How can a single press feature trigger a $3M seed round?

today we share Jack Hammer's story of how he raised $3 million for his seed round for his wild and Specialty Foods Marketplace forged.com Jack shares his insights on how he raised Capital how he generated buzz by doing his own public relations and how that generated attention with investors and why he seeks mentors who are always two stages of ahead of them of where he's at now to always have relevant advice to help guide his let's go ahead and dive in everyone welcome back to the show today we have Jack hamri with us founder and CEO of forged welcome to the show Jack thanks so much for having me Jason hey it's great to have you and I'm excited for audience get to know your story you know let's just jump right into things can you just tell us a little bit about you and what you're doing at forged sure have can to so I'm Jack I'm the co-founder and CEO of foraged We Are The Marketplace for wild and Specialty Foods my whole background is in sustainability Innovation and that SC spans the gamut uh from educational Pursuits to I spend some time in Academia uh I started my first internship career uh at EPA and I realized the EPA was run by lobbyists so my next internship was at a lobbying firm and then I realized lobbyists were controlled by big corporations so I went to business school and joined abmv which is a nice big old Corporation to uh kind of connect those dots some more background um my undergrad though it's uh I'm very interdisiplinary in sustainability Innovation I like to say that sustainability is everything and it's also nothing you can be you can add sustainability and innovation in any sort of system whether that's building roads or pipes or uh thinking about financing housing every single element's connected in sustainability for bades all of it uh so just plug there for for sustainability innovators out there and um the thread that's always carried me along through uh such a a varied career in my early days and sustainability was my passion for food and I had originally set out to create uh something around aquaculture my first thought was sustainable seaweed and if there's anyone out there doing seaweed cultivation please let me know and I can live through you and in NV um I was interested in things like catfish and oysters really anything that can be harvested sustainably inv based species as well and this was in 2020 2020 in fact I was starting to work on some more ideas more more seriously and I kept seeing mushrooms everywhere and I'm a big guy I eat way too much red meat like up to two pounds a day and I'm I'm very large I'm like 65 230 pounds so it's a lot of lot of meat and my whole background sustainability so that's not really living up to to what I do in my professional life but I was getting really tired of portella of mushrooms it's like the only mushrooms you can get and so I was trying to find this mushroom called chicken of the woods I had had it at a couple nice restaurants here in Washington DC and I couldn't seem to find it anywhere and I was talking to my now co-founder at the time a bit of a distant friend Andy and he was living on the coast of North Carolina he knew a lot of people around the kind of the water community so I reached out to say hey do you know anyone doing seaweed or oysters or anything and he said no like such a random question why are you working on a business and I said yeah I I am my backgrounds and sustainability um randomly I bring up mushrooms hey I'm trying to find this mushroom called chicken of the woods and he's like no way I I have a ton I have like pounds of it um and I'm trying to sell it like I'll I'll sell it to you if you want I said what what do you mean he said yeah you only you can only get it in the wild you literally cannot grow it most mushrooms you cannot grow you have to get them in the wild and I'm a forager and I'm allowed to sell it but I'm not going to knock on doors or Craigslist is weird and yeah I'll sell it to you so obviously a light bulb moment but at first I'm thinking this is very cooky and odd there can't be that many people that have the exact same problem we do so start looking into it it turns out a lot of people have this problem it's a huge Market uh mushrooms that you eat we don't do anything with psychedelics we never have then we won't in the us alone is about 13 billion a year globally is approaching a 100 billion a year just for mushrooms that you eat so I thought wow that's that's pretty big that's a big enough market to actually do something and the market itself is fundamentally fragmented and what I mean by that is you can grow CTO Bellos at scale you can grow shiitake and oyster mushrooms at small scale but you can grow them say with lions ve and a few others a lot of the really special mushrooms though like Hen of the Woods chicken of the woods morels borchini mutaki generally you have to get them in the wild due to their relationship with with their ecosystems and other plants and so forth it's a huge Market it's fundamentally fragmented by the the growth and uh the growth mechanisms so I thought that's pretty interesting let's uh let's see who's in the market there has to be someone doing this and I was looking on Facebook Reddit Discord Tik Tok the community around this this industry is enormous and extremely engaged Fanatics 1.5 billion views hashtag foring on Tik Tok type in your hometown on Facebook and I guarantee you there is a group related to foods and mushrooms so this what I'm thinking this is not an odd Edge case light bulb moment there's a serious Market here it's fragmented in the market side and it's concentrated in the community side if you can click these two things together to defragment the market and layer in Commerce on this very engaged Community you've just solved chicken and egg you've just solved barriers to entry you've just solved