and the development. And, you know, my head, I'm just heads down, getting stuff connected, getting systems, talking to one another and things of that nature, where Josh was really on the front lines of how do we find brands? How do I get in front of brands? And so for me, right, when you think of those two different day to days, Josh is like, who am I going to talk to next? I'm like,

What piece of code am I about to break? I'm not gonna know how to fix here in a little bit. And so I think at least on my end, I was so busy getting stuff off the ground that I didn't really have a second to breathe and think through, oh no, like we might be really in for a tough one with everything that's starting to go on around the world and you know, there just came a moment I looked up and we had 20 employees all of a sudden. And then 20 became 40. And it was...

really awesome to just see everything grow and push the way it did. And to Josh's point earlier, hard work will create your own luck. Sometimes it's dumb luck and you just have to be at the right place at the right time, but you put yourself there, right? You put yourself there because you've executed and you came up with a game plan and you both decided, you know what? Fuck it. We don't need to get paid for a little while. Let's find a way to do it. What's funny is Josh had mentioned, oh, Michael started taking a salary. I actually didn't get to take a salary.

It was like deferred salary. It's like, hey, we promise that you can get paid. We'll track this number in an Excel sheet and we'll see how it goes. And so I was just like, you know what? Um, this, this was my time to, to take our, you know, to take my shot and Josh take his shot and really hit the ground with this thing. Uh, I will agree with you, Josh. I think this is one of the better decisions. And you know, I mentioned it earlier with Josh and I being yin and yang to one another, obviously like clean shaven.

Jessie (38:20.736)
Hehe

Michael Bowen (38:48.259)
crazy beard, covered in tattoos, no tattoos. You know, Josh is very much, you know, if you treat us like a restaurant, he's front of the house, I'm back to the house. But we do not have more fun with anyone else when we're traveling, except for maybe our significant others. And I'm sure there's still times, aside from maybe cuddling, that we kind of prefer hanging out and going on these trips together. And so I do want to share that. We have a lot of fun doing this, and I think a majority of our team also has fun with us as well. So.

Josh Jacobs (39:08.97)
Yeah.

Jessie (39:10.463)
I love that word.

Michael Bowen (39:18.015)
Um, everything you're kind of hearing and seeing today kind of reverberates throughout the whole business we've built from, you know, people that work with us, the community surrounding us, even the brand partners we work with. So just kind of wanting to throw a few things on there. I'm also realizing how good Josh is at telling our story. Cause I don't, I don't have to say shit. I'm just gonna, I'm eye candy over here. I'm just hanging out, moving my legs. Cause they're falling asleep. So.

Jessie (39:40.391)
I can't eat. Your butt's asleep.

Josh Jacobs (39:44.822)
The best eye candy though, in your defense.

Michael Bowen (39:47.651)
Thank you.

Jessie (39:50.164)
Ditto. That's awesome. Yeah. That's so funny. So thinking about, you know, building a prototype and you get your first customer, like do you feel that when there's analytics and there's, you know, a little bit more than a prototype, uh, that really kind of help propel your selling story for these brands?

Michael Bowen (40:09.215)
I think so. Josh definitely jumped in. There's only one little thing I want to share. And this was probably, I wouldn't say one of the bigger arguments, but probably one of the bigger disagreements Josh and I had. And that was, when do we actually go live with this thing? And you know, Josh is very much a perfectionist and wants to ensure that we put the best product and the right solution in front of people. And I eventually had to kick them in the shins. And I was like, we need feedback, man. Like we need to understand. Are we?

going in the right direction. Do we keep building to the right, or do we need to change gears and go down the middle, or do we need to take the left at the front? And I will say that if there's any learnings for anybody else looking to build a business, don't let the analysis create your paralysis. And that was one of the biggest things that was gonna be a worry for me was, are we eventually ever gonna get anything out into the public? And I think that there are other people in this space that maybe took too long to get feedback and built a product in the wrong direction.

you know, if I'm going to be candid and we were able to avoid that because we were getting feedback from they want now sometimes feedback sucks because it is a kick in your shins. You're like, Oh man, I just built this whole thing and they say it sucks. Copy and paste, delete or select all and delete. But, um, those, those are just kind of a couple of the quick things overall when you get into the, the data things of that nature. And so Josh, I'll definitely throw it over to you as well.

Josh Jacobs (41:33.79)
Yeah, and then from the brand's perspective as well, the data's absolute gold. The data can be leveraged to guide the evolution of your liquid, your packaging, your marketing strategies, your distribution strategies. All of a sudden, it really flips the dynamic of relationships with wholesalers, where historically brands have had to go on their hands and knees and beg wholesale partners to pick them up,

Jessie (41:39.53)
Mm-hmm.

Josh Jacobs (42:03.704)
of concept in other states or if they're a new brand, they have zero proof of concept whatsoever.

all of a sudden with e-commerce data and with what we're seeing with brands starting to prioritize e-commerce budget first to build their brands, then they can go to wholesale partners and say, you know what? I'm already selling in your state. Consumers love the product. Here are the product reviews. Here are the emails that we're receiving. Here are the reorder rates that we're seeing. And all of a sudden now wholesalers might start fighting over the brands as opposed

Michael Bowen (42:38.531)
Mm-hmm.

Josh Jacobs (42:38.956)
brands begging to be picked up. And this is a much healthier ecosystem. As we mentioned before, we're distributors. They are in a very difficult position.

Jessie (42:44.28)
Mm-hmm.

Josh Jacobs (42:49.814)
where there are thousands and thousands of brands vying for their attention, and they have to take on that risk right now to purchase product when they have no sense of how a brand's gonna perform or how they're gonna perform in that specific market. And all of a sudden with e-commerce, it can provide some of that data. And that can be hugely valuable for brands to determine as we were.

Jessie (42:54.028)
Mm-hmm.

Josh Jacobs (43:12.906)
Hey, are we ready to go to market at scale? And you really need to start small and get as much feedback as possible, and then let that shape.

the evolution and the continued development of your product. And then when you're ready, go to wholesalers and then you have all the data right there. So the data is absolute gold. And when we talk to brand partners, yes, a big part of this is getting to liquid to lips. And another part of this is driving sustainable revenue and driving profitability, but another part of it is the data. And a lot of brands are saying, you know what?

If we can even just break even or even if we are operating at a loss, the data is so valuable that this is a worthwhile venture for us.

