On this episode of Honest Ecommerce, we have Bob DeMars. Bob is the founder of Blind Barrels, a blind whiskey tasting subscription disrupting the industry’s current distribution model by showcasing American craft distilleries, ones which rarely get the shelf space they deserve. We talk about balancing sales with community building, valuing hard lessons during difficult times, keeping investors engaged with consistent updates, and so much more!
Bob DeMars is the founder of Blind Barrels, a blind whiskey tasting subscription disrupting the industry’s current distribution model by showcasing American craft distilleries, ones which rarely get the shelf space they deserve.
The recent quarantine brought about blind whiskey tastings with friends, and DeMars saw an opportunity for a startup unlike any other in the alcohol industry.
These blind tastings are all about discovery, education, removing brand bias, and, of course, supporting smaller distillers that are making some amazing handmade products.
Each quarter, subscribers get to test their senses by tasting and discovering hard-to-try-or-find craft whiskey brands - ones that deserve to be discovered.
In This Conversation We Discuss:
Resources:
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Bob DeMars
[There’s] a lot of different curveballs that you can't anticipate with any startup, and there's a lot of mental suffering that takes place in the wake of those obstacles. And as ridiculous as it sounds, you have to find a way to enjoy it a little bit.
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.
This is the first live recording of Honest Ecommerce that I've ever done at Sub Summit. And I am so lucky to be sitting next to Bobby DeMars. He is the CEO and founder of Blind Barrels.
I don't know if you know this, but three people canceled on me to be my guest today. So I must be cursed, but you are here now.
Bob DeMars
I'm the king of just being there when I need to be there.
Chase Clymer
Awesome, awesome.
Bob DeMars
Congratulations on your first live.
Chase Clymer
So Blind Barrels.
For the listeners that are unaware, what exactly are you guys selling? What are you doing?
Bob DeMars
We're the first ever blind whiskey tasting experience ever. I mean, there's a lot of subscriptions out there for alcohol, but this one is completely blind. It's really a double blind, which means you don't even know what the samples are.
So the samples come right to your door. It's four samples. It'll say samples A, B, C, and D. And then there's a tasting table, there's a QR code, and the QR code. And you got one in front of you if you want to.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, yeah. So we just did a little unboxing here. And so there's a nice little introduction here, hey blind barrel-ers. Some more information here. And then it's got a history of the cocktails on the back, but that's not important.
There's this beautiful box that I'm going to open real quick and then we're going to dive in a bit more. This thing is super nice.
Bob DeMars
Soft touch, gold leaf magnet with a ribbon pole.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. How much time have you dedicated to learning about boxes?
Bob DeMars
There's so much about this industry. I was not in the alcohol space before this company. And this was definitely, I mean, look, what you have to do is you got to make the custom bottles first. Then you have to build the inserts around the bottles and then you gotta build the box around that. And then you can kind of add your bells and whistles and all the cool stuff with that.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
Bob DeMars
Yeah. I mean, I talked to every vendor in the country to be able to get our boxes. I mean, can you believe what you think these boxes cost?
Chase Clymer
With the foam ready for your custom bottles?
Bob DeMars
$5.2 dollars and 80 cents.
Chase Clymer
This thing is super nice. So, what I got in front of me is about the size of a Nintendo Switch, is what I'm going to say in its little case. But it's got perfect foam here. It's got four little tasters of whiskey with no information on them. It just says sample A, B, C, or D, and now I am starting to get why this is cool.
So, if I crack one of these, I don't know what it is. And to find it out, all right, so I'm just going to do it. Why not?
Bob DeMars
Yeah, hey, you're welcome to crack it. We don't have, “Oh, I didn't bring a tasting glass. I should have brought one of our custom tasting glasses.” But you know, when you go through it, I mean, are you an experienced whiskey drinker?
Chase Clymer
I enjoy whiskey. I wouldn't say that I am smarter than anyone else about it.
Bob DeMars
No, and look, everyone's different on their whiskey journey in terms of where they're starting. I was more of a drinker than a taster. I'd say I know more about it, I now know more about spirits laws than I do about tasting whiskey.
I have whiskey wizards or spirits guys, as I like to call them. They help curate the lineups and help come up with what's gonna be in the lineup. And ultimately, when you're starting, there's four stages.
There's the appearance, there's the color and the clarity. And then you go into the aroma, and then there's the taste, and then there's the finish. So on the back of each bottle, in our tasting, each one is a custom insert. And if you flip it over, you see there is a tasting table.
