How he finds $1M+ CPG startup ideas before anyone else using Ahrefs and Manus AI

I’m joined by Ashwinn Krishnaswamy, an expert in launching and growing consumer brands, where we discuss how he evaluates market opportunities and creates unfair advantages. We discuss various tools for market research including Ahrefs for keyword analysis, Particl for competitor sales data, and AI tools for product design. Ashwinn emphasizes that entrepreneurs should work backward from distribution channels rather than focusing solely on product development. Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 03:45 - Ahrefs tool for keyword research 15:08 - Particl for analyzing competitor sales data 18:52 - Why start a CPG brand 21:05 - How to stand out in crowded categories 24:57- Opportunities in Branding for Older Adults 28:40 - Bootstrapping Your Product Idea 33:56 - Researching Your Market and Competitors 36:52 - Manus AI for automating market research 39:58 - Distribution is everything. Key Points: • Ashwinn shares tools and strategies for evaluating market opportunities for physical products and brands • Tools like Ahrefs and Particle provide valuable data on search volume, competition, and sales trends • AI tools like Manis can now automate much of the market research process that previously cost thousands • Distribution strategy should come before product development, not vice versa 1) First, understand that DISTRIBUTION is everything. "First-time founders focus on product, second-time founders focus on distribution." The hard truth? Many subpar products CRUSH IT because they nail distribution and operational excellence. Always work BACKWARDS from how you'll acquire customers! 2) Use Ahrefs to evaluate category demand and competition Type any keyword to see: • Monthly search volume (market size) • Keyword difficulty (competition level) • Seasonal trends • Geographic distribution This helps you VALIDATE demand before building anything! 3) Look for geographic OPPORTUNITIES in the data When Ashwinn checked "electrolytes" he found: • 74% of searches from English-speaking Western countries • Only 3% from India, Philippines This reveals potential to build "Element for Germany" or other untapped markets where trends haven't diffused yet! 4) For physical products, use Particle to spy on competitors This tool shows: • E-commerce sales data for brands • Best-selling SKUs • Category trends Crucial insight: Often 90% of revenue comes from just 4 SKUs! 5) The REAL opportunity in physical products? They force you to become EXCEPTIONAL at marketing. "The bleeding edge of marketing happens in consumer products because it's SO HARD to get attention and convince someone to part with their dollars." It's a marketing masterclass in real-time. 6) How to stand out in crowded categories: Study the competition obsessively! Ashwinn showed how most magnesium supplements look generic and medical. But brands like Moon Juice and Lemme differentiate through: • Distinctive packaging • Custom bottles • Clear positioning • Targeting specific demographics 7) The BIGGEST opportunity right now? Find UNDERSERVED demographics! Most brands target coastal millennials or Gen Z because that's who creates them. But what about products for older adults with: • More disposable income • Less saturated marketing channels • Different aesthetic preferences 8) AI is your UNFAIR ADVANTAGE for research • Competitor analysis • Market sizing • Customer needs • Design trends "It's putting together a report Nielsen would charge $20K for!" 99% of people aren't using AI this way yet. 9) Before building ANYTHING, become a "relentless researcher": • Study every competitor's positioning • Read all the 1-2 star reviews in your category • Visit stores and talk to owners • Contact potential customers directly Notable Quotes: "First time founders focus on product, second time founders focus on distribution." - Ashwinn "Building a physical product business is very hard and by most people probably just shouldn't be done on a whim. But if you can do it in a somewhat low stakes way or low risk way... I think it is a phenomenal way to get really good at marketing." - Ashwinn LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/ BoringAds — ads agency that will build you profitable ad campaigns http://boringads.com/ BoringMarketing — SEO agency and tools to get your organic customers http://boringmarketing.com/ Startup Empire — a membership for builders who want to build cash-flowing businesses https://www.startupempire.co FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/ FIND ASHWINN ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://x.com/Shwinnabego Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shwinnabegobrand Brand Brothers Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/2wgTQ7mXBngdiNzcJ2cUJZ

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Greg Isenberg?

  In this episode, we go through Ahrefs and Particle to learn about how to create a CPG business that uses data and trends. I brought on Ashwin. Ashwin works with some of the top brands to figure out how to create a product that people love and what are some unfair advantages to create products that millions of people are going to use. We learn about SEO, we learn about trends, we learn about branding, and even if you're not building a CPG product, a lot of these lessons could be applied to your software startup. So I enjoyed myself in this episode. I think you're going to enjoy it too, and let me know.

• 0:49Greg Isenberg?

