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Filip Valica: Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Product Startup Podcast, a podcast that helps bring your product idea to life by chatting with successful inventors, product designers, and other industry professionals. This podcast is run by Mako

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Filip Valica: Design + Invent and hosted by Filip Valica. Our goal here is to get to the bottom of what makes a product successful, from initial idea to putting your product on the shelf. We're taking you step by step to build a functional product and scale your product business. Now onto the show.

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Filip Valica: If you've got a good enough product, a good enough message, and a clear enough mission, then then you can start small and people will try and support you. Oh, that's been our experience anyway. So I wouldn't ever let that be too daunting to you,

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Filip Valica: the thought of getting started because it doesn't have to be. The Product Startup Podcast, episode 16. Welcome to the Product Startup Podcast, helping you turn ideas into successful products step by step. With your host,

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Filip Valica: Filip Valica. Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Product Startup Podcast. In the last episode, we talked with Dean Salakas of the party people. 30 years ago, his mom was Patches the Clown and she opened a party store in Australia.

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Filip Valica: Dean and his brother took over this family business and now they're the online market leader in Australia and they're growing their brick and mortar network. Make sure you check out that episode if you want to hear more about how they partnered with brands like 3M and Avery on new product development.

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Filip Valica: Before we get started today, I wanted to highlight one reviewer on iTunes, Ace Designs, who wrote, This is a great podcast for anyone looking to start a physical product business. Philip is a good interviewer and has a good variety of interesting guests.

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Filip Valica: The content is very actionable and it's great to hear about other stories in the physical product space. Keep up the great work, Philip. Thank you for taking the time to leave a review Ace Designs. I really appreciate seeing what other people think of the show.

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Filip Valica: So on to today's episode. Today I'm joined by Luke Lukas from Fottis. Luke owns and runs a startup food production business called Fadis and they specialize in the production

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Filip Valica: of low Fodmat, Bluton-Free, and other allergy-friendly food that they sell online. Luke also quit his career in finance last year to open a cafe and retail outlet, and he's worked full-time in the business ever since.

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Filip Valica: So what a great test bed, being able to validate food in a cafe,

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Luke Lucas: and then selling what works through your online store. So let's get started.

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Filip Valica: Hi, Luke, thanks for coming on the show today.

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Luke Lucas: No worries. Thanks for having me, Philip. So can you please talk about your business and maybe how you got the idea for it?

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Luke Lucas: Sure. So Fotties is a specialty food production business. We're the first business of our kind in the world, actually. We produce a range of low FodMap, gluten-free and other allergy-friendly

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Luke Lucas: foods. You've probably not heard of the term low FodMap before. Most people haven't. Or Fotties, yeah. Or Fotties, yep. So the name Fotties actually comes from FodMap.

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Luke Lucas: It's obviously, it's a play-on-words. Play-on-Words are the Fotties and FodMap and Foodies. So we decided we'd combine the two.

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Luke Lucas: low fodmap basically the short story is it's food that's suitable for people with specific gastrointestinal disorders to make a long story short and as I said in addition we do other

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Luke Lucas: allergy friendly food the idea actually came up when my partner and I started dating we are both forties we both suffer from gastrointestinal disorders when we were dating it was a pretty

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Luke Lucas: ordinary experience we'd go out somewhere we'd have some lettuce and a glass of water super romantic right yeah really something to tell the grandkids about kind of of thing. But look, we thought that we needed to do something about it. So we actually entered into business together.

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Luke Lucas: And then, yeah, the rest is, as I say, is history, but it's only been 12 to 18 months. So it's not a very long history just yet. That's great. So I'm sorry, how long have you been in business already? We actually started our online store first,

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Filip Valica: and that was in February of last year. We opened our cafe and retail store in August of last year. So 12 to 18 months. So you can basically speak to the retail side of serving food and

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Luke Lucas: wholesale side of selling the food to direct to other shops and stores or do restaurants buy

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Filip Valica: your food as well. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And they're very, very different skill sets and things that you need to be aware of a completely different dealing direct to consumer and dealing with retailers and the like. So maybe we'll start at the beginning. So you realize that

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Luke Lucas: there was this issue that other people aren't providing the food that meets your name. needs that has these dietary constraints in mind.

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Luke Lucas: Where did you go from there? Did Chrissy have a background in nutrition? It's one of those things, probably the biggest challenge for us, and we can probably talk about it in a little bit, but the biggest challenge for us is that neither of us have ever had any experience in the food and beverage industry at all.

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Luke Lucas: Chrissy is a nurse, so she did have a good background in terms of health care. So she's a nurse and my background's in finance. I've always been in corporate finance. But neither of us had

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Luke Lucas: everyone worked in a cafe, let alone run a business or a food business or had any kind of dealings with a corporate food business. So that was quite a challenge. But it was as far as where we

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Luke Lucas: started, look, it was just diving in. I think we had an idea. We didn't know when we first conceived the idea how we were going to do it. And so we started talking to people about it. And someone actually suggested, suggested, why don't you wholesale? Why don't you look to wholesale? Because

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Luke Lucas: then you can kind of do it slowly and see if there's a demand there. And that's exactly how we started. We started approaching cafes. And then we thought, well, if we're doing that, we may as well have an online store because we're already making product anyway. And so then we started an

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Luke Lucas: online store. And we figured, you know, it's a pretty easy approach. It's low cost, not huge overheads. It's a just in time basis where you're making food when you get an order. So you're not sitting on perishable stock or anything. And then we just kind of worked our way up from there.

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Luke Lucas: Wow. So you start making recipes in the kitchen or something like that and perfecting them? Yeah, pretty much. So that's where Chrissy has comes in. So, As far as how the role, Chrissy is all responsible for the food. I get to take the credit for it, but Chrissy is the one who's responsible for making it all.

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Luke Lucas: And that just comes from a background.

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Filip Valica: We're both Greek and being Greek, food and cooking kind of runs in the family.

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Luke Lucas: So all of Chrissy's recipes are basically her or her family recipes, which she's brought in and we've

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Filip Valica: commercialized and made money out of them, I suppose. No, that's excellent. Yeah, I lived in Athens for two years before coming to the States. You probably put on some weight because they're not shy giving your food. Well, but you know what? You walk around a lot and, you know, we can get in a diet some other time.

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Luke Lucas: But so you perfecting recipes, were you testing them out on anybody while you were doing this? Or was it just basically the two of you guys that were going back and forth on, is this a good fit for Napoli sauce or whatever it is? Yeah, so Chrissy is excellent.