Geographic problems and that's what we went about doing uh so at the time I was at a den series C startup where I was cheap as staff I helped do some financing rounds some m&a and I was kind of sort of at the end of the of the Rope as far as exciting things to do which uh the president of the company who I was working for noticed and he basically said like hey uh there's not a ton of meat for you here for a bit and I'm sort of pushing you out of the nest and you need to go start your own company and it's like I'll give you I'll give you a little help I'll give you a couple months of sance but you need to go start a company and like get out and as I'm perfect I actually have uh this company I've been working on great and he's like great get out so we uh we turned the site on in April of 2021 and things have just been clicking since I mean we uh we saw chicken and egg very rapidly on the marketplace had Revenue in the first week and it's just been all gross since then that is an amazing story and I could tell this isn't the first time you shared it I was a very San and articulate uh you know pitch there um just for fun I do want to go back to the very beginning of your story in terms of your EPA to lobbyists to cor big corporate where did you say you had the most influence on policy or most influence Lobby I mean the EPA basically just carries out law and law is not entirely written by lobbyist but yeah it's pretty much written by lobbyist so sad I'm dis not the part of our podcast but I just had to ask for you know personal curiosity uh and I was unfortunately right um but going back to to the stories here you know you you kind of went through this journey to G to stumble across you know light bulb idea at what point did you realize that you needed money and and what was kind of the the plan that you put for to go get money I think that's one of the I wouldn't even call it a mistake I think that's one of the traps that a lot of early Founders first time Founders find themselves in unless you're doing something with hard tech or heavy regulatory Industries you can get really far without money you get really far and oftentimes you're better off not having money we had a 50 Cent a day Google ad going for the first nine months of the company that's pretty much the only thing we spend money on at some points we would have 70% conversion rates on a 50 Cent a day Google ad and that got us a lot of traction 50 Cent today a lot of traction we started with a WordPress and a woocommerce site like off the shelf we ended up with 75 plugins half of them were were plugins that we made plugins for to fix the other plugin it was bubble gum and Gorilla Tape yeah and we were better off for it we still have that eatos of let's do everything we can short of actually putting Capital humans whatever into something and I tell my team all the time the way to get more resources and more backing um for whatever you're working on is go do something that doesn't scale prove how influential this could be and if you can prove it I'm pretty much always going to give you budget to go make that even more effective it's great ethos to to live by and uh I I recall my first couple small businesses doing very similar I I despise WordPress at this point because I have so many tragic stories using it but it's a means to get to some you know to start and get somewhere going it's amazing like I mean I I honestly I honestly I don't know if we could have done what we've done even five years ago because of how advanced some of these office shelf tools are yeah and because of how um deeply connected mobile networks are now I mean a lot of our users are in the woods way out in the woods and even five six years ago I'm not sure they would have had the the mobile bandwidth or technological knowhow to to engage with us good point it's kind of hitting your why now statement when you go to investors uh uh well done so but it's it's why you know you avoided raising Capital but you did raise a little bit in the preed rais about 200 in change you know what was that path what was that strategy and how did you go about getting the capital another thing I would this is my personal um opinion but I think it it would vote well for others I purposefully rejected any sort of Overture from people I knew to invest I said I'm not taking any money from anyone that I know at all and I'm not going to ask anyone that I know and I I think it was especially important for me because what what we did and what we are doing is so off a beaten path that I wanted validation from actual strangers people who have started companies sold companies Executives whatever if someone who has been there done that who I have never even met in person validates with with an investment that sounds a lot more than my grandma investing right and also like yeah could we have used the money obviously it's always a great to have money but then we like I don't want to go spend my grandma's money on Google ads that are unintentional and wasteful right so I didn't I not the only exception i' I've made and this was um once we realized that the seed round was coming up a uh family friend of my my now wife's family he was a mentor to me amazing guy I did accept a small amount of money from him Couple Grand that is the only person that I've I've ever entertained that I knew in any capacity I didn't even meet an investor in person until many months after I I took their investment so how did you go about getting in front of these strangers that got you the 200k there's a quite a few different Pathways um there's a million different you databas databases like spreadsheets floating around and you know forly was uh I was really focused on two things one some people who had Marketplace experience marketplaces are a very unique piece very different than traditional businesses the other side was food so that's where I started looking you