  We got Ashwin on the pod. We don't often have people like Ashwin on the pod. And what I mean by that is Ashwin's my go-to brand and physical product guy. And not many people know this, but he uses a lot of tools and software to come up with ideas, opportunities, and ways to create unfair advantages with building any of the startups that he's built, and he's built a bunch of successful ones. Wanted to welcome you here, and I wanted to ask you if you could just give like a one or two liner about who you are, and if you can tell people what they're going to learn if they stick through this whole episode.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  Yes. So, thanks for having me on. So, in one sentence, what I do is I launch and grow consumer brands. And so I've gone through this process of going from idea to launch and growing both in the consumer space and then prior in the software space. Right now, I do this through an agency that I have that's a branding and design agency. We help launch a lot of kind of physical products. I have a couple of brands of my own, and then I just make a lot of content around branding and marketing and distribution and how people, whether you're building software or whether you're building physical products, should think about this and kind of reverse engineer it because now the cost to create things have become so easy, and it is much harder to acquire customers.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think today we're going to get into some of the ways that I evaluate opportunities, how to think about it if you are building something new, what some resources is and how to like look at this data and consider opportunities so that you don't get to a place where you build something and then you're like, oh shit, how do I get customers for this thing now? Like, is there demand for my product?

• 2:38Greg Isenberg?

  I'll tell you why I wanted to have you on the pod selfishly.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:43Greg Isenberg?

  So Ashwin is, you know, people have their friend who's just like always the best dressed, always the best, well spoken, always knows like the most upcoming trends. That's, we all, we all have one of those friends. That's, that's Ashwin for me. So what I want to do is get inside your head and just see how, like when you say how I evaluate opportunities and how, you know, we've been throwing around this word taste. Everyone's talking about taste, right? Taste is the ultimate mode, distribution ultimate mode. I basically want to see how, unpack how you, how you think about taste and, and yeah, let's, let's just

• 3:25Greg Isenberg?

  do a lot of screen sharing today and just, and see what, what we cook up.

• 3:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love it. Okay. So I'm going to start, I'm going to start in here because I was having a conversation with, with someone yesterday where they were talking about a product that they built again in the kind of like physical product world and they wanted to think about how they should invest their time from a digital marketing standpoint. Should they do Facebook marketing? Should they do SEO? Should they do Google email marketing? There's like so many channels, right? And I think especially for an early stage business, again, whether it's software, physical products, you're going to get most of your leverage from one channel. And so it's a question of like, which of these channels should I invest in first and what's kind of worthwhile. But kind of taking a step back here for, for a second, are you familiar with Ahrefs?

• 4:16Greg Isenberg?

  I am, but self admittedly, I haven't gone deep on it.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Okay, so I love Ahrefs and the person who put me on to, so let me give context for what we're looking at here. Let's type in.

• 4:33Greg Isenberg?

  Like to me, honestly, Ahrefs feels a bit overwhelming.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  It is a little bit overwhelming, but it's one of those tools where there's a few key ideas for you to understand from here. And when you can understand those numbers, like forget this chart, right? What is this insane like, you know, graphic down here? I have no idea how to parse this, but there's like two key things that are helpful here. So Ahrefs is a tool where you can, it is, it is a tool really used by people who are in the SEO world. But what one of its really useful kind of features is, is you can type in any keyword and it will give you a general sense of what the search volume is on Google for that keyword or term or brand, as well as the difficulty in ranking for that term on Google.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  And so that's what we see up here, keyword difficulty in the left and then search volume in the top right. And why I bring this up is because this is a really good way. So first, it's a really good way of evaluating category demand and trends in certain spaces. So for example, here, you know, in the physical product world, electrolytes, I mean, you've probably seen Element and all of these brands get super popular. You know, Element probably came out in 2016, I want to say, where there was, there was like some demand there, but it wasn't explosive. But then over the years, there has just been like a rising trend and kind of demand in electrolytes. So there's kind of two things here.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  There's good search volume, but there's also this like seasonal trend around it, right? Where June and July, there seems to be this like huge pops for electrolytes. So just right off the bat there, kind of like tells you two things. All right, if I'm launching an electrolyte brand, sure, there's probably going to be some seasonality here. But the second thing that you see here is that the keyword difficulty is ranked super hard, right? It's ranked 88. So this is a scale from zero to 100. And what this tells you is if you wanted to go on Google and like really play the game of SEO and rank in the first three slots for electrolytes on the first page, it's going to be a near

• 6:48Speaker 01

  impossible endeavor for you. It is going to take in an exorbitant amount of time, money, effort, and like SEO expertise for you to get up there, probably like a 24-month effort and like a ton, a ton of money. So it's, you kind of just look at this and you're like, okay, even not knowing anything else about the brands that are out there, say I only know that Element exists or Liquid IV exists, this like categorically should just tell you there's a lot of competition in here. There's a lot of people vying for this keyword. So this is the, this is the kind of like first place that I look for something.