Jessie (43:59.836)
Yeah, that makes sense. Trying to get, like you were talking about earlier, the customer journey. You know, you purchase it once, you know, now you're in their system, you know, which is, which is gold. I mean, pretty much everywhere you go when you look at sales, it's all about your current list of people, right? Whoever's in your network is sort of.

the most important people that are going to continue to purchase your product.

Michael Bowen (44:27.06)
Mm-hmm. And.

Speaking of people, Jessie, I think there's an important aspect to this as well is that this ecosystem that Josh is kind of hitting on isn't actually just digital only. You can incorporate offline activities, brick and mortar implementations, and everyone's kind of starting to play with digital advertising right now. But where a lot of brands, or the biggest opportunity, I think for brands right now is really tying in digital to the bigger marketing strategy and ecosystem of, hey,

We're trying to do brick and mortar. Where do we open up next? Oh, well, let's actually look to see where people are coming from, from a digital footprint standpoint. Hey, you know what? We have a ton of festivals. Okay, great. How do we engage consumers at the festival to tell them who we are and to incorporate some type of brand experience at the festival and even go as far as just brick and mortar purchasing, right? I'm going to focus on, uh, let's just say.

Georgia, okay, great. We have a bunch of markets, a bunch of stores ready to go. Great. Let's give a $2 rebate or something so we can capture to see which liquor stores are most impactful, which ones are moving product, and can we get insight into the people that are there because we know as a digital or as a marketing machine for a brand, once we can get somebody's information and understand who they are, one, we can reward them for being brand advocates, but two, we can then try and go find somebody else that's similar that will also enjoy the product. And so...

Everything that Josh is sharing is bigger than just digital, right? It's a much bigger strategic and ecosystem conversation that I think a lot of people are starting to realize, but aren't really completely committed at this stage. That's something we push on a regular basis.

Josh Jacobs (46:13.138)
And one of the biggest misconceptions, Jessie, that we constantly go up against is that alcohol suppliers, alcohol brands are product companies.

They believe so many of them that they have the best juice in the world and they might. But at the end of the day, it's not about the best juice. That great juice is table stakes. And at the end of the day, alcohol brands are marketing companies first and foremost. And the brands that are succeeding within Bev Alc and across verticals for that matter

are marketing companies first and foremost. And that's a really different mindset and one that's exceptionally challenging to break through when someone that really believes that all they have to do is produce incredible juice, sit back, and they expect that they'll take off. But once we break through that and start having larger conversations and say, you know what, your bottle and label on a shelf is not enough real estate to share your brand story. It's not enough.

real estate for you to differentiate from the hundreds or thousands of other products in that liquor store and on those shelves. You need to be thinking about another channel, another platform, another medium to engage with consumers, to share your story and ultimately convert them into a buying consumer. And that we believe and so many other entrepreneurs and so many other companies believe happens online first.

If you think about it and step outside of Bevelq...

Josh Jacobs (47:46.59)
Where do startups tend to launch their businesses? Not usually national brick and mortar, absolutely not. They start as lean and small as possible with an online shop and they learn and test the market and then think through a brick and mortar strategy thereafter after scaling their e-commerce business significantly and that's what we're trying to bring to the alcohol industry and that's the opportunity that we're trying to bring to all these alcohol suppliers.

Jessie (48:14.872)
Can you take us on a journey of what that is like for a supplier? Like from kind of start to finish and you know, how does it all work? Like how does the fulfillment work and all that?

Josh Jacobs (48:30.126)
Absolutely. So we integrate a white label shopping cart into the brand's website. And the most common design for this is there might be Whis And we'll create a subdomain, a micro website on shop And WhistlePig is an actual partner of ours. And what we've had historically is this subdomain. It's a separate

mini shopping cart that we build on our platform with our technology, but it's skinned to look just like a mirror of Whistlepig's main website. So unless you're looking at the domain, you're really none the wiser as a consumer. It's a very seamless, native experience. And even if you do look at the domain, it's not some random new company, it's not speakeasy that pops up. It just goes from Whistlepig whiskey to shop

And so as a consumer, they really believe that they're continuing to shop with that brand, which is the intimate connection that we're trying to create.

But on the back end, it is ultimately a sale occurring with a retailer who's purchased that product from the supplier's wholesaler, who's purchased the product from the supplier. So there's no way to circumvent the tiers. When we talk about e-commerce and DTC, yeah, there are a handful of states where the manufacturers, the suppliers, can sell directly to consumer, either in person or online. But it's very limited right now.

Michael Bowen (49:40.736)
Mm-hmm.

Josh Jacobs (50:00.702)
And so what we're opening up is a much more mass market national e-commerce approach and one that simultaneously supports the second and third tier as well.

Jessie (50:12.536)
So if I were to purchase a bottle here in Orlando from like a bourbon out of, you know, wherever, it would actually ship to me from the retail store that's close to my house.

Josh Jacobs (50:30.534)
It would, the financials would flow through a retailer. And then more specifically, the physical movement of the bottle. This is where we get into the second, I guess, if the subscription box was V1 of the company and V2 was this model of white label shopping carts, we initially tried to partner with local liquor stores. That's what we saw.

Drizzly do and we've seen every other marketplace do, but we were scratching our heads saying, why is everyone doing it this way? And is there another way to approach it? And the challenge, if you're working with thousands of liquor stores for fulfillment, it's really challenging to partner with craft players that might not have distribution in all of those liquor stores. And that was our initial focus and continues to be a focus for us today is,

emerging brands and how do we continue working with craft brands that don't have that distribution? And what we realized is that Drizzly and Instacart and GoPuff, they're leveraging a fragmented network of retailers. They're simply a technology layer farming out an order to the closest local liquor store to handle the delivery. And there's a time and a place where you need a bottle in less than an hour and you typically want a widely available product and a case of beer.

and that's perfect for a marketplace execution. However, these liquor stores, they lack the warehousing capacity, the trained personnel and the infrastructure to really do anything other than take a bottle off a shelf, put it in a brown paper bag and drive it to the consumer. And what we were trying to build was really unique experiences. And how we boil this down is these other platforms, on-demand delivery platforms are purpose-built on bringing the corner liquor store to you, the widely available products to you.

where we have been focused on what we call creating unique experiences. And that can be the bottle itself, some premium craft, hard to find, rare bottle, or something else that we were really challenging ourselves with. How do we go beyond the bottle? Custom packaging, merchandise, we've done ugly Christmas sweaters with Bacardi, we have maple syrup from Whistlepig's farm in Vermont, we have signed guitars from Nick Jonas's brand under the Stoli umbrella.

