米国菓子Rip Vanの立ち上げストーリー
Rip Vanというお菓子をご存知でしょうか？
今ではこちらのスターバックスやコストコでも見かけるワッフルのお菓子で、弊社Teatisでも取り扱っており激旨だったので調べてみたところ、Founderが在学中に起業！
夢のあるストーリだったので共有したくNoteを書きます。
以下Rip Vanの創業者がプレゼンしていた際に使用していた会社年表です。
2010年にキックスターターで創業してから、約12年でここまで全米に広がっており、更に素晴らしいのは、一過性のブームでなく、本気でOREOのカテゴリーシェアを取りにいってるところです。売上は（おそらく）$30M/年に届かないくらいだと推察してます。
是非Videoを観てほしいですが、1時間と長いので気になった箇所を以下ハイライトします
ヨーグルトのChobaniに触発されて、オランダのワッフルをアメリカで売ったら良いんではと、Brown大学内でスモールに始める。Family Friend Roundで＄200k集めて試しに1年起業。バカ売れ
マッキンゼーのオランダ支店にインターンしていた時に、イタリアに旅行。暇すぎて本をひたすら読んでいた。「自分が本当に何にパッションが持てるか」を探すことの重要性をプレゼン中に何度も説く
何十ケースも買ってくれるお客さんがいて、聞いてみると会社のランチ後に食べてるとのこと。シリコンバレーのテックカンパニーがちょうどオヤツを無料で提供し始めてた頃で、80社にセールス行脚。1社だけSquareが買ってくれて、そこからグーグルとかPeet's Coffeeに広まっていった
創業7年目に$2Mで工場立ち上げ、スターバックスからの注文を捌くだけで一杯一杯。売るたびにロスが発生する状況だった。その翌年には$15Mで工場立ち上げ、一気にSprouts、コストコ、Amazonで拡大！
ちなみに本文とあまり関係ないですが、「夢はボトルの中に」というHonest Teaの創業ストーリーも面白いです。
段々と皆んながプレゼンを見れば良いのでは？という気持ちになってきたのでので。。。以下書き起こし全文です！ドン。個人的に気になった箇所を太字にしておきました。
では。
Hello, nice to meet you all. It's nice to be back at Brown.
I actually, freshman year, lived in this part of campus.
I remember this area really well. I actually used to study in Smitty
I used to climb through the window on the weekends, kind of a little secret at the time. Like no one was inside, but you could get in through the windows, so you had the top room to yourself.
So some great memories. One of my best friends lived in Andrew. He lived with this boxer guy got in fights though. So I had an amazing time at Brown and it's so nice to be back. And, you know, this is really about you guys.
You know, I feel so grateful to have gone here. I was mostly on scholarship at Brown,
and I had an amazing time, and I hope you are as well. But really, I'm here today to be of service to all of you, and help you guys in any way during this talk.
And so, I think my experience might interest for different reasons, but ultimately, I think there's something deeper here that I can potentially share with you and hopefully it might spark some further interest, and you'll have some follow-up questions. As Danny mentioned, the presentation will be pretty short, pretty precise and concise, and then really let's go into questions. And guys, take this time to really take a chunk out of my leg, and just ask anything, anything that comes to mind.
I'm all yours. So you know, I'm a little bit of a thinker, kind of existential,
and so you'll probably think about like, why did this guy start making wafels,
and we'll get to that in a second. But if you look at this over here,
this applies to all of you, right? So y'all went to school, maybe some of you are brilliant, and some of you didn't until Brown. But the point is that no matter whether you grew up in Namibia or you know Long Island and you're all here right now in college, right, at Brown.
And so the question really is is what do you want to do at Brown? How do you want to spend your four years, and what do you want to do afterwards? And some of you are at the tail end of this and some of you are just starting and some of you are in between.
But I think this is something I actually really started asking myself as a kid actually kind of in primary school. And my parents are physicists, so they were like, you have to really study.
So I basically took the science track in middle and high school and stopped doing anything creative, but as a kid as a super kind of curious, creative kid. I loved to make things, like making remote-controlled cars to pretty artistic as well. But I kind of put the lid on that and then really only started to realize that I can kind of get back in touch with my childhood passions postcollege through entrepreneurship.
So really this is an opportunity to explore how my path might be, A, relatable but B, provide you with a stepping stone to determine what you actually want to do after college.
So now entrepreneurship's a lot bigger, and there's a lot of investment in food, especially consumer packaged goods. There have been a lot of success stories of companies being sold for a lot of money, companies having grown really quickly, some of them with tech multiples, and it's a pretty sexy space to be in. But when I started, no one wanted to invest in food.
Food wasn't sexy. And I very much took my own path. My parents, I was very fortunate, are really passionate about science, and I saw the sparkle in their eye ever since I was a kid. And they're pretty simple people, but they're insanely passionate about what they did and what they're doing.
And so I thought, well, if I can find that for myself, that would be really awesome. And so what I did was I looked at college as really an opportunity to eliminate things that I thought I was interested in but wasn't really sure whether I was really passionate about and could do afterwards. And I think coming from an academic background, I was thinking very much inside of the box.
So if you look at freshman year, I was thinking about studying economics, engineering. I took an intro to neuroscience. I was like, holy shit, this is epic.
Maybe I want to become a surgeon, a neurosurgeon. And then I, first summer--it's not on here, but I actually shadowed a doctor, a surgeon in India. I'm half Indian. My mom's Indian, so our family actually sponsors a hospital there. And so I spent a month almost fainting and fainting a few times.
It's like, that's not for me. And so I started to realize that I didn't want to do something academic. I didn't really see myself becoming a professor. I really tried to become passionate about the things that I liked. I was generally pretty good at math and ended up doing applied math because it kind of was the easiest thing for me, but I realized that my education was a tool for what I would do afterwards. I didn't want to do a PhD in molecular biology. I actually envied people that did at the time because I was like, holy F, like I wish I was that person, but I didn't really know what I wanted to do and it really, really was irritating. It was kind of an itch you couldn't scratch. And so I was fortunate enough to, sophomore summer, get an internship at McKinsey in Amsterdam. I kind of used the whole Ivy League card, like a school in the US. I know I'm very young, but you should give me a shot. And so I was fortunate to do an internship there, and it went really well. They wanted me back. And then junior year came back, and by then a bunch of things were happening in parallel. So freshman year I brought these waffles over from Holland, stroopwafels. Anyone doesn't know what one is? You don't know?
AUDIENCE: I thought you said you do know.
ABHISHEK PRUISKEN: Where are the-- do we have some boxes?
Oh wow, they're gone. Great. That's a good thing. So in Holland where I grew up, 320 million of these are consumed. We only have 16 million people. That's 20 per person per year.
[LAUGHTER] That is a shitload of these waffles. And so I thought, well, there's Oreo in the US.
There's the chocolate-chip cookie and Chips Ahoy being a dominant force, but this product hadn't really entered the US market. At least no one had done it successfully.
So I was really inspired by Chobani, the story of this Turkish guy who brought over Mediterranean yogurt and positioned it in an American way that was sexy and irrelevant, and that took off. So I wasn't thinking about that at the time, but I brought stroopwafels from back home, gave them to my friends, and they absolutely loved them. And so fast forwarding to sophomore summer after my McKinsey internship, I actually went to Italy. And I studied Italian for fun, worked out a bar, paid for my rent that way. And I started reading-- I was really, really bored-- started reading about entrepreneurship.
Danny, I think this was right before I took your class. That's kind of the spark that wanted me to kind of take your class. But essentially I started reading about Richard Branson, all these other entrepreneurs, and I had this aha moment. I was like, holy shit. I can actually make something, and if we can sell it for profit, I can use that profit to make more things. And as a kid I loved making things, so I found my passion. I wanted to be an entrepreneur. So I had this moment in Italy in this sleepy village. And I was like, there's no looking back.
But I didn't have the balls at the time, so I was like, well--I did this McKinsey thing post-financial-crisis. Maybe I want to do something in finance. I was an absolute idiot at the time. But I was like, OK, well, let me see at least what finance is like. So I was working at Alvarez & Marsal. It's a restructuring firm, and they were doing the restructuring at Lehman Brothers at the time in London. I was a part of that team, amazing experience. Got an offer from there as well. But came back and was like, you know what? Either I actually try and do something with this-- so I had in the meantime set up a stand on campus, sold the product. And you guys can ask me more about this stuff, but people seemed to like it. I mean, you guys will eat anything. That's the reality, right?
But I was convinced that, you know what?
I'm going to give up these job offers. I have about $20,000 of savings from internships and whatnot. I can survive for a year. And let's see. Let me try and do this. And then I didn't look back. And basically I had this strategy where I was like, OK, I have a year. I need to get the business to a point where I can get some funding or I'm able to make enough revenue to continue on. But I want to give this a shot.
So this is what happened afterwards. Hello. OK. So had a brief summary of this, and I'll close up and you guys can ask questions. So when I graduated-- you can imagine being in Providence over the summer. No one's there. And I bought an industrial waffle iron from Holland. I roomed with a friend of mine who's two years younger than me. So we paid for the lease that summer, and so I basically stayed in that apartment.
And I was like, OK, we need to somehow start this. I need some money to make more of them, buy more of the equipment, buy more of the ingredients. And so at that time I had partnered with an engineering professor at Brown and his kind of team of students to make an automated caramel dispenser, which kind of is like a big bottleneck in the production process. So with that, I was able to produce thousands of units a week versus a couple hundred units a week. So I was able to, if I found a little spot, a little commercial kitchen, I was able to produce enough of the product and sell them to local stores and on campus. So I raised $23,000 on Kickstarter. I hope you haven't seen my Kickstarter video because it's really embarrassing.
But that basically kept me going until December, January.
And in 2011 I ran out of that $23,000. I had some data from the Blue Room and some other places that Rip Van Wafels is selling really well. We're actually the high-selling snack. And Chobani was the best-selling item outside of beverages, and we're number two. So that was really compelling. So at least I had a case study.
We didn't have any capital. Still early days in terms of scaling, so I really had to put a business plan together, raise some capital to then scale. And so at the time I met Marco, my co-founder, who was still a junior in college.
And so since he was still a college student we could apply for the Brown business-plan competition. So it wasn't totally fair because we, I guess, had a head start, but that worked to our advantage and we were able to win the business-plan competition.
We, I think, won-- it was a $50,000 prize at the time, but most of it wasn't cash.
So I think we ended up with, like, $15,000. And so we used that to actually design the initial packaging, find a co-packer, and run an additional production run. And then we were able to raise some capital from family and friends. We actually ran on that capital for two years selling
to local universities. And then after that we-- well, there were many low points in this startup, but one of them was we were kind of hanging on a string.
We had done around $200,000 in revenue, which is very little. And we were trying to figure out, OK, well, we don't have a distributor. We're selling to these colleges. We're not sure whether we have the right pack size or the right product format. How do we scale this business without deluding ourselves out of the company? Because when you take on capital you have to give up equity, especially at that stage.
And so what we realized was that one of our customers was a biotech company actually in Boston through a distributor we just started working with. And they were buying five cases of Rip Van Wafels a week. And we called them up.
We're like, why the hell are you buying so many Rip Van Wafels? And they said, well, it's the perfect treat in the midafternoon. And we were like, huh, so maybe this will also work in Silicon Valley because a lot of tech companies, after Google, started to basically give snacks for free to their employees.
And so what I did was my little brother, the smarter of us two, was an undergrad at Stanford, and I basically crashed on his couch for a month. And we basically, kind of before the $900,000 capital raise,
I visited 80 tech companies door to door and finally got into Square.
And that actually wasn't a cold call. It was a friend of mine who was a year junior to me at Brown who was like the hundredth employee at Square at the time. He was like, yeah, come visit me. Here's the food person. They start ordering. Literally within a couple of weeks they were ordering like 20 cases a week.
And so then they introduced us to their distributor that then brought our product into some other tech companies, and then with that distributor on board were able to reach a lot more of their customers. And then literally we'd made $200,000 over a couple of months. And we were like, wow, this is really working. And so we had a more robust business plan, a plan to scale the business.
And at that time we had raised around $900,000 from a bunch of angels, like $20,000 to the occasional $100,000 check. It was really hard to raise this, but we did it.
And then that's when we kind of used that success story to get into Pete's. We got into Google. So we were moving 20,000, 30,000 units per month of our product. And then the following year we got into Whole Foods.
We go into more tech companies. And then beginning of 2016 we got into 12,000 Starbucks nationwide. And then we're like, holy shit. This is our moment, right?
We've made it. So we're like, everything's going to be fine.
We're going to set up our own factory. We're going to go gangbusters. We hire all the wrong people. The factory buy turns out to be a lemon. It doesn't work. The moment we place the factory in the facility and essentially started operating, the entire thing catches on fire. We lose a million dollars because our margins go to shit.
We're losing on every single unit we're selling. So we basically lost, I think at one point, $1.5 million in a month, which we miraculously recovered from because right before that we raised $2 million.
So anyways, so basically during that time we were doing around $4 million in sales. There's a lot of demand but we can't fulfill it. We can barely fulfill Starbucks.
And so luckily with a long stream of events, our previous co-packer, they can't set up a production line, a larger one, because they wanted to expand because we had an exclusivity to all of North America for stroopwafel production lines with this manufacturer that kind of screwed us I guess.
So we negotiated a really good deal with them to actually go back to them and essentially at the same cost as if we set our own production line. And so now we have 4.5 million units per month of capacity. We just got into Costco in the Bay Area, and we're about to fly again.
So that's pretty much that. There's a lot of innovation that took place during that time.
And I think I got a lot of clarity and so did Marco about what we wanted to do. And I think this is really important because in the beginning it's about survival. Can an idea work or can you get a certain job or can you get into a certain school? But then you kind of start thinking about, well, why?
Why does it matter? And so I think having gone through so many ups and downs over the last almost a decade. I realize that I'm going to die anyway, and if I'm not doing something that's impactful to other people, then I might be enjoying it but it's kind of like mental masturbation.
So I was like, well, if we can, through our products, have a little bit of an impact in some way, then I think we can feel better about what we're doing.
And if we can do that beyond the waffle-- with the waffle and beyond the waffle, that would be really cool. And so I think that's when kind of our mission really became clear beyond kind of making Rip Van Wafels the next Oreo in the US, or Chobani. And the mission was to essentially improve people's lives by creating better convenient foods.
And we put our money where our mouth is because we actually started to reinvent the waffle every two years. So when we started the company this product had 14 grams of sugar.
Now it has eight to nine, and beginning of next year it'll only have three grams of sugar.
And we've also developed a protein version which has better nutritionals than a KIND bar and a Clif Bar. That's launching beginning of next year. We're launching one-gram-sugar minis. And then we're actually going beyond. So you can take the same technology and create a healthier Pop-Tart, right, and so on.
So next year is actually really exciting from an innovation standpoint. Just took a little while to get there. Now this is my journey, but really it's about you guys. So the question is, how can I help you, with the limited experience I have, to help you figure out what the heck you want to do when you graduate? This is what this conversation is really about. Some of you are interested in entrepreneurship. Some of you are interested in other things. But I think this conversation, questions that will be asked hopefully will kind of spur some thought and help you along the way. Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Thank you. Did you have an advisor starting out, and how important was that if you did? And also if you did, how do you look for advisors or where do you find them?
ABHISHEK PRUISKEN: Specifically for--
AUDIENCE: For like a business-plan-type thing.
ABHISHEK PRUISKEN: Got it. Got it. So actually Danny was the first one to advise me. And he was like, why the hell are you doing this? In his class, part of-- I mean, a lot of you probably know this and you can speak a lot better to this than me-- but part of the class requires you to basically put a business together and essentially test an idea, to some extent. Perhaps it's evolved a little bit since. So he wanted me to think bigger and he wanted me to think--he wanted me to critically think things through, and he basically warned me.
He's like, dude, this is really hard, and you want to make sure that you put yourself in the best
position postcollege. And so I'll answer your question. So I guess he advised me for the first time. But I think I had a gut feeling. So it's kind of very cliche and silly, but I really thought that since this is such a popular product back home and since it's the number-one-sold item in Schiphol, which is our international airport in Amsterdam, this must have legs in the US. And I just love this product so much. I'm not going to listen to anyone. I'm going to see where this goes.
But I think along the way--which was kind of foolhardy because it could have horribly failed, right? So besides Danny giving me some advice, I had Barrett Hazeltine, spoke to him a bunch. I think Barrett Hazeltine's a yes man, and that gives you a lot of self-confidence when everyone around-- she's like, why the F are you making waffles dude because you gave up the job at McKinsey? So Barrett, then there's this other guy called Misha Joukowsky who used to live in Providence and I think now lives in North Carolina-- South Carolina? He's a Brown alum, and he has a family office. He's an investor, and he gave me a bunch of advice.
And then John O'Shea, the chef at Brown, he helped us get into some other colleges. I think that was about it at the time, and it wasn't really until--I think we were doing this in a little bit of a vacuum, and I think that's one of the things that we should have probably done differently is surrounded ourselves with more people that could help us, people that had gone our path or people that have had extensive experience in the industry that we're getting ourselves into. That proved to be very helpful. We just brought on board the ex-CEO of a company called Blue Buffalo, so a pet-food company that just got sold to General Mills for $8 billion.
He's been super helpful. We had the ex-CEO of Clif Bar as an advisor for a long time. She was instrumental. Basically when you have people like that, they're able to prevent you from falling into potholes.
I think also when you're in college, people really are willing to listen to you, and it's amazing how much you actually can learn by reaching out and being a little fearless. And so really use that opportunity. Really use college to kind of reach out to people that you think would never respond, whether it's alumni or not alumni. I think it's a great opportunity because the more of that you have, the better prepared you'll definitely be. And they'll also think more critically and strategically within that domain. They also might be full of crap sometimes, so you really have to think for yourself. Please, mic. By the way, would you guys mind saying your names--
OK my name's Mark Dirksen.
DANNY WARSHAY: --and a little bit about yourself as well?
AUDIENCE: I work here at staff as look over the radiation-safety program. But I had a question about reducing your sugar content from 12 grams down to 3--
ABHISHEK PRUISKEN: 14 down to 3.
AUDIENCE: 14 down to 3, and how are you going to convince your customers that that's a good thing based on so many other companies out there going the other way, promoting more sugar in their products?
Because it just seems like we're in a society where, say, clinicians and pharmaceuticals will say take that lifestyle and we'll give you a pill and you don't have to change it. But you're trying to change a lifestyle by reducing your sugar. So I find that interesting. It seems like it's an uphill battle, but I don't know. that you're--
ABHISHEK PRUISKEN: So I think underlying your question is a very interesting topic of conversation which is how do you decide what to innovate?
I think listening-- and Danny talks about this a lot, but really understanding where the market is going and who your consumer is incredibly important, right?
And I think if you look at who that is for Rip Van Wafels, it's the educated millennial that works in--basically an educated millennial, right?
It's pretty broad. That's kind of the core audience. And if you kind of look at what they care about, right now low sugar is a very hot thing.
So if you look at, for example, a Clif Bar, a Clif Bar has over 20 grams of sugar. But a lot of people don't know that because what they call out is organic and that they're sustained energy.
And so a lot of the product success is based on the positioning of the product.
So if you look at-- there's some really good examples out there.
If you look at Chobani, they promoted the 0% fat at the time, which was a big thing. So our industry is very fatty. But there are a lot of fads and there are a lot of trends, and so if you're able to resonate with those in a way that is authentic where--it's pretty clear that sugar is not good for you. It's actually one of the worse things, especially refined sugar. So if you lower that, that's generally a good thing.
And I think the definition around health and healthy eating isn't defined from first principles. And so the World Health Organization has a different definition. The FDA has a different definition. It's a pretty gray area.
There's certain things with research recently that are pretty clear. So I think one thing that's important to us, irrespective of positioning, is let's try and be honest, but let's also try to be smart and let's try and position ourselves in a way that resonates with what people want. And I think the overlap of the two for an indulgent product like this is sugar.
If she can basically have something that's as indulgent as a Snickers or an Oreo but you're having an order of magnitude less sugar, that's awesome. That's replacing something that's actually not very good for you with something that's less bad for you. So I don't think it's a problem for us. I think it's actually a big strength for our target audience.
But I think more broadly it's about understanding that consumer, understanding what resonates with them, and basically testing that out before you actually go ahead and launch that. That's where kind of the rapid prototyping model is really effective for finding product-market fit, what they call product-market fit. You in the red sweater. What's your name?
AUDIENCE: Hi. My name is Ovia Perez. ABHISHEK PRUISKEN: Nice to meet you. AUDIENCE: Nice to meet you too. And I just want to first thank you
for taking the time out of your day to come here and speak to us. I found what you had to say very inspirational and very insightful, so thank you so much. And so I had--
ABHISHEK PRUISKEN: My pleasure. In fact, actually you should be thanking me because I drove up here, Danny, and actually had two EAs on the phone. And I got a ton of work done because they were basically sending my emails for me, but I could barely see. And I like driving fast but it was raining cats and dogs. But besides that, you don't have to thank me.
So what's a juicy question?
AUDIENCE: So I had two questions for you if that's OK. So the first one would be if you had the opportunity to redo your undergrad years here at Brown, what would you have done differently? And then the second one is I know you've overcome so many obstacles in your career, and I was wondering what's the most important thing you've learned from overcoming those obstacles?
ABHISHEK PRUISKEN: OK, both very hard questions. So I can't speak to the full question, but I'll kind of nibble away at what I can. I would say these four years go by really quickly.
And it's an amazing time to do a lot of different things, but I think being incredibly strategic and incredibly thoughtful about this period where you're--I don't mean to scare you guys away or freak you guys out, but you only have four F-ing years of college, and you better make the most out of it. And you need to understand what that definition is for you, and you need to live up to achieving the goal of that definition. Because if you don't, you're basically pissing your time away.
So I think what's really important strategically is actually take some time and not listen to other people. Just take some time, go to a place that's really boring and just think, read, and reflect. And try and look within and ask yourself, what am I curious about? I think that's super important. So if you do that early on in college, I think that's a huge advantage because you can actually prepare yourself and craft how you allocate your time in college in a way that can prepare you for whatever that goal is.
Now it might end up being that goal isn't ultimately what you want to do. But you're being thoughtful, and I think that's the point because that is a great principle to apply for personal growth.
And so if it's not the thing, ultimately, and that thing might be evolving, or you might be kind of like me. I'm like, I'm an entrepreneur. I'm going to be an entrepreneur for the next 20 years. The point is that seeking process will keep you even keel, and when you look back you'll be like, holy shit, I had an epic time. And at the end of the day, I mean, that's what matters, right? So I think that's one.
I think number two, what have I learned from overcoming obstacles? You know what was really inspiring for me was reading--before Ray Dalio, who's a famous hedge-fund guy, wrote the book called Principles, he actually had a kind of life-philosophy document where he has kind of his principles on life and kind of his principles in business.
And it was a free doc, and I think it's still free, but he's trying to sell his book now. So you can find it online somewhere, but that really helped me think. It gave me a very different perspective of how to think for myself.
Because I think the thing about college and high school and primary school that's really, really bad is that you kind of-- it depends what schooling you've had, but you kind of have to learn by the book, and you're not really thinking critically from first principles in a practical way for yourself.
I think that really helped me do that. So I think overcoming obstacles helped me become more resilient because when you, I guess--I don't work out, but figuratively when you build a muscle, you become better at overcoming obstacles. But I think it taught me that an obstacle is just an obstacle. It's not positive or negative. It's just a thing in your way. And I think the key thing is to understand how you can get around that thing. And we kind of sometimes, when you have failure or setback, feel really bad and our ego gets bruised. But the point is if you can detach yourself from what it is you're confronting and figure out as objectively as possible how you can get around that, that's how you grow.
So I don't know if that helps, but--
AUDIENCE: Yeah, thank you so much.
ABHISHEK PRUISKEN: So yeah, I highly recommend you guys reading this if you haven't already, Ray Dalio's Principles. It's really interesting. You and then you behind.
AUDIENCE: Hi. ABHISHEK PRUISKEN: What's your name?
AUDIENCE: I'm Anya.
ABHISHEK PRUISKEN: Let's get more detailed than that. What year are you?
AUDIENCE: Hi. I'm Anya. I'm a freshman here at Brown.
Thank you for your time.
ABHISHEK PRUISKEN: And where are you from?
AUDIENCE: I'm from the Bay Area, California. I just wanted to ask, so I know you mentioned that you admired how Chobani was able to almost Americanize their yogurt product that had foreign origins.
ABHISHEK PRUISKEN: They're the biggest yogurt company in the country now.
AUDIENCE: So I wanted to ask how initially you figured out how to frame your product in a way that kind of got past the barrier that stroopwafels were relatively unfamiliar to America and convinced people in the US that your product was something that they needed.
ABHISHEK PRUISKEN: Yeah, so that took a while. I think it was when we started to really listen to consumers. So we did a bunch of focus groups. So we created our product. And they were like, oh, maybe we should do this to it or that to it. But we were like, hold on. Let's talk to the people that are eating our product and let's listen to them.
Let's try and infer what they like about it and what they don't like about it. And then let's eliminate the stuff they don't like about it and add the stuff they like about it. And so I think part of that's the actual product itself-- the taste, the texture, the make of it-- but a big part of it also is the packaging. So with a physical products company, if you don't have any money to market, the packaging's the marketing. It's on the front and the back. And so, again, by putting out an idea of the packaging, understanding what the FDA allows you to call out on the front from a health-claims standpoint and then on the back as well, you basically test these things, see what resonates, and then based on what resonates, you make those modifications. So I think once we figured that out, it actually improved sales substantially.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: I'm [? Cherie. ?] I'm a senior from Los Angeles. I was curious to know if you've considered introducing this product back to the Netherlands? How do you think it would do there given that they're familiar with the nature of the product but they might be interested in the other features that seem to be really appealing to the Americans?
ABHISHEK PRUISKEN: Yeah, I think a lot of things that are very successful in the US end up going everywhere. So I think there will be potential for that in the future. I think two things are important.
I think one is focus is really important when you have limited resources and this market is so big, so our major focus is the US. You can grow our business to $50 million plus in sales just focusing on the US, or even double that, and have not even have covered most of the market across different channels. So I think that's kind of the strategic answer. I think that in terms of going abroad, the different markets are different. And I think what's interesting about the Dutch market is this product's very much a commodity. So you could buy a pack of 10 for 0.89 euro.
Well, we sell one for $1.79-- one for here to $1.79. So unless you have a very strong brand and you have a lot of marketing dollars behind your product, even if it's significantly more nutritious, that's a requirement to compete in that market. So I think it would be quite some time before that will happen.
AUDIENCE: Hi, I'm Jasmine, and I'm a freshman here at Brown. So you told me the story of how you went abroad to Italy and then during that time you really got into entrepreneurship. So after coming back to Brown, what did you do while you still had that one last year here at Brown?
ABHISHEK PRUISKEN: I took his lovely class. I highly recommend.
AUDIENCE: Anything besides that? Do you feel like studying here the last year at Brown really helped you pursue your journey in entrepreneurship?
ABHISHEK PRUISKEN: I think entrepreneurship at Brown's gotten a lot better. I think there were a lot fewer people interested in entrepreneurship at that time, which actually was also in some way an advantage because there are more people willing to listen to you. If there are 20 people trying to start a company versus three people trying to start a company, that's an advantage there. But there were less established resources at the university. So I think it was kind of a lone-wolf path.
It was like, OK, I need to figure this out. So I would say not strategically it didn't help at the time
that much. I'd say what really did help, which I think is unique at Brown, is that you have a lot of space and you have a lot of time to do stuff and you have a lot of time to think. And because there's no core curriculum, the flexibility you have here is that much more. So I think it is an amazing test ground to kind of rapidly iterate, make mistakes because you have that time, and the clock's kind of on pause a little bit.
AUDIENCE: So in terms of courses you didn't do really do anything. You just put more effort
ABHISHEK PRUISKEN: Well, I took Danny's class. I took Engine 9.
And then the section of Engine 9, Joukowsky's section was really good. So it was a TA that was really into entrepreneurship just like Danny is and has a decent amount of experience investing in companies. I think that helped a lot. So I did seek out resources on campus at the time. But there was a lot of soul searching as well.
AUDIENCE: OK, thank you.
AUDIENCE: Hi, my name is Jan. I'm a sophomore at Brown, and you talked a little bit about the opportunity that entrepreneurship provides in terms of making a certain profit on this venture and then using that to make an impact somewhere else. You talked a little about the opportunity for impact that this business offers in terms of who knows what else will happen with this.
My question is, when do you think is the right time to start thinking about these additional impacts that you can pursue with your venture? And is it reasonable to start out trying to think of working on a business and doing these things simultaneously or is it better to just go all out on the startup and then think about maybe a few years down the road what can I do with this? What are your thoughts on that?
ABHISHEK PRUISKEN: I think it really depends on how you define impact. So I think the first step is before you even go down that rabbit hole is just try to have a definition. And so if your definition is to increase lifespan, then I would say work at a longevity startup or do a PhD in something that really is within that field so you can make a fundamental contribution hopefully. Or if you're more of the investor type, try and get into biotech investing. So I think it really depends on what it is you want to do. But I think once you figure out what it is you want to do, I think trying to figure out a way to do it and make a living out of it would be the ideal thing. And so my philosophy is don't delay what you know what you want to do if you're lucky enough to know what you want to do.
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