• 7:28Greg Isenberg?

  I will say one thing though, which is interesting. So when I look at the global search volume, US 45%, UK 19%, Canada 6%, Australia 4%. That's, what is that? 74% is basically US, UK, Canada, Australia. What does that tell me? That this is really big in English-speaking Western countries, but electrolytes seems to not be a thing in other places. So there's probably an opportunity to build like an element for Germany, for example.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  100%.

• 8:09Greg Isenberg?

  Quick break in the pod to tell you a little bit about Startup Empire. So Startup Empire is my private membership.

• 8:18Greg Isenberg?

  Where it's a bunch of people like me, like you, who want to build out their startup ideas. Now, they're looking for content to help accelerate that. They're looking for potential co-founders. They're looking for tutorials from people like me to come in and tell them, how do you do email marketing? How do you build an audience? How do you go viral on Twitter? All these different things. That's exactly what Startup Empire is. And it's for people who want to start a startup, but are looking for ideas. Or it's for people who have a startup, but just they're not seeing the traction that they need. So you can check out the link to startupempire.co in the description.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  You know, yeah, you have 3% India, Philippines. Go build like, if you're watching over there, it's like, okay, how do we, how do we build this in these countries? And, and there tends to be these, you know, these like patterns of diffusion of how long things take to spread to these, to other cultures. And I remember there's this like famous like German tech startup that basically like raised a ton of money. And their whole kind of shtick is like, what are the big US tech companies? Okay, like Grubhub got super big there. Great, we're just going to do that in like Germany and EU more broadly. And I think it's smart because you have a proven business model and you're like, okay, this is probably going to be big here in the next five years or so. So, so I think that's a, that's a good call out.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  But how to, how else I, I kind of use this, or I'll kind of tell you why I became so interested in this is, I have a buddy, let me type it in here. I have a buddy who was really good at SEO. And so he, he had a company that was like built off of SEO. He sold it, it was very successful. And then he was like, hey, I want to buy kind of undervalued web properties. And I'm going to see where there is existing demand for that like search term or that kind of asset. So he was looking in astrology for a while. He was looking in religion. And he would go to all of the, he'd say, okay, if they have a search volume of more than one month,

• 10:29Speaker 01

  1 million monthly visitors, I'm going to go find like the fourth and fifth result on Google, try to buy their website and then know that I can pump them to number one. And it's basically like, He's like the SEO like home renovation guy, you know, where he'll like come in and get this like undervalued asset. So he did, he saw there was a lot of opportunity in Solitaire, because you have 8.5 million monthly searches here. And if you were the first result on Google, especially for a highly targeted key term, you're probably going to get 40% of the clicks there, right? So, so he tried to buy like every Solitaire site that was already up there. And no one wanted to sell because they were just like cash cows, right? They make all of this money just running Google AdSense.

• 11:14Speaker 01

  And so he's like, damn, I'm just gonna like build my own from scratch and out SEO these guys. So he built his own from scratch and out SEOed everyone for 24 months. He just like invested like a dog into it. And now he ranks like number one or two, depending on what you search. And that business, I like, I won't share the numbers, but like you, you probably know like some of the figures just like looking at this. He makes a preposterous amount doing that. So there's, there's, there's really good ways to use a tool like this for if you're thinking about an app idea. Say like, hey, I want to build, you know, tax for, for vets

• 11:56Speaker 01

  or like tax, you know, software for vets or like accounting software for vets. Like there's, you should, I would first use this tool because a lot of people start with an idea and they're like, oh, I think that'd be great. Like I know for vet clinics and they all say they have an issue with like their accounting software. I want to go build it. Then they build it and then they're like, oh damn, was there demand for it or was it too crowded already? And so I love first just like gut checking with a tool like this. Hey, what is the search volume for this category look like? Can I organically capture some demand here? And then it also just shows you the competitors that are kind of in this space. So that's my, my, my Ahrefs kind of walkthrough and what I love here.

• 12:39Greg Isenberg?

  I think the mistake a lot of people make when they're playing with Ahrefs is they just look at the data and they don't ask why. Basically, they're not acting like analysts.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:52Greg Isenberg?

  So, so, and this is like a future business idea, like someone should go and create an agent that basically is that, you know, research agent that says, you know, oh, I've noticed that there's an opportunity in Korea for CBD, you know?