Josh Jacobs (52:49.682)
really the sky's the limit as long as it's shelf stable. Again, no produce, we very much try to avoid that. But if we can create these unique experiences that are not available in the corner liquor store, that's the reason why the consumer's gonna go online. If you just want that everyday available product, you're gonna pick it up on your grocery run, or you're gonna pick it up on your weekly run to the liquor store, but what is a reason that's gonna...

Michael Bowen (52:54.038)
you can smoke.

Jessie (52:55.032)
Hehehehe

Josh Jacobs (53:15.338)
push the consumer outside of that standard behavior. And that's, in our opinion, accessing something that's unique. Again, the bottle or this whole experience. And to do that...

we needed to build a completely new paradigm from scratch that didn't exist in the industry. So rather than maximizing the size of our liquor store network, we're actually trying to minimize the number of shipping points to maximize the flexibility of what we can support instead. And that's what's enabled us to handle projects with huge, huge scale, projects like Tesla Tequila, and then also projects with a lot of complexity. Like with Whistlepig,

the trendy sunglass company called Pit Viper. And so we're literally shipping alcohol with sunglasses. I don't think anyone has ever done that before. But so fun, and that's what gets consumers excited. And that's why a consumer is going to go to Whistlepig. Hey, Whistlepig's got some pretty great distribution. You can find a lot of their products fairly widely available, but you can't find this specifically aged product.

Jessie (54:05.73)
That's so fun!

Josh Jacobs (54:23.702)
paired with the sunglasses in every single liquor store. And it goes beyond that as we start selling their Boss Hog and their 18 year and all of these fun, unique products. We did a collaboration with Barstool Sports and David Ortiz, the Hall of Fame baseball player. All of a sudden the brands, they are really, their creative teams are opened up to do so much more when they're not constrained by brick and mortar.

Jessie (54:45.45)
Yeah.

Michael Bowen (54:47.011)
Mm-hmm.

Jessie (54:49.388)
So did you create your own wholesaler license in these states to keep, you're talking about having too many retailer network connections and you're trying to keep them low. So how are you doing it?

Josh Jacobs (55:05.45)
We work closely with a number of different wholesale partners. And so if one of our partners, and we work, yes, with small emerging players, but we also work with Constellation and Edrington and Stoli and William Grant and Remy and a number of these large players, Whistlepig I mentioned, Heaven's Door, and a lot of them already have wholesale partners lined up.

So we have to be agnostic, but for some of the smaller emerging players that might not have a wholesaler in this specific state, we do work with a lot of terrific wholesale partners from LibDib to Park Street to MHW to American Spirits Exchange that might not take the full retail margin that have some of this flexibility that jives and fits really nicely with e-commerce. And so when a supplier is thinking,

because I don't have a wholesaler, that's incorrect. We have the relationships and they can get plugged in and up and running with us.

Jessie (56:08.78)
Wow, that's pretty, that's like another tier. That's a whole other new way to build a brand, right? Because like you were saying, you build the analytics, you get your proof that the brand will sell. Then the distributor's like, yeah, okay, turn it on.

Josh Jacobs (56:16.26)
Absolutely.

Michael Bowen (56:20.131)
I'm going to go ahead and turn it off.

Josh Jacobs (56:26.534)
Absolutely. And what's really cool is we're starting to see certain skews or even brands now that are really focused online. And is there a need to ever enter brick and mortar? We're not sure.

Jessie (56:26.84)
That's pretty cool.

Michael Bowen (56:37.3)
Thank you.

Josh Jacobs (56:41.698)
There are lots of very successful e-commerce companies, especially as we start thinking more and more premium. I think at certain price points, it's gonna be very difficult to achieve the scale that you're looking for online exclusive. But when you start getting into bottles that are $500, a thousand or many thousands of dollars, those are really built to be.

online, you simply don't have enough inventory to stock liquor stores around the country. And if consumers want these products, these are the highest value consumers for an alcohol supplier and they're forced to hunt from liquor store to mom and pop liquor store for these products. Super frustrating experience and one that we can automatically streamline on the back end and get product to consumers doorsteps with just click of a button.

Jessie (57:19.029)
Yep.

Michael Bowen (57:28.555)
Mm-hmm.

Jessie (57:33.644)
That's pretty powerful. Cause I know there's some cult brands out there that have that exact problem, you know, uh, and distributors fight over the allocation and, uh, you know, cocktail bars and, you know, certainly, you know, there's a lot of competition for.

for cult brands like that. But then after that, the consumer loses, right? Cause it's, oh, it's all taken from the restaurant side. So that's, yeah, that's really cool that consumers can actually look to that as an option. Interesting.

Josh Jacobs (58:06.742)
Did you wanna jump in, Michael?

Michael Bowen (58:09.203)
No, it's pretty much said my notes that I had already on the table. We're good.

Josh Jacobs (58:13.026)
Do you want to talk about maybe how brands are able to have more control around who has access and making sure VIPs?

Michael Bowen (58:25.587)
That's definitely more on your pitch. That's definitely the sales side of you, Josh. So by all means, feel free to jump in again. There's a reason I don't lead, uh, sales and, uh, the presentations and everything from that standpoint.

Josh Jacobs (58:27.502)
Okay.

Jessie (58:29.068)
Ha ha ha!

Josh Jacobs (58:37.278)
Yeah, so going back to where you just highlighted, Jessie, around the different tiers fighting over product and allocation, it doesn't end there. The most important individual is also fighting over these products, the end consumer.

And what's been so frustrating for alcohol brands, and since they're two tiers removed, they're entirely removed from the end customer transaction, there's not a lot of control. And that's intentionally by design of the three tier system, but there are ways to continue to empower the brands to take back.

some control and what we're seeing with e-commerce is that if a product is all of a sudden available On your website or you don't have to share that information Evenly and equitably across the board you can start creating different email lists VIP lists who's purchased your product many times before who's an absolute superfan Well, let's email them first and if it happens to sell out with just your VIPs Well, that's a huge win and all of a sudden that

is something that the consumers can really value and create an even deeper and stronger bond between the brand and the consumer. And so it really doesn't just end with the tiers, we ultimately have to figure out a solution where the brands have some influence over the best and most VIP customers getting their hands on these VIP products.

Jessie (59:52.812)
Yeah, for sure.

