Transcript: Adam Callinan (00:45) Our conversation today is with Joe Welstead. Joe is the founder of DrinkOcean. That's O-S-H-U-N. It's a supplement company focusing on electrolytes, creating a marketing and branding approach that is entirely different than what you have probably ever heard from an electrolyte company, unless you are already familiar with Oshun. He is a multiple time founder. He previously had a supplement company, VC backed, growth at all costs that did get acquired, but he has taken  all of the lessons and learnings from that experience and is building it now into this next CPG company, Trink Oshun A ton of learning in there from what it was like to be in a VC backed company and now doing it profitably from day one, bootstrapped, know, growing much, much smarter, much healthier, He was previously a professional swimmer,  which he got to after being rejected from a high performance swim program. So lots of durability, lots of experience, overcoming big adversity and difficulty stuff. ⁓ Spent a lot of time talking about mentorship and the things that he uses and leverages to remain durable and in the game through all these fun entrepreneurial ups and downs. So this podcast is just full of gems coming from somebody that has built a company in this space before and is now doing it in a much  better leaner, healthier way. So I hope you enjoy this conversation with Joe Wellstead.  Adam Callinan (02:10) Um, you were a swimmer. You were a pro swimmer before all of this, or maybe during all of this entrepreneur stuff, how, how did you get into that? And  Let's start there, how'd you get into that?  Joe Welstead (02:23) Sure, let's see. I was an okay swimmer as a kid, but I also played rugby. And I didn't know as a young teenager which sport I would really go for. But my swimming coach was the first person to say to me, you need to choose. And just by being that person who was looking out for me, I picked swimming. So I got into that and...  I don't think I was necessarily the most talented swimmer as a kid, I just like, I over, as I grew older, I just worked harder and harder and harder and I got to quite a good level just through sheer determination.  Adam Callinan (03:09) Did you recognize that earlier that you were just gonna have to work harder or was there somebody there that was like pushing you through that mentality?  Joe Welstead (03:17) I guess there are people that helped me, but the moment I really realized is when I was 19, I went to university or what you'd call college in Scotland and I joined basically like a high performance training center. But I thought I was joining this high performance training center. And then actually I was told I couldn't join because I didn't have the level to join the training center. So I had to become part of another group. And I realized like, ⁓  I'm not good at this sport yet. Like these guys are so much better than me. So I spent the following five years just trying to catch up and eventually overtake some of these guys that had got there at the same time as me. And that was just like the moment I was like, I need to really, really work at this. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I was 19 and I just, I just rocked up. Like I thought it was all.  Adam Callinan (04:04) So you got told no. That's powerful. How old were you when that happened?  Joe Welstead (04:12) I thought I was just like gonna go straight in and everything was sorted and I was like, ⁓ no, this is not gonna be that easy. I guess like at the time it was the hardest thing ever. Like that first year was, I was probably depressed and it was like really, really difficult to adjust to this, but probably like what really built my character, I guess, or one of the things it did.  Adam Callinan (04:32) Yeah, what an impactful experience at a young age. Where did you grow up?  Joe Welstead (04:38) So I grew up in France and then I moved to Scotland to go to university.  I was born in Scotland, so I turned up essentially as a Scottish student athlete, but I had never gone to school in the UK. I had never done any school in French and English. All my education was going be in French up until this point. I spoke English at home. But you know, if you speak English at home and never do any kind of scholar activity in that language, like I could speak fine. Like I could, you know, I was perfectly capable in the language, but I had never studied in English. So suddenly like there's all these new  things that come at me. I've got to perform at university in English for the first time ever. The system is so different. And suddenly I'm going from training like six times a week to 10 sessions a week. I was just absolutely destroyed that first year. It was a big adaptation.  Adam Callinan (05:38) How did you, so how long did you swim for?  Joe Welstead (05:41) I swam until I was 24. So I guess like the sort of last four, three to four years I would consider like my pro career. Swimming is not a super pro sport, suppose, comparatively, but I was at the University of Stirling, then I made it into Team Scotland and I had a pro club in France. So was kind of going back and forth to compete in France as well.  Adam Callinan (06:07) Amazing, I mean, that's a, yeah, we'll definitely come back to that. There's probably a lot more learnings in there around building and being durable and whatnot, which is a big part of what we talk about here. When did you get the entrepreneurial itch? Were you one of those kids that was selling rocks to the neighbors when you were eight years old or did that come later?  