• 13:10Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, let's look at this, right? So we have CBD that had, was explosive in 2019 and then has kind of like declined steadily ever since. And you say, okay, well, why was it explosive in 2019? It was explosive in 2019 because the 2018 farm bill passed and that basically allowed like the manufacture and sale of hemp based products. So you have everyone in the industry kind of pumping it up and talking about it. Okay, so there was this like peak when people were, were super interested in it. There was this like secondary peak. Okay, I have to figure out what happened there, but it's been declining. And then why has it been declining? And if you look at that and you cross, cross that with

• 13:50Speaker 01

  this thing called Delta 9, which is basically like legal THC, right? Kind of like gets you high because it's derived from hemp.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  Well, that's been growing since 2020 and that's kind of like been explosive. So it's kind of the D9 took the place of like what people were looking for from CBD because it's like, oh, I can get it legally and I still have this, you know,

• 14:16Speaker 01

  experience from taking it.

• 14:18Greg Isenberg?

  You still kind of have to know how to prompt it though, right? You kind of still have to have some, you know, market information to know, you know, for example, I know, I didn't know anything about Delta 9, you know?

• 14:32Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. Yeah, so I think to your point, if someone can package, like it's always SEO agencies that interpret this data for you and they know what to do here.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  But yeah, if someone can make something like agentic here that like parses some of the data category trends and gives you some insight, I think super useful.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  Cool. What other, what other tools do you use? So I use, and then again, this is in the physical product space. I use this tool called Particle. Particle basically allows you to type in a brand, type in any ecommerce brand. So I was looking at, today I was looking at Vital Proteins. Let's just type in an ecommerce brand. This data isn't public typically, because these aren't public companies. And it allows you to see not just their sales over time. So this is like Vital Protein's sales, just from their ecommerce website over the past four weeks, but it shows you the categories of which they have products in and what their best-selling products are.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  So a couple of ways that I like to use this is I like to see, number one, what are the numbers that competitors are doing in my space? But then even more importantly, what are their best-selling SKUs? So oftentimes, people will think, hey, if I'm launching a brand, you know, I need to have, I'm going to grow by expanding the set of SKUs or flavors or options that I have. And then you come in and you look at some of the sales data and it's like, hey, 90% of this company's revenue comes from like these top four SKUs and they actually come from these two flavors. So if I'm a product in this category, making flavored

• 16:17Speaker 01

  supplements, for example, let me not go make a, you know, whatever, like crazy concoction flavor. Because let me look at like the biggest, a few of the biggest players here. And okay, if I look at four of them and they're all selling chocolate and vanilla, it's like, all right, I should probably just make a chocolate and vanilla one. So kind of enables you to like de-risk some of the product decisions that you make. But this is, this is a super cool tool, because you can be intentional about searching certain brands, but you can also just look at, they have their own kind of like Trend Explorer, Trend Explorer Insights

• 16:57Speaker 01

  here. There's certain like products and categories of products you can take a look at and see how they're kind of trending up and down. So I kind of like to look at both things on Particle, as well as Ahrefs and just like get a Position of where things are in the market.

• 17:17Greg Isenberg?

  I know you're you're a big TikTok guy. You know, how much do you think about TikTok shop and looking at how much revenue people are doing on TikTok shop and stuff like that? I'm guessing Particle doesn't incorporate that?

• 17:30Speaker 01

  Particle does not incorporate that, but Particle does not incorporate that. But browsing on TikTok shop, they show you all the sales figures. I mean, even Amazon shows you some sales figures.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  Where it used to be how many they sold in the last month, but now what do they show you? Yeah, 100K bought in the last month, so I like to look in certain categories.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  Okay, this like this, you know, magnesium is super hot right now. So this brand is selling a ton of a ton of this, but you know, let's look over here. This brand is probably, okay, this brand is selling 40,000, but then that kind of goes all the way down to supplement selling, you know, 50 units a month. So you kind of get a sense of how competitive a space can be.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  But so, so I do a similar thing on TikTok shop in like physical product categories too of, hey, there's a lot of people talking about this one supplement or this product category. It's selling a lot. And again, they make that sales data public, so it's it's helpful to see.

• 18:40Greg Isenberg?