Jessie (01:00:09.888)
Yeah. Wow. That's really cool. That is really, really cool. So it sounds to me, cause you know, in my mind, I'm like, well, how can I help you guys connect with brands? So it seems to me you're pretty much working with everybody. So in other words, who's your ideal customer? And it sounds to me like you can do custom brands to large volume brands.

Josh Jacobs (01:00:35.934)
Absolutely. We get asked this question all the time, Jessie. And now that we started laddering up to partnering with the largest spirit companies in the world, there has been some

assuming that that's exclusively who we want to work with. And that couldn't be further from the truth. At the end of the day, we want to work with the brands that believe in e-commerce and are willing to make the investments and have those resources. And there's certainly a correlation. Hey, if you're more established, you might have an e-comm team, you might have some larger budgets to allocate this, but as we're seeing, there are startup brands that truly believe that e-commerce is the future

and they might be allocating the majority, even 100% of their marketing spend to e-commerce. And those are absolutely the brands that we want to work with. And so at the end of the day, it's who believes in, who's willing to make those investments, and then we're willing to reciprocate and make those investments back in you. I will say the one other piece of this, Jessie, is even if you have the capital and you're willing and able,

it also is somewhat driven by the nature of your product. So for example, if you have a very inexpensive value-based product, and when we're talking about shipping as opposed to on-demand delivery, shipping is more expensive. You have this adult signature, these are big heavy boxes, and it can be challenging as a value-based company to get average order values large enough.

compared to the shipping costs that the consumer can justify paying it. And that is something that's been a learning for us over time and why we continue to focus a little bit more on craft and premium where it's very easy to get average order values in that hundred, a hundred and fifty dollar and we have $650,000 transaction that we did earlier this month, believe it or not, someone bought a barrel.

Josh Jacobs (01:02:40.682)
for $650,000. I just, I didn't know that this was something that ever would happen in the alcohol industry, but as we continue finding new opportunities and figuring out ways to get really premium experiences to consumers, we keep getting surprised by what people are willing to spend.

Michael Bowen (01:02:45.859)
Ha ha ha.

Jessie (01:03:00.212)
Wow. I'm in shock. That's a lot of money.

Josh Jacobs (01:03:03.322)
In shock. Yeah. The most expensive bottle we've sold so far is about $9,000. And we expect to beat that. We're bringing on a new partner that's going to have a $50,000 bottle. And so that'll be our new record once we sell that. And last year we started thinking through what are some other avenues and other opportunities. And it was actually a brand partner that said, you know what?

Michael Bowen (01:03:03.991)
Hehe hehehe

Josh Jacobs (01:03:30.326)
We have this big barrel program, but everyone has to come to our distillery to pick up the barrels. What if we could make this nationwide? And we're like, let's just figure it out. Let's just bring it to market and see what happens and let the data speak for itself. And they started selling hundreds of thousands of dollars of barrels. It was wild. A company.

Jessie (01:03:50.556)
That is crazy.

Josh Jacobs (01:03:51.986)
Yeah, company bought nine barrels as a gift. And so that was $122,000 transaction from this company. And then someone told us they wanna sell barrels for over a half a million. And we're like, yeah, right. Look, they've done it.

Jessie (01:04:08.204)
Wow, that is incredible. I didn't know that. That is, that is, wow, that is incredible. What a great story. Yeah.

Josh Jacobs (01:04:18.002)
Us laymans, we don't necessarily know that there's this whole other side to the industry that's really catering to collectors and high net worth individuals. And there are these white glove private client directors that are calling on these individuals to sell bottles and barrels in these price points. And there's still people that want better access to these products and they want it more streamlined. And so that's absolutely something we can help out with as well.

Michael Bowen (01:04:23.542)
No.

Jessie (01:04:46.876)
That is just awesome. You're right. It's not something that, you know, I've been in the industry over 20 some years and it's like, I still haven't been exposed to that, you know, to that market in our business, it's such a small percentage of, of buyers, you know? But yeah, that's, that's incredible to be able to experience.

Josh Jacobs (01:05:07.722)
But now that you know, Jessie, should we mark you down for a $650,000 barrel?

Jessie (01:05:13.0)
Uh, in five years. Ask me again. We'll see. Yes. Do that. It'll get my incentive to get rich quick.

Josh Jacobs (01:05:14.39)
Five years, okay. I'm putting it on my calendar now.

Michael Bowen (01:05:14.924)
Yeah

Josh Jacobs (01:05:24.694)
This podcast episode is probably gonna be the breakthrough that you've been waiting for. Heh.

Jessie (01:05:29.284)
I hope so. I hope so for both. I hope so. I'm kind of like you. I'm waiting. I got to get that market up. So, so, Michael, we got to talk. I need to sell some merch.

Josh Jacobs (01:05:35.721)
I'm out.

Michael Bowen (01:05:43.387)
I'm happy to help anyway. Any way I can, we can ship it for you. I can cover that part for sure.

Jessie (01:05:49.62)
Yeah, that's the part I don't know how to do. That's like that's because I, my website, I can build a market on my website now. I just don't know what to do, how to do the rest.

Josh Jacobs (01:05:59.838)
And a lot of brands don't. And that's something that we haven't hit on as we've learned that we wanted to focus on a centralized fulfillment model. We realized that liquor stores aren't built to handle the scale and complexity of e-commerce. So we said, you know what?

The only way we can do this as fast and at the standards that we really desire and require internally is to do it ourselves. And so we've actually launched our own warehouses where liquor stores rent space. So it's still three tier compliant. We always position it as where the glue that binds all the tiers together, but remain on license, which provides us the latitude to have the relationships that we have. And now we have our own.

Jessie (01:06:45.368)
Nice.

Josh Jacobs (01:06:47.318)
our own processes and our own staff managing the warehouses, handling the picking and packing. And that's what affords us the ability to do all these really cool projects and these big projects where liquor stores, they're not built up. They're not built for that.

They're built for people to come in and peruse products. They're not built for e-commerce. It's not their fault. And this is how we've really approached it really, really differently. And it's been very successful for us. So yes, Jessie, we know quite a bit about fulfillment or I should say not the royal way. Michael is really the expert here.

Jessie (01:07:25.929)
Okay, Michael, we got to talk. I'm super impressed that that's the other part. Okay, great. So, you know, I buy all this merch, where do I put it? Like, it's not going to go in my closet. You know? That's so fun. Oh, that's awesome. See? This has been so great.

