Max Altschuler:

Welcome to this episode of The Career Hacking Podcast. Today we’re talking to Justin Mares, CEO of Kettle and Fire Bone Broth. Before we get started, just wanted to say a special thanks to our sponsor, ZipRecruiter. I’ve been a customer of theirs, even before they were a sponsor at some of my previous companies, and we just loved the way that their platform works. It’s really hard to find great talent and really inefficient if you’re not doing it the right way, and ZipRecruiter just makes it really easy, efficient, and effective at the end of the day to find the right talent. Whether you’re a candidate looking for a job, really easy Google Play app or a iTunes app, one click can apply to jobs. If you’re a company looking to hire, there’s no better place to list. So right now, my listeners can try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com/hack. That’s ZipRecruiter.com/hack and it’s the smartest way to hire, so go check em out.

We’ve got a great show and even better guest for you today, my buddy Justin Mares is joining us, and Justin is an inspiration. He’s been a close friend of mine in the tech world for the past few years, really young guy, lives and breathes building businesses and spinning them up and making them successful in short periods of time, has a SAS business on the side called Fomo. They just got at, close to six figures and multi recurring revenue. He sold his first company to Rackspace, wrote a book called Traction that sold tens of thousands of copies and did really well for him. And then he took his talents to the CPG space. He didn’t feel like tech was enough of a challenge for him, so now he’s running companies in the consumer packaged goods space. One called Kettle and Fire, which is a bone broth company, doing over ten million in annual revenue. Just an amazing story so, he’s gonna impart some wisdom for us today. Justin, thanks for joining us.

Justin Mares:

Thanks for having me man.

Max Altschuler:

Awesome. Well you’ve got a pretty incredible story. A lot of windy roads here. You went from tech, sold a company, worked for Rackspace for a little bit, wrote a book. You’re one of the go to guys on growth hacking and startup marketing, and then kinda randomly it seems like, started one of the hottest CPG companies in Kettle and Fire Bone Broth. So what’s your story? Take us from graduating college, or starting to graduate college. What were you thinking and how’d you end up in tech first? How did that snowball?

Justin Mares:

Yeah, so I had a company when I was graduating college, I had a company. At that time when it started, when I was like a sophomore I guess you could probably say. So, I had started this company, it was called Roommatefit, we were doing eHarmony for roommates. So personality based roommate matching because I had an awful freshman year roommate. I was working on that and when I graduated, honestly, it was not a good idea, didn’t have a good team. There was a lot of issues with it. I mean, the team was fine. The challenge was I just wasn’t paying any of them. It wasn’t really easy to get a lot done and it was just really difficult. So I’m between bad idea, my first time doing it, it was pretty apparent to me that I had to take on, I had to start being around other entrepreneurs. So for me, I got out of school and was like, “Okay, I’m gonna try and meet, network with, and work with the smartest people that I can.”

So that’s kinda where I came up with the, and pitched this guy Gabriel Weinberg, who I ended up coauthoring Traction with, Traction book, which is the book that I wrote, and that’s also how I found Johnathan Seagull, who still to this day is one of the smartest, most successful people I’ve ever met. And ended up working very closely with him for just over two years

Max Altschuler:

So how did you end up reaching out to those types of guys?

Justin Mares:

Yeah so, cold email honestly. So Gabriel, I was pretty lucky. My family, after I graduated high school, they moved to an area called Schwenksville, outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. So I’d grown up in the DC area, moved and then I basically knew no one. So there was this guy, Gabriel, who was the only tech startup founder that I knew of, or could find, in the Philadelphia area. Gabriel Weinberg, so I just cold emailed him and was saying, “Hey, I moved here, I’m looking to get into tech. I don’t really know anyone. Do you want to meet up and chat?” So I came over to his house and he was totally game and so we built the relationship that way.

Then he had this idea of writing a book called Traction, just about how different startup founders get traction for their businesses and all that. As part of that, I was like, “You’re clearly very busy with your own company”, which was DuckDuckGo, and still is. Why don’t we pair up and do this together? Marketing is something that I’m doing, it’s something that I want to get better at, something I want to meet a lot of people in. We should pair up and go write this book and write what we thought was the best book on review.

So that’s how I met them. And then Johnathan I met by cold emailing the CTO of Heroku, a guy he had just sold Heroku to Salesforce for 200 mil or something like that. We met, had a great chat, and he was like, “You should chat with this guy named Johnathan Seagull.” So that’s how I got introduced to him, which was amazing and so fortunate in retrospect

Max Altschuler:

Yeah, so you wrote this book, you got it published by a real publisher. Who was your publisher for that one?

Justin Mares:

We self published the first edition, but the second edition was picked up by Portfolio Penguin, and they published it.

Max Altschuler:

So obviously, you got paid pretty well on writing this book, you probably graduated college and never thought that you would grade a book right? I mean, was this something-

Justin Mares:

Yeah, it was definitely not on the radar.

Max Altschuler:

Exactly, but it opened up so many doors for you and I’m sure you got paid nicely on it. Along that road, what were some of the key learnings from writing that book that you realized and what were some of the things that helped you write that book that you may not have realized, at the time, were helping you to get to that point?

Justin Mares:

Yeah, it was really hard. I mean writing a book is really, really hard. When I said let’s do this, I don’t think I fully understood what I was getting myself into, but it was a long project. So for months I would wake up, and I was working with Johnathan full time, but I would wake up and just get up and write for two hours. That was six days a week. Get up write for two hours, close my computer, and go do the real job, the real work. It was a slug. The things that helped me, the only thing that ever really helped me honestly was setting a time in the morning where I would write and never missing that time. I tried to write the first chapter by just doing it whenever I felt inspired and doing it not on a schedule or whatever, and it did not work at all. It took me like a month to write the first chapter. After that, I talked to Gabe and I was like, “Look, we gotta get this moving or else this is gonna take three years to write.” Then I just cranked out a chapter a week for twenty weeks and then the first draft was done. At that point, I was like okay cool. Let’s hire an editor, let’s move to the next step. And we just kept plotting through it.

Max Altschuler:

Do you remember writing that book? What were some of the things you thought back on as you were writing that book that was like, “Wow, I didn’t realize I learned so much from that experience”, but allowed you to write that book.

Justin Mares:

I became a much better writer throughout that book. I became much better at research and laying out my ideas and thinking more logically, but when it came time to edit… After I finished the last chapter, I went back and looked at the first chapter that I’d written and was gonna edit it and was like man, I am just a, like I could literally see how much better of a writer I’d become over the last 300 pages of writing the book. So that was really cool, and I think around that, it was just putting my hands down and practicing and writing as much as I could. I wish I could say there was some secret sauce, but there was just a lot of writing time, you know?

Max Altschuler:

So you sat there, you cranked that out. How many pages was it?

Justin Mares:

The first draft was 360 pages, which is way too much. Then we cut a ton of it and got down to 220.

Max Altschuler:

So now it’s like punchy and concise, and it’s much better for the reader.

Justin Mares:

Yes exactly.

Max Altschuler:

Okay, because they get the meat out of the book.

Justin Mares:

Yeah, exactly. The first draft was like, I had never written a book, Gabriel had never written a book, and we were just trying to, specifically me, I was trying to write a book that I thought would read like a book should. Put a lot of my sentences, flourish, transitions, and all this stuff, and it ended up being way too long.

Max Altschuler:

Was it easy to coauthor a book like that?