YouSaid · the spoken record

Pete Maldonado

lines on the record: 117
first: 2023-01-30
most recent: 2023-01-30
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

“What I would say is both for Shudi and I come from immigrant families. And just growing up watching my grandmother working two to three different jobs, raising six kids on her own, unable to speak English really well, but it was just, she just did it. And then my dad had that exact same mentality. It's just the mindset that he has always, always had and really instilled in me. That's what I've seen growing up. Rashid comes from very similar background. I think the two of us really have this scrappy, resourceful mentality and extremely resilient. Like it does not matter if you tell, if we set our minds to something, we will make it happen. And that's just how we've always been.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would say it's a little bit of both, but I think Pete and I are really good at is taking luck and capitalizing on it, right? There's kind of a burden hand opportunity and there's a few different approaches you could take. And I think, you know, we were fortunate to get that call from Trader Joe's, but we were also able to leverage our skill in what we thought the one in the business to do to capitalize on that opportunity.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think we'll have a feeling when we may need help and raise our hands, and that may drive it. But I think, you know, we've got a good five to seven years to continue to build towards that billion dollars. Like at the end of the day, innovation go two ways, right? It can either be really bad or be really good. And that's why we're patient about what we bring to market. There's a lot of stuff that we're working on right now and we have a lot of good things underway, but we can grow with our existing line. We don't need to launch more products to grow, at least in the next two years.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, we had opportunities for minority stakes, majority stakes, or we could have sold the whole company and we were not excited about that whatsoever. Like we have so much work to do and things that we know that we can accomplish on our own. But we do also realize and we recognize that we've never built a company this big before. We'll be the first ones to raise our hands and kind of. And so, what we wanted to be able to do was learn from somebody else's scar tissue. And I think that is so valuable. That's worth more than any amount of money. So it's just been an absolute game changer and they totally leveled up the business since they joined.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say more importantly than the cash because we didn't do the raise because the company needed cash, right? We needed what we were doing is we were trying to align ourselves with very, very smart people. We were interviewing investors to see who's going to bring the most value.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I do think I would say my approach isn't to slow things down, but I think I can refine sometimes Pete's ideas, but I think collectively we both are able to pour fuel on the fire, right? Like if we want to get something done, we can execute and move quickly, but also do so diligently. Like it's tough to do both.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Truck barreling down the road. I'm the guy with my foot pinned on the gas. Rashid's actually steering the truck, and he set up the guardrails to make sure we don't fly off the highway. And we're just going faster and faster and faster right now.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I were like, we're so aware that we want to grow the team the right way and we never want a situation where we kind of grew too fast. And I think it's also the tension between P&I as far as like our measured risk on how we want to do. And I think we found a happy meeting. But like people is one thing where we're very deliberate about who we bring in where we want to make sure that they meet our core values, but also that there's longevity. And it's not something where it would require us to pull back.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I mean, we have now three separate manufacturing facilities and three packaging lines running simultaneously. And we went ahead and ordered six more. So next year we may have up to five facilities running jobs to be able to keep up with demand. It just took time, right? At the end of the day, like we didn't want to flip a switch and not have faith in the new manufacturing partners to be able to produce the exact same product. And so it just it took time to get them to stand up. But now we're in a lot better shape.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Opening his doors back up, allowing more people to come into the stores. We saw all of that demand come back and then some. It things just blew up, like the brand just kept getting bigger and bigger and faster than we ever imagined. And we hit a production capacity with our co-packer.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we saw that massive spike that you mentioned. Then the rug got pulled out from underneath us, you know, because we're very, we're impulse. We're an impulse purchase, right? Like you're at all these registers at all these different retailers. And if you suddenly see a huge drop 90% overnight in foot traffic, that hurts. And so your product's going to stop moving on top of that not being an essential item or not the paper towel or toilet paper or whatever other items. We're just a snack. The distributors themselves were not even saving room on the trucks for products like ours. So they were either just sitting in their warehouses, not making it to the store, or they just stopped ordering. And I think as soon as everything came back online in terms of like distributors having more of that capacity and other retailers.