Josh Jacobs (01:07:48.414)
It has been a lot of fun.

Jessie (01:07:51.598)
You can fulfill beyond just liquor. That's awesome.

Josh Jacobs (01:07:54.966)
We already do a lot of our brands. We have glassware and hats and t-shirts, as I mentioned, maple syrup. We have cornhole boards. Really, the sky's the limit. And now all of a sudden, brands aren't limited to the three inches on the bottle label. All of a sudden, they can figure out new experience to enter consumers' homes. And that has really unleashed a world of creativity. It's been a lot of fun to participate in and support.

Jessie (01:08:24.388)
Yeah, well, that's a huge pivot when you think about your kits, you know, and you're B to C, and now it's just so B to B now. That is such a huge shift. And you know, it's also one of these things where you start a business thinking that it's this, but then it pivots and you got to pivot with it, right? And you saw other opportunities and you know, I mean, you're kind of still doing it with your experiences though, right?

Michael Bowen (01:08:29.515)
Mm-hmm.

Josh Jacobs (01:08:53.238)
Yeah, absolutely. You have to be humble enough to accept that you don't know what's best, that you don't know what hundreds of thousands or millions of people are going to want. And so the only way to actually get the feedback is to test it, to go to market and let the market dictate how you should continue to evolve and iterate.

And that's something that we've really held onto and coming full circle, we've actually now launched our own marketplace. So historically, when you've gone to speakeasyco.com, it's all been about our B2B integrated white label business. But in October, we launched our new direct to consumer brand. So if you go to speakeasyco's website, you can actually shop across our supplier partners, not all of them yet.

Michael Bowen (01:09:28.603)
Mm-hmm.

Josh Jacobs (01:09:41.186)
but this is just our minimal viable product, our MVP that we have up and running, and you can go and shop across them, and now all of a sudden, we're a direct to consumer facing brand again, and we're planning on rolling out a subscription box to really complete that roundabout.

Jessie (01:09:56.564)
And there you go. Back to where you started. Just a bigger format. That's awesome. Oh, that's really cool. Congratulations guys. This is amazing. What a, what a journey and what a story and you know, uh, a lot of, a lot of happy consumers out there.

Josh Jacobs (01:10:01.118)
Yeah.

Josh Jacobs (01:10:15.998)
A lot of happy consumers. I would say generally we're pretty happy. It depends what day you catch us. Some days not so much, but that's certainly just part of this roller coaster of a journey that we've been on. It's the highest highs and some of the lowest lows, but at the end of the day, Mike and I are just having so much fun with each other and with the incredible team that we've built. And we just feel so fortunate every day that we get to wake up.

Jessie (01:10:22.444)
Hehehehe

Josh Jacobs (01:10:40.654)
and work on the business that we've built and the business that we love with people that now have come so near and dear to our hearts. And at the end of the day, it's so much about the journey, not the destination. If we were only focused on the destination, we would have thrown in the towel a hundred times. What we didn't hit on Jessie is all the times we thought we were going out of business. And there were plenty of those over the years. Not as often anymore, if any of our investors are listening, at this point,

Jessie (01:10:58.965)
Oh yeah.

Jessie (01:11:08.242)
Yeah.

Josh Jacobs (01:11:10.528)
going well, but it has been just such a challenging ride, but one that has been incredibly fulfilling.

Jessie (01:11:20.268)
Well, when you have a business with so much legal compliance, I mean, just to navigate that by state is really a challenge. I just, I can't imagine.

Michael Bowen (01:11:33.843)
I will say it, Jessie, the thing that made it easier is Josh and I were idiots when it came to this industry because we had no idea what was going on. So every time somebody said, hey, you can't do it this way. You can't do it this way. We're like, okay, I'll come back with another way to do it in another way. There was never a no in our book. We can't do this. And even today, you mentioned the additional states and everything that we have to deal from a regulatory standpoint.

Jessie (01:11:40.992)
Hehehehehehe

Michael Bowen (01:12:01.663)
We have conversations with legal teams and like, you know what? No one's ever asked us this question. Nobody's ever looked at this problem this way. And most of our legal bills involve them trying to figure out if what we're trying to do is actually doable. And that's what's really helped us get to this stage is Josh and I never said, Nope, we can't do it. It's all right. Well, then we can't go left. We'll drive right or we'll drive straight through, or we'll take a different fork or create our own fork. Um, so I think that's something that's always been key to our success overall.

Josh Jacobs (01:12:30.666)
Yeah, Jessie, you'd lose your lunch if you saw what our legal budget was. Now we have legal teams and so many of the states that we operate in and all the time, Michael and I get asked like, Hey, if you knew everything you knew today, when you were launching your business, would you have done it? Absolutely not. Ignorance was bliss. We had no, no idea where we're getting into. And we learned one step at a time. And so we just never knew how much was stacked up against us.

Jessie (01:12:31.713)
Yeah.

Michael Bowen (01:12:35.565)
Hahaha

Jessie (01:12:52.597)
I bet.

Josh Jacobs (01:13:00.214)
And that was really such a blessing. We were very, very fortunate there. And a lot of times we also get asked, why didn't someone within the industry come up with this idea first? And I think it's because of all of that baggage and the intimidation and all of the...

Jessie (01:13:13.896)
Yeah, no way. There is no way I would ever try to do that. And, you know, we're taught, well, it can't happen. It's not going to happen. And so we needed someone like you, whether ignorance is bliss or just the desire or want and the vision of it, because it's not something that we in the industry could ever envision, you know, or, you know, as a possibility, as a legal possibility in how to navigate that.

Michael Bowen (01:13:41.129)
and

Jessie (01:13:43.296)
Yeah, so yeah, that was good. That was good. You weren't you didn't have any influence from that piece of the business, because it's a big part of every part of it. You know. From from the beginning of a brand to everything about it, you know, labeling and, you know, all of it, it's just it's highly regulated, which, you know, I guess is good. Right. We want that.

Josh Jacobs (01:14:07.314)
Yeah, initially, I would say and definitely jump in here, Michael, but for me, the underlying motivation was just to build in corporate America. I just, I felt.

like I wasn't unleashed and I had so much creative energy and I had so much drive, but I didn't have an avenue to invest all this energy into. And I really found that entrepreneurism and startups was an avenue where I could be as creative as I wanted and the only person holding me back.

was myself and that was so exhilarating in the beginning. And we didn't care if we heard no a million times. It was like, well, we'll just ask the million and first time and we'll finally have that breakthrough because we just wanna keep going and building.