Joe Welstead (06:29) I don't think I did any of that, but I grew up in a household where my parents had their own business. And so it was just kind of like a normal thing for me. I didn't really necessarily think of it as like a big leap because it was just the environment. And then...  I think that what happened when I got to sterling is I had to figure things out for myself a lot. So I had to do my own research into my diet, like what I could do to improve my performance, what I could do to sleep better, what I could do to recover quicker, anything that was possibly going to improve my performance. I researched the hell out of, I was taking things like probiotic supplements back in 2009, 2010, when I don't know about in the States, but in Europe, like it was not really a thing. I think I was importing it from Australia at the time.  really wanted to get like clean sources of protein and protein supplements. Again, like not such a big thing back then. So I was at that time, I remember the first one of the first brands that I was using was ⁓ a Canadian brand actually called Vega Sport.  Adam Callinan (07:36) I remember them. ⁓  Joe Welstead (07:36) And this was this  was unknown in the UK. was, was like flying it over from Canada to like, cause I thought this is the best thing that I can get my hands on. So I'm going to buy it. ⁓ but I guess like that kind of led to entrepreneurship a little bit. Cause I just had to figure things out for myself from a young age.  Adam Callinan (07:54) funny in trying to think back in 2009 in the US pre no protein and supplementation was probably big clean wasn't there what that wasn't a thing like right there was just a thousand companies that made proteins and supplements or whatever but there wasn't a whole lot at least for my recollection of testing and lab reporting and and that so probably not too much different but maybe a little ahead  Joe Welstead (08:16) Exactly.  But also at that time, it was still in, at least in, in performance sport at that time, any kind of supplement was still considered a little bit taboo. we didn't, people didn't really want to talk about it. Like the, the professionals, like the, the governing bodies just didn't want to talk about it. Things like creatine were considered like really like borderline, know, doping. And now you think like, well, this is like so many people take creatine, but it's funny how much has evolved, but like I had to go through the research.  Adam Callinan (08:42) Yeah.  Joe Welstead (08:50) I guess myself a little bit.  Adam Callinan (08:53) Yeah. And that just, that alone has changed dramatically with, you know, with PhDs and doctors that are now doing podcasts in and around talking about the data behind these supplements. Like creatine is a great example. Like it is suddenly it's been around. It's like the most tested supplement in history and it's been around for forever. And it's just now coming to the major. And it's actually pretty good for everybody for a whole lot of stuff. And there's, there's not really a downside to it. obviously if you're getting it clean. So that.  Joe Welstead (09:16) Exactly.  Adam Callinan (09:22) So your first company from there was Modern Nutrition or did you have a step? Motion, excuse me, yeah.  Joe Welstead (09:27) motion  ⁓ So  motion nutrition, yeah, I co-founded in 2016. So a couple of years later for ⁓ two or three years, I was ⁓ in the sports management world. ⁓ So a friend of mine had set up a sports management agency and initially wanted to represent me as a client. And then there was like two weeks of that. And then he was like, no, actually Joe, I'd like to work with you rather than represent you. I don't know if he worked out that I was a smart guy or if he worked out that there was no money in swimming. I don't know. It was one of those two things.  We started working together and then, again, like similarly to this stuff we're talking about 2015 is when we had the idea for motion nutrition. And at that time, like supplements in general were just booming. Like it was really becoming, this is no longer about bodybuilding or elite sport. This is like a mass market thing, but all the products were still the same. Like there was nobody really apart from those early pioneering brands, like Vega sport, nobody was really doing like clean supplementation. And if they were.  Vega Sport is a perfect example, it was all vegan. And I was like, this doesn't really make sense because there's like 5 % of the population that's vegan and a lot of people that are going to take protein powders and other supplements. So maybe let's look at doing something really healthy, all organic, that's going to help with sure your performance, but also just feeling good, sleeping better, recovering better, waking up with more energy, that kind of thing. So that was the idea for that. And ⁓ ran that company for six years and sold it in 2022.  Adam Callinan (10:59) And that was primarily a protein company or were you making other supplements by the end of that?  Joe Welstead (11:05) It started primarily as a protein company and then ⁓ maybe three years in, ⁓ we launched two nootropic products.  And I think we were quite novel in this. We, Neutropics were starting to really become quite popular at the time with AlphaBrain from Onnit. This was like the really first like big, right? Yeah, it was super popular. ⁓ And we noticed that and we thought, well, this is cool. Spoke to our, ⁓ we had a neuroscientist that we worked with a lot who was really like on to all the latest research on this stuff. And together we thought, well, it'd be great if we could improve people's  Adam Callinan (11:24) Yeah, I used that when it came out. I remember it.  