  And can you can you make the case for why someone listening to this should start a physical product business? I mean, one interesting piece of that could be the same tools or similar tools that we're using for coming up with, you know, AI startups, you know, rappers, that sort of thing. You could use to create physical products and a lot of, there's just a lot of competition right now in software. But I'm curious your perspective, like, what is the case for why someone should go and create a physical product business? When it feels like a bit, it just feels harder in terms of like

• 19:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:17Greg Isenberg?

  supply chain and stuff like that.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  It's, I think it's like one of the hardest business models to. Like to act on because there are so many of these pieces that you have to be really good at and you've probably seen people who are in the many millions of dollars going, trying to go from like seven-figure brand to an eight-figure brand where they're like, hey, at this point, it's like not even really about the product and like even the marketing. It's about like having a really good supply chain and being maniacal about the finances of the business, right? So you end up learning a lot more about like your cash conversion cycle and like the margins that you need to operate well and like inventory forecasting and all of these other things. So let me say this, building a physical product business

• 20:04Speaker 01

  is very hard and like by most people probably just shouldn't be done on a whim. But if you can do it in a somewhat low stakes way or low risk way where you're not like throwing a ton of cash into it or like betting your entire career on it, I think it is a phenomenal way to get really good at marketing because like the bleeding edge of marketing is happening in the consumer product world because it is so fucking hard to get people's attention, to get a single person each time to part with dollars to buy something. It is much easier to go to a company, give them software and say, hey, can you buy this for 500 bucks

• 20:45Speaker 01

  a seat per month and it like saves you guys, you know, 30 minutes a month? And they're like, yeah, sure.

• 20:52Greg Isenberg?

  So can we talk about that? So now we understand two tools around trends and what products we should create, but can you talk about, okay, great. I want to create this magnesium glycinate product.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:08Greg Isenberg?

  But how do I get people to actually buy it?

• 21:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. So if we look at, so here's, here's a kind of, I think this is a good example. Magnesium is becoming very popular in the world of people who care about performance and recovery and productivity. And I think it's probably like, there's probably like a Huberman Lab episode or like a Peter Attia episode on magnesium glycinate and like now it's this thing, right? So you have all of these brands creating magnesium supplements, like tri-magnesium supplements. Now,

• 21:44Speaker 01

  Just because there is category demand and it is a popular thing does not necessarily make it easy to like go into and it's actually somewhat easy to create a supplement, but it's very hard to stand out. So the first place that I kind of look is, okay, we'll go on Amazon, we'll type this in like magnesium glycinate and we'll take a look at these brands. And a lot of these brands, just kind of as I'm scanning here, okay, these look like, these look fairly medical, these look kind of generic, maybe like Nature Made is a brand I recognize from like being at CVS and Walgreens and it's like distinctive, right? It stands out with it's like yellow cap and, and yellow coloring here. Everything kind of looks like, they're all kind of like stock white bottles. They all look a little

• 22:27Speaker 01

  medical. They look like a little bit like generic and weird and like not terribly appealing. So I look at this and I'm like, okay, there could be an opportunity to stand, to stand out here and like do something different. And so then you come across a brand like...

• 22:45Greg Isenberg?

  I was just gonna say, that's what I, this is the product I have.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you look at Moon Juice and it's like, they're probably, they're probably sourcing their powder from the same places like 600 of these other brands, you know? But it's like, they have this amber jar, they have like, they're building a different kind of like brand around it, but just like visually it's striking and it stands out relative to things here. So there's one place in which you can differentiate and that's on the, on the look and feel of the brand. And there's, there's this brand, this is like Kourtney Kardashian's brand that I really like from how they've differentiated. So they're a supplement, they make gummy supplements. And what they did is they invested in kind of like this custom bottling. So it's this kind of like hard plastic feels like glass

• 23:30Speaker 01

  kind of bottle with these cool ridges. They have these cool custom caps. The whole thing is this like purple. They are very much positioning to women here and making it like much more fun and much more like accessible, right? Take a look at the Lemmy products versus pure encapsulations, which is like, that is straight from like the compounding pharmacist, right? There's no branding on that. So... So Lemmy is kind of coming in and saying, hey, we're going to differentiate on look and feel and the language that we use, but we are also going to differentiate on the positioning of the brand and the audience that we're going after. We're going after like a Gen Z woman and it like makes sense, you know, with like Courtney being behind the brand.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  You know, Seed is differentiating in the category, both from how they speak to consumers, how they look, that this kind of like audience that they that they go after. And I think both in, again, physical products as well as software, you have to, especially in the early stages, figure out what niche you're kind of positioning to and how you're speaking to them and go hyper-targeted to them and then get to a certain scale and then you start to expand that niche more and more.

• 24:45Greg Isenberg?

