On this episode of Honest Ecommerce, we have Zack Schreier. Zach is the CEO of Lifestacks, a premium health company creating delicious daily rituals infused with potent supplements to boost performance and fortify long-term health. We talk about repurposing a high commodity product, validating products through customer feedback, repeat purchase as success indicator, and so much more!
Zack Schreier is the cofounder and CEO of Lifestacks, and previously the creator of Quevos Egg White chips for which he secured a deal on Shark Tank.
As a Type 1 Diabetic, Zack is obsessed with building a lifestyle that supports his health and performance holistically, and he's passionate about creating and sharing products that delight and empower others.
Zack recognized a widespread deficit in focus, energy, and willpower, leading to the founding of Lifestacks and the development of their first product, a delicious supplement-infused coffee creamer that helps consumers be at their best.
In This Conversation We Discuss:
Resources:
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Zack Schreier
For us, we know that the product works when we've actually established a ritual for somebody.
Chase Clymer
Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game.
On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating real results.
I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.
Let's get on with the show.
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. I'm your host, Chase Clymer.
Today, I'm welcoming to the show Zach Schreier. Zach is the CEO of Lifestacks, a premium health company creating delicious daily rituals infused with potent supplements to boost performance and fortify long-term health.
Zach, welcome to the show.
Zack Schreier
Thanks for having me, Chase. Glad to be here.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. All right. Well, quickly, Zach, let our listeners know what exactly are the products that you're selling at Lifestacks.
Zack Schreier
Yeah, sure. Thanks. So as you mentioned a second ago, our focus is bringing really amazing, high impact ingredients into your day in a delightful format. So, basically, something that's delicious and enjoyable, and it's going to boost your performance and health.
And we currently have a single product in the market in that vein, which is a coffee creamer. And so our thinking was that basically, coffee is the occasion of choice for energy for Americans, actually, something like 70% of Americans drink coffee each day.
And so we thought that would be a great opportunity to deliver additional healthful and impactful ingredients. So we've got a coffee creamer with ingredients like tyrosine, taurine, rhodiola, huperzine, ginseng, really a great list of stuff. And it's actually MCT based. So MCT is a vegan and keto fat. So instead of dairy or sugar in your morning coffee, we've got a healthy fat to help you kickstart your day.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing. That's amazing. So where did the idea for this product come from?
Zack Schreier
Yeah, I guess to sneak up on where we're at right now, I'll go back to my origin story or at least pertaining to health and business. So in sixth grade, I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. And basically, that makes you the steward of your own health in a way that's pretty intense and ongoing.
There's no days off from Type 1 and that got me interested in all things health and performance, particularly because I saw that every little thing I did would impact my sugar in one way or another.
So whether that's just meal, meal timing, meal quality, meal quantity, exercise, at different intensities, sleep, sickness, everything. And so that sort of kick started my interest in food and in fitness.
And I actually founded the company before this one called Quevos. We made chips from egg whites. The idea was for somebody like me or somebody watching their carbs in general, a low carb, delicious, crunchy snack would be a great option.
So we developed that company. We were on a chart cake for that in 2020. And basically at the same time that I started Quevos, I got really interested in supplementation.
And the logic is essentially that supplements are just the most potent, sort of like dense nutrition.
And if you can figure out the right combination of supplements for your body to boost performance and fortify long-term health, that could be a huge lift.
And so I started looking into combinations. I started looking at the basic capsule format, realized that was pretty boring.
And so I wanted to figure out a way to get these sorts of high impact ingredients into our days in a more delightful, enjoyable way.
So that kick started Lifestacks. We had a beta version on the market in 2021. Updated that, raised some money, developed a brand and now we're relaunching or we have relaunched a new, improved and delicious version just this March.
Chase Clymer
Oh, that's fantastic. Obviously, I'm not going to let you skate over the Shark Tank experience.
Talk a bit more about the successes with Quevos and the Shark Tank situation.
Zack Schreier
Yeah, absolutely. So I launched Quevos with my best friend in 2018. And that was really good timing for a product like ours. Because if you recall, that was when Keto was really taking off. And the...
Chase Clymer
I did Keto in 2018.
Zack Schreier
Oh yeah. There you go. Exactly. And I'm sure you remember that the buzz around Keto was massive.
And I'm sure your audience has heard a lot about this evolution of marketing channels and things like that. 2018 was when Instagram was still a channel where you could share your product and drive a lot of awareness and traction pretty cheaply.
And so that was a really good time all around. We grew the company to a pretty solid size over those two years. We did all the manufacturing in house. So we had to set up a facility.