Joe Welstead (11:45) mental awareness and performance during the day and then also help them switch off in the evening.  And so we developed two products, one was power up and one was unplug. One that you took in the morning, one that you took in the evening. And the idea was just that we're going to help you like do better through the day, but then also help you switch off at night. Cause like it's so hard to be amped up all the time. then the expectations you can just like sit down, switch the light off and you're going to relax. Like it can be a lot harder than that. So I think we were quite early to do that kind of distinction of daytime and nighttime. I recall like  thinking it's strange that nobody's done this. Like, I think we're on to something, but maybe not because nobody's done this. Maybe we're wrong. I don't know. But that really took off. And that we basically became known in particular for the unplug product, which was the sort of nighttime nootropic we called it. But it just helped people sleep better and like wake up feeling a lot better.  Adam Callinan (12:38) How did you sell that? Like as a brand new concept? It's almost like an entire new vertical. Like, yeah, how did you launch that?  Joe Welstead (12:42) Hmm, that's a good question. Yeah.  I would say the first year there was so much education to do and we were an omnichannel brand. So we selling in places like Whole Foods, but also online and also on Amazon. And so we had to educate consumers, buyers and media. So I remember very clearly, like I think it was March, maybe 2018. I had a meeting with the editor at Men's Health ⁓ UK.  And I told him about these products and he was like, Joe, I love them. Like we're going to cover them, but I just can't tell you when. And it took a whole year. And by March of the following year, they added a whole new category to their like annual awards for supplements. So it had been until then, like things like protein, maybe like a recovery powder, like classic, almost bodybuilding type stuff. And then they added this new tropic category and they gave us the award for power up the first year. And then the second year they gave us  award for unplugged asleep, the sleep nootropic. So that was cool. But that's a good example of like across the board for consumers, for retail buyers and for media. It took a whole year of like just telling them about this, telling them about this, telling them about this. And then eventually we got the fruits from that.  Adam Callinan (13:56) What happened in that year? I mean, were you you're selling the product? It just wasn't selling at the capacities you wanted or is it really just kind of sitting until that men's health happened or to that? Okay.  Joe Welstead (14:07) No, definitely snowballed. ⁓  It was growing gradually, but it's one of those things, like you convince the early adopters, but then to really get traction, it takes some time and you need a lot of social proof and that kind of thing. But eventually we got...  You know, there's sort of, ⁓ guess, professional influences in a way. And what I mean is people like personal trainers or nutritionists or any kind of health professionals, like when they start endorsing a product, people will pay a little bit more attention to it.  Adam Callinan (14:40) Got it, so you created that snowball and then that product took off and that company was acquired in 22.  Joe Welstead (14:47) Yep.  Adam Callinan (14:49) Amazing, what happened after that?  Joe Welstead (14:52) So I basically promised myself that I wouldn't do CPG for a long time. And I think I lasted 18 months or something like this. ⁓ But my, so at this point I had a new business partner and we started that. ⁓  Adam Callinan (15:02) Yeah.  Joe Welstead (15:09) I guess a little bit earlier, but things are just like crossing paths a little bit. We'd started a media production company together. So by October 22, I joined them full time on it and we were producing content typically for outdoor brands. Initially sportswear brands like the North Face was our first big client. And then we kind of went into any kind of outdoor based company. So we did some really cool stuff for brands like Aston Martin, National Geographic, things like this.  So that was great, but we basically realized that we were not just producing content anymore for people. We would end up inevitably like advising them on products, strategy, this kind of thing. And Jack, my business partner and I kind of realized, well, ⁓ if we're doing all this stuff for them.  maybe we should be doing it for ourselves rather than our clients, because we were paid for the media stuff, but inevitably the scope of our work was much wider than that. And we enjoyed doing it because we kind of knew what we were talking about and we thought we could help. But doing it together, were like, there's a skill set here that we should probably apply to ourselves. And at the same time, we had noticed ⁓ this kind of...  booming interest or at least at that time growing interest in hydration and electrolytes. And this was, I guess, a couple of years ago now. And initially the way that I look at this stuff is like, if you have sort of large scale markers of a movement, things like, you know, Google search trends and this kind of thing. if searches are kind of creeping up, but then also you have like those sort of professional influencers that I talked about. If they start talking about this stuff,  At the same time as that mass market curiosity grows, you're like, this looks interesting. So I would see people like health experts on Twitter talking about like making their own like clean electrolyte products for hydration and how they'd use maybe like watermelon or different kinds of salts and this kind of thing. thought that's really cool.  but not that many people are going to do that because that's a lot of work. These are people who are dedicating their whole life to their health and like fantastic, but for most people, it's not going to be realistic. ⁓ So we saw that happening. And at the same time, we landed on this incredible product that I had been aware of for a little while. And that was ⁓ not really, ⁓ I guess...  