  I was just, the aha moment I had is while you're talking and seeing some of this is there's a lot of rivy, it seems like in products for for women, it's getting more and more popular to have just like well-designed, well-branded products. I don't think that's ubiquitous yet. Like, you know what I mean? So I feel like there's, maybe there's more opportunity in in creating products for not women, which is highly branded Seed style or Lemmy style. Like, I think that this branding is is really beautiful. Just curious what your thoughts are on there on that.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  So if I kind of recap that, you're saying there's a lot of products that are kind of geared and branded towards women?

• 25:31Greg Isenberg?

  No, my, my point is like, so Seed is, it's a, well, actually, it says it's probiotic for women and men, right?

• 25:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's like in all of their influencer marketing, it's like really for women because like women are the buyers of these products and.

• 25:46Greg Isenberg?

  I guess my point is, I think that there's probably a lot of opportunity in doing this style branding for older adults, not young females.

• 25:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 25:56Greg Isenberg?

  And there's probably an opportunity to do it for, well, older adults, let's just say, that's one, that was the one that first came to mind is. The older adult, you know, the 65 or older male or female, you know, just because they're older doesn't mean that they don't want great, beautiful products that make them feel, make them feel good or excited about it. Right. They, they're, they're just like us.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 26:28Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay. Yes. This is a extremely important idea and a problem that like everything that is in the consumer packaged world runs into this, this kind of like issue, right? Where it's, we had this like era of like millennial blending with consumer products, which is like, everything kind of looks the same. You can kind of think of like Harry's or Casper and their design sensibilities trickled into like every product set and category. Right. Like our pans, our cookware, like our rugs, our furniture, everything kind of looks the same. And now we have the same thing happening in for Gen Z because there it's like they're the next generation of buyers. So like, let's make everything super bright and vibrant and saturated and look like a brand called, um, I'll, I'll just

• 27:13Speaker 01

  show you like a good example of this, um, uh, like Starface, right? And all of this is a byproduct of the people who are building these brands tend to be mostly like coastal people between the ages of 22 and 35. So they just make stuff that they and their friends want to buy. But it turns out when everyone's doing that, it gets like extremely crowded and hard to compete or stand out. So I always say like, hey, when you're thinking about a category or building a brand in the space, yeah, sure. Maybe your like friends need the product, but like, I don't know. Do, let's look at Starface. Do older men

• 27:56Speaker 01

  and older women have pimples? Do they like, could they like benefit from these patches? Okay. Is there a way to just like, take this concept and apply it to a totally different demographic that is not really targeted with the current product category? And especially when you go older, like they have more disposable income. They like, you know, consume information from these different channels that are not super saturated with advertising dollars and brands and products and influencer seeding. So it can kind of make your life a little bit easier, finding these opportunities elsewhere.

• 28:27Greg Isenberg?

  Okay, so say, say I'm a listener to, you know, I'm listening to this and I'm like, you know, I want to create this Starface for older adults and you've got like a good vision in your head for, you know, the positioning, the marketing and the actual physical product and boxing and stuff like that. Is the only way to actually go and create the website, create the Shopify, create the product, going to an agency to do it? Is there like a bootstrap way to, to, to start like sketching out your idea and putting something out there before like investing half a million dollars or whatever in an agency?

• 29:05Speaker 01

  Yes, 100%. And I think there is, so there's two things. I think like, you know, if you look at, if you look at a brand like Mighty Patch, for example, that's pretty like straightforward. There isn't this like incredibly fancy design with it. It's like nicely done, seems like kind of clinical, seems effective, but it's really just like communicating the information. You could probably figure out how to make that in Canva, right? Whereas Starface, like, okay, probably like bring in a graphic designer to like make this whole like brand and world feel good. There are, there are categories where design matters more than less. So a good example of this is in the, in the spirits business,

• 29:50Speaker 01

  right? In like wine, alcohol, beer, you can't really say, hey, I want to make a new wine brand that like tries to position to this audience and I'm gonna like really like bootstrap the design and like try to get some traction for it because that's one of these categories where like you're building a kind of lifestyle brand and the most important cues for the success of those brands comes down to intentional design choices. That's reflected on the packaging as well as the overarching brand. So there are some categories where it's just kind of like a nonstarter. You either have to be like a very well-equipped designer or be able to tap into design talent or an agency to like find success there. But in these

• 30:34Speaker 01

  other categories that are maybe a little bit more problem, solution oriented, think like the Starface or Mighty Patch or any of these brands.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  There is a way to get it done more on a budget independently. You can hire independent freelance designers. You can look at things like Fiverr and Upwork and look through their catalogs of work and hire these people and be like, hey, I just need some simple packaging design done. And like, hey, I need a simple landing page set up for this. And you know what? Maybe you spend 500 bucks on that or 1,000 bucks on that. And then you say, okay, well, I'm going to now go run Facebook ads and see if I can drive some leads for this and see if I can gauge some demand here. So there are ways to do it. I think you just have to be resourceful around pulling together the right people. So it looks halfway decent and credible.

