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

Jason Kirby (00:02.346) Everyone, welcome back to the show. Today we have Jack Hamrick with us, founder and CEO of Forged. Welcome to the show, Jack. Jack HAmrick (00:09.794) Thanks so much for having me, Jason. Jason Kirby (00:11.726) It's great to have you and I'm excited for our audience. Good to know your story. Let's just jump right into things. Can you just tell us a little bit about you and what you're doing at Forged? Jack HAmrick (00:22.582) I'm Jack. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Foraged. We are the marketplace for wild and specialty foods. My whole background is in sustainability innovation, and that spans the gamut from educational pursuits to spend some time in academia. I started my first internship career at EPA, and I realized the EPA was run by lobbyists. So my next internship was at a lobbying firm. And then I realized lobbyists were controlled by big corporations. So I went to business school and joined AB Inbiz, which is a nice big old corporation to kind of connect those dots. So more background, my undergrad though, it's a, I'm very interdisciplinary in sustainability innovation. I like to say that sustainability is everything and it's also nothing. You can be, you can add sustainability and innovation in any sort of system, whether that's building roads or pipes or. thinking about financing, housing, every single element's connected and sustainability pervades all of it. So just plug there for sustainability innovators out there. And the thread that's always carried me along through such a varied career in my early days in sustainability was my passion for food. And I had originally set out to create something about aquaculture. My first thought was sustainable seaweed. And if there's anyone out there doing seaweed cultivation, please let me know. And I can live through you and NB. Um, I was also interested in things like catfish and oysters, really anything that can be harvested sustainably invasive species as well. And this was in 2020, 2020. In fact, I was starting to work on some more ideas more, more seriously. And I kept seeing mushrooms everywhere. And I'm a big guy. I eat. way too much red meat, like up to two pounds a day. And I'm very large, I'm like six, five, 230 pounds. So it's a lot of meat. And my whole background is sustainability. So that's not really living up to what I do in my professional life. But I was getting really tired of portobello mushrooms. It's like the only mushrooms you can get. And so I was trying to find this mushroom called Chicken of the Woods. I had it at a couple of nice restaurants here in Washington, DC. And I couldn't seem to find it anywhere. And I was talking to my now co-founder. Jack HAmrick (02:42.926) at the time, a bit of a distant friend, Andy. And he was living on the coast of North Carolina. He knew a lot of people around the kind of a water community. So I reached out to say, hey, do you know anyone doing seaweed or oysters or anything? And he says, no, like such a random question. Why? You're working on a business. And I said, yeah, I am. My background is in sustainability. Randomly I bring up mushrooms. Hey, I'm trying to find this mushroom called chicken of the woods. And he's like, no way. I have a ton. I have like pounds of it. And I'm trying to sell it. Like, I'll sell it to you if you want. I said, what do you mean? He said, yeah, you can only get it in the wild. You literally cannot grow it. Most mushrooms you cannot grow, you have to get them in the wild. And I'm a forager and I'm allowed to sell it, but I'm not gonna knock on doors or Craigslist is weird and yeah, I'll sell it to you. So obviously a light bulb moment, but at first I'm thinking this is very kooky and odd. There can't be that many people that have the exact same problem we do. So I started looking into it. Jason Kirby (03:35.467) You know. Jack HAmrick (03:41.47) It turns out a lot of people have this problem. It's a huge market. Mushrooms that you eat, we don't do anything with psychedelics, we never have and we won't. In the US alone is about 13 billion a year. Globally is approaching 100 billion a year just for mushrooms that you eat. So I thought, wow, that's pretty big. That's a big enough market to actually do something. And the market itself is fundamentally fragmented. And what I mean by that is you can grow portabellas at scale, you can grow shiitake and oyster mushrooms at small scale, but you can't grow them. Same with Lion's Man and a few others. A lot of the really special mushrooms though, like hen of the woods, chicken of the woods, morels, porcini, matsutake, generally you have to get them in the wild due to their relationship with their ecosystems and other plants and so forth. So it's a huge market. It's fundamentally fragmented by the growth and the growth mechanisms. So I thought that's pretty interesting. Let's see who's in the market. There has to be someone doing this. And I was looking on Facebook, Reddit, Discord, TikTok. The community around this industry is enormous and extremely engaged. Fanatics, 1.5 billion views, hashtag forging on TikTok. Type in your hometown on Facebook. And I guarantee you there is a group related to wild foods and mushrooms. So this is why I'm thinking this is not an odd edge case, a light bulb moment. There's a serious market here. It's