This is meant to get you thinking, these aren't necessarily what the whiskeys are, but it's meant to jog your senses and really think about, “Ph, are we getting cereal grain, what type of grain is that? Or are we getting something that's fruity? And what kind of fruit is it? Is it a pit fruit? Is it a stone fruit?”
And then try to see what different flavors that you're getting on the nose and on the finish. The finish is really the mouth feel and then like how long it lingers. And then when you get to the QR code, it will then reveal everything about it. So the age, the mash fill, is it a bourbon, is it a rye? You know, the proof level.
In fact, we're gonna be gamifying that in future boxes working on code. So it's gonna be like Wirtle with whiskey, where you're gonna guess is this suburban or is it a rye, is it a blend, is it a single malt, is it a wheat dominant?
Chase Clymer
Are these the notes that I'm tasting? Like all of that kind of gamified?
Bob DeMars
I don't know. The problem is there's so many notes that it's gonna be hard to gamify that but the proof and the mash bill for sure. And then there's gonna be a point system. So it's something you'll be able to share after that.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. All right. So while I try my first sample here, take me back in time.
Where did the idea for this business come from? It is so unique and so interesting.
Bob DeMars
So my buddy was doing blind cases during COVID and just to get everyone together, we're all isolated. He was sending kids out to everybody. He's coming up with blinds. And after the first one, I just fell in love with it. I was like, “Oh, this feels like a business.” And I called him. At that point, he did 8 samples. So we were a little inebriated.
And I reached out to him, I'm like, “This is a business.” And he's like, “Yeah, okay.” And I'm like, “Nobody's ever done this before.” And I'm like, maybe there's a reason. Maybe there's, you know, obviously we're in a heavily restricted space.
And so I called an ABC attorney, an alcohol beverage control attorney. And you know, you can call any attorney and usually do a free hour long consultation. And the first attorney, it lasts about seven minutes. He's like, “There's eight veteran laws you're trying to break right now. You can't just pour whiskey into some of the bottles. There's a whole process. There's a three tier system.”
Chase Clymer
When I worked at a bar, I remember it was so illegal to marry a bottle, pouring one into another, which I'm assuming has nothing to do with what you're talking about. But there's definitely a lot of control around alcohol.
Bob DeMars
Yeah. When prohibition ended, basically a three tier system. So the producers have to pass it to a distributor. And then that wholesaler then gives it to a retailer before it can pass to a consumer.
So I did 16 more free ABC hour-long consultations. And there were three of them that gave me key information that I was able to piece together and found a way to do it. I then found a better way to do it.
But the first way was how I raised the money. And then it took a whole year actually to get custom bottles, custom packaging, to get our liquor license. You gotta lease a space before you get the license. So we're just kinda having a space for a year while we're trying to get all the things in place.
Obviously in the meantime, we're building the website. We're trying to come up with the marketing. I mean, this was a super startup bootstrap. All the funding came from friends and family. I had a neighbor across the street that put in 25 grand and at the 11th hour, I tried to convince him to not do it. Cause I'm like, “I gotta see you every day. This is risky, dude.”
Nobody's ever done this. And there's a lot of hurdles. And there were hurdles that we didn't foresee. There's so many different ways that a company can fail. And we got through all those things.
And now in hindsight, I would have been kind of a dick if I told them to not do it now that we not only survived, but we're thriving.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, that's a little spoilers. They're doing good. That was a great investment for them.
Bob DeMars
Yeah. It worked out and our growth just kind of... the whole thing about scaling up. I think when people talk about scaling, what does that mean? It's like, “OK, well, I'm not ordering 3000 kids anymore. Now I'm ordering 10,000 and I'm not doing it once a year. Now I'm doing it every three months or I'm doing it every six months.” And you have to have all the money upfront to be able to do that.
And my secret was I told my investors I'm not gonna take a salary. To this day, I haven't pulled the dollar from the company. And I'm like, we're gonna grow because we're gonna take all the money that we're gaining and we're gonna get bigger and we're gonna scale up that way. And now nobody cares if I take a salary or not.
So we might cross that threshold because the bandwidth is getting a little bit low for that. But that was my commitment. One of the things that when you get friends and family to invest in you, because really, they're investing in an idea, but they're really investing in you. And this is true for any investor. They're always going to be investing in the individual and the person.