We had to create the product from the ground up. There's a reason there were no egg white chips before. Like it's a pretty hard thing to actually create.
And so there's a lot of troubleshooting and a lot of iteration, but we finally got a product that was great. We sold that on Shopify and Amazon, and then we got into a bunch of retail stores also.
Actually, Shark Tank reached out to us. They have an internal team that just looks at all sorts of opportunities on the market, and then they'll reach out and invite you to apply.
We went through the whole application process, then I guess we filmed it in 2020 and aired it in 2021.
It was actually an amazing experience. We were quarantining for eight days, actually, in advance of the show. So it was just me and Nick in a 700 square foot room, kind of just watching episodes of Shark Tank and grilling each other on Q&A.
And then by the time we made it into the tank, like we were in that mode, like really solidly. And yeah, I think we had really gone over all the different things that the sharks were liable to ask because we had seen so much of the show. So we knew kind of what was gonna come at us.
And we did a pretty good job rehearsing. The various sorts of things we wanted to get across.
And the producers that were communicating with us were also very helpful, like directing us, telling us what sorts of things that the sharks would ask and how to kind of control the room a little bit so you don't just get like, you know, just have that sort of storm that sometimes happens to people where they're like blown all over the place and they have trouble staying on their feet.
So it went well and we made a deal with Daniel Lubetsky from KIND bar. He was actually the shark we were hoping to make a deal with because he's got experience in exactly this space.
And I guess I'll jump to the end and say that we had a couple good years of working on the business of Daniel and growing it. And then we just sold this January to a private buyer.
Chase Clymer
Well, congratulations on that success and a fantastic exit. And honestly, one of probably the most amazing networking experiences of your life doing that.
Can we talk... I always like to ask, what was the Shark Tank bump? What happened when the episode went live?
Zack Schreier
Yeah, sure. I think we can talk about this openly and if not, then apologies to whatever NDA I'm violating here.
Basically we talked to a lot of founders and I should say Nick, because Nick is a better network here than I am and he did a lot of outreach to other people that had been on Shark Tank just to get a sense of what kind of level of boost to expect.
And the prediction was that we would see a lift of half a million dollars within that month post-airing. And that's exactly what happened.
So in the first 24 hours, it was 300k. And then in the next 5 days, it was another 100k. And then over the next 3 weeks, it was another 100k.
And then we got back to the pre-shark tank levels plus 50%. So we saw a sustained lift. It wasn't tremendous. But it was something.
And that blitz of selling a lot of products really helped too. That made 2021 quite a good year of sales for us.
Chase Clymer
Can I ask, knowing that this is going to air and this lift, this intense amount of sales is going to happen, what were you doing on the operations side to prepare for this to not fall flat and not be able to fulfill the demand?
Zack Schreier
Right. Yeah. Totally. Well, we produced a shit ton of products, basically, is what we did.
So in the 3 months leading up to the show, we just stockpiled inventory. So we hired more employees, and we ran more shifts. And we got more storage space and just created just about half a million bucks of surplus inventory.
And of course, there could have been a lot of waste there had it not quite been that level of lift. Also, we could have sold out and then missed some opportunities. But it worked out really nicely that that was the amount we sold.
Chase Clymer
Is there anything sort of interesting to you, maybe something no one would think of that you learned from that whole experience?
Zack Schreier
I guess there were a few things. It's not that fresh in my mind anymore. I should have probably taken more notes and consolidated some more memories about it.
I think one thing that was interesting is it kind of obscured the actual fundamentals of the business.
So we had this tremendous lift in sales, but that doesn't necessarily say anything about what's going to happen in the future. It probably made for a better story than it actually did. Like a change, a fundamental change to the business.
But that said, I'm still very thrilled we did it. Both for the awareness and because Daniel was a great mentor to us for those couple years.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. It's almost... I always talk about this concept and I wrote about it in my book. I wrote this a little bit ago. Well, this idea of like you can't really plan for...these like acts of God moments, right? Like Kanye West wearing your t-shirt or being featured on Shark Tank.
That can't be your business plan. And so that won't fix a fundamentally broken product or business.
And so it's refreshing. And the honesty of you saying like, “Maybe we took our eye off the ball a bit with this detour.”
Obviously, it was a fun detour. But I've heard other founders turned down Shark Tank because it wasn't the... It's a lot of work.
Zack Schreier
Oh yeah, definitely a lot of work. And I should say, I actually worked on the business full time from its inception to the middle of 2019. So that was about a year and a half of our first period of business.
But I actually took time off of college to do this. And I actually ended up going back to school during, you know, from mid 2019 through the exit, which was this January in 2023. ‘Cause my position became more of a strategist and board member alongside Nick, who was running it full-time.
And so it was a lot of work, and it was especially a lot of work for Nick. And I sort of like, I was in the privileged position of just getting to hear about everything that was happening and contribute my input, but mostly the legwork was not mine to do.
So for me, I think it was a great experience. And for Nick, I think it was a great experience and also a lot of work. So you're totally right about that.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Now let's shift focus back to the current business Lifestacks.
Obviously, you knew the exit was on the horizon. And is that when you started to dive back into this concept and build your next business?
Zack Schreier
Yeah. Actually, it was before that.
So in 2018, December 2018, was when I really started diving in supplementation. And there were seeds of that in my health and consumption history before we launched Lifestacks.
Like gabbling with various nutraceuticals beforehand and even more, slightly more illicit stuff like modafinil for example is something I had tried before that for getting work done and writing good papers and that sort of thing. Even microdosing and whatnot.
These are not recommendations by the way, this is just my history. Got to say that.
And so yeah, actually we were pursuing it starting in 2018, kind of starting to do all the research, look at what was effective and sort of clinically validated on the market, look at all the products out there.
The different combinations of ingredients just really get the light of the land. And shortly after that, we formulated a capsule product. So it was like, you know, I think we had 11 really excellent ingredients that I believed in for my own health and performance.
But really, we kind of wanted daily performance as a side effect of actually improved health. So you know, we don't want to override homeostasis and get you to work harder than you actually can sustain. We want to lift your capacity and allow you to sustain a higher level of output.
So that was that first product. It was really well received. You know, people that tried it and loved it and bought it again.
But the marketing around it was difficult because it wasn't so differentiated. You know, it's like who needs another capsule?
And so then we learned pretty quickly towards the end of 2019. So maybe six months after we launched the capsule product, we'd realized that issue about the format, and we wanted to have something that sold itself a little more.
Something that was just so like, “Aha,” to people when they heard about it.
And so we pretty quickly thought of the coffee creamer idea. And we, during 2020, like the onset of COVID and right before actually, we were working on prototyping the product. We launched a beta version of that in 2021.
And then kind of, I graduated on June 21, and then we went all in.
So now, for two years, we've been working full-time on Lifestacks. And I think I mentioned earlier that that sort of included a whole branding phase, some investments, and a lot of R&D, a lot of work on production, all the fundamentals.
And we just launched the business with this new product in full this year.
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Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Can we go back to you launching the product as a pill format?
How did you get that out there into the market? What was your strategy to validate the idea? How did you get that response that made you pivot?
Zack Schreier
Yeah, for sure. I guess I'm saying one more thing about the trajectory of Livestocks, maybe as compared to Quevos or other businesses. This was very much a project. We had an LLC and we had insurance because we were distributing consumables.
We didn't invest a ton in terms of capital, it was more like time and passion and research, like sort of driving our continued engagement with Lifestacks.
And I think, you know, I think there's a model that we pursue with Quevos, where you do everything as quickly as possible and like, you know, break things and learn and scale.
And I think that was the right thing for Quevos. I think we needed to get out there and the timing was right. I think that's the right thing for a lot of businesses.
But as I was doing that, as I was in school, Lifestacks, I think, belonged in this project phase for longer. So we can let things naturally brew and cultivate and simmer.
We launched the capsule product. Actually, we had a Shopify store. No Amazon, no retail presence.
And we were pretty focused, actually, on selling that to the college students that were around us. And we also, we actually did end up selling to sort of local retailers near our college and we would engage with the repeat customers at those stores to learn.
But we ended up getting a lot of insight through Shopify. It was a pretty low level of revenue, but we had a lot of customers to talk to and to sort of ask what they liked about it, and get feedback.
So I don't know exactly what flipped that made us realize coffee, except we were hearing from a lot of people that when they would take our product alongside their cup of coffee in the morning, they would feel really sharp and really clear.
Probably that was due to the L-theanine that we included in the capsule. And caffeine and theanine is a pretty prominent nootropic combination.
So yeah, I think that was what catalyzed us to think, oh, let's actually create a product that we can add directly to coffee.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
So then you pivot, you shift and you guys relaunched about 6 months ago. How have things been since then?
Zack Schreier
Really good. Yeah, it's been great. Our big indicator is repeat.
So for us, we know that the product works when we've actually established a ritual for somebody.
The ingredients we use are ingredients you should take for your lifetime. They're not just like most health interventions. It's not something you do once and then have a sustained years-long benefit, something where the impact and the benefits accumulate.
So with our product, I mean, there is that immediate effect where you feel really good and you feel really sharp.
But then, you know, ultimately we want to establish habits so people can benefit from this stuff over years.
So our repeat rate has been sort of exactly what we were hoping for. We see customers come back like every single month, like clockwork, our subscriber numbers are a pretty high proportion of our total customers.
So yes, it's going well.
I think when it comes to any kind of sales, the kind of physics of business, it’s ultimately you produce transactions, those transactions go and feed the ability to basically reconstruct the precursors to those transactions.
So you kind of got this circular causality where the sort of final event of the customer purchasing it is what enables you to do all the setup to that purchase. So then you can sustain yourself over time.
Obviously, if you're taking a loss, it means that the transaction's not actually sufficient to help you regenerate the setup to produce that transaction.
And so anyways, that whole thing is kind of composed of various aspects of your funnel. You've got the awareness, you've got the conversion funnel, you've got the retention.
And I think so far what we've seen is conversions good, retention is good. Now we need to really drive much more awareness.
So much more top of funnel activity. We've been pretty minimal on our spend so far, and it's been predominantly Amazon that we're that where we're selling.
But now I think it's basically time for us to tell the world that we exist. And then hopefully, what we see is that the same success we've seen on conversion or retention with the subset of people that have already tried it, we hope that that scales to a much broader audience.
Chase Clymer
Well, I wish you all the success with that.
Now, is there anything I didn't ask you about that you think would resonate with our audience? Well,
Zack Schreier
I would take the opportunity to talk a little bit about branding, if that's all right. It's something that's very top of mind for me right now.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
Zack Schreier
Cool. Okay, cool. So I guess let me actually return to the physics of business idea again, a little bit.
So the question basically is, if you don't yet have a company that exists, what are the kind of conditions under which the company could exist?
And obviously, you've got like the actual core of the product. So like what's inside the package?
And then you've got the package and then you've got the touch point with the consumer, which involves not only the package you're showing, but all the messaging around it. You know, however they're hearing about it, all the stuff that goes into that.
And I used to kind of, I've always kind of, well, I used to not appreciate just how important the branding aspect of it is. I kind of thought that that was just like, you know, you're just dressing up something, but THE actual powder was the relevant stuff, not the package.
But then I sort of realized that the brand is how you can firm up in somebody's mind exactly what's happening, why they should repeatedly engage with what you're doing, how they can understand it so that they expect the right sort of things.
And we've recently done some branding exercises that I find super helpful.
There's one exercise where you kind of try and assess your DNA.
So you figure out whether at your core, you're a missionary, a mechanic, or a mother. And the missionary is focused on changing the world in a particular way. The mechanic is very focused on the product. So it's all about what's in it, and how do all the pieces fit together basically?
And then the mother is focused on the customer. And so the mother basically goes to the customer and learns as much as possible before making product decisions.
And so I, well, I think that's a super helpful framework and it's one that you can use almost as a prism for making other decisions.
I think ultimately it's not a decision as much as it is an exercise of reverse engineering your motivations. So you kind of ask yourself, “why am I doing this? You know, what constitutes success in my mind?”
And you know, if it's like, I've got a happy customer, then you're the mother. If it's like, I changed the world, you're the missionary. If it's like, I created this product and it exists now, then you're the mechanic.
And Lifestacks, we've discovered that we are definitely the mechanic. Like we obsess over what goes into the formulation. We read as much as possible about all the ingredients.
And one thing that's interesting about the mechanic is that they will create a product without necessarily knowing what the audience is yet. So they've got such a high confidence that they can create a good product that they put on some of those other aspects until later.
And that's how we've gone. Like we developed the capsule and then we found customers.
We learned something from the customers and then we developed a new product and then we found customers. And I guess one other aspect of mechanics is that they invest a lot in RD and they are obsessed with new products as well.
And so I guess I'll say, whether or not our coffee creamer sounds like something that your audience would love, just stay tuned because we're going to have a lot of cool stuff in the future.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
And if they want to stay tuned or they want to check out the coffee creamer that already exists, where should they go?
Zack Schreier
Yeah. Thank you. Thanks so much. Well, we've got a website, lifestacks.com.
That will definitely stay up to date with your products. And you can get our creamer through that website. And then we're also on Amazon.
And that's where we're doing most of our business right now. But you can't go wrong either way.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
Zack Schreier
And to find us on Amazon, just type Lifestacks.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. I'll make sure to link to the website in the show notes.
Zack, thank you so much for coming on today and sharing your story. I'm sure that we'll chat soon again.
Zack Schreier
Yeah. Thanks so much, Chase.
Chase Clymer
We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes.
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Until next time!