• 31:28Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, I wonder if some of the AI tools like V0, Manus could help with some of the design?

• 31:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:38Greg Isenberg?

  I don't know. But I will say that there's probably a $100 million startup idea in the, I want to create V0 for CPG. Like that in itself, I think is a huge opportunity for someone to run with as a startup idea.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I'll give you good. So number one, yes, I agree with that. Number two, I was talking to a guy who's building a, he's building a whey protein, like a protein brand that is geared more towards like a South Asian audience from like a flavor profile standpoint. He has a pretty good audience on Instagram. And so he was talking to me about his branding and packaging and he was showing me some revisions. And he was like, hey, what do you think about this? What would you change? And he showed me three options and they looked like pretty good. Like if I saw that on a shelf, I'd be like, yeah, that's like, that's like nice. I would, I would, I would buy that.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  And he was saying he used like a blend of mid-journey and something else to generate the V1 of it and then hired a designer on Fiverr and was basically like, I want you to recreate this kind of thing in a vector and then like change a couple of the elements. And he spent $250 with the designer doing that. So you can kind of like piece these things, these things together. And yeah, there will be, you can always find people to work with you on that stuff.

• 33:05Greg Isenberg?

  The cool thing about that is it allows you to really clarify your vision. So I think the mistake a lot of people make is they go straight to an agency without really understanding what it is they want to build. So sometimes with just doing the hard work around like, okay, what, what does a mood board look like? And, you know, how, how should the positioning look like? What should the copy look like? You know, what is my strong point of view as a first version? Getting that, getting that out is, is super helpful.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, 100%. Yeah, so, so I'll kind of share, um, share something. So I kind of mentioned wine, uh, because we recently worked on a wine brand project from the agency and something about developing a point of view. So I always tell, if you're building, whether you're building software or you're building consumer products, you have to be like a relentless researcher of the category and the competition. So from the agency side for this non-alcoholic wine brand, they came to us and they said, hey, we're building a non-alcoholic wine brand. We think this is our position, but like, what do you think? And so before we ever touch design, we say, hey, well, we don't know anything about the

• 34:23Speaker 01

  NA wine category, so we're going to like read everything that we can. Then we're going to look at every brand in this space, right? So we'll kind of canvas all of these brands and we'll say, okay, here's this brand, here's like this brand, this one looks a little bit more like elegant and sophisticated, whereas this one looks a little bit more like a daily casual drink. Let's take a look at their website. Okay, like very minimalist, very clean here. This leans into like luxe. It feels like far more feminine in their like visuals and their language. This one is this like German brand. I don't know, it's not communicating a whole lot to me. And we'll kind of like go kind of brand by brand and do our like, what is our takeaway? What's our one sentence takeaway from this brand and what it's communicating and who they're speaking to?

• 35:07Speaker 01

  Um, we'll go into things like you'll, you'll go into stores and you'll talk to the store owner and be like, hey, what's selling here? What's not selling? What are people looking for? What are they interested in? And this is such a

• 35:20Speaker 01

  You get an insane amount of insight doing this where you become so much more confident in the direction that you want to take your brand and it's it's it's free to do. It's free to do. It's free to like go into stores or like go to like just doing research. And so this is like how I do it from the physical product standpoint, but if I were to do this from the software standpoint, okay, if I want to build like a better CRM for for vets, right, or better CRMs for like dentists. Um, okay. Well, like, let me look at the software that exists out there today and let me look at what the reviews are on that software and let me look at the one star and two star reviews and what are people

• 36:01Speaker 01

  complaining about there. Okay, let me contact three dentist office in my neighborhood or like, let me go into them and like, talk to the staff about them. And it's like, these things that seem kind of hard to do, but you can just go in and if people are like more often than not willing to talk to you and like, give you some perspective and it allows you to just like, develop a much more robust point of view than just saying, hey, I'm gonna do this and I'm just gonna like hypothesize everything that I should build. Meaning it's like, I'm just going off hunches that this is the right direction.

• 36:34Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, you don't want to do that. You know, you don't want to do that. Um, can I show you something real quick?

• 36:41Speaker 01

  Please.

• 36:43Greg Isenberg?

  So let me show my screen. I thought it would be fun to prompt Manus. Uh, can you design a CPG product? I'm looking for boxing in the actual product. The idea is a Starface competitor, Pimple Patch, but for older adults.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 37:00Greg Isenberg?

  And I wanted to see what it would come up with. Um, and so it's researching competitors in the Pimple Patch market. So it's it's kind of doing a little bit of like what that Figma was, I would hope. Um, you know, it's starting that research. You can see here, we're watching it live, uh, just going through the Starface website. Oh, you can see here on the right hand side.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  Incredible.

• 37:26Greg Isenberg?

  Incredible, right? Research Starface product details, analyze competitors in the Pimple Patch market, research skincare needs for specific to older adults. Like insane, right?

• 37:35Speaker 01

  Insane. Insane. Holy shit.

• 37:39Greg Isenberg?

  Have you played with this at all?

• 37:42Speaker 01

  So I have not played with Manus, but I probably run like three or four deep research queries a day.

• 37:49Greg Isenberg?

  Okay.

• 37:50Speaker 01

  So I spend a lot of time with that, but this is, this seems amazing.

• 37:55Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah. Look at this. It's going through Credence Research, which I'd never heard of, but it's some sort of research company. Here are the best ones. We tried 17, you know, pimple patches, battle of the pimple patches. So I think that a lot of people could, you know, your unfair advantage might just be using something like Manus.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  100%. I was having this conversation with someone yesterday, like it boggles my mind how few people are using, like we're in this bubble on Twitter where everyone's like talking about like the latest bleeding edge stuff in AI. But 99% of people like they open up chat GPT and it's like, oh, flights from New York City to San Francisco. And it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. There's like so much more that you can get from this. And so yes, this is exactly, this is like an unfair advantage. I mean, maybe a year or two from now, everyone's going to be doing this, kind of like de facto before building things. But right now, there is no excuse to not, there is no excuse to go into a space and be like,

• 38:58Speaker 01

  oh man, I was like ill-equipped, like I don't have enough, like I didn't do enough research on the category because it can all just be done for you right now.

• 39:06Greg Isenberg?

  Look at this. How to care for your skin in your 60s and 70s.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  So good.

• 39:10Greg Isenberg?

  So good.

• 39:11Speaker 01

  So good. How long do you think this will take? Like 30 minutes?

• 39:15Greg Isenberg?

  I think it'll take 10, no, not even. I think it'll take 12 minutes.

• 39:19Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 39:20Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah. So we'll have a, a full-on prototype in 12 minutes.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you know what's so crazy is that like, they're probably putting together a report that Nielsen would have charged like 20 grand for.

• 39:40Greg Isenberg?

  For sure. So that's a crazy time. All right. Ashwin, this has been cool. What do you want to leave our audience with?

• 39:52Speaker 01

  I think no matter what you're building, whether software or physical products, you have to start by working backwards from distribution and thinking about the channels that you're going to acquire customers and the channels that you're going to win in, and then build the product. And it's not vice versa. And it's like, there's this adage that you probably known and felt personally, which is like first time founders focus on products, second time founders focus on distribution. And I don't think there's anything more true. Like you see a lot of like subpar products in both the software world and the physical product world that are just like worse products, but they crush it because of like incredible like distribution and operational excellence.

• 40:37Greg Isenberg?

  I like it. I learned about you, by the way, through your TikTok account. You just kept popping on my feed and you were breaking down brands like Star, you know, like Starface, is that what it's called?

• 40:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 40:52Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah. Yeah. You were breaking down these brands and just kind of auditing them and just learning about your taste. You're one of those people that I followed you. No, I liked you so much that I then followed you on Instagram because I was like, I need more of this guy in my life.

• 41:06Speaker 01

  Wow, thank you. I love it.

• 41:08Greg Isenberg?

  I'm gonna, we're gonna include in the show notes, links to your socials so that people could follow you. Even if you're not building a CBG product, I think that it's going to help just inspire people to create better software products too. And yeah, I just want to, want to thank you for coming on and giving, I want to have you back on. So I want people to, to like this episode. I want to just let it know if you like this sort of thing because I would love to have you back on for around two and.

• 41:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, let us know in the comments what types of things we could go deeper on because I think we covered a lot of things here where we could just probably spend a whole episode. We could probably take that Manus thing and like turn that into a full exercise. Building, building like a new software business on a call. Let's see if we can piece together like AI tools to like build the thing, build the landing page testament. I don't know. Anyway, let us know in the comments, but, but thank you for having me on, Greg.

• 42:04Greg Isenberg?

  All right, my man. I'll catch you later.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  See ya.

• 42:07Greg Isenberg?

  See ya.