And what has been awesome as we go through all the different chapters of Speakeasy, initially it was just Michael and I, and then the developer in Texas, and we just wanted to build. But as we've built this great Speakeasy community, we call ourselves the band of misfits coined by Michael. All of a sudden it's gone from just being motivated to build, now we're motivated to keep this group alive.

Jessie (01:15:15.032)
Hehehe.

Josh Jacobs (01:15:23.69)
and keep this community going and marching in the right direction. And there's a lot of people that depend on us and a lot of people that we want to continue working on this shared vision and shared dream with.

Jessie (01:15:35.084)
That's awesome. Well.

Michael Bowen (01:15:37.439)
Yeah, not too much more I can add to that, Josh, other than, uh, you know, the, the misfits thing is it ties to, and I'm not gonna remember the quote appropriately, but many, many years ago, Steve Jobs said it's always fun to be on a pirate ship than it is to be on a Navy boat. And so that's kind of what we've really focused on. And as we've continued building, you know, there's a lot of great minds in the group, you know, a lot of tinkerers, problem solvers, and people that just say,

I honestly believe in no, let's find a way to make it work. And then that's something that's really pushed our community.

Jessie (01:16:11.448)
That's great. I love that. Yeah, community is so important. And I'm hearing it a lot, you know, even just on the podcast. That was my word for 2024's community because I think it's so important. You know, you're seeing people on social media say, you know, it's always going to be there, but it's just not enough, really. Right. So you're one to so many. But let's talk about things that we really care about. Right.

Michael Bowen (01:16:31.875)
Mm-hmm.

Jessie (01:16:38.896)
And so that you can kind of see this evolution of community. Is there anything else that we haven't talked about that you guys want to cover before we jump over into your journey?

Jessie (01:16:54.072)
Can I talk about that?

Josh Jacobs (01:16:56.31)
I don't think so. I feel like we've pretty much done everything, yeah.

Michael Bowen (01:16:57.059)
No, I think we fit on a lot. I think we hit

Jessie (01:17:00.328)
Yeah, we did. It was fun. That's so great. I'm so excited with what you guys are doing. So Josh, do you want to just kind of give us a little bit of background into, you know, your work experience that kind of led you to this opportunity?

Josh Jacobs (01:17:18.967)
I'm a-

data scientists by trade, so a math geek and was building models in college and my parents were challenging me to find a career path that would lead to a paying job. And fortunately, my university, Wake Forest, had a mathematical business degree, bringing together the practicality of the business world with the backing and education of a mathematician. And that was really just before the world.

Michael Bowen (01:17:26.243)
Thank you.

Josh Jacobs (01:17:49.532)
Word data science was around, or I guess words data science were around. And my first job out of school, I was working for IBM as a consultant. But before that, in college, a buddy of mine and I launched our first startup. And once we had this taste of entrepreneurism, I was really intoxicated by it.

And I knew that I wanted to continue working on different ideas. But when my co-founder of that business and I each got full-time offers him and investment bank meet IBM, we're like, yeah, well, this is fun, but this is real, like guaranteed money. So let's take these jobs. But I never fully lost that itch. And after settling into IBM and

Jessie (01:18:31.7)
Right?

Josh Jacobs (01:18:40.394)
really starting to experience the bureaucracy and some of the frustrations and limitations in corporate America, I went back to entrepreneurism and launched a series of startups from.

online moving to online art. I started a fashion business, made every mistake in the book, spent quite a bit of money. And that's where I came up with this whole, not came up with, but that's where I really started discovering this whole idea of minimal viable product and lean startup, something that Michael's really helped me embrace and push forward. And that's ultimately what led us to where we are.

today where we just continue to push stuff into the market, get feedback. Sometimes it's successful, sometimes it's not, but the whole principle of failing fast to get to those ideas that are successful is really what's helped us along this journey continue to iterate and build the successful business that we have today.

Jessie (01:19:44.768)
Nice. That's awesome. Yeah. Data science. It's every other word now. It covers every single aspect.

Michael Bowen (01:19:51.427)
Hehe

Josh Jacobs (01:19:52.01)
Exactly. I'm almost glad that it wasn't any bigger because if it was taking off like it is right now, I probably would have found jobs that I was really challenged by and excited with. So I might not have gone back to the entrepreneurism. But for example, when I was at IBM, they didn't have enough projects and I was a consultant. So we were really...

we were really driven by our clients' projects. We were reliant upon the clients' projects and there weren't enough data science projects. So I ended up getting stuck on SAP and Oracle ERP implementations, pulling out my hair, going absolutely crazy. And the only way that I could get all of this creative energy out and do something that was exciting was to figure out something myself to work on.

Michael Bowen (01:20:29.123)
Thank you.

Jessie (01:20:46.292)
Yeah, that makes total sense. Well, I'm so glad you did. What, yeah, what about you, Michael?

Michael Bowen (01:20:50.723)
No.

Josh Jacobs (01:20:51.318)
We are as well.

Michael Bowen (01:20:55.043)
Um, not nearly as fun or exciting. Um, you know, I, growing up, I was one of those people. I still had to make a decision of whether or not I wanted to work with my hands or learn computers growing up. Right. And I had a lot of fun jobs, everything from working in out of motive to being an ATM tech, to learning a little bit about this thing called the internet at the time, it was a fad. Nobody knew that it was going to become the kind of important.

resource in all of our lives as it is today. And at that time I just realized, you know what? I'm gonna try and figure out this internet thing. I'm not a college kid. I attempted college, wasn't the best at it. Bounced out of there pretty quick and really just started working with e-commerce companies, mainly in the automotive industry initially. One of the few people that initially got kicked off and banned off of eBay for leveraging trademark issues, which had a nowhere thing at the time. So apparently that was a big deal.

And, you know, going from there, working with insurance and mortgages, which for a lot of people, those are bad words when it comes to the early days of the internet and lead generation and working from that into, you know, digital ad agencies across San Diego, working with a few. Never thought I would get to the point to where I was given ad budgets north of hundreds to, you know, $500,000 to help very, very big, notable brands go online and advertise. And.

Jessie (01:22:04.044)
Hehehehe

Michael Bowen (01:22:23.555)
Through all of that, I just kind of saw everybody building their own little empires and I was really helping them support it. I said, you know what? Fuck it. Why not me? Why can't I try and build something? And then at that point, launched a few different startups and built things from the ground. My motivation was very different. I loved solving problems. I mentioned earlier, I really enjoyed tinkering. And really it was challenging. We say, I can't do something. I'll find a way to do it. So that's where looking at some of these industries.

You know, I fell into the alcohol space when Josh had reached out and it was just prime for the picking because I had no idea what was going on. And I thought, even if we didn't make it, I'm going to learn a lot and I'm going to figure out a lot of things and you know, fast forward to now, um, I'm still learning, I'm building things. I had no idea about building warehouses, logistics, you know, full truckload, less than truckload, everything that's tied to the data and

You know, now I'm negotiating everything from there to Shopify, to building things out in Magento and tying things to local carriers and nationwide carriers and things of that nature. And I will say, if you ever asked, would we have a team or whatever, um, have a community, you know, 40, 50 people. I don't think so. I, or people early on always asked, Oh, how big is speakeasy going to get? I was like, I can't see us getting over 25, 30 people. And then we blew past that. So, um.

Again, a different story, a different story than Josh's, definitely a little shorter and summed up on my end, but definitely excited for the path and really looking forward to what the next five, 10 years hold, both for Josh and I, while we work together and inevitably potentially choose different paths at some point. I think what's really funny is we've talked, everybody always speculates, hey, what's the what if? What happens if we move on from speakeasy?

Jessie (01:23:49.023)
That's awesome.

Jessie (01:24:16.128)
Hehehehehehe

Michael Bowen (01:24:17.603)
And we both kind of agreed, it's like, all right, we'd probably take some time off, but somehow one of us would find a problem to solve and we'd bother the other one. And then eventually we'd start something again, which is this kind of always been a fun banter here and there as well.

Jessie (01:24:32.84)
Yeah, that would be fun. You see that a lot too, right? People that sell out and they're like, okay, I have to do something else. I can't just not do anything, you know?

Michael Bowen (01:24:41.699)
I don't know if I'd use the word sell out. Sell out's got such a negative connotation. Like, oh, you sold out.

Jessie (01:24:45.612)
Well, I'm not saying for you, but no, I mean, that's a lot of people. That's what a lot of these brands are. They're just building up the brands to get sold, right? And then they're like, oh, okay, I can chill out. Now I can go do what I want and I can pay for it. You know what I mean? It's really about money, the money behind it.

Michael Bowen (01:25:04.323)
Yeah. And I think that's kind of what led to that, that uprising, you know, you make a good, a good call out with regards to selling out and where we saw a huge spike on the celebrity side and you know, Josh, also please feel free to jump in, tying a big name or a big brand to something doesn't work anymore. And if whoever is helping, you know, promote or build a brand, if they're not sold, if they're not really in on it and they're not, you know,

blood, sweat and tears and working towards really pushing the story and the messaging, it's not going to work regardless of who the celebrity is. You might get a drop or two, but the longevity of it, something like the George Clooney, Casa Amigos bit, I don't think it does what it used to do. Just a quick note on selling out, I guess.

Jessie (01:25:52.393)
Yeah, I agree.

So Josh, do you want to talk about some mentors that you'd like to call out that kind of were a part of your journey?

Josh Jacobs (01:26:02.39)
That list is too long to name everybody, but I would definitely wanna call out Goat Rodeo Capital. Great name, first of all.

but also amazing people behind the company. Goat Rodeo is a venture capital firm focused on CPG companies. And they were the first ones to believe in us. A lot of startup founders, they go to friends and family first to raise money, but Michael and I didn't wanna go down that path. We really wanted some external validation before trying to raise a bunch of money from friends and family and potentially losing it.

Goat Rodeo in 2020 when we had this kernel of an idea and we are starting to grow, they ended up investing a million dollars into the business and not just the capital but their guidance and continued partnership and friendship has really been instrumental for helping us get to where we are today.

Jessie (01:27:08.696)
That's great. Yeah, that's awesome. And you don't, that.

Josh Jacobs (01:27:12.574)
Michael, anyone else you want to make sure we call out?

Michael Bowen (01:27:15.555)
I don't know if there's anything else that we would, everyone's leaving the warehouse right now. And so they actually funny little story, Pina came over. She leads our pick and pack team and peeled an orange for me because I haven't eaten yet today. And she's like, Oh, make sure you eat. I don't get to share that story with too many people because not many people are here while I'm talking. But you know, I think goat rodeo has been extremely huge for us, Josh. I wouldn't.

Jessie (01:27:31.672)
Oh! Heheheheh!

Michael Bowen (01:27:44.131)
necessarily pick somebody different from a whole company or whole global standpoint. But to Josh's point, I think if we were both to look at the mentors and the people that have had impacts on our lives, those lists would be pretty long and I wouldn't want to necessarily do a disservice by missing anybody and or get those text messages once I share this link out like, hey, if I can listen to us on this podcast, why don't you mention me? I thought we've been friends or I thought I've been, and I just don't want to deal with any of that either. So I will second the goat rodeo bit.

Jessie (01:28:08.401)
Hahaha! Yeah.

Okay. What about resources?

Anything you want to call out?

Michael Bowen (01:28:22.179)
You know, I think from a resource standpoint...

Michael Bowen (01:28:28.195)
Josh has done a very good job of getting us in front of not just other players, but industry leaders and things of that nature. And when you open up and you have a conversation, you'd be surprised how helpful a lot of the other tiers can actually be with guiding and providing insight. Again, I'm, I don't want to certainly point out, to one group, but I will share that. Given the opportunity to genuinely connect with people.

you're really able to build a good network of resources from the distributors to suppliers to even some of the retailers and things of that nature. And you'd be surprised to know that we have conversations with a lot of other players in our industry, even competitors, just to share ideas, talk through some of the things that do create problems. And the bigger thing I'm really interested in from this resource standpoint is at what point can we all pull resources and really push through some...

lobbying to really help make things more friendly for the consumer and not such a big roadblock and things of that nature. I don't know if that'll ever happen, but that's something I would eventually really love to see. Now, I also don't know how much we would have to pay in to support that. I hear lobbying is very expensive and that is not in our budget at the moment. And I'm allowed to speak to the budget because Josh sells everything. He's in the good side of our budget. I'm the one that spends all our money. And so I'm on the bad side.

Jessie (01:29:55.138)
Yeah, tech is not cheap. Warehousing is not cheap. Yeah, not cheap.