Adam Callinan (17:17) Yeah.  Joe Welstead (17:41) people just weren't really aware of it. And so this whole space kind of looked really interesting. And it's one of these ones where it's a little bit like protein in 2025, sorry, 2015. You have a lot of products in the market.  but that are all going after performance and you sort of zoom out and you go, performance is like a couple percent of the market. Like how about if we attack this from a completely different angle and we talked about how electrolytes can help with your skin. They can help with clearing brain fog. They can help with sleep. They can help with like stable energy levels, all these things. They can even help with like if you need to get up to pee a lot during the night, the chances are you have an electrolyte imbalance because you're not retaining water properly.  So there's all kinds of like everyday benefits from taking good, healthy electrolytes. And this is different from rehydration solutions. So electrolytes can quickly become like, ⁓ talked about badly, this is inevitably what happens is people and sometimes health professionals will confuse electrolytes with the rehydration solutions. Rehydration solutions are super high sodium, high sugar products that you would take if you were sick, if you were medically  dehydrated if you had just like run a marathon in you know 120 degree heat and you were completely dehydrated like you need something that's gonna Completely ramp up your sodium levels and your hydration levels really fast That's like acute products that you would take that in very isolated moments not something you want to take every day  What we do with ocean is this is a product that you can use every single day. It's like drinking mineral water, but you can use it with, if you have a filter at home, you filter your tap water, add some ocean, you basically have super high mineral water at home.  Adam Callinan (19:29) I'm in Bozeman, Montana, which is where element is based out of. So I get to hear about element all the time, which is a, you know, which is a, I assume one of the bigger players and like the electrolyte space. And, and I think your take on sort of like democratizing the use of electrolytes is really, really interesting. And I obviously, I mean, I've, I've been watching what, what you do and how you talk about it on LinkedIn for quite a while. And I, I think that's a brilliant.  Joe Welstead (19:36) Yeah.  Adam Callinan (19:58) sort of spin and take on like the non-extreme athlete, which I mean, we're in Montana, we have a lot of extreme athlete stuff just based on where we live, but the other like 99 % of population that's not going and running, you know, 15 mile high altitude trail runs on the weekend, you know, they're having that as an approachable market is a really interesting strategy. How's that work? So when did you launch lotion? I'm sorry, ocean for context.  Joe Welstead (20:14) Yeah.  ⁓ We launched  Oshun in April 24, so 16 months ago. So still super young, ⁓ but honestly growing really rapidly now. So it's pretty exciting. And I have a lot of time for brands like Element or Liquid IV. I think they've done an incredible job at creating awareness around this market.  and the benefits of the products. Where I have a slightly harder time with these types of products is that they are clearly, usually, maybe not all of them, but most of these products are made, as you've out, for endurance sports or extreme conditions and extreme efforts. But now, like...  The time for that is not that big. And some of these companies have become so large, like Liquid IV does close to a billion dollars in top line revenue a year. That's so large. Of course they're going after a much broader audience, right? So then they're no longer only targeting people who are trading for Ironman and...  and things like marathons and things like this. They're going after a much, much wider audience and using things like incredible flavors and this kind of thing. But the formulations have stayed the same. So in a typical element sachet, I think you have a thousand milligrams of sodium.  and you might take like one, two, three of these a day, that's a lot of sodium unless you're like sweating a lot. So I would kind of consider that even if it's sugar-free I would class that more as like a rehydration solution rather than a mineral pure electrolyte solution and  I think there's a slight risk with these types of products when you combine it with like a high caffeine sedentary lifestyle, you're basically putting a lot of pressure on your cardiovascular system. you're like ramping up sodium, ramping up caffeine, maybe also ramping up with nicotine. And you're basically telling your system, like, want you to work on overdrive all the time while I sit at my desk. This is not good for your heart health. So I think these products are great. And you know, they've always had incredible success.  but I would just advise some kind of caution if you're going to use it as an everyday product and you're not exercising heavily every day.  