So yeah, you're selling a product, you're selling an idea, you're selling a service. At the end of the day, you're always selling yourself. But it put a bigger onus on me to not screw it up and make sure that I was getting it right. And it definitely added to the stress of what normal startups and things that I've been involved in. But I'm grateful for it in the end.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
So take me... Obviously, there's an insane amount of hoops you have to jump through because of this being alcohol, which is very controlled in the United States of America. But outside of that, take me to the go-to-market strategy. How are you... And I don't know if we really highlighted this. This is a subscription box that features whiskeys and bourbons. How did you get customers that weren't your friends and family?
Bob DeMars
Well, initially, I think that was 50% of who we had. I didn't have a big healthy budget. We only had $150,000 to start the company. And a lot of that went to legal and creating custom everything. We only had about $10,000 set aside for marketing.
We couldn't just kind of put that all out initially. We kind of had to figure out how much we were gonna use to spend that so we could figure out how much we could actually learn from that and continue to be a little bit more strategic in our marketing.
So we did a lot of influencer reach outs where we did some pre-kits for everybody. Probably our saving grace was a big radio personality, Frank from Heidi and Frank. They're more on the West Coast market, but it used to be Heidi, Frosty and Frank. They took over for Mark and Brian in Southern California.
One of his friends was a good friend of mine, and he's like, “This sounds like something Frank would love to do.” I met with Frank, we hit it off, and he became a partner. So he talked about us on the radio, like two or three times during the morning show on an FM radio market all week. So I'd say 60% of our subscribers came from that.
At some point you saturate that market, and he still talks about us all the time, we still get things that come in from that. But then ultimately was taking all that revenue and then taking the new revenue for people that are doing annuals and putting that into a bigger marketing plan.
And that's when… I studied business with an emphasis on marketing in college at USC, and I was in the film school there and on the football team. So I had no life for the five years that I was there.
But all the stuff that I learned there was kind of out the window because of all these new terms and all these avenues and SEO and CRO and all these different elements. There was a big learning curve for me and just how I was getting… This is a national product, so other companies have been a part of or even when I'm making a film, it wasn't really ever my job to sell the film once it was made.
So it was always trying to, other than maybe the PR aspect of it.
And I quickly learned that if you're early in the business and you get a publicist that tries to sell you on something, usually the worst money you've ever spent, you're going to be your own best publicist right off the bat. And people will respond to CEOs and founders with personal emails rather than mass emails from the publicist any day.
So just rolling up the sleeves and getting organized with that and getting the friends and family, obviously doing their reach out. The reality is your friends and family aren't always great salespersons.
You know, my aunt signed up, I remember, with the first quarter, and then she canceled immediately. She's like, “No, we don't really drink whiskey.” And I was like, well, I love the support, sort of. But it's like, “You screwed up my churn, right, Aunt Jeanette? What are you doing?”
Chase Clymer
So launching the business, everyone that listens to this show is a giant nerd. So what did you launch on? Is it the same technology you use today? How did you get your first subscribers?
Bob DeMars
Our first subscriber was just like... I think it was one of our investors, my twin brother. And then it was my best friend and one of my other best friends. So yeah, the first 100 people... If anyone's ever done a Kickstarter, it's funny. You'll get this huge influx of money.
And if you try to create a regression model where you're predicting how much money you're going to raise the next 30 days... No, you're going to raise a lot in the first three to five days. Like, we got a lot of signups in the first two weeks, and then it just drops off and it's crickets and you're just hitting that refresh button and the stress kind of starts to build.
From a tech standpoint, we were built on Shopify. It was what the web person that we hired told us to do. We used an app for subscriptions called Bold. We're still with Bold.
At the end of the day, the issue that we have is that we are seasonal subscriptions. So if somebody orders, like, we just sent our June kits out for 2024. So if somebody orders now, they'll get the June kit and then I'll dial the renewal back to just before the next one.
If it's an annual… The issue with when you do these subscription things is that an annual is once a year and quarterly is every three months. And that's the recurring model. Whereas we wanted our annual to be prepaid for four shipments that are seasonal and no subscription app is set up for that.
So I say you gotta find your guy in India. Not to profile a whole country, but man, there's some killer code writers there and don't go into Fiverr. What's the other one?
Chase Clymer
Bob DeMars
So Upwork. I interviewed 50 people on Upwork before I could find somebody that could really create the custom code that was built around for our model and setting up the right tags in the right system so it didn't turn into a big headache and tracking everything.
And at first it felt like everything was held together with duct tape, and now everything works really well and it's really predictable and it's easy to operate and it's easy to use and I can train somebody else to use it.
But yeah, I mean building the whole… guessing the word with whiskey or guessing the mash bill and all these other cool things with it, there's no app for that. So we gotta build the code for that. But ChatGPT, especially 4.0, you get a guy that really knows how to do that, which really, if you're using it to write original code, it's phenomenal. If you're using TaskAid, I mean, you can start using these AI tools.
And the thing is that a lot of people don't realize that it's not overwhelming. All this, I think initially is overwhelming, but you just gotta get in there and get your hands dirty.
I mean, I did all of our Facebook, all of our Meta ads, all of our IG ads. I did all of our pay-per-click. And it was really just because when I hired somebody to do it, I needed to have a baseline of what they needed to be, and also just knowing how it works. So I know what the numbers meant and I know what CPC is, all that.
Chase Clymer
I think that's something that a lot of entrepreneurs overlook is they... You hear, delegate, delegate, delegate. But if you don't know what you're delegating or what success looks like because you can't speak that language, you set yourself up for failure the first couple of times.
And then you angrily take it in-house, figure it out and go, “I might have screwed these things up”, and then you can actually properly delegate it because if you don't know what a successful outcome is, then you don't know how to delegate for it.
Bob DeMars
Exactly.
I mean, and ultimately, you have to delegate because you only have so much time. And if anyone's ever placed ads on Facebook, Instagram, Google is actually pretty friendly, I would say. And you can get pretty comfortable with it pretty quickly because they have AI that really walks you through it.
But building funnels in Mailchimp or Klaviyo, you can really easily get in the weeds for that in terms of how you're automating it, the rules you're setting for it.
Once you understand the rules and once you get it set up and then ultimately when you do get somebody that's expert at it and actually, we went through four marketing teams where people said they could do things, but they couldn't beat my stats.
And I'm like, “You guys do this.” I'm like, “I don't even do this. You have to be able to beat me.” And I'm not saying that I was good at it. I'm just saying,
Chase Clymer
So far it's not very high.
Bob DeMars
Subscription and alcohol is tricky too, because you can't use Meta's AI because first, you can't put an age restriction on it. So ours has to be above age 21 and who we're marketing to. So you can't just use their AI and their advantage, their Meta advantage or whatever it is. It's not just like, oh, you click the button and it just starts working.
And maybe there'll be some adjustments for that at some point. But you're restricted within that. Subscriptions are heavily restricted in the Google space in terms of what platforms you can sell on, or even gift cards and things like that that are a big part of our business.
So once we found a team that figured out a way to do all of that, that's when…What I didn't understand about marketing, or at least I thought I understood, was the synergy that takes place on, let's just say, email, pay-per-click, and social, and how all those touches and the people experiencing your brand and when you're going to convert them.
And why it's important that all of those things are running really well is because they all kind of fuel each other. And then ultimately, because you want good people on your site. You just don't want eyeballs on your side. You want people that have intent. And that is going to get it.
So I was going through this whole phase where I'm like, “Is the site broken? Is our pricing wrong? Is it me? Is it our messaging? Is there confusion?”
And look, there's still some tweaks that we want to do to our site with our CRO, with our conversion rate optimization. But until we figured out all of those other marketing channels, it would have been a waste of energy and money because if those other things aren't broken, then you don't even know what your baseline for success is anyways.
Chase Clymer
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Chase Clymer
Yeah, I think that conversion rate optimization… Well, first of all, it's a misnomer and I could go on all tangents about why it's named wrong. But I think a lot of young brands think that they can change a few things on their website and it's gonna magically fix something, which is not true at all. It's definitely a numbers game to make CRO work, but you need enough visitors that are qualified visitors.
And that's what I think you were alluding to there, is if you get a million sessions a month, that's great. It's from some blog article that doesn't match your ICP. You're just ranked really well and people just see it, realize it's the wrong thing and then leave all that bad traffic is like ruining all of your stats. And you should probably get rid of that blog because it's not helping you by any means.
That's just like one example of many that I've seen out there where it really comes down to like you really need the qualified traffic first. And it starts at the top of the funnel. Then you can start optimizing things.
One, I think gift codes were really important for us because what happens is once you release a discount code, you're going to get an affiliate on your affiliate site that's going to create a whole coupon list. So for all your 10% off discounts are going to be there. So people are going to be using Honey or whatever app they're going to get that 10% off code.
And then you have to pay an affiliate fee to the person that gave them that code when it's like, “Come on.” So there's this double dipping aspect. And what we did is, so we have custom tasting glasses that have our logo on. And we sell them for $20. Now, if you sign up for a quarterly, we'll send you a free glass. If you sign up for an annual, we'll send you four of them.
And once again, I talked to every vendor until I could find one and get our custom glasses for less than $2. So when somebody buys an annual, because I'm shipping those four glasses with their initial shipment, the extra shipping is maybe a dollar. And so I'm spending $9 instead of losing $20 when they use a 10% off coupon.
So it converted four times as much. So you're really looking at eight times the value and just figuring that element out.
And so you never really know what it is that's gonna work or what isn't gonna work. I mean, we have a, if you search hat and lid, we're the number three site for our hat. Now how did that happen for SEO? I just had a meeting and they were showing this march for our SEO and how many pages ranking. And I was in the car so I couldn't really look at the chart and I saw this thing shooting up exponentially.
And I'm like, “Is that where you think we can get? He's like, “No, that's where you are now.” I'm like, “You mean from the last like three months?” He's like, “If you search hat and lid, Blind Barrels is the #3 site for it.”
And I don't know why. And it's funny because it's a really valuable keyword to search for. And I do know why, but I don't know why we're that high on it. So I'm not messing with it. I mean, lid is the most popular, like premium hat brand out there. And we use a really premium hat for our hats. Everything is top notch. But I didn't even know that at all.
Until I was just like, “Oh,” and I was talking to my web guy. I'm like, “How did you do this?” He's like, “I don't know.” And I'm like, “Great.”
Chase Clymer
Sometimes Google just blesses you.
Let's talk about marketing because offline, you and I chatted a lot about... You have been experimenting with influencer strategies and you prefer YouTube, micro influencers. It's kind of what I heard, correct, over a lot of them?
Bob DeMars
Yeah, we've used several of them. Instagram doesn't really lead to sales. What's interesting for Instagram is the whiskey people, the whiskey bros, the whiskey nerds, whatever you would call them, a lot of them that are really deep in the whiskey rabbit hole, they're searching for blends, they're searching for Wellers and Pappy Van Winkles, allocated bottles that are really hard to get.
Now, I like to think of our bottles as allocated because they're not accessible. You can't get these brands from your local Total Wine or Bevmo. A lot of these only exist in their native state. We're really trying to disrupt distribution with our model and what we're trying to do.
So Instagram is more about getting your brand out there and getting saturation within that world. So you're in the ether, so it doesn't hurt you, but you're not gonna be able to point to direct sales and be like, “Look at all these sales that came from that.”
Whereas YouTube has a little bit of a different mix there. So if you get a mega influencer that's got… well not mega, I'd say they got half a million followers or something and you pay them a decent amount of points, it's nice for your brand, but once again, I feel like you're paying more for your brand saturation to be out there. You're not gonna get the amount of money you're spending. The sales that you're gonna get back aren't gonna equate to what you're doing in your other marketing for your customer acquisition costs.
But the micro influencers, we have this couple called Stuff & Whiskey, and they're just really likable. They're really authentic. They're really honest. I watch all their videos too. There's just something endearing about them. I feel like they're my friends. I feel like I know them. They're kind of my friends. I'm paying them, I guess, to be my friends, maybe. I don't know.
But they're doing the lineups and they're being honest with it. And it only costs us, like, 15 bucks a subscriber from the conversion of what we're paying them. So the value, I think people overlook the small influencers and don't look at their subscribers and don't look at their views. Obviously, look at those things.
But look at the comments and you can tell if they're bots or not. If it's just like a lot of people giving the fire emoji, it's probably some bots. You know what I mean? But if it's people going like, “I love it when Aaron bites her lip after a good whiskey,” as creepy as that may sound, whatever. That's not a bot. That's somebody that's a super fan of that particular person and whatever it is that comes across.
I look at all their comments and see how genuine they are. So the volume of it and really, these people are all willing to work with you and sometimes they'll just do it for a product trade. So now we have all sorts of members that, if I have a member that's starting a YouTube or a podcast, I always offer, “Hey, if you guys want me to come on, or if a bunch of people, we have some companies that…they have 20 memberships for all their people.”
And if they can't make me do lives, with our members we do two live tastings every quarter. If they can't make that, I say, “Hey, you tell me, I'll jump on with you guys.”