Michael Bowen (01:29:58.755)
No, neither is warehousing. So that's a good way for me to not answer your question, but give you a whole bunch of other stuff to edit later.

Jessie (01:30:10.72)
Okay. Is there any pain points?

Josh Jacobs (01:30:12.386)
We wouldn't be here today without you. Go ahead, Jessie.

Jessie (01:30:16.563)
Oh no, go ahead.

Josh Jacobs (01:30:18.514)
I was just going to say, building on what Michael shared, we would not be here today without an impossible to name list. So many people have been absolutely critical along this journey from investors to advisors to the amazing team that we have. And I would say, going back to what Michael was sharing, we really have embraced the mindset that a rising tide lifts all boats. And so we are maybe unique.

in that regard where we're proactively.

having conversations with distributors and with retailers, and of course with brands and everyone in between, thinking that if we remain customer-centric, consumer-centric, and focus on creating the most incredible experiences for the customer, we should all win at the end of the day. And as Michael said, that even means with what other people would call competitors, we like to refer to them as peers, because we really don't think we need to fight with each other.

on growing this niche and then we can all win.

Jessie (01:31:28.032)
Yeah, I agree. It kind of goes back to the first time in business where I understood the rising tides for all. It's Ted Baszler at St. Michelle Wine Estates and they're a Washington-based winery. And it's like, if you get a Washington winery on a menu at a restaurant, we all win, right? Because people are starting to look to Washington as wines on the list.

Michael Bowen (01:31:52.259)
Mm-hmm.

Jessie (01:31:55.868)
It's, it's, and also it's, it's fun to do it together. Right. And that just all, all by yourself all the time. And so I think in, and then it also provides your community, right. Which is so important. So I really, really liked that you said that.

Josh Jacobs (01:32:03.182)
Exactly.

Michael Bowen (01:32:07.491)
Mm-hmm.

Josh Jacobs (01:32:08.962)
Big time.

Jessie (01:32:14.556)
Is there outside of the legal aspect of this, is there any other pain points or anything that you'd like to, uh, you know, comment on, you know, it might be a little bit, you know, challenging, I guess it would be, you know, more on the tech platform side or.

Josh Jacobs (01:32:32.31)
Before I answer that, Jessie, I am gonna have to drop in a minute or two here. Yeah, is this the last question you have? Yeah, we could go all day.

Michael Bowen (01:32:38.435)
Same.

Jessie (01:32:38.792)
Okay. Yeah. We keep going, don't we? Yeah. Well, you can pick that one or Outlook or passions. We could just jump to passions if you want. Like outside of work. If you got to go.

Michael Bowen (01:32:42.947)
Hahaha

Josh Jacobs (01:32:51.414)
Got it. Michael, you wanna go first?

Michael Bowen (01:32:54.979)
Yeah, passions. We hit on it earlier. Food is good. I love food. I love grubs, a couple drinks. But oddly enough, you know, I know I don't look it. I turned 42 and snowboarding. I actually recently picked it up and you know at this old age my knees hate me for it. But snowboarding has really become a passion enough so that that's the main reason why we traveled to Japan.

Jessie (01:32:59.413)
Yeah.

Jessie (01:33:10.913)
I'm impressed.

Josh Jacobs (01:33:24.615)
Last Jessie.

Michael Bowen (01:33:28.995)
This is one we would normally screenshot if you're on the Speakeasy calls. is one we would normally screenshot if you're on  the Speakeasy

Josh Jacobs (01:33:37.357)
It could have been a funnier face though.

Michael Bowen (01:33:40.259)
It could, yeah. Because they can edit, Josh, you might wanna share some of your passions and then, worst case, we can wait till it hits 95% and then bounce.

Josh Jacobs (01:33:52.002)
Oh, and now she's gone. I guess it's still recording. I don't know if she wants to be on while we're answering. Whatever, I'll just answer and then we can drop when she's back on. Well, you're on as well.

Michael Bowen (01:34:02.147)
It's gonna be weird, it's gonna be like you're talking to yourself. Yeah, but I only listen to you half time.

Josh Jacobs (01:34:09.77)
Yeah, that's perfect. You don't need to listen to this. My passions on my end. So for sure, food and travel, like Michael already highlighted, in addition to food and travel, music, definitely not on the playing side, but on the listening side. And then the other thing for my wife and I, we are just workout junkies, all different types of exercise, just wanna be out in the sun, get the body moving.

Jessie (01:34:38.495)
I love that. I could tell cause you're kind of, you have a standup desk. I do too. You've inspired me. I need to stand up more cause I could see you standing up and say, you know, staying up. Yeah, that's great.

Josh Jacobs (01:34:45.816)
Heh!

Michael Bowen (01:34:47.715)
Well, now I feel judged. I'm at a stand-up desk, and I have a stand-up desk at home. I never use it, though, so...

Jessie (01:34:55.495)
I don't use it enough. Yeah. Yep. This is true. Well, guys, this has been amazing. I know you got to go. We'll wrap up here, but thank you so much for taking the time. Sorry it took so long to get you scheduled, but great story. And, you know, love what you're doing. I, band of misfits. I love it. Awesome.

Josh Jacobs (01:34:57.438)
And it's the first step. You have it.

Michael Bowen (01:35:11.363)
No worries.

Michael Bowen (01:35:17.955)
Hahaha

Josh Jacobs (01:35:18.922)
We appreciate the opportunity, Jessie. At the end of the day, our biggest challenge is getting our name out there, and even just not our name, spreading the word about the potential for e-commerce and continuing to build this up.

Jessie (01:35:33.367)
Yeah, education. I mean, there's a lot of education behind that.

Josh Jacobs (01:35:35.046)
Education. So thank you for giving us this platform.

Michael Bowen (01:35:39.267)
Yeah, thank you, Jesse. thank you, Jessie.

Jessie (01:35:39.527)
Absolutely. All right, Michael, I'll be in touch when I get ready to merch my stuff. Alrighty. You guys take, yeah, it'll be fun. It'll be really fun. Alrighty. Well, take care guys. Uh, have a good evening and a good rest of your week.

Michael Bowen (01:35:44.963)
Hahaha

Michael Bowen (01:35:49.699)
Done. Can't wait.

Josh Jacobs (01:35:59.838)
Likewise, Jessie, we'll talk to you soon.

Michael Bowen (01:36:01.027)
Thank you guys.

Jessie (01:36:01.711)
Okay. Bye.

Jessie (01:36:05.963)
Yeah, I'm glad you guys kept going.