know who who has have big exits or a lot of experience in marketplaces that now does Angel Investing or who is someone similarly in the food world uh I had ended up connecting with um our very first Angel through I think some honestly some random spreadsheet I found was reaching out to people with with thoughtful with thoughtful cold Outreach right people like to do the spraying prey that's that's not it that's not it especially with angels because Angels take a much different approach than institutional and uh so the first two investors we had one was uh just very steeped in Silicon Valley sort of like Facebook uh a lot of other exits and the other was a Marketplace expert who had and exit to Airbnb and so they added a ton of value in the early days from helping us like stay close to our super niche market not expanding too quickly out of that helping with some Communications ux UI I I valued them immensely so I was reaching out to them a lot but one of the things I I valued in our earliest investors and with our VC is almost everyone has taken me approach of I don't really mind if I don't hear from you unless there's like something bad happening there's something bad happening you need to tell me if something good is happening I'll give you a high five for sure but like you don't I don't need to give you a high five go get high five from someone else go to the other thing I know that sounds really crass I love that that was very attractive to me it was honestly kind of how I was raised where it's like you know I don't need a bunch of pats on the back I'm more intrinsic but if something's wrong you better tell me it's it's a great people to have when you're you're cap table early and so you took some money you get to you get get to Market and uh you know shortly after closing kind of both you in which I guess or the rolling safes uh you know one in 2021 and one in 2022 you went on to raise a fourball seed round from best Venture partners of all people you know pretty sizable Big Brand uh raising 2.7 for your seed kind of tell us about that Journey you know how did you one decide that was the time to raise your seed and how did you go about doing it it happened not as planned but it happened much better than the plan would have gone so that's always nice we um so this was Winter 2022 and I thought we should get some press I know it's a new channel we haven't tried to do it we have no money so I'll figure it out myself I started reaching out to did a bunch of research about tech crunch reporters who's covering food who's covering sustainability ability found a reporter who was sort of in our Niche pitched them said hey we're a really early stage company we're doing some some cool stuff with Marketplace and odd foods that haven't really been online before we're growing like crazy and we had no money and we're kind of weird does this sound interesting to you and they said yes that sounds interesting so the original plan was go through 2022 hopefully do a formal seed round at the end of the year and we got ahead in Tech crunch in April 2022 and the VC's just descended I mean it's kind of you know blood in the water to hear like odd company growing well with no money so I didn't really expect that to be honest but that's exactly what happened and we were fortunate to be raising in a good environment we're were just on the edge of like things getting kind of uh kind of odd in the way that they are now and we had quite a few uh DCS reached out immediately got into conversation uh we had quite a bit of diligence material prepared already for them and the experience for me was because we had very little money I wasn't even making a salary then um we were still spending I think at that point maybe $5 a day on Google ads we were balling out it was awesome and so for me it was having a huge check one that I'm not driven by the number of zeros like that's fine I'm certainly not driven by the number of employees I have if anything it's like a tarnish on a Founder's resume to to be chump putting that so for me it was really culture fit because we had such a great roster of early Angels who did have meaningful contributions it was not about about the dollars and cents to me so besser immediately appear appeal to me their their attitude the way they thought about the market the way they thought about the evolution of e-commerce as a whole um unbundling uh was one of their big Theses Community Based e-commerce so that really attracted me right off the bat and some of the other things that turned me off with some of the other VCS that had reached out it's not that Revenue interaction and things don't matter obviously that's the only thing that matters for a business but we were a year old we're doing some really weird stuff no one's really done this before and so some of these other calls of VCS opened immediately with what's Revenue going to be in 12 months what what's your month after month growth for the last three months that matters yes it matters I'm not saying it doesn't but given how unusual we were and are that was a huge red flag to me like if they're not on board for this new world that we're creating that no one's done before and all they care about is money that's that's not going to work and bester of course cared obviously this matters I'll say it again these things matter but in the early stages given who we are there was a lot more there that was more important to me than benef check so in this case is really about Mission alignment and then with their questions showing that they get it and that they're behind you less so much the standard check boxing of you know like oh Revenue RP you know all the different you know kpis that VCS want to see and trying to put you in a bucket and one thing I'll compliment you on is staying out of the bucket and I find companies have a much more successful Capital raise when they Define either