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Luke Lucas: That's one thing that she's incredible at is making food and substituting ingredients and making a good quality product. But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what we think to an extent that end user and the customer has to think that we,

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Luke Lucas: think as we do that it's a fantastic product. So yes, we did try it. We predominantly tried amongst friends and family. We did it a lot of work colleagues. So I would take in some samples to work.

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Filip Valica: I had a few offices that I worked in. So I would quite literally just hand around cookies and brownies and that kind of thing. And no one ever says no to a cookie or a brownie.

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Filip Valica: Yeah. So you just said, look, the only price is feedback. And we just got our feedback that way. No, that's excellent. One of the guests that we had on the show kind of did the same thing where he started a beef jerky product and he just

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Luke Lucas: brought it to the bar and they would bring it to the bar every Friday night and they would keep bringing it until that we're coming to the bar finally said hey listen take my money I just I just want a bag of it now and that's when they knew that they had a good product on their hands you can't argue

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Filip Valica: with that kind of feedback band you at the end of the day we as entrepreneurs we can think that our

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Luke Lucas: product is the next best thing but it's it's ultimately meaningless if the consumer doesn't share the same opinion which is stated in the obvious so that's great that you went out and tested it Did you find that you were meeting more and more people that had some of the same issues as you as you got out there?

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Luke Lucas: Yeah, it was amazing when we started telling people that we were going to do this, how many people we realized were the same as us. I mean, you always have an idea and you kind of know, you have mates, friends, sisters, uncles, brothers, you know, that kind of thing.

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Luke Lucas: But as we started actually telling people, it really, they really started coming out of the woodwork, or we really started seeing that there really was a big demand. You hear statistics, they get thrown around. And you're like, yeah, whatever, it's a statistic. You can find statistics for anything.

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Luke Lucas: But anecdotally, we started seeing and hearing of a lot of people that were really interested in what we were doing.

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Filip Valica: And on social media, we saw it a lot as well, because we used social media quite heavily. And that was kind of what kept pushing us and motivating us was the response that we were getting on Facebook in particular. And you talk a lot about motivation.

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Filip Valica: I think that's really hard because when you first started, you're basically by yourself and after you have that initial hit of an idea and say, hey, let's do this. It's really exciting. and maybe the first month you have some struggles or challenges,

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Luke Lucas: it's really hard to keep going unless you have some sort of a positive reinforcement to say, hey, I'm headed in the right track or this is going to take off. And so I guess hopefully getting some of that feedback helped to kind of keep you going. Yeah, it did. And that was especially the case for Chrissy.

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Luke Lucas: I don't want to speak for her too much, but I was fortunate. This is actually my fifth business, my fifth startup that I've established. So I'd kind of been through the process before. I understood that things take time.

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Luke Lucas: I understood that a lot of people were a lot of talk sometimes, and I understood how you have your moments. Everything's going great, and you think this is going to be incredible, and then you have your bad times when you're like, oh, this is just the worst thing. Why do we even do it? So I kind of

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Filip Valica: had that experience previously. Chrissy, I think, was a little bit new to it, but she certainly learned along the way. But yeah, you're absolutely right. It does give you that motivation. And no matter where you are, no matter who you've been, there are always down periods, and you do need that

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Luke Lucas: motivation to get through. That's great that you were able to find that. Can you maybe talk a little bit about how you created your line from the beginning? I imagine you didn't start out with a dozen products. How did you pick that first one or two that said, okay, you know what? This is what we're

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Luke Lucas: going to enter the market with? We started with half a dozen baked goods, cookies, brownies, melting moments and our peanut butterballs as well. They're not baked, but they're treats nonetheless.

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Luke Lucas: The reason we did them were because we wanted to set out to prove that you could make allergy-friendly food that still tasted delicious.

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Luke Lucas: That was my thought process and why we did it. Interestingly, I think it was probably the wrong decision looking back. People bought it and people loved it, but I think I got it wrong thinking that that was what was important in terms of

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Luke Lucas: getting something that was really nice and sweet and delicious. People, oh, our market certainly are more conscious of what they eat and what they consume. So we very quickly realized that, and we launched our protein balls a few months later. because they wanted something that was healthy.

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Luke Lucas: Now,

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Filip Valica: our treats are treats. They're treats. A lot of people think that our treats are healthy, but they're still treats. Our cookies are like any cookie on the market, despite what people think.

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Luke Lucas: So we realized that we needed to do something and healthy, and that's where the protein balls came. So in a way, you found out more about your market that not only do they have these insensitivities, but they're also more health conscious than the average consumer? Would that be right?

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Luke Lucas: Yeah, more aware, just more aware in general. what they're consuming. So some are, yeah, some are absolutely. Some just are happy to eat whatever they can eat finally for a change. But yeah, they're just generally more aware because

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Luke Lucas: they have to be more aware. But it was more a message to us that we needed to stay as a business

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Filip Valica: nimble and we needed to be prepared to pivot and change if what we were doing was either not working. In this case, it was working, but probably wasn't working as well as it could be working.

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Luke Lucas: So it was a good message to us to start with that we needed to be prepared to think on our feet and move quickly if we needed to. That sounds like a great message for anybody whenever they're creating a product. So you created your first, say, half a dozen products and you went to market.

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Filip Valica: Was this through your online store or the cafe as well? Online store, yeah, online store and wholesale. The cafe didn't come until about six months after that. So, yeah, the online store on the cafe is how we were testing the market. And we were getting feedback from our cafe purchases as well about what they thought.

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Luke Lucas: And that obviously helped. What was some of the feedback that you got online that maybe you felt was really helpful to you? Or did you find anything that was kind of surprising that you didn't really know? You talked a little bit about the health conscious buyers and so you rolled out your protein balls.

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Luke Lucas: Were there any other type of aha moments that you found really helpful? Yeah, I think so. That was the main one.

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Luke Lucas: But the other one which probably started then and has only grown since we've done more things is price points and entry points. There's a conception or a misconception, I should probably say, that people are

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Luke Lucas: prepared to pay more for this kind of product. It's a specialty product, therefore people are prepared to pay through the nose to purchase it. They're prepared to pay a lot more than they ordinarily would be prepared to pay. There is that conception in the marketplace.

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Luke Lucas: And yes, to a point, that is true. But I am of the opinion, I think we've learned from what we've done, that our market and our target are actually

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Luke Lucas: annoyed and frustrated that they have to pay more. That's how they see it. There is an expectation, yes, it's not going to be as cheap as you're mass produced, off the shelf, anyone. People understand that, but I think a lot of businesses will try and take liberties

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Luke Lucas: and say, well, no, they're prepared to pay more, so I'm just going to charge as much

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Filip Valica: as I possibly can, whether it's justified or not, just because people are prepared to do it. And I think we've learned over the journey that that's probably not the case. They actually resent that they have to pay so much more. So we've tried wherever we can to be affordable.