Adam Callinan (23:17) Yeah, you hear people like Rhonda Patrick talking about that a lot. don't know if you've followed her. She was one of the first to really like mainstream this heavily medical data backed information and kind of translating it to the masses for the listener. If you're not familiar, it's super interesting. She's been doing it for a long time. And she talked, I remember listening to a podcast, you know, in the last six months talking about that specifically using these high sodium things are great for a specific purpose, but  Joe Welstead (23:29) Yeah.  Adam Callinan (23:45) kind of that unless you're going and doing these things, know, maybe you use a fifth of the packet, not the entire packet as you go do this, this or that or just balance it out. Yeah, yeah, which is hard. Totally get it. So what did you learn from motion that you pulled into ocean? It's funny those rhyme. I don't know if you did that on purpose. ⁓ Like what did you translate from that experience into this and how has that played out?  Joe Welstead (23:54) Yeah, is going to be difficult. Yeah, it's tricky. Yeah.  So much. mean, honestly, like second time around running a primarily DTC CPG brand is like cheat code.  You like the first time is really hard because you're just discovering absolutely everything. Second time around is of course, it's not easy, but it's so much simpler because you know, like you can see mistakes coming from a really long distance. So you can avoid those from, know, and keep them far away. And I think that more, I guess, on a pragmatic level, ⁓ launching with this one product has been fantastic because if you can have one product  with a big enough tam, a big enough addressable market, and you can communicate it clearly. Your job as a marketer or as a salesperson becomes incredibly clear. You have basically one product, maybe a few different types of profiles that you want to sell it to, but everything that you say is like,  very very clear so you can ⁓ not cause too much confusion about what your brand stands about what the benefits are when and how you should use it.  you can communicate a message that is very easy for people to understand. think that makes the job of a founder a lot easier. The trade-off is it can also make it boring. Like people look at founders lives and think that it's exciting and novel every day. And actually like there's a lot of repetition and you're saying the same thing over and over again, like a hundred times every day. So that's a trade-off, but  ⁓ In terms of putting all of your resources, time and money into communicating one product, it feels fantastic because you can really spend a lot of time crafting that and making it look and feel just right.  Adam Callinan (26:03) we had at Bottlekeeper, which is my first consumer product company, that we accidentally did that on purpose. And that was, we launched one product, one size, one color, and that's all that we did. And it allowed us in hindsight, it allowed us to really focus on the consumer and their experience and then build out from there without getting too out of control with SKUs, which of course we did. And then had to peel it back because that happens. What is next then with Oshun? you still at the early enough in the  life cycle of that business that it's, are you still pushing a single skew? Are you diversifying like flavor profiles or how does that work with Oshun?  Joe Welstead (26:43) So obviously still figuring it out, but right now, we have a second skew planned for post-summer that I'm pretty excited about. But it's not going to be a flavor, it's going to be a different product, but similar format, but different product.  ⁓ Our electrolyte concentrate, our flagship ocean product until now, is completely unflavored and it's really tempting to go down the flavor route. For now, we're not doing that. ⁓ Partly because we just try and do everything differently to what's already out there. So if you look at everything that we talk about and the way that we ⁓ present our product, ⁓  it's there's no flavors. We never talk about sports or exercise. We talk about completely different things. We talk about having clear skin and a clear mind. ⁓ We look so different to any kind of sporty electrolyte brand. Our format is different. It's in a pump. That's something that we really enjoy. Just if you can design a product that is  by default, unique and interesting. Your marketing efforts are going to be so much simpler because you don't have to create a fancy fairy tale around your product. lot of the time, what we have to do is just present it in an easy to digest way. So a little bit of information and this is how it works and this is how you use it. And it's very easy to kind of grasp. And so we love that. And also not having flavors. Eventually, maybe we will.  But as soon as you enter the flavor game, you're also ⁓ going to have people that don't like the flavor. ⁓ Of course, it's electrolytes, so we're adding a slightly salty profile to any drink, like that's inevitable. But if you add it to ⁓ filtered water in particular, or if you have a reverse osmosis filtration system,  you basically end up with very dry, what I would call dry water. ⁓ Water that doesn't have any minerals in it feels dry on the palate. And then if you add minerals or electrolytes in it and nothing else, it makes it silky. A little bit like if you drink Evian water, like it has that kind of silky profile. That's what happens when you add ocean to filtered water. And for most people, that's really enjoyable, especially once they realize that it makes them feel better. It's a nice little feedback loop. Flavors are great.  but it changes the perception of the product so much. So I'm both excited and terrified about doing it at some point.  Adam Callinan (29:18) Yeah, I suppose consumer feedback drive some of that stuff. Talking about the consumer in the community, you did some interesting things community wise with the launch of Oshun. How did you look at engaging the community before you had a product and how did that work out?  Joe Welstead (29:23) Sure.  Yeah, I think this is super important for anybody who wants to start. ⁓ The assumption is that you need a product to get feedback and you need to present it and ask people to buy it then you get the feedback and the feedback tends to be they buy it or they don't buy it initially. But you can bring a lot of that forward and not spend any money and get feedback, but you just have to be a little bit more clever about it.  But it doesn't need to be complicated. what we did is initially we just, we weren't even sure we were going to do this yet, but we just said, we are doing this. We're, think the way that we presented it initially was we're going to do the ESOP of electrolytes. So, know, ESOP, the skincare and like lotion brand, ⁓ soap brand. ⁓ That was the kind of aesthetic and people could immediately kind of grasp that. And I think the first question that we asked on all of our networks was, help us pick a name and then  weeks later we did help us pick like an art direction and thankfully the answers reinforced the direction that we wanted to go but it wasn't necessarily about that it was more about finding out if people were going to give us a minute or two of their time.  Because essentially we're in an attention economy and you can judge people's interest just by whether they give you a little bit of their attention and that's almost as valid as them giving you bit of their money. If you can stop people in their tracks, get them to spend a minute with you and give you some feedback, that's pretty telling. ⁓  This is a great way to validate your idea. Of course, it's not the same as asking them to get their credit card out, but I think it's good validation. And also gets people's, you you can start building your audience like that, builds awareness around your product.  Adam Callinan (31:17) Yeah.  Let's get tactical on that. you went, you decided using the naming as a perfect example, you decided that you're gonna go to a community, maybe it wasn't necessarily your community, it was just a network community. How did you actually execute that? Did you create video or display content and then put dollars behind it that led to a survey fill out? Like what were the tactics behind that early move?  Joe Welstead (31:44) It wasn't even that ⁓ smart, I guess. It was super simple. We just put a survey. Yeah, super simple. We put a survey on every network that we were live on, me and my partner. ⁓ So it went on to LinkedIn, it went on to Instagram, it went on to Twitter. I think that's pretty much it. Maybe I had a small email list, so it may have gone out there too. ⁓  Adam Callinan (31:50) Simple is good. Yeah.  Joe Welstead (32:09) But you know, we just got some, few hundred people reply and fill out our little survey. And that was great. Like just getting that amount of ⁓ response from a relatively small sample. And even if you post something on LinkedIn and you see like a thousand people view it and 500 people fill your survey, like that's pretty strong. You know, so you can, you can judge like people's interests by doing things like this. And you don't necessarily need to spend a lot of money on it or if any.  Adam Callinan (32:16) you  Yeah, it's a lot. ⁓  Yeah, proving out early concepts like that before you go and spend time and money and resource is so important and people overlook it all the time. ⁓ That was another thing we did well.  Joe Welstead (32:49) I think it's easy  to just think that you can't do anything. To think that you're going to need to spend money or you're going to need to make the product or whatever. I think also...  A lot of the time people are worried about showing something that's imperfect. So they think, let me just like squirrel away over here and get my idea perfect and then I'll show the world. But you've wasted all this time and maybe money on a direction that maybe nobody's gonna like anyway. So you might as well just show it up front and get the feedback early and then course correct if you need to.  Adam Callinan (33:23) Yeah, I'm a big fan of the phrase, don't let perfection get in the way of progress. And I see that. Well, obviously you see it as well. That happens. That happens. A lot of people sort of get into analysis paralysis and then it's been three months and actually nothing has gotten done outside of staring at sheets and screens. Let's shifting gears. How does your background and experience, maybe it comes from swimming, maybe it comes from upbringing. Maybe it just comes from experience. How does that  Joe Welstead (33:28) Exactly.  Mm-hmm.  Adam Callinan (33:53) How do you leverage those experiences to deal with the ups and downs of being an entrepreneur? Are there things in your life that you do and practice today that help you manage?  