their own bucket or hop out of the bucket that they're trying to be put in uh and that seems like what you guys did here acknowledging that yeah weird Specialty Foods which you know going on your website I like I have no idea what any of these things are yeah so it's probably on you've mastered to understand and know and what they want and how they want um so you kind of went down a different path here you you grinded quite a bit you tried to stay as lean as possible and you it opened up doors for you in terms of doing the tat crun article you kind of walked us through how you did that but I guess what was the overall response can you quantify the response uh that you got from getting into Tech Crunch and over what time of period did that happen and and how did you go about manage managing all the influx of you know inbound I really didn't it was probably naive of me I didn't expect the response to be venture capitalist interest my expectation was cool we're real we're in it's like this is this is validation that you know we're in the major publication so to me it was kind of a happy unintended csequence very happy untended consequence also one of the funny things I I was saying our two first Angels who I love so much uh he would text me like almost every day after after the uh techr trle came out saying like don't get too big of a head this is only going to happen to you a couple times enjoy the honeymoon phase don't let this get to your head which I think I'm I'm not like uh I don't know I don't really enjoy inflicting pain on myself necessarily but I think most people would hear that and be like screw this guy man I'm I'm I'm king of the world right now I actually really appreciated it because it's true right um so anyways we had probably 15 20 BCS reach out after the tech runch article of varying degrees of interest of of varying um specificity in their Outreach which is another thing I would tell Founders when you're receiving in Bound it always especially for the first time when you're receiving inbound interest you feel like king or queen of the world and everyone wants me read read how thoughtful their emails are if you as a founder and particularly as a CEO you are the sales head of sales always until you're like IPO even then you still are think about how you would Outreach to a customer a prospect someone else you're going to be thoughtful you're GNA say I like this about you I like that I notice this trend I noce that Trend so that would be a piece of device I would have for found uses consider how much thought they put in we got into diligence with probably a dozen or so some of the conversations were less R full than others uh immediately I I loved besser the partners there the associates there and we pretty rapidly went into diligence towards ter sheets and ultimately closing the round in probably took about six weeks about eight weeks from first Contact uh to get the whole round closed okay not too bad it's pretty solid quick uh quick process and was it only best or did you guys have some follow on Capital come in or did best take the whole round so that was another thing during the the negotiations on the round itself was as I had said we were so lean the dollars and cents were less important than the contrib potential for contribution so as part of the negotiation I requested quite firmly that they would be individuals included in the seed pool and so we tacked on some extra money to the round um specifically reserved for high value individuals again food and Marketplace and also just Tech in general but to me that mattered immensely it really did and they've been fantastic some of these uh recognizable names to be sure I'm still in touch with very much uh I get text emails from them all the time they share market insights ask how things are going I reach out to them for advice on on things and it really makes a difference i' I've been someone who I I've always kind of found the whole like advisor thing a little fluffy like it does it really matter if you have a slide in your deck that's like we have advisors and you know all of their names but they actually don't do anything well you should see most the decks I I do my monthly deck roast and the advisor slides are a bunch of no buies and no one knows and they're not doing anything so right uh yeah ego ego for me is is that's part of the whole ego thing that I don't subscribe to um but anyways the investor that did come in for not advisers have added True Value and so that was a sticking point for me in in the C negotiation and thankfully besser seems to know everyone in the entire world so I was fortunate to get some some pretty awesome people on the table well I'm sure when best call people answered that could make things a little easier for you and then for um you know out and raising you mentioned seven frustration points but I feel they kind of like gloss over them little bit it's bit Rosy picture at this point I guess what were some of the frustrating points about raising capital and kind of having to put yourself out there for Angels it's a different game right so in the really early days unless they are unless they have like unlimited money which some angels more or less do they're probably going to be on you a lot and I think it's important to get a sense for that early on and see that pattern and get ahead of managing those relationships this is with angels uh in particular on the seed round I mean admittedly I I the process was not that difficult is not the right word mine was smoother I think than other stories I've heard and I'm very fortunate and thankful for that the couple things that stood out to me legal council is important get a good legal counsel at the outset ask your angels for recommendations that's what I did it's expensive as hello so be prepared very expensive Council if you're doing a formal price round with an Institutional