And I think one of the mistakes that I made initially was, because we're a small company, if you hit up our customer service line, that email's gonna go to me. The little chatbot on the site, nobody abused this by the way, if you go on our site and you just start asking me questions, it's gonna go to me, okay?
And I get those weird emails in the middle of the night, and I used to act like I was customer service, and I was, “Blind Barrel support team.” Now if somebody's really angry, I'll probably just be Blind Sarrel support team.
But instead, I do, “This is Bobby DeMars, this is the founder of Blind Barrels.” So I always respond to people, I let them know that it's me, that there's something tangible about it. I have a Batphone that all my members have access to my phone number, my other phone number.
And the funny thing is, if you give everyone your phone number, nearly like practically nobody ever uses it.
But there is something about that. We did want to build a community. We did want to build a whiskey community. We do think great whiskey is meant to be shared. This is really a healthy approach to it. We're not sitting here taking shots. We're being mindful, we're being present with the company that we're in.
We have people that have brothers and mothers and fathers and friends and coworkers that are in other parts of the country. And everybody gets the same box at the exact same time. And that lineup never repeats again. And so it forces everybody to come together every three months or come together with us.
It's funny, I've made more friends through our members, than I have friends that have become members. I probably know about 30 people that are now our subscribers, that are friends or family that really do love what we're doing, and that's the only people that we want to be in our community.
But the irony is, I never get to do blinds anymore. So I'll have like 40 samples sent to us. That's one of the cool things about our job. “Oh no, I've got to taste whiskey again. Oh no, we've got to make a cast-strength rare bourbon for 12-year-olds.”
You know, they'll send us sometimes six full bottles and I create blinds for my whiskey wizards. And so they're doing blinds all the time. Whereas I'm never getting to do blinds. So there's two members now that every quarter, they send me some of their stuff in a blind tasting. I send them some of the stuff that's not in the lineup.
So the members that have been loyal, the members that I interact with a lot, I'll put a sample, I'll put an extra sample in our kit sometimes that isn't, that potentially is from a future brand to get feedback and engage with them in that capacity.
Or, “Hey, you've got a distillery that you've been on the trail, or it's in your area that we should know about?” So we've had two whiskey brands out of the 40 that have been in all of our lineups that have come from our members' recommendations. And when they do that, I send them a bottle, I send them a bunch of stuff.
And what I think people figured out now is when we do our lives with everybody, so it started out we had like 10 people that show up and now we've got like 70, 80, 100 people that are showing up in each of the lives that we're doing. We give away a lot of stuff.
And by the end of the night, everyone's a little bit lubed up from drinking or whatever one of our whiskey wizards, he might start pouring like 20 to year mickters that he's gonna sound a bottle, like some $8,000 bottle that he's just gonna send samples out to the people. And so the word has kind of gotten out that the lives were given away, a lot of stuff. So people have been showing up and it's really interactive and it's really fun.
And everyone gets to kind of guess. It's not about who's right and who's wrong. This one good and that one's bad. If we had 20 people in the room and everyone did this lineup, at least three people would say sample A was their favorite. And the same would be true for all of them.
“So what do your taste buds tell you?” Remove the bias, the brand, the label, the cost, all the other things that we associate with anything. We've all bought that bottle at the liquor store and been like, “I spent two hundred dollars on this. You'll be amazed." And we get home and it's like, “I think I left the Opus one in the car and it went bad.”
We don't admit that because of that label failure, we've convinced ourselves that it's amazing. So remove all that bias and what do your taste buds taste tell you? And do it as a healthy approach.
I come home every Friday and I sit on my back porch and I play with my kids and I watch my kids play and I have the same glass of whiskey for two hours. I'm not getting drunk. I'm just being present. I'm being… It's a good reminder to stop, take a moment, be present, and be mindful.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
Now, you've obviously talked so much about the product, but we need to mention where people can go to check it out. I don't think we've done that justice. So if I enjoy whiskey or I want to gift it to someone in my life that enjoys whiskey, where should I go to check it out?
Bob DeMars
Yeah. So if you go to blindbarrels.com, you can find everything about us. I mean, the nice thing when we picked Blind Barrels as the brand, there were only 17 sites that ever turned up for combination of the words blind and barrels and it was all blind people surfing. So, surfing barrels.
So, I'm never worried about people finding us but if you go to blindbarrels.com, you can follow us on Instagram, @blindbarrels. And yeah, if you reach out, if you message us, you're gonna get me, at least for now.
We are growing pretty quickly and eventually we're gonna get into tequila. We've got a model for hotels, we've got a model for restaurants that we're gonna be rolling out in 2025 that is gonna be really, really interesting.
The same way that we're showcasing and supporting these small American businesses, we're going to be doing something very similar with restaurants and try to create synergy with that. I mean, one of the coolest things about this whole company is the relationships that we've gotten to form with these small American distillers, and they've become really good friends and we continue to push them on social media.
You know, when you're doing posts on Instagram, the hard thing is you feel like you're supposed to be selling all the time instead of maybe creating a culture. And so there's this fine line you're straddling of like, I'm just not trying to feel like I'm selling everybody all the time.
And a great way that we can do that is we get to talk about all these brands that have been in lineups. We can talk about brands that we want to have in our lineups. We get to objectively talk about bigger and smaller brands and just talk about it and ultimately create authentic content without feeling like, “Oh, you need to sign up today, today, today.” or “You're missing out on this.” I mean, we do some of that, but we don't have to. And at the end of the day, we are creating the community and we are creating a culture around the brand.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing.
Now, Bobby, before I let you go, is there anything I didn't ask you about that you think would resonate with our audience?
Bob DeMars
I think one of the things is when you have investors, keep them afoot of everything. I think once you get the money, you wanna be narrowed and you wanna be focused. But I'm a best idea wins kind of guy.
We've had investors that aren't in this industry, they're friends or they're just friends of people that had money and getting feedback from them is always really important in terms of what you're doing because they're close to the brand too, but they're not as close as you are, they're not insular as you are.
So getting outward feedback, I think, is really helpful. Every quarter I send kind of an update on where we are, where we've been, where we're going, and it keeps everybody excited about what they're a part of, and it gets them to invest their energy into the company.
And not just believing in the brand, but like, “Hey, you got an idea for something? Awesome.” And look, there's all sorts of ways that your business can fail. I think there's a psychology behind risk taking that is overlooked.
So I'm the son of an inventor. You know, I'm a filmmaker, I've made documentaries and you know, every time you make a film, I mean the stomach lining that you lose, you're going to wake up at four in the morning with a bunch of problems that you can't solve.
Most people aren't built for that. You have to get accustomed to knowing that you're going to have those days and you're going to look back fondly at those days and not fondly at the day that you're trying to get to, which is an exit or whatever that is, or the beach house or whatever that dream is, that element that's motivating you. But it's the hard days that you look back on.
And I had a buddy when I was making a film. I made a documentary about college athletes called The Business of Amateurs. So I was the first football player to get into the film school at SC. And we utilized the film to change the NIL laws. So I'm on the Overset Committee for a nonprofit that created the NIL laws, which is Name, Image, and Likeness for college athletes.
So we started a bill in California. We replicated it in 12 other states. And then we got to the Supreme Court about two and a half years ago. And then overnight, college athletes can make money from their name, image, and likeness.
Five minutes of my film played at that audience, for all those Senate hearings and Supreme Court. It was what we set out to do. But when you make any film like that, it is really difficult to talk about the money and the academic integrity and the injuries and all this other stuff that was involved in it.
And I had a buddy who was vying to be a composer and I ended up hiring somebody else that wasn't a friend. And on his worst day, when I'm telling him I'm not hiring him, he's giving me maybe the best advice I've ever received, which is, “On the most difficult day that you have, remember to enjoy it.”
So there were days where we interviewed widows of a guy that died of ALS and really difficult, hard rooms to be in, taking on the journalist role that I hadn't taken on before. And I really took that advice to heart. And I remind myself of the really difficult days, and you can talk about long hours and all that, if honestly, if you love what you're doing, it's not really work.
If you're telling everybody, “I worked 80 hours this week,” then you should stop whatever you're doing. And you're completely looking at it the wrong way.
But yeah, there's a lot of different curveballs that you can't anticipate with any startup. There's a lot of mental suffering that takes place in the wake of those obstacles. And as ridiculous as it sounds, you have to find a way to enjoy it a little bit.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Those are some sage words to end on.
Thank you so much, Bobby. Please go check out Blind Barrels. If you're interested in whiskey, joining a subscription, he has made a customer out of me. He doesn't know it yet.
But Bobby, I thank you so much.
Bob DeMars
Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you.
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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