fragmented in the market side and it's concentrated in the community side. If you can click these two things together. to defragment the market and layer in commerce on this very engaged community. You've just solved chicken and egg. You've just solved barriers to entry. You've just solved geographic problems. And that's what we went about doing. So at the time I was at a then series C startup where I was chief of staff. I helped do some financing around some M&A and I was kind of a sort of at the end of the, of the rope, as far as exciting things to do, which the president of the company who I was working for. noticed and he basically said like, Hey, uh, there's not a ton of meat for you here for a bit. And I'm sort of pushing you out of the nest and you need to go start your own company. And it's like, I'll give you, I'll give you a little help. I'll give you a couple months of severance, but you need to go start a company and like, get out. And as a perfect, I actually have a, this company I've been working on. Great. And he's like, great, get out. So we, uh, we turned the site on in April of 2021. Jack HAmrick (06:04.286) And things have just been clicking since. I mean, we, uh, we saw chicken and egg very rapidly on the marketplace, had revenue in the first week and it's just been all gross since then. Jason Kirby (06:14.538) That is an amazing story and I could tell this isn't the first time you've shared it. That was a very succinct and articulate pitch there. Just for fun, I do want to go back to the very beginning of your story in terms of your EPA to lobbyists to corporate corporate. Where would you say you had the most influence on policy? or most influenced lobbying. Jack HAmrick (06:35.843) Love you. I mean, the EPA basically just carries out law, and law is not entirely written by lobbyists, but yeah, it's pretty much written by lobbyists, yeah. Jason Kirby (06:48.347) So sad and disappointing. Not the part of our podcast, but I just had to ask for personal curiosity. And I was unfortunately right. But going back to the stories here, you kind of went through this journey to going to stumble across light bulb idea. At what point did you realize that you needed money and what was kind of the plan that you put forward to go get money? Jack HAmrick (07:12.938) I think that's one of the... I wouldn't even call it a mistake. I think that's one of the traps that a lot of early founders, first time founders find themselves in. Unless you're doing something with hard tech or heavy regulatory industries, you can get really far without money. You can get really far. And oftentimes you're better off not having money. We had a 50 cent a day Google ad going for the first nine months of the company. That's pretty much the only thing we spend money on. At some points we would have 70% conversion rates on a 50 cent a day Google ad. And that got us a lot of traction, 50 cents a day, a lot of traction. We started with a WordPress and a WooCommerce site, like off the shelf. We ended up with 75 plugins. Half of them were, were plugins that we made plugins for to fix the other plugin. It was bubble gum and gorilla tape. And we were better off for it. We still have that ethos of. Let's do everything we can short of actually putting capital, humans, whatever into something. And I tell my team all the time, the way to get more resources and more backing, um, for whatever you're working on is go do something that doesn't scale. Prove how influential this could be. And if you can prove it, I'm pretty much always going to give you budget to go and make that even more effective. Jason Kirby (08:37.97) No, it's a great ethos to live by. And, uh, I recall my first couple of small businesses doing very similar. I, I despise WordPress at this point because I have so many tragic stories using it, but it's a means to get to some, you know, to start and get somewhere going. Jack HAmrick (08:51.554) It's amazing. Like, I mean, I honestly, I honestly, I don't know if we could have done what we've done even five years ago, because of how advanced some of these off the shelf tools are and because of how deeply connected mobile networks are now. I mean, a lot of our users are in the woods, way out in the woods. And even five, six years ago, I'm not sure they would have had the mobile bandwidth or technological know-how to engage with us. Jason Kirby (09:18.978) Good point. It's kind of hitting your why now statement when you go to investors. Well done. But it's funny, you avoided raising capital, but you did raise a little bit in the pre-seed. Raise about 200 and change. What was that strategy and how did you go about getting that capital? Jack HAmrick (09:38.098) Another thing I would, this is my personal opinion, but I think it would bode well for others. I purposefully rejected any sort of overture from people I knew to invest. I said, I'm not taking any money from anyone that I know at all, and I'm not going to ask anyone that I know. And I think it was especially important for me because what- what we did and what we are doing is so off the beaten path that I wanted validation from actual strangers, people who have started companies, sold companies, executives, whatever. If someone who has been there done that, who I have never even met in person validates with an investment, that says a lot more than my grandma investing, right? And