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Filip Valica: We still obviously need to make money. We are a business, but we don't, we're not trying to gouge our customers. We want to be value,

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Filip Valica: but still have a quality product. Yeah, and I've seen that a lot in the United States. You'll put the label of artisan on the front of something, and all of a sudden it's, yeah, it's handcrafted, but you know, you're questioning whether it really was. Exactly. So that's interesting.

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Luke Lucas: Yeah, so I wanted to actually dig in a little bit. You're selling your first product, and you've realized now that you need to be competitive. from a price perspective, how are you able to make product since you don't have as much

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Luke Lucas: experience in the food industry? How are we able to compete in that space? I think it's a, it's a recognition that at the start, we're not going to be as profitable as we'd like to be. I think that's just, I don't think there's, in our industry at least,

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Luke Lucas: I don't, I can't speak for the states because I don't know. But in, in Australia, it's, it's very difficult to start a food business. The odds are stacked against. you the big players. I'd imagine it would be the same. I can't see why it wouldn't, but the big players

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Luke Lucas: have purchasing power, they've got bargaining power, they've got access to research, they've got market data, they've got lots of money at their disposal.

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Luke Lucas: So we don't have that.

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Luke Lucas: So obviously, again, as I mentioned, our prices will be slightly high, but they can't be too high. And that's just a recognition that, look, we're going to make a margin. It may not be what we'd like, but we'll go in

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Filip Valica: with this price point and then provided we can get through the first 12, 24, 36, months, we'll then try to improve our margins by saving on costs rather than on the top line,

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Filip Valica: if that makes sense. We'll try and decrease our costs so we get an overall better margin, but the price point stays the same. That's kind of the approach. Maybe add some equipment or things like that. It's funny that you say that because the last guest that we had on the show,

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Filip Valica: she started in the kitchen with a kitchen aide and then moved up to a larger mixer and then had a floor model type mixer. It was a step-by-step approach to get to where she is now. And now,

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Luke Lucas: now she has good economies of scale. They're still creating their own product. You talked about in the U.S. about getting in the food industry. I'm not sure if this is in Australia, but we have co-packers here. Do you have those types of companies at your disposal there? They're basically

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Luke Lucas: companies that have the approved regulations or that have been approved to make food in these types of markets. And you just basically come to them with a recipe and they will pack it for you with your own label and everything like that. Yeah, we do. And now that you mentioned it, we actually are

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Luke Lucas: looking at going down that route with our sources because the sources have probably been our best-selling product that we have, our line of sources, and we're struggling to keep up in addition to doing what we're doing. So we are actually looking at outsourcing the production

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Luke Lucas: of that. The issue that we have, and this is all of Australia doing any kind of business, is that our market and our size is so much smaller than the states. One, you don't get a lot of

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Luke Lucas: choice, and two, price tends to be higher, especially when you're doing what we're doing, we need our product to be gluten-free. Now, there aren't any manufacturer out there that just does gluten-free manufacturing,

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Filip Valica: which means you need to find someone that's prepared to strip down, wash down all their equipment before the run,

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Luke Lucas: and then they're happy to do the run, but that means a higher cost. We don't have a lot of options in Australia because we're just not that big. I mean, we've got 24 million people that live in Australia. I think New York State has probably more than that.

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Filip Valica: So it's a very, very different market. and that gives us that is a challenge for us but it's something that we have to work within

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Luke Lucas: well maybe when you expand over to the states that's something that can help you and get a foothold here yeah absolutely we are actually speaking to someone at the moment to try and make that happen but yeah look that that is the ultimate goal because the reality is to achieve what we

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Luke Lucas: want to achieve we need to go global and the the u.s is probably not probably the u.s is the best path and opportunity to make that happen for us that's exciting so right now you're basically producing all your own food yourself

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Luke Lucas: in your own kitchen. Can you talk a little bit about the requirements in Australia for that? Yeah, so they're pretty stringent. So we, there is something called HACCP, which is a global

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Luke Lucas: thing. It actually started, NASA from memory, started it for their astronauts when they were making food for them. HACP is the hazard analysis and critical control point plan where you try and make,

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Luke Lucas: we're not trying to make sure, you implement a plan to make sure that your food is prepared and stored hygienically. Otherwise, you've obviously got issues down the track. So we follow that. We've got a plan in place for our products.

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Luke Lucas: In addition, we also have a plan that had to be put in place for our local council.

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Filip Valica: Any local business needs a local food safety plan. So we've got two plans that will put in place, one for council, one for hazard purposes. But in addition,

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Filip Valica: because of what we're doing, we have our own safe food safety plan

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Luke Lucas: from a cross-contamination perspective in terms of dealing with allergens that we implement ourselves. We're actually speaking with the Celiac Society of Australia to get certified and we'll be one of the first businesses, if not the first business in our country to be certified

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Luke Lucas: by Celiac Australia, which will be pretty cool. That's really exciting. So do you have an indicator of, I mean, did you do that just because it was kind of in line with the products that you were making already? Or did you say that, you know what, here's another part of the market that we feel is being underserved and we should

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Luke Lucas: kind of get into that. A bit of both. So we,

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Luke Lucas: there's two markets that we service, I suppose. The low Fodmap market, well, there's more, the low Fodmap market, the celiac or gluten-free market, and then all the other ones, lactose-free, dairy-free, a whole range of different things.

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Luke Lucas: The low Fodmap market eats gluten-free, but the consequences of them eating gluten aren't as severe as a celiac eating gluten. If it's gluten, it increases their chances of cancer and they react quite badly.

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Luke Lucas: It's a pretty unpleasant experience. So the low FodMap market is different in that regard. But when we started doing that, we realized that a lot of celiacs were also low FodMap and a lot of low Fodmaps are also celiacs.

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Luke Lucas: But we noticed, more importantly, that a lot of celiacs, the vast majority were complaining about, one, their options, but two, how little it seemed that food producers and retail outlets

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Luke Lucas: and cafes, how little they cared about a celiac and taking their concern seriously.

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Filip Valica: that was probably the biggest issue that they had, not necessarily the lack of options, but the fact that they'd walk in and they'd say, we need something gluten-free,

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Luke Lucas: and the cafe would say, yeah, that's fine. It doesn't matter that it's cooked on the same toaster, does it, or that it's cooked in the same pan, or that we use the same tongs or whatever the case may be. Now, that's not okay for a celiac.

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Luke Lucas: You do need separate dedicated workspaces, appliances, utensils. You do need to take it seriously, and we saw that pretty early, so we then implemented that, because we thought that celiacs especially would appreciate it, and it looks like they do, which is good.

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Luke Lucas: That's amazing. So do you find that you have to have separate places in your kitchen for that? Do you just make a rule across the board to say, you know what? We're going to be celiac friendly for all our products? It would have been easier for us to go gluten-free 100% on everything, but one of our

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Luke Lucas: our overarching mission is to unite and bring people together through the freedom of food choices. So when we looked at it like that, we thought that people who don't have food allergies, and intolerances would be forced to eat gluten-free, even though they may not want to.

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Luke Lucas: And there's a lot of instances, I don't know if you know anyone who eats gluten-free, but a lot of people will drag their partners or friends along to a place where they can eat and the person doesn't really want to go, but they do it because they want to be a nice friend or boyfriend or girlfriend or whatever the case may be.

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Luke Lucas: So we kind of wanted a place where you could come and have regular food and specialty food. So our menu has a duplicate version of everything. So you can have a parmesan a regular or you can have a parmesan that's gluten-free and lactose-free.

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Luke Lucas: So you can have two people having the same thing, but completely different at the same time.

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Luke Lucas: So, look, it would have been easier to go gluten-free 100%, but we didn't think it was consistent with the mission that we're striving to achieve. But what that does mean, as you alluded to earlier, is we do have a dedicated work

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Filip Valica: service and prep area that's gluten-free. We have doubled our appliances. We've doubled our utensils. We've double all of our everything, our pots and pans. Our deep fryer only has gluten-free products in it, so there's no cost contamination in the friar. Our staff are all trained.

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Filip Valica: We make the vast majority of the food ourselves, so we know what goes into it. It is more work. It does represent a higher additional cost as well, because you don't just have one salamander, a toaster thing.

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Luke Lucas: You've got two of them, and that's across the board. So it is more expensive to set up, but we were comfortable that our customers would appreciate that, and from our feedback with them, they certainly do.

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Luke Lucas: it's really good feedback to get so let's talk a little bit about how you've found that this was the direction that you wanted to go and you've obviously grown your business in a kind of a step-by-step

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Luke Lucas: fashion right now someone's listening to it and they might be saying i don't have the resources to go all in in that way they just see this huge wall can you talk a little bit about how you managed growth

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Luke Lucas: so it was sustainable for you yeah yeah absolutely and we still are and we're still having these same conversation. So the first thing I'd say is do not let that stop you. There is no reason you have to

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Luke Lucas: come out and bring the Coliseum to to your business. It doesn't have to happen. And that's actually one of the mistakes that I made in my previous businesses. I invested a lot of money in a brand new shiny

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Luke Lucas: website and the best this and the best looking that and the prettiest that. And then I thought, well, now I've just got to get people to come and buy my product or take my service, whatever the business was.

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Luke Lucas: In this case, it was a bootstrap start, and that was, we cooked out of our home kitchen. The council came in and certified the kitchen,

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Luke Lucas: because you obviously have to. But outside of that, I mean, the website I made myself, I didn't pay anyone to do the website. A good website designed in Australia at least will probably cost between $3,000 and $6,000, depending on who you go with and what functionality you have.

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Luke Lucas: I did it myself, and it was free. So, I mean, it was $60 to host it and $40 to buy the domain and, whatever, it's 100 bucks. And then the labeling and packaging,

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Luke Lucas: I just researched it myself. We got plain paper bags and found someone who could print some labels. So the, sorry, plastic bags, the plastic bags probably cost a couple hundred dollars. The labels cost a couple hundred dollars.

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Filip Valica: And then the, I mean, the certification with council was a few hundred dollars. All up, it would have been between one and two thousand dollars to get started. It's not a 10, 15, 20,000 investment necessarily. Well, it doesn't have to be. If you can do that, well, by all means, go for it.

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Luke Lucas: you might be able to achieve certain things a bit more quickly, but you don't have to. If you've got a good enough product, a good enough message and a clear enough mission, then you can start small and people will try and support you. Oh, that's been our experience anyway.

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Luke Lucas: So I wouldn't ever let that be too daunting to you, the thought of getting started because it doesn't have to be. Yes, it can be helpful, but it wasn't, we didn't need that for us. And we just dove straight in and grew step by step from there.

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Luke Lucas: That sounds really exciting. Can you say how long it took you to maybe get to the point where you were selling your full range of products on your store now? It hasn't been an evolution where you're adding a product every month. So our baked goods launched to start with on our online store. That was February.

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Filip Valica: Our protein balls, our protein balls, we actually got wrong to start with. We launched protein balls in the first couple months after we launched the baked goods.

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Filip Valica: We reworked them because we actually didn't like what we ended up with. So we actually reworked them and brought out a whole new range in it two months after that.

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Luke Lucas: Then a few months after that, we brought out some dips, and then a few months after that, we brought out sources.

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Luke Lucas: So every probably four months, we've brought out a new range. So, no, it's not, we don't just, we didn't come out with 50, we don't have 50 products now. We didn't come out with, you know, 20, 30 products immediately. As you said, it's a step-by-step approach because then we can manage it as well. We know what's selling.

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Luke Lucas: We know what to focus on. And it just gives us a chance to wrap it around what's happening. Have you considered at all about whenever you're creating a new product that we use these ingredients now in these products and maybe because we want to leverage that. So what can we make

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Luke Lucas: with what we're already using? Or is it the blue sky? Well, you know what? Here's this popular food product that everyone's eating and there's no gluten-free alternative for that. So let's chase that. Yeah, it's probably a bit of both, to be perfectly honest, probably a bit of both.

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Luke Lucas: The two examples I'd give with that. The first is the dips. Our dips that we launched, there are no dips that are low-fod map. There are just none. Certainly not the ones we do. They just don't exist.

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Filip Valica: So we thought that needs to happen. But the sources, which are the last product line we launched, that was because of our menu. And that's actually one of the benefits of our model, having a retail outlet in a cafe, is we put food in front of customers and they eat the food then and theirs.

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Filip Valica: They're coming to eat.

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Luke Lucas: And they say, I really like this. Can I buy it? And that's when we started saying, okay, well, if we put in a bottle, we can put it at the front of the shop and you can buy it. That's fine. And that's exactly how the sources started. Interestingly, the dips have been our worst performing product.

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Luke Lucas: which is what we brought out thinking we have to do this. But the sources have been the most successful product, which we were serving as part of our cafe, and our customers started telling us they wanted. So there's probably a hidden message in there that I'm beating around the push on. Yeah, that's fascinating.

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Filip Valica: Well, I guess if you look at it from a practical standpoint, I'm probably more inclined to buy two or three sauces that I can use during the week than a dip that sounds maybe like more of an appetizer. My wife and I might not have an appetizer during the week unless we're entertaining and the sauce is maybe more practical.

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Filip Valica: Yep. Yep, exactly right. You have to be in a mood. I want a dip. It's not one of those things that, yeah, well, I mean, look, to an extent if there's one in the

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Luke Lucas: fridge and you're feeling peckish, you might go and grab a dip. But it's not one of those things. It's not versatile. You can't make pasta with it. You can't make pizza with it.

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Luke Lucas: You can't do a lot of things with it. It's just a dip. And again, it comes back to that whole listening to your consumer. And you might have the grandest vision and think

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Luke Lucas: this is what we need. This is what they need. But at the end of the day, they think practically, they think their daily lives. And that can be very different to what you're thinking from a business. perspective. So that's great that you have that cafe then that's amazing because you basically

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Luke Lucas: have a live test bed where you could even roll out a new recipe and say, hey, today we're having this free special. All the tables get this new food product that you've created. And the only thing that you have to do is ask your servers to make sure that you get that feedback. So you basically

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Luke Lucas: have people coming to pay you to test your product. Don't go giving away our market secrets now. Sorry. No, but you're right. You're absolutely right. And that is exactly why we structured the model the way we did. And a lot of people said it's a lot of work. And it is a lot of work. We've got a

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Filip Valica: wholesale store. We've got our package products. We do catering. We do ready made meals. We run our

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Luke Lucas: cafe. We do quite a bit. We take on quite a bit. But as you've identified, we get access to a lot of real-time market information that our competitors don't have. And even existing big businesses,

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Luke Lucas: talking, you know, Cadbury and either real Mars and all the really big food production businesses, they don't have that. And they have a very, very long. It's one thing I've learned. They have a very long lead time if they want to bring out a new product. It can

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Luke Lucas: take years by the time they they formulate the idea for the product then they get the first recipe and then they do their focus group research then they do the first batch and then after two years they release a product hoping that it's going to sell i mean coke life the the the new

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Luke Lucas: coke you guys have coke life yeah the yeah coke will rebrand some items that might have the

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Filip Valica: same formula but by a different name yeah sure yeah it's this new it's in between coke zero and Coke. It's got less sugar than Coke, but more sugar than Coke zero. That's their way of trying

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Filip Valica: to get the more health-conscious consumer. So they, goodness knows how long it took them to bring out that product. It would have taken a very long time. And over here, it's absolutely diving. No one's buying it. It's just, it's a completed abject fast. Probably like New Coke back in the

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Luke Lucas: 80s. It's a pretty bad story. And that would have been a lot of money that was pumped into that. Whereas for us, we put, we change our menu every six months at the cafe because that's what you do. in the cafe you keep things fresh and as you said customers come in they pay us for our food

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Luke Lucas: then they give us the feedback we get a new product that week so it's it's a pretty advantageous to position me it's more work but we're happy to do it i'm thinking about what it takes to run that

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Luke Lucas: type of business in my head starting to spend because running a cafe by itself is a lot of work making sure that you're on top of all the food that's coming in and managing customer satisfaction and that's a completely different type of business to your product based business where you're

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Filip Valica: trying to get quantity out. Do you find that are the two businesses competing for your time in a way or competing for resources or have you been able to duplicate teams? So you're there basically running parallel tracks. Yeah, no, that would be nice and maybe one day, but at the moment

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Filip Valica: predominantly it's myself and my partner, Chrissy. So we have the equivalent of full time, the equivalent of two full-time workers. We have one full-time and a couple of part-time and casuals.

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Filip Valica: But really, it's predominantly just the two of us. And we work seven days a week. We also work most nights.

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Luke Lucas: It was hard at the start because in addition to having the cafe, which was breakfast and lunch seven days a week, we also did dinner service Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. So that was hard on our body as much as anything else.

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Luke Lucas: But look, at the end of the day, we're really passionate about what we're doing and we actually want to change the world. And as far as I'm concerned, no one ever changed the world working nine to five. So you got to give something if you want to do that.

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Luke Lucas: Well, that's a good message for everybody. So I was just going to ask, I expected you to have a much bigger team than that. Got maybe four-ish employees. How are you able to recruit and make sure that everyone's happy and they're putting out good

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Luke Lucas: work and that it's to your satisfaction, but you're also able to run two businesses at the same time? Talk a little bit about maybe your recruiting strategy and how you're finding everybody and creating even a company culture.

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Luke Lucas: Yeah, look, it's, I think so to an extent the culture is starting to form, but we made a lot of mistakes. That was probably the area where we made most of our mistakes is the people

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Luke Lucas: department. We started with the wrong team categorically. No questions, no ifs, no buts, no maybes. We had the wrong team that we started with.

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Luke Lucas: It has been a challenge finding people and this, this, what's been very difficult as well as in the kitchen, and it's been interesting because you think as a society, you know, things are changing, things are improving. But it's been very

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Luke Lucas: interesting that Chrissy being the head chef and being in charge of the food, we've both noticed that it is more challenging for her because she's a female. And I was very surprised at that,

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Luke Lucas: but we, look, in Australia, again, I don't know how it is in the States. In Australia, the kitchen

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Filip Valica: is very male dominated, very male dominated. All the head chefs are guys. All the cooks are guys, predominantly.

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Filip Valica: There has been issues with that, which has been quite interesting. But we've learned along the way. So now we've had a year to

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Filip Valica: fix all the mistakes we've made. More importantly, to learn from the mistakes. And we now know who to look for. And when we find the right people, we make sure that we teach them and impart on them what our vision is and what we're trying to achieve. Because we don't have the

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Filip Valica: ability to offer the perks that a big business has. We can't, you know, do a lot of those kind of things. But what we can offer is a chance to make a

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Luke Lucas: meaningful impact on people and to build a career with us. And that's kind of what we've been focusing on. And since we started doing that, I think we noticed that there was a lot more buy-in and the dynamic within the team improved dramatically. And that's what we've been doing

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Luke Lucas: probably for the past six months. And it's been a lot more stable and there hasn't been anywhere near as many headaches as we had when we launched.

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Luke Lucas: Right. Yeah. So maybe setting the proper expectations. I was an engineering manager in my last job and so I did a lot of hiring. And And there was kind of the same story where we had a small company with less benefits compared to a lot of our bigger competitors.

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Luke Lucas: And we had to constantly push that message. Here, you wear more hats and you're happier as an engineer and you get to be more creative and you're more hands-on. But there is no formal training program that's going to take you to be CEO in seven years or whatever your goal is.

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Luke Lucas: And it's been hard. And you pass up a lot of really good candidates sometimes. But at the end of the day, you have a much better fit for your team. and I think we had a much more close-knit team than some of the larger companies would because you're focusing on that part. Yeah, and it doesn't have to be a negative.

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Luke Lucas: I mean, yes, you can't offer what the big guys can offer, but that's not necessarily a bad thing because the downside of going with the big side. And look, I mean, I've worked in big companies before. I've worked in some of the country's biggest companies. The downside of it is that you're just a number.

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Luke Lucas: Well, the reality is you're just a number. And yes, you get career plans and you get this and you get development plans and all that kind of thing, but next year you've got a different manager because they've gone and done something

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Luke Lucas: different as well. So there is a pretty big downside to going with that big business route,

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Filip Valica: whereas we as small businesses and as a startup that wants to do what we want to do, you can be a part of something. And if you show loyalty and stick with us, if we achieve what we want to achieve, you can make a name for yourself. You can be a really valuable part of the team.

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Filip Valica: And more importantly, if that doesn't matter to you, from a practical perspective, you will get

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Luke Lucas: much better and a broader range of experiences and skills, then you would in a big organisation, because you've got so many people in a big organisation. You get pigeonholed. Your job is to do job X. Job Y and Z are completely beyond your job description. So if you

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Luke Lucas: ever look at that, you're going to get in trouble, get back to doing job X. That's kind of the approach. Whereas if you're in a small startup, you know, it's nimble. One day you're doing this and the next day you're doing that and then you're doing something completely different. It builds you

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Luke Lucas: was an individual and your resume while the name may not be as impressive, your skill set is absolutely more impressive. So I think as startups, we need to be focusing on that side of the

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Luke Lucas: equation rather than that, you know, I can't give you your, you know, your corporate car and your travel card and that kind of thing. I can't do that. I think we've got to focus on the positives. No, absolutely. And that's the type of candidate that you want anyway, that you want someone

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Luke Lucas: that self-motivated that's going to take some of that stuff because you can't, you can't manage them day to day to that capacity. Let's talk a little bit about you've released your products online and maybe you started your cafe.

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Luke Lucas: Can you talk a little about your marketing strategy and how you did that on a shoe string? How are you able to kind of bootstrap that and grow? Yeah, social media. So that is now, unfortunately, if you're thinking about doing a business now, it is more

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Luke Lucas: difficult because of some changes that Facebook have made to their policies. But for us, it was entirely social media. That is how we grew our business. We grew our business from nothing all on social media.

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Luke Lucas: So we now have about six and a half thousand fans and followers across both Instagram and Facebook, which have been our two big platforms.

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Luke Lucas: A lot of them, a lot, it's all relative, I guess, about 10% of those are actually international people. We've reached internationally, which is great. But for us, it was entirely social media and Facebook has been the biggest for that.

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Luke Lucas: Instagram is good to showcase our food because it's obviously photos and it works. but the message that we're trying to sell is much more difficult to be conveyed, obviously, through Instagram. So that's why I think Facebook's been better for us. And that's where, again, I mentioned earlier,

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Filip Valica: it's about finding your message, finding your mission, and communicating that to your consumer, because it's about freedom for us. And that's why our mission is all about unity through freedom of food choices. It's about freedom.

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Filip Valica: It's not so much about the food. It's that feeling that you're not normal. It's that feeling of being that. difficult person. It's that feeling of missing out on something. It's the experience and the

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Filip Valica: freedom that people are missing. And that's what we promote. So if we ever promote a photo of something, we don't just say this is our product. We say something along the lines of we bet you

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Luke Lucas: thought you'd never be able to do X again. Well, this is a photo proving that you can. We bet you thought that you would never be able to enjoy this person's company because of this. We focus on that and the

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Luke Lucas: emotion rather than, okay, this is a picture of some sources, a big deal. It's about that emotional connection.

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Luke Lucas: And while it is more difficult now to communicate with your fans and followers on Facebook, if you're able to connect, then you'll get more interaction. And if you get more

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Luke Lucas: interaction, then Facebook's algorithms will automatically put you in front of more people. So it's, it's more difficult, but it just means your quality needs to be higher. Yeah, and it's been really

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Luke Lucas: challenging, especially for me in the last eight months, I've noticed a big change and how I can interact with fans on my page. It's basically, I don't want to say irrelevant, but that people like your page, it's not, it used to be that your information would pop up at the top of their

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Luke Lucas: feed, but now it's, you have to fight for everyone, even if they've already connected with you.

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Filip Valica: Yeah, absolutely. Maybe we can dive into a little bit of those tactics if you don't mind, some specifics on sharing. I know Facebook, for example, people bat around the idea that you shouldn't be sharing

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Filip Valica: links as much as photos or you should be sharing a live video more than text. Have you found any particular strategies that work for you? No, it's engaging content. I think it's a very simple,

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Filip Valica: easy solution to say X works better than Y and links are better than this or they're worse than that or whatever. But at the end of the day, our experience is an engaging post, whether that's

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Luke Lucas: in the form of a link or in the form of a sentence or in the form of a photo. If it's what our consumer and our fans and followers want to see, it will perform well.

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Luke Lucas: It doesn't matter really what it is. It has meant that we have had to up our game in terms of our photography to make it more engaging. We've had to up our game in terms of our presentation to make it more engaging. But I don't think there's a silver

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Luke Lucas: bullet that one works better than the other. It needs to be engaging and relevant. Relevant is probably the biggest thing to what your fans and followers want. It has to be relevant and it has to be, it has to nail it. You're going to have some posts that don't

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Luke Lucas: do well and some posts to do better and that's obvious but yeah generally speaking you have to be able to get what they really want to see part of being relevant is knowing who your audience is right because in

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Luke Lucas: the beginning sometimes you might be mass marketing to a really broad group and that won't really help you because now the message isn't very clear yeah how would you advise people that are looking

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Luke Lucas: to hone in on their audience better let's say you've started a business and you only have you know a handful of face-to-face interactions and you're getting data and it's not really, you're not able

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Filip Valica: to funnel that down into one picture of your audience. How would you do that? I think in that instance, if you can't get through it all, to an extent you need to trust your judgment, you need to be

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Filip Valica: prepared to make a call and do what your guts telling you, but you also need to be prepared to admit that it's not working if it's not working. So honestly, I don't think there's an easy way if you're in that

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Filip Valica: situation. You need to make a decision and say, okay, I'm going this route. You need to commit to

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Luke Lucas: that route. If that route doesn't work, you need to change and pivot immediately. And that can be very difficult to do because you can say, oh, but it was right. It's this and this and it should

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Luke Lucas: work. It doesn't. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. As entrepreneurs, we have, and as startups, we have a big advantage of a big business that we can change tomorrow. There's no processes and policies and people that we have to speak with. We can wake up tomorrow and say, no, I'm going

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Luke Lucas: to do this differently. We have that ability. So I think people should not be afraid of being prepared to change. They should be prepared to try something. In this case, this is my message. This is what I'm

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Luke Lucas: going to go with. If it doesn't work, fine. I know it doesn't work. I'm going to try something different. I really, in the scenario you've presented, I don't know that there's really any other way short of going through all the data that you've got. I don't see that there's any other way personally.

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Luke Lucas: Yeah, fair enough. How many people do you find would be valuable enough to say,

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Filip Valica: you know what I've talked to like for me I think if you speak to 25 people you should have a good idea of who your target audience is if you actually have those conversations it's not survey and not

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Luke Lucas: some data that you find online you've actually went out and talked to 25 different people by that point you should have narrowed down your audience do you feel like there's a it's a different number for you or that you found that as you increase in numbers your audience becomes

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Luke Lucas: a little bit more complicated look I don't know if I'd have a magic number as much I mean that number sounds reasonable just because of the number. But I guess so long as they were different

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Luke Lucas: kinds of people, if people approach it as a checkbox activity where, yep, I've spoken to my 25 people, so I'm good, maybe not so much. But if they spoke to, you know, three males, three

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Luke Lucas: females, three 60-year-olds, three 20-year-olds, if you get that kind of process, then, yeah, you're probably getting around there.

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Luke Lucas: But I think you just need to be prepared to talk to everyone about it. And as many people as you can, I probably, once you get to the point where you start

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Filip Valica: hearing a lot of similar responses, you're probably finding that's where you're getting to that point of saturation and you're not, you're getting diminishing returns. There's no point going any

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Luke Lucas: further because you're getting similar stuff, whether it's good, bad, and different. That's probably, and that may, that number may be around that mark, but it may be different. It depends on the product. So you've marketed your product now. Obviously, you want to try to turn over as many

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Luke Lucas: leads as you can into buyers. People can buy directly through your website now. Are you shipping out product yourself? Are you literally going to the post office every day or they're coming by and

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Luke Lucas: picking up packages? Yep. So we do ship. So we started with our Australia Post, which I think is your USPS.

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Filip Valica: So Australia Post is our equivalent. We learned pretty quickly not to use them. I don't know how yours is, but ours aren't great. Customer service isn't good. The way they deal with your packaging

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Filip Valica: isn't good. So we actually found a site, another startup. They're an aggregator of courier services.

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Filip Valica: So there's a lot of websites out there where you can compare insurance policies, car insurance policies. I'm sure you guys have them as well. It's like that, but for couriers. So you can enter

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Filip Valica: in a job and you'll get 10 different quotes on courier shipment. So that's what we do now. So yes,

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Luke Lucas: we do ship. We ship out of our production facility, which is in Melbourne, and we ship Australia a white and that's just basically through a courier. So a courier will swing through at some point pick up the delivery and then take it for us. Wow, that seems like a lot to manage because

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Luke Lucas: you might be dealing with a whole handful of different couriers who have maybe different policies or is it basically the same thing for everybody and it's just a different face that comes in and picks up the package. Yeah, thankfully the guys we use make it a pretty consistent process. So for us,

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Luke Lucas: it's going onto their platform. It's booking in the job. Yes, we use different people so we see different faces sometimes. It's funny. Generally, it's the same firm. For whatever reason, they've got better pricing in most places. So we tend to go with them.

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Luke Lucas: But generally, the user experience from our perspective is fairly consistent. There were some teething problems at the start because they're a startup as well. So I think they needed to get their stuff together. But yeah, generally speaking,

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Luke Lucas: it's pretty consistent and pretty straightforward for us. So do you find that your audience has certain

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Filip Valica: expectations when it comes to buying and receiving product. For example, in the US, Amazon Prime is huge. People have now been conditioned to receive their packages in two days from, you know,

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Luke Lucas: you place an order and two days later it's in your home. And even if your business is not on Amazon, now that's just this new standard that's been set and they feel like if they don't have communication throughout the entire process and if you haven't delivered in, you know, three

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Filip Valica: or four days, then maybe something's wrong. Yeah, look, yes and no. I think where,

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Filip Valica: as

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Luke Lucas: As Australians, we're conditioned to accept that service is nowhere near as good as it is in America.

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Filip Valica: It just, again, it comes back to that size thing. We instantly roll our eyes and think, yeah, of course, it's like that because it's America and we're Australia. So we're probably lucky in that regard.

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Filip Valica: Having said that we do get our orders out pretty quickly, but we also communicate that we make most of our orders fresh to order because we don't use preservatives in our food.

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Luke Lucas: And our consumer, I think, likes that. So, yes, they may have to wait a couple of days extra, but they know they're getting something fresh and they're getting something that doesn't have any nasties in it, which they're usually prepared to wait for.

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Luke Lucas: And in addition, again, Australia being Australia, we're quite big. We have a lot of people in a small number of cities, but there are also still people quite rural. And that just, no matter what you do, it's not getting there in two days. It's just not going to happen.

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Luke Lucas: It's going to be five days, five, six, seven days. And they understand that. So we're fortunate in that regard that expectations are set pretty early. And I imagine you've got something on your site that says, hey, thanks for placing the order. We make everything fresh. Yep.

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Luke Lucas: Just spelling it out for them that way that, you know, they're not surprised when it takes that long. It's just about communication. It's making sure that they're aware.

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Luke Lucas: Just so at the time, either before the time of purchase or at the time of purchase, just so they're not sitting there. As you said, it's going on with my order. Is it coming? If they've forgotten it, if they lost it, whatever the case may be. No, that's awesome. It's breakfast time here.

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Luke Lucas: So I'm feeling like I wish I could just hit the order button. and have some food some food to try might take a while to get to the state that would be right thanks again for coming on the show and sharing all your wisdom can you give

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Luke Lucas: maybe one tip for a struggling entrepreneur or product founder that is at some stage of the process maybe your younger self that really wants to succeed in in selling their product but

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Luke Lucas: they just haven't been able to make it do you have a couple tips to kind of help push them along the first which may sound kind of upsetting is you you you

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Filip Valica: You need to be prepared to accept that there is a risk that you will put everything in what you're doing and you will fail. You have to be prepared to accept that and it sucks. And when you think about the work you've put into date, when you think about the work that's to come,

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Filip Valica: it's very, it can be very demoralizing to think that it's not going, it may not work. I mean, it's not going to, it may not work. There is, there is unfortunately a risk that it may not happen.

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Filip Valica: And it can be quite difficult and what you will find is you will think what if you, You can psych yourself out and think, what if I do this and it fails? What if I do that and I lose all my money? What if I do that and my girlfriend breaks up with me?

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Filip Valica: What if I do all these things and you focus on the negatives? What I do to keep me going and to keep me motivated, I have the what if as well, but I change what my what if is. My what if is what if I don't do it?

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Filip Valica: What if I am lying on my deathbed and I look back and I think I never did that

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Luke Lucas: and I always wanted to but I never did it. What if I don't give it a go? What will my girlfriend think of me if I don't do that? What will I think of myself more importantly if I don't give it a go?

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Luke Lucas: What will that mean? And that's what I focus on. And when I have that conversation with myself, I realize that it's not an option not to do it. As much as it's scary and intimidating

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Luke Lucas: and a lot of work, when I ask myself, what if I don't do it, I can't not do it. It's just not an option. So my single piece of advice, if there was just one piece of advice, would be ask yourself

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Filip Valica: that what if question. What if you went your whole life and never gave it a go? That advice

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Luke Lucas: definitely speaks to me. I actually started the concept of the site the day that my daughter was born because I realized that, oh my God, I'm in my early 30s and I've always talked about doing my

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Luke Lucas: own thing and I've done business competitions and I've won money and I've done all sorts of things

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Filip Valica: that other people would normally say, hey, you're on a path. But it's

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Luke Lucas: never kicked off. And I've worked the safe corporate job and never did anything. And finally,

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Filip Valica: the day that she was born, I thought, oh, my God, she's going to be 18 tomorrow and going off to college. And I haven't done anything. And I'm going to retire and I haven't done anything.

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Luke Lucas: And it is just this paralyzing fear that said, I need to get off my rear end and do something. And since then, it was just like a fire. And until then, I was waiting until the right time or the right idea or the right, whatever, the right circumstances. But really, those,

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Filip Valica: will never come right you'll have to you have to create all those opportunities so yeah that's excellent advice so thanks again luke for coming on the show where where can we buy some of your product if we wanted to go out and get anything could you have anything that's selling in the

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Filip Valica: states look not at the moment you would have to come out and fly to us and have a good shop around our store which you're certainly welcome to do just say you've listened to us here and we'll see what we can do for you um but no look in in all seriousness we are in discussions with someone as another

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Filip Valica: up business in the States who are looking at importing some of our products. And look, if that goes well, which we hope it will, our ultimate goal and plan is to get there at some point. So hopefully our first export goes well.

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Filip Valica: And then we'll be able to establish a physical presence in the States. And then we'll have our production facility in the States. And then you'll be hopefully hearing a lot from us. And what about if you're in Australia and you just wanted to swing by? Yeah, if you're in Australia, we're in Albert Park in Melbourne. We have a physical store where you can sit down and have a cab.

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Filip Valica: You can have a food from our menu. You can buy all the products in store in our food store, Fodmart. And you can also buy online if you're in Australia because we do ship Australia wide, whether you live rural, regional or city-based. So you just go to Fotties.com.

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Filip Valica: F-O-D-D-D-D-O-D-D-Fodd-E-S.com. F-O-D-D-E-S dot com. F-O-D-D-I-E-S dot com. We're also on Facebook and Instagram. Perfect. And can people send you an email in case they say, hey, you know what? You're not shipping to my country, but I really wish you would.

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Filip Valica: Do you mind getting those emails? No, absolutely not. Absolutely not. So info at forties.com is the best email to get in touch with us. You can message us on Facebook. You can get in touch with us on our contact page on our website. But yeah, absolutely. And look, don't be afraid to do it because it keeps us motivated.

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Filip Valica: It's one of those things where if you tell us you want it, it makes us want to give it to you even more. There you go. Luke said that you have to give them trouble. So now everyone needs to send him an email and say.

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Filip Valica: Awesome. Well, thanks again for coming on the show, Luke. I really appreciate it. No worries. Thanks for having me.

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Filip Valica: And that's all I've got for today. Thanks for listening, everybody. I put all the links that we've covered under the show notes on the product startup.com slash episode 16. Last week, I mentioned that one of the most difficult parts of podcasting was that it feels

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Filip Valica: that I'm talking to myself. So I asked you, what do you think of the format of the show and what would you change?

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Luke Lucas: Should I rodden the guests that we have on the show to get a variety of perspectives, or should I just keep a laser focus on the creators of physical products? So I'd like to thank Eric Chang at joypulp.com who emailed me the following note.

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Luke Lucas: Stick to physical products. There's enough entrepreneurial creative podcasts that overextend into too much knowledge or database industries. There's enough written about those. I was only attracted to this one because of the focus on physical products.

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Luke Lucas: Eric, thanks again for sending you your comment. Do you agree or disagree with Eric? Please let me know. Eric recently launched a brand called Joy Pulp at J-O-Y-P.

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Luke Lucas: and he's dedicated to designing and hand-crafting high-quality longboard decks. He's still formulating his MVP and working on some online marketing.

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Luke Lucas: So if you're interested in board sports or skateboarding, check out his site and give him some feedback.

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Filip Valica: Join me next time as I speak with Damian Lee of Mr. Lee's noodles for a truly inspirational episode. If you've listened to the show for a while, you'll know that I don't use that word lightly.

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Filip Valica: Damien is an ex-Australian Special Forces member, a former city headhunter, a single dad of two, and a stage four cancer survivor who's in remission.

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Filip Valica: He lost his latest startup, but cleaned up his diet to help beat cancer and realized that he loved noodles but hated all the nasty chemicals.

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Filip Valica: So he created his own healthy, gluten-free pot noodle, which he'll soon start selling on university campuses through high-tech noodle kiosks. It's a really powerful episode that I think everyone will get something out of. So make sure you join me next week.

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Filip Valica: So thanks again for listening to this show. I really appreciate your support. I'll see you guys next week. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Product Startup Podcast with your host, Philip Velica.

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Filip Valica: For more great content and to stay up to date, visit theproductstartup.com. Your guide to getting there.

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Filip Valica: Thanks for tuning into this episode of the Product Startup Podcast, the show that teaches you what it really takes to bring your product to market and turn it into a big success. This podcast series is brought to you by Mako Design + Invent, the first firm in North

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Filip Valica: America to provide global caliber end-to-end physical consumer product development to startups, inventors, and small product businesses. If you're looking for product development help on your

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Filip Valica: invention, head over to Mako-design.com. That's m-a-k-o-design.com for a free consultation from one of Mako-design for design studios from coast to coast. Thanks for listening. and see you next time.