Investor it's going to be expensive which TR to clarify some things up front you get either do a fixed round uh price with your counil if that's possible have some sort of caps know what you're getting into for pricing because it is very very expensive and can take a meaningful chunk out of your round do share how much are I'm costing you if you can hundreds of thousands for a seed it's a formal round we had a lot of documents you know it's important because these are going to be the documents that persist through the life of the company it was not I mean it was not hundreds and hundreds it was not hundreds and hundreds I will say it was in the six figures certainly uh and I wish I had I wish I had know that at the outset lawyers do add up and uh I talk to Founders all the time on this definitely set a cap up front seeds are usually pretty manageable the the request on the legal side usually is often like have your terms already negotiated and never allow lawyers talk to lawyers that's where things get escalated substantially keep your conversations with the partners at the firm H between you and the partners and not the actual uh the VC firm not the do not let lawyers talk to lawyers because they can uh rack up things pretty pretty astronomically I did not have that advice going into it I wish I I wish I did because that's exactly what happened yeah so for everyone that's looking at any kind of legal of anything the most important rule you can tell your laer whoever you hire is they are not allowed to talk to another lawyer without your permission first and that will save you a ton of money and time and hassle because yeah we don't have to go into you know that whole conversation right now but I'm glad you shared that and I think that's a good warning to to all founders out there there are ways to mitigate this a typical seed Brown price could be my experience 30 to 60 you know all in um and uh sometimes even less depending on the complexity of how much you had prepped beforehand now if you're rolling safes on saf on safes on safes then coming into like a price round it gets pretty hairy pretty messy uh because there's a lot of back dating and you know cleaning things up but yeah yeah we did have a fair amount of clean up yeah we did have a fair amount of clean up um like I myself and my co-founder had have to paid ourselves legally as part of the round we needed to back pay ourselves that took some configuring on on the legal side another piece of advice I would give uh and I didn't think this would be a big deal it wasn't a huge deal but it definitely racked up some hours we did take money from an unaccredited investor on a safe and that ended up being not that fun yeah yeah that was a tough one to get out of um we won't give any legal advice here but uh it sounds like you had to get that situated um which is never NE really a fun conversation to have so when when taking Capital if you're not familiar with accreditation laws and things of that sort that's why you get a lawyer and there's a conversations usually you can Google as well to address and not have to spend the money but uh ideally you're not taking money from un accredit investors that and often will probably be the biggest headache too because they write the smallest checks and it's money they can't lose and Venture investing is all about losing money so they they need to get ready to swallow that pill pretty quickly um so it sounds like yeah you had some uphill battles and had toay ultimately pay the price but you know fortunately you got Venture money in the door so you know covered some of it but I imagine you'd rather have hired two people for for that money in you could say that you could say that ni um so another thing you talked about before we got on was the delaying of your announcement of your Capital race you actually raised last summer in 2022 but didn't actually announce until summer of this year so tell us why number of reasons one we were extremely Scrappy and we were on a WordPress site when we raised I didn't really want a huge influx of of people on our site that we were already like we raised a SE Dr to get money to build a site that was not WordPress so first I was like let's save the influx uh for a bit the other thing too was um actually that same Angel who was who's telling me like keep your head size in check during the the tech crunch uh honey moon phase was adamantly against it he said there's no reason to do this now like go start growing go start building what's the benefit to make your head get big like that doesn't move any needles and he's totally right it ended up working out really well for us where we didn't need it yeah so like I feel like I've talked about ego things so much now that it seems like it's it's like ironic and opposite yeah but I swear I'm genuine like what's the point what what what is the benefit unless you have a benefit besides you go don't share her you're just GNA invite competition you're gonna invite other people in the space you're gonna have people sniffing around if you don't have a strategic reason to do so then just keep your mouth shut it was kind of my thought and we built really heavy for the last year after the round um and it was a good time this summer we we really have not done very much for true growth marketing we spend very little on marketing a lot of our growth is organic it's SEO it's Community Driven because we are a true platform Marketplace so we have all those Network effects and it was time to actually do some press like there's a lot of people in the world uh I like to call them the bone appetite crowd it's kind of the Muse we have the products on our site most of them have never been on the internet before and if they are on the internet they're on some site that looked like it was built by like Al yeah people from like website yeah so like let's we need to get people to know about