Joe Welstead (34:08) Yeah, first of all, like I think the background of swimming is helpful, not because ⁓ people will say like these really vague things, statements like athletes make great entrepreneurs. I don't think that's true. But I do think that having gone through some kind of ⁓  like elite level activity, whether it's sport or any, or maybe arts of any kind, forces you to understand like the sort of marginal gain mindset that you're going to be like not even 1 % better every day, but it's going to take a really freaking long time to get better. And a lot of it is repetition, repetition, repetition. And you can't have like crazy rewards on a daily basis. especially swimming is like pretty brutal with this. You spend months and months and months in training to  then have a one shot at improving your personal best that you set a year before. So you have like a kind of, have to zoom out and go, okay, this is like a two year plan, three year plan, four year plan that I'm going to have to chip away at every single day. And that's not easy for a lot of people. It's not easy for me, but having gone through it with swimming definitely helps with business. ⁓ The other thing that I found helpful ⁓ in hindsight with my swimming career is having somebody external that kind of gives you  a goal because setting your goals yourself can be quite challenging and difficult. You don't necessarily know how far you can push. You don't necessarily know how skilled you are. You don't want to be completely delusional and say like you're going to be Olympic champion or you're to have a billion dollar company if it's just not possible ⁓ with your skills or with your genes or in the ⁓ industry that you're in.  But having somebody external help you set those targets can be super, super helpful because you're suddenly not biased by either like delusion or on the other hand, ⁓ like the fear of what you might or might not be capable of. So for assuming that was really helpful and now I'm finding it helpful in business, just having like a couple of mentors that can, ⁓  help us figure out what might be achievable. And then from there we can step back and go, all of these are the little steps that we need to achieve to get there. ⁓  Adam Callinan (36:24) How did you find  those mentors?  Joe Welstead (36:30) So both Jack and I have basically spent the last 13 or 14 years where we've been in some kind of work scenario.  I think just quite good at keeping in touch with people and making new connections and relationships. And that compounds, it compounds big time over when you're talking about decades. And so that grows naturally. And I think that people sometimes think about networking as something where you can just go to like an investor networking event, or you can go to like a founder's dinner and you're gonna have...  network. Like I don't think that's how it works. I think the way this works is you need to be curious, you need to be genuine, you need to be interested in people, need to stay in touch with people. And if you do that, and if you learn to enjoy that and do that for years and years and years, you're going to have a great network because you're going to have people who know you, trust you, want to help you. And that's how, you know, inevitably either they'll become a mentor or they'll put you in touch with somebody who's going to be just right for you.  Adam Callinan (37:32) Yeah, I wholeheartedly agree. Like networking events like that are my kryptonite, kind of for that exact reason.  Joe Welstead (37:39) I mean, they can be great, I've actually, one of the mentors that I had for quite a few years, ⁓ I met at an investor meeting or an investor networking event ⁓ years and years and years ago. But the way that I met him was completely different to what you'd expect. He was sort of sat at the back of the crowd.  looking at his baby monitor from his phone. And it sounds creepy, it's not that I was looking, but he was doing it right next to me. And so I had to ask, you know, is that your kid? Like, how's this going? And, and, you know, again, like you just have to show curiosity and be interested in people, I think.  Adam Callinan (38:18) Yeah. I mean, that'd be pretty weird if it wasn't his kid. He was, you know, baby monitoring someone else's kid. Yeah. I think, yeah, that, you know, I lived in LA before being in Montana for a decade and so much of the networking space in and around that was the polar opposite of being curious and was entirely built around what, can you do for me? So I got, I got kind of burnt out on that. think I did that twice and about to never do that again, but I do agree the curiosity and the, particularly in a smaller setting.  Joe Welstead (38:37) Hmm.  Adam Callinan (38:48) ⁓ can be can be pretty magical.  Joe Welstead (38:53) Yeah, think also, especially if you're young, it's easy to, like you're starting off in a career, it's easy to kind of dismiss people if they're not in like an important role. ⁓ you fast forward 10 years and the chances are that person is now in an important role. So, you know, we, for example, Jack's got a great friend that he met when he was an intern at the North Face, like.  Adam Callinan (39:03) Yeah.  Yeah, yeah.  Joe Welstead (39:17) 15 years ago or something. And he's now global strategy director, one of the biggest like music equipment and sort of headphone companies in the world. And how would you know? How would you know? You have to be interested in the person, not just their job.  Adam Callinan (39:33) Hey.  Yeah, yeah, that's great advice. Getting mentorship is a thing that I know a lot of particularly early stage entrepreneurs struggle with going and finding. So providing some context for that is helpful. Is there anything else that you want people to know about you, your experience with Oshun, what you're going to, you know, working towards trying to accomplish the end game?  Joe Welstead (40:06) So what's been really exciting with Oshun is that we've been profitable from day one. So we've managed to grow this company ⁓ through reinvesting profits and we've done that literally from the first week.  