also like, yeah, could we have used the money? Obviously, it's always great to have money. But then wait, like I don't want to go spend my grandma's money on Google ads that are unintentional and wasteful. Right. So I didn't, I've not, the only exception I've made, and this was, um, once we realized that the seed round was coming up, a, uh, family friend of my, my now wife's family, it was a mentor to me. Amazing guy. I did accept a small amount of money from him. Couple of grams. That is the only person that I've, I've ever entertained that I. new in any capacity. I didn't even meet an investor in person until many months after I took their investment. Jason Kirby (11:09.09) So how did you go about getting in front of these strangers that got you the 200K? Jack HAmrick (11:14.102) There's a quite a few different pathways. Um, there's a million different, you know, database databases, like spreadsheets floating around and, you know, for us, it was, uh, I was really focused on two things. One, some people who had marketplace experience. Marketplaces are a very unique piece, very different than traditional businesses. The other side was food. So that's where I started looking at, you know, who, who has had big exits. or a lot of experience in marketplaces that now does angel investing or who is someone similarly in the food world. I ended up connecting with our very first angel through think some, honestly, some random spreadsheet I found, and was reaching out to people with thoughtful, with thoughtful cold outreach, right? People like to do the spray and pray. That's not it. That's not it, especially with angels, because angels take a much different approach than institutional. And so the first two investors we had, one was just very steeped in Silicon Valley, sort of like Facebook, a lot of other exits. And the other was a marketplace expert who had an exit to Airbnb. And so they added a ton of value in the early days from helping us like stay close to our super niche market, not expanding too quickly out of that, helping with some of the communications, UX, UI. I valued them immensely. So I was reaching out to them a lot, but one of the things I valued in our earliest investors and with our VC is almost everyone has taken the approach of, I don't really mind if I don't hear from you unless there's like something bad. There's something bad happening, you need to tell me. If something good is happening, I'll give you a high five for sure. But like, I don't need to give you a high five. Go get a high five from someone else, go to the other thing. I know that sounds really crass. I love that. That was very attractive to me. It was honestly kind of how I was raised, where it's like, you know, I don't need a bunch of pats on the back, I'm more intrinsic. But if something's wrong, you better tell me. Jason Kirby (13:17.822) That's a great people to have when you're cap table early. And so you took some money, you get to market, and shortly after closing kind of both in which I guess are the rolling safes, one in 2021 and one in 2022, you went on to raise a formal seed round from Bessemer Venture Partners of all people, pretty sizable, big brand, raising 2.7 for your seed. Jason Kirby (13:47.258) One, decide that was the time to raise your seed and how did you go about doing it? Jack HAmrick (13:54.709) It happened not as planned, but it happened much better than the plan would have gone. So that's always nice. This was winter 2022, and I thought we should get some press. It's a new channel, we haven't tried to do it, we have no money, so I'll figure it out myself. I started reaching out to, did a bunch of research about tech crunch reporters, who's covering food, who's covering sustainability. Found a reporter who was sort of in our niche. Pitched them said, Hey, we're a really early stage company. We're doing some, some cool stuff with marketplace and odd foods that haven't really been online before. We're growing like crazy and we have no money and we're kind of weird. Does this sound interesting to you? And they said, yes, that sounds interesting. So. The original plan was go through 2022, hopefully do a formal seed round at the end of the year. And we got ahead in tech crunch in April, 2022. And the VCs just descended. I mean, it's kind of blood in the water to hear like odd company growing well with no money. So I didn't really expect that to be honest, but that's exactly what happened. And we were fortunate to be raising in a good environment. We were just on the edge of like things getting kind of. Jack HAmrick (15:19.358) And we had quite a few DCs reached out, immediately got into conversations. We had quite a bit of diligence material prepared already for them. And the experience for me was because we had very little money, I wasn't even making the salary then, we were still spending, I think at that point, maybe $5 a day on Google ads, we were balling out. It was awesome. And so for me, it was having a huge check, one that I'm not driven by the number of zeros, like. I'm certainly not driven by the number of employees I have. If anything, it's like a tarnish on a founder's resume to be trumpeting that. So for me, it was really culture fit because we had such a great roster of early angels who did have meaningful contributions. It was not about the dollars and cents to me. So Bessemer immediately appealed to me. Their attitude, the way they thought about the market, the way they thought about the evolution of e-commerce as a whole, unbundling. was one of their big VCs, community-based e-commerce. So that really attracted me right off the bat. And some of the other things that turned me off with some of the other VCs that had reached out, it's not that revenue interaction and things don't matter. Obviously, that's the only thing that matters for a business. But we are a year old, we're doing some really weird stuff. No one's really done this before. And so some of these other calls with VCs opened immediately with what's revenue going to be in 12 months? What's your month over month growth for the last three months? That matters. Yes, it matters. I'm not saying it doesn't, but given how unusual we were and are, that was a huge red flag to me. Like, if they're not on board for this new world that we're creating that no one's done before and all they care about is money, that's not going to work. And that's where, of course, cared. Obviously, this matters. I'll say it again. These things matter. But... In the early stages, given who we are, there was a lot more there that was more important to me than the future check size. Jason Kirby (17:21.058) So in this case is really about mission alignment and then with their questions showing that they get it and that they're behind you less so much the standard checkboxing of, you know, like, Oh, revenue or poo, you know, all the different, you know, KPIs that VCs want to see and trying to put you in a bucket. And one thing I'll compliment you on is staying out of the bucket. And I find companies have a much more successful capital raise when they've define either their own bucket or hop out of the bucket that they're trying to be put in. And that seems like what you guys did here, acknowledging that, yeah, weird specialty foods, which, you know, going on your website, I'm like, I have no idea what any of these things are. Yeah. So that's probably a very niche audience that you've mastered to understand and know and what they want and how they want it. So you kind of went down a different path here. You grinded quite a bit. You try to stay as lean as possible. Jack HAmrick (18:03.388) Yes. Exactly. Jason Kirby (18:19.018) It opened up doors for you in terms of doing the TechCrunch article. You kind of walked us through how you did that, but I guess what was the overall response, can you quantify the response that you got from getting into TechCrunch? And over what time of period did that happen and how did you go about managing all the influx of, you know, inbound? Jack HAmrick (18:40.25) I really didn't, it was probably naive of me. I didn't expect the response to be venture capitalist interest. My expectation was cool. We're real. We're in TechCrunch. Like this is validation that we're in a major publication. So to me it was kind of a happy unintended consequence, very happy unintended consequence. Also, one of the funny things I was saying, so our two first angels, who I love so much, uh, he would text me. like almost every day after the TechCrunch article came out saying like, don't get too big of a head. This is only gonna happen to you a couple times. Enjoy the honeymoon phase, don't let this get to your head. Which I think, I'm not like, I don't know, I don't really enjoy inflicting pain on myself necessarily, but I think most people would hear that and be like, oh, screw this guy, man, I'm king of the world right now. I actually really appreciate it, because it's true, right? So anyways, we have probably... 15, 20 BCs reach out after the TechRunch article of varying degrees of interest, of varying specificity in their outreach, which is another thing I would tell founders when you're receiving inbound, it always, especially for the first time, when you're receiving inbound interest, you feel like king or queen of the world and everyone wants me. Read how thoughtful their emails are. If you, as a founder and particularly as a CEO, you are the sales, head of sales always until you're like, even then, you still are. Think about how you would outreach to a customer, a prospect, someone else. You're going to be thoughtful. You're going to say, I like this about you. I like that. I noticed this trend and I noticed that trend. So that would be a piece of advice I would have for founders is consider how much thought they put in. We got into diligence with probably a dozen or so. Some of the conversations were less fruitful than others. Immediately, I loved Bessemer. The partners there, the associates there. And we pretty rapidly went into diligence towards term sheets and ultimately closing the round and probably took about six weeks, about eight weeks from first contact to get the whole round closed. Jason Kirby (20:52.598) Okay, not too bad. That's pretty solid. Quick process. And was it only Vessemer or did you guys have some follow-up on Capital come in or did Vessemer take the whole round? Jack HAmrick (21:02.83) So that was another thing during the negotiations on the round itself was, as I had said, we were so lean, the dollars and cents were less important than the potential for contribution. So as part of the negotiation, I requested quite firmly that there would be individuals included in the seed pool. And so we tacked on some extra money to the round, specifically reserved for high value individuals. Again, food and marketplace and also just tech in general. But to me that mattered immensely. It really did. And they've been fantastic. Some of these, uh, recognizable names to be sure I'm still in touch with very much. Uh, I get texts, emails from them all the time. They share marketing sites, ask how things are going. I reach out to them for advice on different things. And it really makes a difference. I've been someone who I've always kind of found the whole like advisor. Thing. fluffy. Does it really matter if you have a slide in your deck that's like, we had advisors and you know all of their names, but they actually don't do anything. Jason Kirby (22:12.414) You should see most of the decks I do my monthly deck roast and the advisor slides are a bunch of nobodies that no one knows and they're not doing anything. So, uh, I'm happy. Jack HAmrick (22:23.35) Yeah, so ego for me is, that's part of the whole ego thing that I don't subscribe to. But anyways, the investors that did come in, they're not advisors, have added true value. And so that was a sticking point for me in the seed round negotiation. And thankfully, Vesmer seems to know everyone in the entire world. So I was fortunate to get some pretty awesome people on the table. Jason Kirby (22:44.978) I'm sure investment call people answered. Uh, that's like, that can make things a little easier for you. And then for, um, you know, going out and raising, you mentioned some frustration points, but I feel like you kind of like gloss over them a little bit, it's a bit of rosy picture at this point, I guess, what were some of the frustrating points about raising capital and kind of having to put yourself out there? Jack HAmrick (22:47.47) They do. Jack HAmrick (23:11.938) For angels, it's a different game, right? So in the really early days, unless they have like unlimited money, which some angels more or less do, they're probably gonna be on you a lot. And I think it's important to get a sense for that early on and see that pattern and get ahead of managing those relationships. This is with angels in particular. On the seed round, I mean, admittedly, the process was not that difficult, it's not the right word. Mine was smoother, I think, than other stories I've heard. And I'm very fortunate and thankful for that. The couple things that stood out to me, legal counsel is important. Get a good legal counsel at the outset. Ask your angels for recommendations, that's what I did. It's expensive as hell though. So be prepared. Very expensive counsel if you're doing a formal price round with an institutional investor, it's going to be expensive. I would try to clarify some things upfront. You either do a fixed round price with your counsel if that's possible, have some sort of caps, know what you're getting into for pricing because it is very, very expensive and can take a meaningful chunk out of your... Jason Kirby (24:35.366) Do share how much they didn't cost you, if you can. Jack HAmrick (24:40.834) hundreds of thousands. Jason Kirby (24:45.012) or a seed? Jack HAmrick (24:47.286) It's a formal round. We had a lot of documents, you know, it's important because these are going to be the documents that persist through the life of the company. It was not, I mean, it was not hundreds and hundreds. It was not hundreds and hundreds. I will say it was in the six figures, certainly. Uh, and I wish I had, I wish I hadn't done that at the outset. Jason Kirby (24:56.846) That what the lawyer said? Jason Kirby (25:09.238) Lawyers do add up and I talk to founders all the time on this. Definitely set a cap up front. Seeds are usually pretty manageable. The request on the legal side usually is often like have your terms already negotiated and never allow lawyers talk to lawyers. That's where things get escalated substantially. Keep your conversations with the partners at the firm. Jack HAmrick (25:23.531) Mm. Jason Kirby (25:34.418) between you and the partners and not the actual, the VC firm, do not let lawyers talk to lawyers because they can rack up things pretty astronomically. Jack HAmrick (25:47.016) I did not have that advice going into it. I wish I did. Because that's exactly what happened. Jason Kirby (25:52.938) Yeah. So for everyone that's looking at any kind of legal of anything, the most important rule you can tell your law firm, whoever you hire, is they are not allowed to talk to another lawyer without your permission first. And that will save you a ton of money and time and hassle because, yeah, we don't have to go into that whole conversation right now, but I'm glad you shared that and I think that's a good warning. to all founders out there. There are ways to mitigate this. A typical seed round price could be, in my experience, 30 to 60, you know, all in. And sometimes even less, depending on the complexity of how much you had prepped beforehand. Now, if you're rolling saves on saves on saves on saves, then coming into like a price round, it gets pretty hairy, pretty messy, because there was a lot of back dating and cleaning things up, but, yeah, appreciate it. Yeah. Jack HAmrick (26:29.971) Yeah. Okay. Wow. Jack HAmrick (26:40.814) Yeah, we did have a fair amount of cleanup. We did have a fair amount of cleanup. Like I, myself and my co-founder had never paid ourselves legally as part of the round. We needed to back pay ourselves. That took some configuring on the legal side. Another piece of advice I would give, and I didn't think this would be a big deal. It wasn't a huge deal, but it definitely racked up some hours. We did take money from an unaccredited investor on a safe and that ended up being not that fun. Yeah. Jason Kirby (27:12.887) Mm. Jason Kirby (27:19.851) Yeah. That one's a tough one to get out of. Um, we won't give any legal advice here, but, uh, it sounds like you had to get that situated, um, which is never a, uh, really a fun conversation to have. So when, when taking capital, if you're not familiar with accreditation, laws and things of that sort, that's why you get a lawyer. And there's a conversation. It's usually, you can Google as well to address and not have to spend the money, but, uh, ideally you're not taking money from. credit investors that, and often will probably be the biggest headache too, because they write the smallest checks and it's money they can't lose. And venture investing is all about losing money. So they need to get ready to swallow that pill pretty quickly. So it sounds like, yeah, you had some uphill battles and had to ultimately pay the price. But fortunately, you got venture money in the door. So covered some of it. But I imagine you'd rather have hired two people. for that money instead. So another thing you talked about before we got on was the delaying of your announcement of your capital raise. So you actually raised last summer in 2022, but didn't actually announce until summer of this year. So tell us why. Jack HAmrick (28:15.038) Yeah. Nice. You could say that. I'm sorry. Jack HAmrick (28:36.454) Number of reasons. One, we were extremely scrappy and we were on a WordPress site. And when we raised, I didn't really want a huge influx of people on our site that we were already like, we raised a seed round to get money to build a site that was not WordPress. So first I was like, let's save the influx for a bit. The other thing too was actually that same angel who was, who's telling me like, keep your head size in check during the tech crunch. uh, Honeymoon phase was adamantly against it. He said, there's no reason to do this now. Like go start growing, go start building. What's the benefit to make your head get big? Like that doesn't move any needles. And he's totally right. It ended up working out really well for us where we didn't need it. I mean, yeah. I feel like I've talked about ego things so much now that it seems like it's like ironic and opposite, but I swear I'm genuine. Like what's the point? Jason Kirby (29:31.83) Yeah. Jack HAmrick (29:36.086) What is the benefit? Unless you have a benefit besides ego, don't share. You're just going to invite competition. You're going to invite other people in the space. You're going to have people sniffing around. If you don't have a strategic reason to do so, then just keep your mouth shut. It was kind of my thought. And we built really heavy for the last year after the round. And it was a good time this summer. We really have not done very much for true growth marketing. We spend very little on marketing. A lot of our growth is organic. It's SEO, it's community driven because we are a true platform marketplace. So we have all those network effects. And it was time to actually do some press. Like there's a lot of people in the world. Uh, I like to call them the Bon Appetit crowd. It's kind of the muse. We have the products on our site. Most of them have never been on the internet before. And if they are on the internet, they're on some site that looked like it was built by like AOL people from like the nineties. Yeah. Jason Kirby (30:29.403) Yeah. Gina, Gina cities website. Jack HAmrick (30:34.106) So we need to get people to know about us. There's so many cool products, so many cool stories. We have 800 vendors from seven countries, all these products that you've never had a chance to experience. People need to know about us. And I also don't like the game of spending, you can spend money on growth and you can fuel growth with capital generally, unless your product is really bad. But it doesn't prove anything, right? So we still only spend a couple grand a month on advertising and the advertising is very concerted. It's very specific. But it's time to go tell people about what we're doing and the world that we're creating, which is of course, one of the reasons I'm talking to you here. And so that was really the genesis of it. Like we're in a good spot. Our product's good. We've grown a lot. Let's go tell people about it and let's roll that PR push from the announcement side into more broader awareness among sort of general consumer outlets as a whole. Jason Kirby (31:27.126) Gotcha. No, it makes sense. And I think that's something that I always like to articulate to people. It's something we made a decision in one of my companies a while back where it was actually going to hurt us if we made the announcement, given that we were servicing kind of like more of an underserved community, that money was not common. And to say, we raised $11 million, you know, it's like kind of rubs it in their face until it came to the point where we had to recruit and have legitimacy from talent acquisition standpoint. for people that feel safe to leave their big jobs to come join us. That's when we had to finally make the announcement. Um, so it's, it's smart for founders, like what you did to kind of be strategic as when to pull that lever. Because if you just build your load and you do like a business wire PR wire press release, like, yeah, we raised money. It's like, no one's going to care. You know, so it's better to, you know, really think about strategically, how it can impact your business and how that can potentially seed like a. of a roadshow or PR, out push and things of that sort. So, you know, good advice there. From here, kind of, you know, since you're doing your PR now, have you been seeing a new influx of investor interest or engagement at this point? Kind of what's that been like? Jack HAmrick (32:26.383) Certainly. The pattern has held, certainly. Yeah, we had a huge influx after the announcement. Uh, and it was kind of funny because I think other founders must be. Attuned to the strategy of sitting on news, uh, because quite a few of the VCs that reached out sort of immediately said, I assume this is not new. I assume this was from a while ago and you just announced it. And I said, you are so smart. That's exactly what we did. Um, but yeah, we had a enormous interest and the conversations have been very different this time after the seed. Um. much serious is not the right word. They've been. We've skipped a lot of the initial steps I would say. Now that we are obviously a legitimate company, legitimate team, legitimate backers, a lot of the early like patty cake in the conversations had been skipped over, which was nice. And we got contacted by probably upwards of 30 DCs over the summer after the announcement, which was a bit odd to me. I think we're really cool, but I'm like, are we this cool? Apparently so, I didn't really think so. But the conversations were, it took a lot of time to be sure. Yes. I wouldn't recommend like, unless you're raising a lot of people would say it's a complete waste of time and just focus on growth. I disagree with that though. We essentially got 30 free strategy calls with some of the best venture capital firms in the world. For free. It forced us to get all of our metrics in line. It forced us to get all of our dashboarding cleaned up, our roadmap, our strategy, our hiring plans. Like it was a huge forcing function. Jack HAmrick (34:21.09) to be diligent internally. And that honestly was really valuable. Not that we were like chaos internal, but we're squeaky clean now. And there's a big value in that. And then we got a ton of different, everyone has an opinion, right? So you gotta take any conversation with a grain of salt. They don't know that, no one's gonna know the full context that the founder would know, but they're valuable. We had really, really valuable feedback from a lot of these different firms. I don't think we're gonna close around anytime super soon. But I would say if there's a founder in a position to have these types of conversations, to an extent where you're not wasting time and you actually are getting value from it, I think there is true merit in that. And the advice I've gotten before, during, and after was the exact opposite. And I learned that it was worth doing. Jason Kirby (35:14.871) It's interesting you hear that. The podcast is predominantly about raising venture capital, but I've invited on some recent guests to talk about bootstrapping and why venture capital can be evil or maybe not necessary for companies. But in this case, it's a perfect example of when venture capital can play a very valuable and impactful role of going through the motion of raising capital. it buttons you up and makes you kind of get prepared, put your best foot forward and run a better, tighter ship when you have that level of oversight. And as you see it as an opportunity for strategic input, because when you ask for money, you get advice, you know, you ask for advice, you get money. It's kind of the same as it goes, but here are you actually getting, you know, some valuable advice and input from VCs and... you get to play your options. You kind of get to see whether now is a good time, tomorrow is a good time, or, you know, do you continue to run your course without having to raise additional capital? So I guess it was a good exercise for you and your firm to go through. Um, you know, at this point, you know, you, you kind of addressed, you know, the history today and it's relative in short, you know, it's only been about two and a half years or so from the company. It sounds like you had a pretty good run. Uh, you know, I guess for the product itself, like what's next for you guys. You got some pretty interesting, as I kind of navigate the website from mushroom supplements and the variety of other things, things that I have no idea what the value are in and of itself. I'm like, so curious, like what I'm missing out on, uh, you know, kind of what's next for, for Forged. Jack HAmrick (36:58.099) So we provide small scale food producers with a turnkey business solution. First and foremost, come for the tool. plus instant access to a nationwide customer base. Stay for the network. And by centralizing such a fragmented market, consumers get access to all of these myriad rare foods that have never been available before. So when we think about how we grow as a business as foraged, I like that our destiny is tied to the success of all of these mom and pop, hardworking, salt of the earth food businesses that rely on us for their own livelihood. I love that. I like to say it's an alignment of interest, not a conflict. So I tell my team all the time, rising tides lifts all ships. So when we think about what do we need to be doing, we need to be getting more sales for the small scale food businesses that operate in our platform. You can do that through a number of means. Through the products, through marketing, partnerships, whatever. Us as a tech company, that's primarily driven through the product and through engineering. So what we're working on now is a lot of innovative tools to further extend the life cycle of business potential through our technology as a vendor. So we have a mobile app coming out soon. That's going to have point of sale functionality. It's going to be sort of the unified tool for farmers market operations. We'll still have the platform marketplace. Our average shipment goes over 1000 miles, the average order. So clearly we're. unlocking some cross border network effects. And now what we're going to be doing is since we've unlocked these cross border network effects is further drilling down into the local ecosystem to kind of like plant the flag and go out, but then we're sort of operating right now in like the stratosphere. So it's really about lifecycle capture and continuing to expand the portfolio of products and continuing to serve more restaurants and wholesale operations. Direct to consumers about Jack HAmrick (39:02.61) 90% of our business right now, which is fantastic because everyday people are getting access to the same ingredients that the best chefs in the world are cooking with. And there's a big opportunity right now to sort of triangulate between platform marketplace of ultra rare, ultra specialty, um, exclusive inventory, triangulated with vertical SAS in the mobile app and the unified business tool and triangulated with wholesale. restaurants, chefs, that sort of world. So right now we're kind of like figuring out where, where the gravitational pole is between the three. And as I was saying, the, the calls with these, uh, the strategy sessions really is how I approached it with all the VCs recently has helped sort of draw some color on, on that triangulation. And so we're kind of, that's sort of in my head right now as CEO is where's the gravitational pole among it and what do we need to be doing to experiment and prove. in the positive or to refute some of the inferences that we have about what might be most attractive at the intersections of those three. Jason Kirby (40:08.126) Awesome. Well, appreciate that. And I guess before we go, what would be your kind of parting words for founders out there that might be exploring their, their fundraise now? Jack HAmrick (40:19.527) Well, something we didn't, I didn't hit on earlier. I would say if there's anything you could do, especially as a first time founder, is find a mentor that is a stage to three stages ahead of you. You don't want someone who is too far ahead, because then they're just not really in the mix. They don't really get the current reality. You don't want someone, well, you can have someone at the same stage as you. That's always great, bonding, people going through the similar thing. But if you can find a mentor to... stages ahead of you, they're going to be able to add so much context, so many introductions, a lot of managerial expertise. I have a mentor, his name's Alex. He has been absolutely pivotal to the trajectory of the company. Intros, mentoring me on how to manage people, how to think about growth. There's anything a founder can do, find a mentor because that can unlock a lot for you. Jason Kirby (41:11.03) That's a great piece of advice. And I do appreciate putting that range as well, because you know, you got someone that's retired and it's kind of out of the game, it's a very, may have amazing story track record, but just the advice doesn't hit the same as someone that's a little bit closer to home. Um, well, Jack, I appreciate you being on the show. Uh, what would be the best way for people that want to get in touch with you, be able to learn more about you or contact you? Jack HAmrick (41:35.164) You can check us out at foraged.com, that's f-o-r-a-g-e-d.com, or on social, foraged.market, is our handle across TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, et cetera. And we'd love to help you try some new foods. Lots of interesting things that you certainly never heard of, so give us a shot. Jason Kirby (41:52.223) Alright. Jason Kirby (41:56.166) I know you're talking about chicken of the woods or, you know, I'm like, does it taste like chicken? That's all I want to know. Does it, does it taste and give it a good. Wow. Jack HAmrick (42:03.442) It does taste like chicken. Go to our recipe section. Our very first hire, his name's JV. He is a godsend, absolute unicorn of an employee. He does all of our culinary content and marketing. His recipes are out of this world. Photography's amazing. There's a Buffalo chicken sandwich recipe using chicken of the woods on the site. Go check it out, it looks amazing. Jason Kirby (42:12.225) Yeah. Jason Kirby (42:25.806) All right, I'll have to start experimenting. Well, Jack, appreciate you being on the show and I look forward to getting this out to our audience. Jack HAmrick (42:32.77) Thanks so much for having me, Jason. Jason Kirby (42:34.434) Hang in there.