us there's so many cool products so many cool stories with 800 vendors from seven countries all these products that you you've never had a chance to experience people need to know about us and I I also don't like the game of spending you can spend money on growth and you can fuel growth with capital generally unless your product is really bad but it doesn't prove anything right so we still only spend a couple Grand a month on advertising and the advertising is very uh concerned it's very specific but it's time to go tell people about what we're doing in the world that we're creating which is of course one of the reasons I'm I'm talking to you here and so that was really the the Genesis of it like we're in a good spot our product's good we've grown a lot let's go tell people about it and let's roll that PR push from the announcement side into more uh broader awareness among sort of General consumer Outlets as a whole Goa no that makes sense and I think that's something that I always like to articulate to people something we made a decision in one of my companies a while back where it was actually going to hurt us if we made the announcement given that we were servicing kind of like more of an unders community that money was not common and to say we raised $ million you know it's like kind of rubs it in their face until it came to the point where we had to recruit and have legitimacy for Talent acquisition standpoint for people to feel safe to leave their big jobs to come join us that's when we had to finally make the announcement um so it's it's smart for Founders like what you did to kind of be strategic as when to pull that lever because if you just build your load and you do like a Business Wire PR wire press release we raise money it's like no one's going to care you know so it's better to you know really think about strategically how it can impact your business and how that can potentially seed like uh kind of a road show or PR out push and things of sort so there um from here kind of uh you since you're doing your you know PR now have you been seeing a a new influx of investor interest or engagement at this point kind of what's that been like the pattern has held certainly yeah we had a a huge influx after the announcement uh and it was kind of funny because I I think other Founders must be attuned to the strategy of sitting on news uh because quite a few of the VCS that reached out sort of immediately said I assume this is not new I assume this was from a while ago and you just announced it and I said you are so smart that's exactly what we did um but yeah we had a enormous interest and the conversations have been very different this time after this seed um much serious is not the right word they've been um we we've skipped a lot of the initial steps I would say now that we are obviously a legitimate company legitimate team legitimate backers a lot of the early like patty cake in in the conversations had been skipped over which was which was nice and we got contacted by probably be upwards of 30 GCS over this summer after the after the announcement which is a bit odd to me like I don't I think they're really cool uh but I'm like are read this cool appar apparently so I didn't really think so but the conversations were um they took a lot of time to be sure yes I wouldn't recommend like unless you're raising a lot of people would say it's complete waste of time and just focus on growth I disagree with that though we essentially got 30 free strategy calls with some of the best Venture Capital firms in the world for free it forced us to get all of our metrics in line it forced us to get all of our dashboarding cleaned up our road map our strategy our hiring plans like it was a huge forcing function to be diligent internally and that honestly was really valuable not that we were like chaos internal but we're squeaky C out and there's a big value in that and then we got a ton of different everyone has an opinion right so you got to take uh any conversation with a grain of salt they don't know that no one's going to know the full context that a Founder would know but they're valuable we had really really valuable feedback from a lot of these different firms uh I don't think we're going to close around uh anytime super soon but I would say if if there's a Founder in a position to have these types of conversations to an extent where you're you're not wasting time and you actually are getting value from it I think there is true Merit in that and the feedb the advice I've gotten before during and after was the exact opposite and I learned that it was worth doing yeah it's interesting to hear that you know the podcast is predominantly about raising Venture Capital but I've invited on some some recent guess so to talk about bootstrapping and you know why Venture Capital can be evil um or you know maybe not necessary for for companies but in this case it's a perfect example of you know when Venture Capital can play a very valuable and impactful role of kind of going through the motion of raising Capital it buttons you up it makes you kind of get prepared put your best foot forward and run a better tighter ship um when you have that level of oversight um and as you see it as an opportunity for strategic input um because one yeah ask for money you get advice you know you uh ask for advice you get money uh is kind of the the say as it goes but you know here you are actually getting uh you know some valuable advice and input from from VCS and you get to play your options you kind of get to see whether now's a good time tomorrow's a good time or you know do you continue to run run your course without having to raise additional Capital so uh I guess it was a good good exercise for for you and your firm to go through certainly um you know at this point you know you you kind of addressed you know the history today and it's relativ been