And that's just the most powerful thing that you can do because you suddenly like you can choose exactly which course you go So I had a meeting with a VC today and I literally said to them I don't know if I want to go this route and they couldn't They they failed to make an argument in favor of going down the VC route. Like I said, we're here if you want to which is great ⁓  But they didn't have anything to convince me that that was the way that I should go, or that we should go. Which is like super cool place to be. And I think that there's a couple of ways that...  I'm really proud of having done this. One is that we attached ourselves to a growing space so that we were clever in the space that we chose. the other is that our product is fantastic. And I see a lot of people talking about in the marketing world, talking about all the stuff around the product.  you how you communicate it, what your ad strategy is, what your media buying strategy is, what your campaign structure looks like, ⁓ your creative assets, how many creators you work with, like all this stuff. And to me, all of that is basically downstream or marginal to how good your product is. And by product, I don't just mean like the actual consumable part. I mean, like how it's designed, how it feels, what it looks like. ⁓  who it talks to, who understands it. All those things to me are part of the product and all that stuff, most of that stuff can be worked on before you've done anything. So this is like what I've discovered through this is if you can spend a lot of time being clever and creative upfront, everything is gonna feel easier or simpler or more like downstream.  A, be part of a bigger movement that's growing and B, have a good product with clever design that looks interesting and eye-catching or that triggers some kind of emotion and everything becomes simpler.  Adam Callinan (42:27) Profitability is something that I talk a lot about. Bottlekeeper was the same. It was profitable from the first year. We never raised money. It was profitable throughout. We just reinvested everything for the first couple of years and then it got big enough to where we could take money out of it. Was motion like that or did you raise money in motion and you're now taking the learnings from that and being profitable?  Joe Welstead (42:49) Totally. ⁓ I'm not sure we had a single year where we were profitable. It might have been like breakeven, but ⁓ yeah, it was completely different approach. But also like back then there was so much kind of brainwashing that like the VC way was the way. I think we're in a much better place. There are much healthier place now where people, founders understand that there are options there. ⁓  And the VC route can be fantastic, but also it's by far not the only option and could be the right one for you or maybe it's not. But people have kind of worked this out. Whereas for me, I guess I was also younger, but I was really ⁓ impressionable and I thought like, okay, everybody's talking about this. This is the way to go. So yeah, we raised quite a lot of money ⁓ and we were able to do some great things. ⁓  But I'm really enjoying doing things differently this way, this time. ⁓  Adam Callinan (43:42) What did you do, like tactically speaking, aside from not raising money, how did you look at this brand differently? Like, you literally sit down and design out your margins and what you needed to sell it for? Like, how did you back into profitability? Because you can't actually plan to be profitable. I'm a big believer in  Joe Welstead (44:02) ⁓  Yeah, sure. The margins are important. need to have the right cost of goods sold and the right selling price. But again, it's kind of downstream from the product again, because if you have a really good product where people are going to repeat purchase, whether you're profitable in the first order or not, it kind of doesn't become that important anymore. ⁓  I mean, I'll tell you over the last three or four months, we haven't, we've maybe grown our ad spend by 10%, but we've grown our top line 2X just because we have really good retention. And ⁓ maybe we got better with our creatives and the meta machine learning has improved and our targeting is better. But I think that the biggest thing is that our retention is great ⁓ because people can feel the benefits and they feel better from using it. It's a format that creates a habit. All these things are lining up.  Adam Callinan (44:41) exceptional.  Joe Welstead (44:59) So yeah, you need to have all those basics right. And again, it's a bit like the advertising structure, like it needs to work, but you don't want to be swimming upstream all the time. Like you need to have a good foundation with a good product. And I think you need to tap into some kind of emotion that gets people's attention.  Adam Callinan (45:20) That is a great place for us to stop. I mean, that's amazing. It's a really great transition from VC backed, not profitable, still, you know, for all, at least public perception successful, it was acquired. I'm sure there's stuff behind the scenes there as there is in every company that goes through. mean, there certainly wasn't bottle keeper in our acquisition. ⁓ To selectively building a business in and around profitability and building that foundation, that's brilliant.  Where do you want people to find you and Oshun?  Joe Welstead (45:54) www.drinkocean.co, so that's www.ocean.co and I'm Joe Wellstead on LinkedIn, Twitter, yeah definitely come say hi.  Adam Callinan (46:06) Awesome, we'll make sure links and everything are in the show notes so people can find you. Thanks a ton, Joe. I really appreciate your time.  Joe Welstead (46:10) Sweet. Thanks Adam.  It's been great.