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think also there's one stat, like with one of our retailers, we were bringing 40. New folks to the jerky set. So people eat chomps not because it's a jerky product, it's just a better for you snacking option.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All of it, all of it. We've got mommies. We've got, you know, it's just pretty wild. And we didn't really set out to build the business that way, but I feel like the way that we started within these niche diet tribes very early on, those were all very heavily female focused. But then also as an e-commerce brand in general, like we built the brand on social media. It was all free for us back, you know, back when we did it.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, very different. And here's a fun fact, actually. So, our core consumer is over 70% female. If you think about that jerky or meat snacks category, how it's sold”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We would get comments like that, but then we would just be like, have you looked at our growth? I mean, you can't argue with numbers, right? And that's just our growth was very strong. And it was all very concentrated within this core product line. We get comments every so often, but it's like, you know, I think we've kind of proved that wrong at this point. We're going to be exceeding the, we have exceeded that nine figure range of revenue.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like we're starting it to a little bit more as we get into broader retail exposure, but our core, you know, Jacqueline's since they're not in Trader Joe's, right? They're not in Whole Foods. They're not in sprouts. And so that's where it's like, you know, we wanted to make sure we're priced right so the consumer will not like bulk on it, but like we're price, we're lying priced with all the other competitors in the space.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, if you look at the category in general, right? You have Slim Jims, you have Jack L But the majority of the jerky category is in C store convenience, right? Gas station and chomps were not playing in that space right now. And so a lot of the times, like we're not necessarily going head to head with them.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have no idea what that means, or why it would be that way, but it was something strict. Something a little shady going on. And I think, you know, I think customers caught on to that. And I feel like that's, and we're very selective too. Like we will go through 10 different flavor profiles before we actually launch something. And even today, we only have nine flavors. So you got to imagine those types of bigger companies, you know, they overinnovate. They throw as many different skews out there. They test and see what's going to work. But they do it when it's out in the marketplace. You know, anytime we ever launch a product now, we spend a lot more time and there's a lot more feedback coming in.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, first off, I think a lot of it is people are seeing through some of that greenwashing too. So they're going for specific claims, right? Just the check boxes The customers are so educated nowadays. They know how to relabels. They know how to read ingredients lists. And so you might have something on there trying to claim certain things. So for instance, there was a product out there that was, this is how it read, 100% beef grass fed, right? So you change the order. So our label says 100% grass fed beef. That's the right way to say it. They said a 100% beef grass-fed.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, even when those big brands came out with grass fed organic, jerky products like yours, competing products, it would be like, I don't know, if, I don't know, Coca-Cola came out with a kombucha, people would be like, I'm going to stick with my kombucha brand.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, for sure. It did. But I think what happens is the customers that were buying those products, they know those brands and they're not interested in those brands. It doesn't matter if they're selling something that's comparable. They know what that it's more of it would almost be like selling out, right?”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we hire this marketing person to kind of really professionalize the brand. And I think one of the big things we did in 2018 was we had a packaging refresh where the brand chomp says, as you see the brand today, that's what kind of came out of that process. And I think that was a big milestone in our growth because it allowed chomps to. Stand out on the shelf compared to kind of all the other brands out there that are kind of the, we say the sea of sameness.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But we were still growing e commerce, right? So that's where it's like we were focusing on e commerce, Amazon, and Trader Joe's. And both were just, I mean, Trader Joe's every time we launched another SKU, the business would almost double.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and we just didn't intuitively felt wrong. It felt like what we should be doing is treat Trader Joe's the absolute best that we ever could be the best possible vendor that we could. And that's exactly what we did. And in hindsight, it was the absolute right thing to do”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By the way, that is, it was totally contrarian to what all of the other people in the industry even advisors that were working with us, they were pushing us to do the exact same thing and saying use this as a springboard. This is your chance. Use this momentum”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, like, from my perspective, again, we were profitable, but we were profitable because the business was lean, right? Pete and I weren't really drawing. We didn't really have infrastructure. So when we got Trader Joe's, Pete and I made the decision. That we were going to be the best Trader Joe's partner. We weren't going to leverage all those folks seeing it to try to get into the other retailers.