YouSaid · the spoken record

Katlin Smith

lines on the record: 85
first: 2021-02-15
most recent: 2021-02-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I do. So at that point, I plan our first production run, I ship all the ingredients there. I was still working in consulting, so I flew there from the client site. I did a production run on a Friday. And it needed to get all of the product back to Atlanta. Now, because I was in consulting and flew a lot, I actually got upgraded on the way back, which on the flight, which I really loved because it meant that I got three checked bags and the check bags could be up to 70 or 75 pounds. And so I decided to get these U-Haul boxes and put all of the product in there from the production run. And check it into the fight. It was free shipping, right?”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At that time, I had started transitioning to a contract manufacturer. They're classically difficult to find. If you Google search contract manufacturer for, I don't know, crackers or baking mixes. The one that you end up working with is typically on like the 12th page of Google. I remember it looking almost like a phone book list of contract manufacturers and you have to call every one of them and figure out what they do and figure out what their minimum run sizes are. And we were running pretty small run sizes and we were using nuts and we were gluten free, which made us very unattractive to work with.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She wrote about our muffins and said how great they were. And so it was really that that helped us take off on Amazon. Because at that point, Amazon had a sales history and said, wow, this product actually does sell. And so then they started putting us higher up in the search results and pretty quickly we became the best-selling muffin mixes on Amazon.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It honestly wasn't crossing my mind back then, I don't think. I think I was more focused on the retail path, but a few months later, a influencer, what's now called an influencer, discovered the product and wrote about it on her Facebook page, which just kind of astounded me. We sold out of the product in probably an hour. Wow.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Amazon ranks things based on what sells And so, without a selling history on Amazon, it's hard to get your product picked up. Like, you're going to be on like the 12th page. And so no one was seeing the product”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep, I actually started selling through the Simple Mills website and also Amazon before I got the product into Whole Foods. Right. So I put her on Amazon back before I was ready just to get some feedback on it and see how it would sell. I had these visions that like if I put the product on Amazon and all these people were searching for almond flour, the people would just find it. And that was not at all the case. I mean, I put it on there and we'd sell, gosh, maybe like one or two a month Those people usually knew me. Like, I could see the address and see that person knows me.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I was trying to save every dime. I actually moved into a smaller place in Atlanta around that time. It was like this basement apartment that had a lot of issues. 400 bucks a month so that I could, again, put all the money toward the business. Right.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, it's not the easiest thing to do. But yeah, I mean, the FDA rules are publicly available on the internet. You can figure it out.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, but then you put it in and then it's like off by, you know, 10 grams. And so then you take a little bit out, and then all of a sudden it's off by 10 grams in the other direction. Right.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It would typically be like a Friday afternoon I'd drive out there. And then work until like two or three in the morning making product. And I would source the ingredients from either online, like I'd buy like 50 pounds of almond flour. Yep. Or I would go to my local no joke Trader Joe's and buy like 30 bags of almond flour, which was always perplexing to the cashier. Yeah. And then, yeah, I would make product there. I couldn't afford a mixer, which cost $2,000. So I had divined this idea to put all of the powders into these food grade barrels, and then I would roll them back and forth across the countertop to mix them together.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I had gotten this commercial kitchen right outside of Atlanta. I rented space. It was by far the cheapest option. I researched all these different commercial kitchens and this was really, really cheap. I mean, I think across the first six months of manufacturing the product, I probably only spent $200 on the kitchen.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, when he says, let's do this, it means I have to fill out the paperwork to get into Whole Foods and then they place their first PO three months later. And that PO is something like two cases of muffin mix, which would be 12 units.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I baked up some muffins for him. I brought him a bag of mix. It was just five minutes from my house, went in there. And I remember being so nervous to show him the muffins and see what he thought of them. And to my, I don't know why I was surprised, but to my surprise, he said, this mix made these muffins. I was like, yeah. It's like, they're really good. And we sell a lot of almond flour. Let's do this.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had actually developed the packaging. It was basically this label that you could print off with a printer. And it was laser cut and you could then take it off and put it on a clear package. So, I had sourced the packaging. And so all I needed to do was print it off my printer.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I never knew when I got it right. It was a complete accident that I actually took the product into stores. I was more trying to investigate what the timeline was and how you actually got into Whole Foods. And I called up my local Whole Foods store and asked them, I said, okay, how do you get into Whole Foods? And he said, well, you come down here and talk to me. What product are you developing? And I told him I was developing an almond flour baking mix. And he said, well, just come down here and show it to me. Are you available on Wednesday?”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I thought of this idea, I think I actually first worked on the products. The products came before the brand name. At first, I wanted to name it simple foods. And I went out and searched for the domain name for that, and it was $3,000, and I couldn't afford that. So I was like, okay, what's better than simple foods? And came up with simple mills. And the domain name for that was $12.99. Perfect. So I decided that was my winner. Yeah, which is such a much better than simple foods.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I tried to start in the easiest way possible, and I thought that muffins were a good place for that because it was easier to create delicious food in that space. I really thought about like Simho Mills is like this equation of making it convenient, but also it needs to taste really good. So it couldn't just be this product that tasted good for fill in the blank, good for paleo, good for gluten-free. It needed to be something that tasted good.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I started out by trying to make bread mixes, which then quickly morphed into making muffin mixes. So our first three muffin mixes that I worked on were chocolate muffin mix, actually blueberry muffin mix, and our banana muffin mix.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there were some bloggers out there who had started working on some recipes in this space. Where I would go out and try the recipes, and then I'd just kind of play around and modify and figure out different ways of or use different ingredients. I mean, there were at least a couple bloggers out there that I could draw inspiration from.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, this is basically primarily weekends and Friday nights. I stopped traveling quite as much on the weekends during that time because I just wanted to be at home working on this”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, I was not a baker by any means. My sister, in fact, was ironically the baker of the family. Actually, it played to my advantage because I came in with Jessica naive view on how you bake something. And so I would just put these things together and see if they worked versus saying, you can't make a baked good out of it.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like in hindsight, it was shocking to me what little market research I did. I think the one piece of market research that I did do is I watched the turns of almond flour at my local Whole Food store. So I watched that it was almost always sold out. And so I could tell people who are buying it. But part of my theory was that I was building something for an audience that wasn't there yet. And so it didn't really matter to me that much what the data said.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would think as a management consultant that I would have done more research than I did? I would have thought you would have done more.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I was just going to the grocery store and buying bags of those flowers, but some of these ingredients weren't even readily available. So you talk about like coconut sugar. Like I'm having to buy that off the internet”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I figured that people needed breads to go with their food. Like, people love bread, right? Yeah. It's still to this day one of my favorite foods. And so part of the question was how do you just make it out of things that people should be eating more of? So less of tons of carbohydrates, more of things that have nutrition like almonds or coconut flour, which has a lot of fiber. And so I started playing with those flowers. Now, this is 2012. Those flowers are just beginning to hit the market. Right. And so I was playing with these ingredients that were kind of new and different.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I probably had 10 different ideas on that list. And Simple Mills partly came out of this idea of almost like a meal kick company that would make it easier to eat real food. And so one of the meal kits could be like a sauce that goes on salmon. So then it's a lot easier to buy salmon and figure out how to cook it. Another one of the meal kits would be maybe like a fecca bread. So that got me playing, and the baking space I'm playing with breads and muffins. And I realized that that was a space where it would be, I guess, a lower barrier to start like when you're working with sauces, that's pretty hard to make them shelf stable. And so it was a place where I felt like I could start. I should also add that at the same time, I was applying for business school”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I remember coming home from the client one day and just sitting on my patio that afternoon and just brainstorming different ways that I could help change what people are eating. Because part of the problem is it's figuring out how to eat better. Yeah. It's something it's not necessarily convenient and easy, and it's hard to make it taste good. And so I just wanted to figure out how to make it easier for people.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, not at all. I think it was a little bit bored. And then around the same time as when I decided to try cleaning up my diet. And so I started thinking about going and getting my master's in public health simultaneously started thinking about how I could help change what people were eating from a business perspective.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is yeah, and I felt like I had so much more energy. And if I would go back and I would put the sugar back in or put the processed food back in, I could tell the difference. And I just, I couldn't believe that food could have that kind of impact.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so to my shock and awe, everything changed. All of these kind of things that I'd struggled with for years, I no longer had to deal with. Like I at one point looked up and my Zertec had expired, which had never happened before.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. It was actually pretty difficult in those days to figure out what you could eat. Like, I actually have this memory of I went out of town at one point. I was trying to figure out what I could eat in the grocery store. And I wandered up and down the aisles for, I think probably 30 minutes. And all I walked out of the store with was just an avocado. And then I sat down at a table and I ate an avocado with a spoon. But I mean, over time, I figured out what I could eat. And so I would develop these recipes. Like I came up with this crepes recipe where I would use coconut flour and eggs. Or I would just try to get a lot more vegetables and meat than I historically eaten and definitely more cooking for myself than I'd historically done.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it really wasn't great. I mean, I was exhausted. I didn't feel like I was 22 years old. And I just really looked at it and thought 22 year olds shouldn't feel this way And I had another friend who just told me, you know, maybe you should take a look at your diet and see what happens if you change your diet. This was something that I'd never really been exposed to before, this idea that the food that we eat, like growing up, I was taught that food affects your waistline and it affects diabetes. But we didn't talk about so many other things that it could affect. Back in 2012, which is when I really had this realization paleo was just like in its in a very nascent form. There were just like these fringe bloggers out there. And so I just decided I was going to go paleo for a couple weeks. And just to see if that would change things.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I was eating a lot of pasta, a lot of bread, a lot of dairy. I remember having like burrata for lunch. There was a point actually on one of the client projects where I just literally had baked brie for dinner.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Steal them off the table. Like, you're not supposed to give them to a child who's unsupervised, but sometimes the child ticks it and runs”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The weekends where I wasn't going to production runs, I was doing demos in the stores. And so my rule of thumb was if it was a three-hour demo, I needed to bake for three hours in order to make enough muffins for the demo.”
2021-02-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Simple Mills: Katlin Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT