Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to How I Built This early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Hello and welcome to the Advice Line on How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. This is the place where we help try to solve your business challenges.
And this week, we're bringing you a special mashup episode featuring three returning guests and three new callers. You'll hear advice in using AI to grow your business and new ways to break through a crowded social media landscape. And if you're building something and you need advice, give us a call and you just might be the next guest on the show. Our number is 1-800-433-1298.
Send us a one minute message that tells us about your business and the issues or questions that you'd like help with. You can also send us a voice memo at hibt at id.wondery.com and make sure to tell us how to reach you. And also, don't forget to sign up for my newsletter. It's full of insights and ideas from the world's greatest entrepreneurs. You can sign up for free at Guy Raz dot com.
And we'll put all this info in the podcast description. All right, let's get to it. Our first guest is Randy Hetrick. He's the founder and the guy who actually invented TRX. Randy first came on How I Built This back in 2017, and he told this wild story about being a Navy SEAL on a remote assignment, rigging an old jujitsu belt to a door,
and basically creating an entirely new way to work out wherever you are. It's an awesome episode.
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Chapter 2: What unique challenges do founders face in today's social media landscape?
We'll put a link to it in the show notes or just search TRX in our feed. And as you'll hear, Randy's also exactly the right person to talk about how to get a product in front of more people and actually get it noticed. All right, Randy, let's bring in our first caller to the advice line. Please tell us your name, where you're calling from, and just one line about your business, please. Thanks.
Hi Guy and Randy. It's so great to be with you today. My name is Shireen and I co-founded Moji Masala with my husband, JD. We are a family owned and operated business based in Philly. We started Moji Masala to make it super easy for anyone to make authentic, delicious, homemade Indian food from scratch.
It's a very intimidating process often and a little complicated, but with Moji Masala, you just take one of our 14 pre-measured spice packets. You buy a few produce items. You use our recipe to make one specific Indian dish that serves three to five people. And they are my mom's heirloom recipes that I spent two years beta testing to actually create the final product. Nice. Wow. Congrats.
Well, welcome, Shereen. Thanks for calling in. So basically, these are spice packets and you mix them with like oil or clarified butter or and add them to a meat or vegetable? Yeah, it's a simple process, but you're actually cooking the dish as if you opened up a recipe in a cookbook and they gave you this list of 15 spices and gave you the eight steps.
So the hardest part of Indian food is actually aggregating the spices, having a recipe for the blends, and then just knowing what to do with it. Our product packaging is very informative. It has like a shopping list on the back and a QR code that goes to the actual recipe and a cooking video. So there's no guesswork. There's no leftover spices.
You're literally just using our product to create like kind of a magical dish and experience is so seamless that I think it's almost like alarming to people to actually have this experience. By the way, when did you start the business? So we really were ready to launch right in late 2019, right before COVID.
And then coming out of COVID the last couple of years is really when we've pushed hard on our online, but also on retail expansion. And is this your full-time job? Is this what both of you guys, you and your husband are working on? This is my full-time job. It's my husband's Half-time job, I would say, and my full-time job. Yeah, it's a second career for me. That's awesome. So you launch in 2019.
Tell me a little bit, and are you mainly selling online and through Amazon and retailers? Break that down for me. Yeah, we started online and naively thought we could hit the ground running online. I think it became pretty clear that unless we had like a million dollars that we really needed a retail strategy.
We got into Citarella about a year ago, which is a seven-store chain throughout New York, Connecticut, and the Hamptons. We also got into Fresh Direct, and we are in a WE, which is an Asian online retailer. Sure. We've done WE on the show. Yeah. And tell us what your question is. What's your pain point that you're looking for help with? Yes, so Randy, our in-store demos have been very successful.
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Chapter 3: How can AI be leveraged to enhance business growth?
So I pulled up your website as soon as you started talking and it's friendly and it's inviting. And what I was hoping you were going to say is exactly what you said, which is you're out there sampling. Yes. Right. And because to me, something like, I mean, you guys are, are you guys profitable at this point on a, just on a, on a monthly operating basis? Or are you, how are you?
financing this in other words? Yeah, so the way I it's self financed, you know, because I had a long career, we did have savings, that's not a bottomless sort of pit of savings. So you know, we have to be smarter about our next steps. But one of the things I was really important to me was that the product be profitable, like so when I when we sell this product, it is profitable.
Now, of course, there's I don't know how to think about and this is also I'd love your input, like all the other costs associated with that, you know, as far as marketing and, you know, maybe you have to go do trade shows, which are thousands and thousands of dollars. And so it's very easy to be sorry. Here's where here's where I where I was going to go with this is that.
The reason I asked the question about profitability is because if you don't have outside investors that are, for instance, you're a ticking clock that forces you to do things, you're in a great position right now. If you have a really great product, and it certainly sounds like it and looks like it, the question is, how do you get that trial? And I would say to you, given that you don't have...
external pressures really on you that the that what's the rush? The best way to do this right is to is to be out there on the ground, letting people try your product and then and then, you know, showing them that you have a website because obviously you have to be a little bit careful about going into a to a retailer's establishment and then trying to drive people to your website.
So you got to be a little bit careful about that. But The, I think that the idea of figuring out how to scale your sampling program is to me a better and much more, um, sort of long lived way to get customers who are going to fall in love with you.
Cause look, you can spend a lot of money putting your, your foods avatar in front of me, but if I can't smell it and I can't taste it, it's lost in the noise. Whereas if you put it in my mouth and I'm like, Oh my gosh, This is delicious. Now you've got me, right?
So to me, I would spend less time at the moment, given where you guys are doing paid media, and more time actually having people get their get your product in their mouth. Yes. No, I love that you have that reaction because I think instinctively we think that and we're two people and I'm, you know, we had the opportunity, for example, to go national.
We deferred that because it's just takes a lot of money. And we knew we
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Chapter 4: What strategies can help increase attendance at cooking demos?
I think, Randy, you're exactly right. I would just add to that that you can do some of this concurrently. Like, I'm not sure that you need to do one before you do the next. Like, I do think that it's true. This is something you want to sample. People want to smell this. It's going to smell so delicious, right? Yes. Here's the thing, and you know this.
My kids right now, as we speak, are at my house in the kitchen making steak sandwiches based on a YouTuber. Because they follow a YouTuber and they went to the store and got all the stuff and they're making sandwiches. So many people now are making recipes based on what they're seeing on Instagram and YouTube. I'm talking about micro-influencers who might be...
Maybe it's somebody who's just a really interesting food – micro-influencer around food and you work with them and you partner with them and you say, all right, we're going to put like $20,000 into this, which is no small amount of cash, right? But you say let's think really strategically. Let's really kind of – Find out who's out there.
And by the way, you can use AI to help you with this, to help you find and identify some of these sort of medium to micro. And a micro-influencer is somebody with like 10,000 to 50,000 followers, right? Yes. You do want people to smell this and try this, but you want people to see it too. And it's hard to scale an in-store demo, right? The way to do it is through the right…
partner and food influencers are enormous. There's it's still a grow. It's as far as I understand, it's still a growing sector in a lot of these social media platforms. That's a good point you make, Guy, because we have worked with influencers, but I hadn't really put the number around it the way you have. And I think as opposed to 300 here, 500 there, let's see what we get.
Really sort of saying, OK, we're going to have a $20,000 budget for 15 months and really maybe go deep with two or three people with that. I don't know if that would go. And spend the time really following these people and looking at what they're doing and seeing how much engagement they're getting. Oftentimes people put their engagement numbers right there on their Instagram or TikTok.
You can see how many views. So I would start by doing some searches and looking at AI and having them help you and having them help you. And then looking at some of these influencers and picking a few and just saying, you know what, we got 20 grand to work with over the next year. And we're going to start to seed this cash. Yeah, I love that idea.
Where I was sort of thinking more that I would shy away from is doing sort of big paid ad buys, right? Because I think spending a bunch of money on Facebook platform or any other platform to take an ad and project it isn't really where you need to be right now. I totally agree with Guy that if you can find some fun, quirky, foodie...
influencers with followings and get them to show just how cool and easy and tasty this thing is to use, that'd be a great way to do it. And you wouldn't spend a bunch of cash. It's a great two-prong strategy. It's great advice. Shireen Khadri, the brand is called Moji Masala. Congrats. Good luck. Thank you so much for calling in. Thanks so much. All right. Thanks.
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