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like all the things from an operations perspective, accounting finance, I still was managing all that, right? It's like I was doing it behind the scenes and sometimes Pete didn't fully understand all the work that went into it. And I think unless you live in the world of operations, like there's just a lot of stuff that needs to happen for it to run the right way and not hearing anything means you're doing a good job, right? But it was just, there was tension, there was stress, and it put a lot of pressure on our relationship.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I would say, I don't think Pete and I communicated. We were both super competitive, even with each other, and we always wanted to win. So even if it was like RDA versus his idea. And so I think fast forward, we now know how we're wired, how we tick, we know kind of how to work. Maybe I think right now we're working together. It doesn't mean like it's all Kumbaya that we still will, we need the tension because I think that's what makes the business special because we have such differing perspectives when it comes to how things should be and it allows us to challenge each other the right way. But it just created a lot of stress. But in my mind too.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would get so mad because I'm like, he's freaking right. And I get mad at myself and mad at him, and it would just like super frustrating. But yeah.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I would say it was that was probably the source of most of our any contention back then. I think the way I felt about it was that I was over here working on things and then he would come and his consult, he's a consultant. So what he does, he walks in and he spots issues and points them out to people and tells you what to do to fix them, right? And so I'm over here like, what the hell? Like I'm over here busting my butt and then you come in and you're picking apart my work. Why don't you quit your job and work with me? It would be so much more efficient so I don't go down some path and have to like unravel everything I just did. And so like that was this like ongoing. And by the way, the things he would point out were like.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and Trader Joe's, they gave us some projections. They thought that we were going to do, and they kind of let us know their forecast. And we far exceeded the projections. I think by five times. When it was just validating for us, and then the craziest thing was to think that there's just now millions of new people all over the country.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I still remember we were negotiating the terms. He's like, no, no, I need to make sure you guys have a personal guarantee on this. I get it. So, I mean, it was a very smart decision when we look back, right? Given that we didn't have to give up equity, it was a debt only. But there was risk in it. So we were always very transparent about the risk, but also say like, you got to trust in Pete and I, we can execute it. And we did.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was all friends and family. Rashid's family's brother, his dad went hard. They actually helped us out big time. But then.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's the fun part. So we were like, all right, well, what are we going to do here? Like, we have no time to go to some institutional investor or. Anybody else, like, what are we going to do? So we both just decided let's just call everybody we know. And so we actually thought of like what the terms would look like that we would offer people. And we were going to do like a short-term debt with a simple interest rate. I think it was a 10% interest rate. We would pay it back within, I want to say it was nine months, Rashid. Is that what it was? I think the first one. And we raised money from probably eight different investors that put up between $100 to $200, a little more. Some of them had a little more.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm thinking, oh shit, like how this is not what we discuss. This is way more than what we discussed. And so my phone rings its pee and he's like, you see in this? I was like, yep, Pete, this is a lot more than what he's like, yeah, yeah. And so I was like, give me a second. So I go in my room, I build my spreadsheet. I'm calculating the total, like what does it actually look like? So I'm like, Pete, we need, I don't know, it's like 1. something million to be able to fund this. And so, in this situation, we needed the cash.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's funny. So, first of all, Kevin told us no, probably half a dozen times, but I just kept asking it in a different way where it's funny, like once we got through it and got the multiple, like, I remember I was talking to him and he's like, Rashid, I don't know how you convinced me to do this. It was a lot. But no, it's the same partner was able to scale with us. So getting him to at least commit and getting the supply plan in place, like that was a feat. Before we could even do that, we then had to figure out like how are we going to get the money to even fill this PO, right? Because this was an e-commerce, right? We didn't have that amount of cash. So I think we got the PO on a Friday. We're looking at this and we're like,”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is 1.1 million sticks. And when we saw that first PO, like that's where I was like, this is it, this is what's going to put us on the radar. It's going to change everything. And it was larger than the previous year altogether in a single PO.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just cut in it. I mean, it would have been a huge undertaking for us So it was actually an interesting conversation because it ended up where she was able to bring in a certain percentage, like I think it was 5% of the SKUs that she brings in each year. She could do branded. And she said, I would do this for you. But she wanted to make sure that we had all of our ducks in a row. We can handle all the scale. We could finance it, all of those things. And so, of course, I'm a sales guy and I'm like, yeah, of course, we could do all of that. When their actual first POs came in, that was game changer.