short you know it's only been about two and a half years or so so for the company sounds like you had a pretty good run uh you I guess for the product itself like what's next for you guys you you got some pretty interesting as I kind of navigate the website from mushroom supplements and a variety of other things things I have no idea what the value are in and of itself I'm like so ious like what am I'm missing out on uh you know what's next for for forged so we provide smallscale food producers with a turnkey Business Solution first and foremost come for the tool plus instant access to a Nationwide customer base State for the network and by centralizing such a fragmented Market consumers get access to all of these Myriad rare foods that have never been available before so when we think about how we grow as a business that's foraged I like that our destiny is tied to the success of all these mom and popop hardworking soft ofth Earth food businesses that rely on us for their own livelihood I love that I like to say it's an alignment of Interest not a conflict uh so I tell my team all the time Rising Tides right lifts All Ships so when we think about what do we need to be doing we need to be getting more sales for the small scale Food business food businesses that that operate in their platform you can do that through a number of means through the products do marketing Partnerships whatever us as a tech company that's primarily primarily driven through the product and through engineering so what we're working on now is a lot of innovative tools uh to further extend the life cycle of business potential through ART technology as a vendor so we have a mobile app coming out soon that's going to have point of sale functionality it's going to be sort of the unified tool for farmers market operations we'll still have the platform Marketplace our average shipment goes over 1,000 miles uh the average order so clearly we're unlocking some crossb Network effects and now what we're going to be doing since we've unlocked these crossborder Network effects is further drilling down into the local ecosystem to kind of like plant the flag and go out then we're we're sort of operating right now in like the stratosphere um so it's really about life cycle capture and um continuing to expand the portfolio of products and continuing to serve more restaurants and and wholesale operations direct to Consumers about 90% of our business right now which is fantastic because every day people are getting access to the same ingredients that the best chefs in the world are are cooking with and there's a big opportunity right now to sort of triangulate between platform Marketplace of ultra rare Ultra specialty um exclusive inventory triangulated with vertical SAS in the mobile app in the UniFi business tool and triangulated with wholesale uh restaurants chefs that sort of world so right now we're kind of like figuring out where where the gravitational pole is between the three and as I was saying the the calls with these uh the strategy sessions really is how I approached it with all the DCS recently has helped sort of draw some color on on that triangulation and so we're kind of that's sort of in my head right now as CEO is where's the gravitational poal among it and what do we need to be doing to experiment and prove in the positive or uh to refute some of the inferences that we have about what might be most attractive at the intersections of the of those three well appreciate that and I guess before we go what would be your kind of parting words for for Founders out there that might be exploring their their fundraise now well something we didn't I didn't hit on earlier I would say if there's anything you could do especially as a firsttime Founder is find a mentor that is a stage to three stages ahead of you you don't want someone who is too far ahead because then they're they're just not really in the mix they don't really get the current reality you don't want someone well you can have someone at the same stage as you that's always great bonding people going through the similar thing but if you can find a mentor two stages ahead of you they're going to be able to add so much context so many introductions um a lot of managerial expertise I have a mentor his name is Alex he's been absolutely pivotal to the trajectory of the company intros mentoring me on how to manage people how to think about growth there's anything a Founder can do find a mentor because that can unlock a lot for you that's a great piece of advice and I do appreciate putting that range as well because you know you got someone that's retired and it's kind of out of the game it's a very may have amazing story track record but just the advice doesn't hit the same as someone that's a little bit closer um yeah well Jack I appreciate you being on the show uh what would be the best way for people that want to get in touch with you be able to learn more about you or contact you you can check us out at for aed.com that's f r a g d.com or on social for. Market is our handle across Tik Tok YouTube Instagram Etc and we'd love uh to help you try some new food so lots of interesting things that you certainly never heard of so give us a shot I know you're talking about chicken of the the woods or you know I'm like does it taste like chicken that's all I want to knowes does it taste and it does taste like chicken go to our recipe section uh our very first hire his name is JB he is a godsend absolute unicorn of an employee he does all of our culinary content and marketing his recipes are out of this world photography is amazing there's a a buffalo chicken sandwich uh recipe using chicken of the woods on the site go check it out it looks amazing there I'll have to start experimenting Well Jack appreciate you be on the show and I look forward to getting this out to our audience thanks so much for having me Jason