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And so I basically kind of politely said we just can't. And in hindsight, if I had known the type of volume that they could.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, they wanted to do that. That's just how they work. I mean, essentially the conversation went, you know, we would love to bring in the product. It needs to be under the private, the Trader Joe's label. We just weren't set up to do that at all. And being able to manage two different brands essentially through her co-packer, like he was already having a hard time dealing with our scale. And then now running another separate brand just not to get too into the weeds on how it works, but the USDA really makes it difficult when you're making any kind of changes to your packaging. So for us to start from scratch on creating all new packaging for Trader Joe's was not something that we could handle at the time.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I was down here in Florida actually walking my English bulldog, taking her for a walk, and I get a call on my cell phone one day. And it's a very high up person at Trader Joe's that had been there for a long time, told me that her daughter had been eating chomps and started bringing the product home. And the family liked the product. And they wanted to find out about putting the product into the stores. Wow. Yeah, honestly, I thought I was being punked and it must have been like a prank call, but it turned out she was legit”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I think at that point was where I was like, I'm in, I'm sold. I'm going all in. And so I was kind of just done. Like I saw that, you know, writing on the wall at this, this thing could get huge if we just dedicate our time to it.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was, and I like. My first kid in like 2015. And so my wife wasn't working. It was just me. So like, again, similar situation where it's like I had income. The business wasn't at a scale where we could draw anything and we needed the cash to continue to grow it. So it just, it wasn't the right time. And we talk about the dynamic of P&I, a lot of the tension was around when we both would go full time.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Trade shows or see us in Chicago at the CrossFit, one of the CrossFit gyms. And we would every time they'd see us, they'd be like, you guys full time yet? Are you full time yet? And they would kind of push us because they both dove in right away going full time and building the business. And we all know where that ended up, right? Yeah.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And they had a little bit of a different go-to-market strategy despite that they started with eComm as well. But they also went very hard in terms of CrossFit with like all the attending a bunch of the shows. But Rashid and I couldn't do that. This was a side gig for us. It's actually funny. We're buddies with Peter and Jared, the founders. Of our Xbar, and they would see us at various shows or wherever, or see us in Chicago.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say the gross margin is an expensive product to make, but our business, like Pete and I weren't drawing a salary and we didn't really have any costs. But this isn't like the cosmetics space where it's these crazy 50, 60, 70, 80% gross margin product. It was kind of within that 30 to 40 percent level. So, right? So, at the end of the day, we were profitable because the business was very lean.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we had a few domestic partners, but we actually started having some quality challenges because I think the way that they process it and measure the lean point, they call it core drilling where they'll drill and measure and get an average versus all other places in the world, they actually will x-ray every single individual box and it's more automated. The other thing was, like you mentioned before, there wasn't a ton of supply. So that's where we started to figure out are there other opportunities for grass-fed globally. And we ended up landing on a partner in Australia, in both Melbourne, Australia, and Tasmania.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's like we stumbled on a lot of these things where it's like, wow, it's the perfect product, but it also, I think the uncrazy situation put pressure on the business when we realized we had to solve this problem, that we couldn't fill it ourselves, right? And so that's where we kind of aligned with a third party to do the fulfillment that integrated with Shopify. And it kind of made the business, again, a bit more streamlined where we realized that it was a problem we had to solve.”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the beef company And so once we got the product, like the clock was on, and we need to make sure we sold through it to generate the cash to pay off the invoice when it's due. And the other thing is the blessing, we only did e-commerce. It was direct to consumer, and all of those transactions were credit cards. So we got the money up front. That's why we liked e-commerce. I mean, first is because it was a side thing for P&I. It didn't require you to be on nine to five. You can kind of do it on off hours, but also we got paid up front, the product itself, the chomps tick. It's ideal for shipping. It's very...”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I would say it was profitable, and I think one of the things as a consultant what I realized was the value and understanding of cash flow. And so we got terms with our co-packer and with our protein supplier. And so effectively, the goal was all...”
2023-01-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT