241 | Developing a Wellness Product Like a Tech Product | with Peter Reitano

Peter Reitano  

We need to think about ways that can build organic visibility as much as you can and brand credibility so that the paid ads start landing.

It's difficult to [just go] straight out and acquire [customers] without that softening.

Chase Clymer  

Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game. 

On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating  real results. 

I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.

Let's get on with the show.

Hey, everybody, welcome back to another episode of honest ecommerce. I'm your host, Chase Clymer.

I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And today we're welcoming to the show, Peter Reitano.

Peter is the founder and operator and investor with 15 years of experience in the consumer brand and advertising world. 

Currently, he's the founder of the supplement brand Mojo and he's a partner at the ad agency Academy. 

Welcome to the show, Peter. 

Peter Reitano  

Thanks so much. Pleasure to be here. 

Chase Clymer  

Absolutely. And for the third time we've tried to do this. That was the best intro of them all. 

Peter Reitano  

You nailed it. 

Chase Clymer  

Awesome. Awesome. So for those that are unaware, what types of products are you guys bringing to market over there Mojo?

Peter Reitano  

So Mojo is essentially a gummy that mimics the benefits of a microdose. So what does that mean? 

It means when people are microdosing substances like psilocybin, they're looking to get an increase of energy, focus, improve cognition over a period of time, mental clarity, mood improvement, things like that. 

And so Mojo mimics those benefits in a fully legal platform. We have 12 different ingredients that we stacked together. They work synergistically to bring you those effects. So it's a pretty unique and innovative product, we think. 

We launched it in 2021. And it's been rocking and rolling ever since.

Chase Clymer  

Well, that's fantastic. Where does one come up with the idea for this? Or how did you step into this industry? It's a little interesting.

Peter Reitano  

Yeah. I've been working in these frontier/emerging markets for a little bit. So I've got a lot of experience with cannabis and CBD. I brought products to market in that space.

I've been interested in mushroom-based wellness for a long time. I've tried all of the products that are out there. We all know the brands: The coffees, the teas... Things like that. 

But I have also been super interested in psychedelics and what they can do from a mental wellness/mental health perspective ever since I was 16, really. 

Back then it was definitely more, "Let's mess around with these mushrooms and see what we can do." It wasn't really the mental wellness aspect. 

But over a period of time, the science, the history, the research really captivated me. And frankly when I was creating Mojo, it was really scratching my own itch. 

This was at the beginning of the pandemic. I'm a busy dad of two. I've got a business. I like microdosing. But some of the legal challenges around it are issue access, things like that. 

And I just thought, "Wouldn't it be cool if we could create a product that mimics those benefits, those effects, but in a fully legal platform so we could scale it up around the world, get more people to have access to these benefits, but also create a really interesting business?" 

Because at the time, psychedelics were really starting to take off in terms of capital moving into this space, in terms of cultural interest. 

Every week, it seemed like another celebrity was taking ayahuasca and doing all of these things. And so, we wanted to tap into that growing cultural zeitgeist. 

Regulations were softening up and capital was flowing into the space. Businesses were being funded off the back of them. 

We were ultimately funded by a host of different psychedelic science investment funds. So that's how I got here and it's been tremendous, really. 

I really enjoy it so far. 

Chase Clymer  

That's fantastic. Alright. So you've got the idea, you see there is a trend forming in this industry that gives you the insight to be like, "Alright, this is worth pursuing."

What's the next step? After we have an idea for a product, what do you do?

Peter Reitano  

So really, it was the... You're exactly right. 

I had this vision: I wanted to make psychedelic wellness/mushroom-based wellness more accessible.

I had tons of different product ideas. "Why don't we make a drink? Why don't we make grow kits for people to grow at home?" 

Of course, tons of different products is not a good idea for a startup so I really wanted to narrow it down. Mojo was the idea that really stood out for me. And to be honest, it was really [serendipitous]. 

I was at a conference watching somebody speak. It was a psychedelic science conference and somebody was in the chat group talking about psychedelic science and some of the R&D that they were interested in. 

And it turned out to be Daniel, who became my co-founder, who became my co-founder. But Daniel is a biotechnologist expert in genetics. 

He has been doing R&D for a long time with CBD/cannabinoids wellness products. And so we started chatting, hit it off, and we started riffing on the different ideas. 

It turns out, he already had an initial formulation that was in the realm of what we were talking about, which was he created a product at university to mimic the effects of Adderall so he could use it as a study aid. 

So we took that, used that base formulation, iterated on it, and gave it out to loads of people. 

And at the start, it was way too strong, it was too sugary, we had all of these problems with it. We were giving it out to all sorts of people, collecting feedback. 

And we basically treated it like a  tech product. We iterated, did focus groups, who liked it... 

To start with, we thought it would be gamers. Turns out that wasn't right. 

And so we slowly worked out who was interested in it, what we needed to do from a product R&D perspective. And then in 2021, we launched the final version of the product. So there was a lot of... 

It was really product R&D to start with, as well as capital raising, financing, talking to VCs, being visible in this growing space. 

And then come 2021, it was go-to-market strategy, PR, "What are we going to do from an acquisition standpoint?"..

Chase Clymer  

I love that you just helped me do my own job. Let's talk about that. How did... What was the go-to-market strategy? How did you get this new product in front of eyes?

Peter Reitano  

Yeah. So my background is growth marketing and paid acquisition so obviously, we thought a lot about that. We tested a bunch of things to start with. Very shallow. So it could be... 

At that time, TikTok was like... 

Every consumer brand needs to be on TikTok and it still is like that. But there was a time when organic [reach] was very easy. Throw something up there, you could get some hits. 

So we tested TikTok, we tested Facebook, we tested Google. We tested a bunch of things. We started testing creative for different buyer personas. We weren't… 

We were reasonably sure on where to go. But the type of content, that type of audience,  it was something that we needed to test and learn. 

Ultimately, the platform that has worked best in Mojo has been Meta. Going very deep on Meta, a small amount of Google, some brand protection, and some broad terms, and then Amazon spend. 

And we don't spend anything on TikTok. We post organically on TikTok. But those 3 platforms are really where we spend the majority of our time. 

And I think that's probably true of most Ecommerce brands, to be honest. 

Marketers, we love complexity. We love to build 360 campaigns and look like we're doing lots of these different things. But for the most part... And that applies to targeting as well on  Facebook or Meta as well, to be honest. 

For most brands, broad targeting --letting the algorithm and AI do the work is the way to do it-- versus narrow targeting and doing really tight optimizations like that. Simple is best and so we ... 

I think for most brands up until you're probably about $10 million - $15 million dollars in revenue, you could probably saturate Facebook first, depending on your exact target audience and then start moving out to these other platforms and testing and learning. 

But then we also started to get into retail stores. So we're in Urban Outfitters, we're now in Walmart online, we're in Well.ca... 

So a bunch of digital marketplaces as well as physical stores. And we do a ton of UGC. 

So from an acquisition standpoint, what works best for us is UGC on Meta, talking about the products, testing different angles and hooks, sending them to different landing pages. 

So we have a free trial page, we have a 20%-off always on page, and then we whitelist from different UGC creators as well. So it's coming from a third party. So that works tremendously well. 

That's probably the key, I'd say, just broadly for TikTok and Meta to be honest is the targeting and the algorithms have got so good. You really just... 

It's the creative. It's the copy and the creative that drives results. That's how you get the exponential growth and returns: Getting killer creative, testing different hooks angles that are in line with the buyer personas, and making really good direct response sales copy that works for the scripts in those ads.

Chase Clymer  

Absolutely. Now breaking a brand through an advertising channel being your number one acquisition strategy, it's not cheap. 

Can you share anything about what types of budgets brands should try to allocate if that is going to be their avenue they pursue to acquire first-time buyers?

Peter Reitano  

Yeah. The truth is, if you're not allocating enough spend, you'll never get out of the learning phase of any of these platforms. 

So I haven't really seen campaigns that are spending too much less than $5,000 a month, going in on one ad set, optimizing towards conversion. So ideally, you want to be spending more. 

But really, it's a question of your economic metrics. You should be willing to spend really a third of your LTV on acquiring a new customer: What can you acquire them at and then how many do you want to acquire? And multiply that out. 

Chase Clymer  

Exactly. 

Peter Reitano  

But I would say, also caveat, building a brand, you're going to be paying high CPAs to start with. You've got to spend on doing some awareness. 

You want to be hacking early on to drive awareness and brand credibility. Can you get featured in different press articles? Are you doing something interesting/novel? That could mean doing PR in a traditional sense, but that could mean doing like... 

I've got a friend that runs a cool breathwork app and physical space. And they spend a lot of time doing podcast tours. 

So he does like 100 - 150 podcasts in a couple of years, just relentlessly getting out there talking about the product. 

You need to think about ways that can build visibility, organic visibility, as much as you can and brand credibility so that the paid ads start landing. 

It's difficult to go just straight out and just acquiring [customers] without that softening.

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Chase Clymer  

And that's why you mentioned earlier that you guys launched not only through paid but you had that organic/PR element to the launch strategy as well.

Peter Reitano  

Exactly. We want it to be in the Vices, Insiders, Forbes... These things. A, it creates a lot of visibility. 

Early on, one of the articles that did really well for us was in Business Insider. It was somebody that actually reached out to us based on another article that they'd seen. They wanted to do a review. And the headline was... 

It was something along the lines of "I tried a gummy that was meant to give you the same effects as Adderall. Here's what I think." 

And that article alone, that headline, was so useful for us sharing on socials, using it in ads. We picked up a lot of organic steam so you can't underestimate the importance of that stuff.

Chase Clymer  

Yeah. And just to walk someone through how that works you'll have those articles go out to... 

Obviously, these places have a bunch of followers, some are probably interested, more than likely most of them aren't. 

So the ones that are interested and the ones that land there and then venture back to your your store or your landing page or whatever you know, the CTA, call-to-action, is on that, those people now get picked up by whatever Pixels you're using for retargeting to just better enhance the targeting for those tools. 

So it allows those tools to refine and get out of that learning phase just that much faster.

Peter Reitano  

Exactly. And you'll get all of that stuff. But really the long tail of usefulness for those articles is in the content that you're making. So, most of the UGC content when making will... 

It'll talk about legal microdosing or any of those kinds of headlines. And in the background, we'll flash up the different articles we've been featured in just to build credibility. So it's real like... It's a content play. 

We were recently on Dragon's Den, which is the Shark Tank in Canada. That's useful from a visibility standpoint. It's free to apply, you can get on TV, so that creates visibility. 

But you also can use the footage. And using that footage in your UGC really extends life, it builds credibility. 

So all of that stuff's really helpful with the type of content that I think most Ecommerce brands need to make.

Chase Clymer  

Absolutely. Now, we're talking about all the positives of building this awesome brand in this emerging category. But let's be real here, it's still kind of a vice category.

The one thing I want to call out is obviously, you had a bunch of experience previously with the cannabis industry.

And Canada is a lot more friendly these days than the United States is in certain aspects of how that works. 

So what are some of the downsides of launching a brand into such a "controlled" category, if I was going to use that phrase?

Peter Reitano  

Yeah. Ultimately, it's much more difficult to build a brand in these spaces, because the D2C element, all of those tools that you would typically use with abandon... 

Say if you're just using... You're selling a cool compost bin that does it electronically. Random example. I don't know why that popped into my head. But there's going to be no flags on TikTok, or Facebook, or Twitter, or Google. 

But if you're building a cannabis company or CBD company, you can't advertise on these platforms, or you can't advertise in a legitimate way. 

There are ways to run an ad from a third party account, send it to a landing page that doesn't mention cannabis, push people through that squeeze page onto the main site... 

So there's hacky ways to do it. But those aren't really conducive to scaling a brand and scaling your ad account when you've got to be that hacky. And although our product is fully legal everywhere, we've run into problems continuously. 

TikTok, specifically, is very prickly about microdosing type language. If you're ever... 

If you're in a supplement or wellness vertical, --so forget about cannabis or psychedelics or anything like that-- you've always got to watch out for health claims: What can you say about the product? What can you realistically claim about the product? Making specific direct claims is tricky. 

And Facebook likes the platform and the ads to be a bit more uplifting. So talking about aspirational things not [like] "You've got acne. This is how you solve it." type of thing like accusatory type issues. 

So there's a whole host of issues there. And like I said with Mojo, Tik Tok has taken us down. I'm convinced we've been shadow banned. So although we're not taking down, the reach has been on-and-off restricted. 

Facebook has its issues. Shopify Payment Processing can be a challenge. So you need to make sure you have... 

This is a live example for me over the last few weeks. You need to make sure you have, you know, backups for payment processing. Because again, even though it's not illegal or illicit, each platform has automated ways of switching things on and off. 

And the support systems for these giant billion dollar companies are virtually non-existent most of the time. So that's really the challenge. 

And there's a whole host of other challenges with cannabis and CBD specifically. CBD has a bunch of, a huge amount of competitors flew into that space. So it's just full of people slinging, what is essentially a commoditized product. 

The health claims on them are fairly speculative. There's not that much good science behind cannabinoids and CBD. There's a little bit. Nothing compared to what there is for, say, psychedelics that have been studied since the 60s and 70s. 

So in CBD, you're in a market that's hugely saturated, the health claims aren't really there, and you can't advertise on the standard channels, and you definitely can't use Shopify Payment Processing. So it's tricky. 

It's tricky, for sure. You need to have a very good proposition if you're going into these spaces.

Chase Clymer  

Oh, absolutely. Whenever a brand reaches out to the agency about working together, depending on where they are in their journey, one of the first questions that comes up [is] "Hey, I'm just confirming you have a payment processor already sorted, right?" 

And that shows you the caliber of business you're talking with by the way they answered that question. If they assumed that they were going to use Shop Pay, you know that they haven't done their research. 

Peter Reitano  

Mm-hmm. 100%. 

Chase Clymer  

Now, we talked a lot about Mojo. And we just brushed over Academy. But a lot of your expertise from the advertising buying world came in [from that experience]. 

What are you guys up to at Academy? What types of brands are you helping? What are you doing over there?

Peter Reitano  

Yeah. I've always been in the agency game. My first agency I worked on in the UK was like a web development agency that we built our own SaaS products. So it was a great experience. 

For me, I found an agency called Spark, which was an SEO/AdWords agency in Toronto when I first arrived. 

And we sold that agency and then started an agency called Abacus, which was a paid acquisition agency purely focused on paid acquisition, mostly on Facebook. 

And back then that was a bit of a differentiator. It certainly isn't now but we ran that agency for 6 years. 

And then [we] ultimately realized over a period of time that if we wanted to control the results, we needed to control more of the funnel. And it wasn't good enough being this hyper specialist agency, just focusing on the optimization side. 

It became increasingly obvious that you needed to be very good at the content and creative and producing content, or creative at scale that works on these platforms. So we started to build in a bit of our own offering. 

So we started to build in a bit of our own offering. But we started working with an agency called Sophomore, which is a creative agency and just fell in love. 

We realized that we were a good good partnership. And we started working on clients together, we started pitching together. 

And ultimately, we merged the agencies together to where it is now, which is much more of a  full-service advertising agency, but our focus is content: Building out content that's made for strategic performance. 

So what does that mean? It means we're creating content. It could be high glossy TV commercials, but in reality it is quite often brands need a lot of different types of content: Maybe behind the scenes content, maybe UGC content, maybe quick cut social content that works very well on Tiktok. 

So we make all of that type of content with the through line of “We want to make sure that this content actually performs for the brand”. So UGC effort for Ecom brands. That's typically a lot of social ads. 

Social content that conforms to the social story arc. So in the first few seconds, get people's attention and tell them what's in it for them. So we make a lot of that type of content. 

And we really focus on how we distribute it effectively to drive the results that the brand wants. 

And we work with, like I said, Ecom brands, large Ecommerce brands, but we also work with an airline, helping them expand their different routes. 

We work with a huge Mattress Company here in Canada, helping them with kind of driving awareness for physical retail as well as their online proposition. So it's really all over the place. 

But we're a content agency. And we're trying to innovate on the process of producing really good, high-quality content that performs in the market. And like I said, it's quite often the case that… 

I think one of the biggest problems for brands is getting the sheer amount of volume of content, quantity of content at this scale you need, at the speed you need to drive the kind of campaigns that you need to drive for performance campaigns. 

So a lot of the big brands come to us and they have incredible retargeting systems, but they're using the same piece of content for all of these amazing, different funnels. 

And so you need a lot of content: There's high quality, there's strategic… And you need it quick. 

And you need it to be in rapid response to changing norms, culture, and results coming back in so that testing feedback is super important.

So that's one of our real value propositions is producing content at scale that ultimately feeds into the system that gets tested and battle-hardened to work in whatever working means to that brand.

Chase Clymer  

That's amazing. You guys are doing some heavy lifting over there for the brands that you're working for. Now, is there anything I didn't ask you about today that you think would resonate with our audience?

Peter Reitano  

You got some pretty good questions. I'm happy to talk about anything agency related, content- related, or D2C stuff.

I feel like I've seen it all from different angles. So I've raised money for brands, I've built brands, I've worked for brands.

That's one of the great things, I think, about running a brand. 

I think every agency should just try or every agency owner should at least try to launch their own brand and spend their own money on acquiring customers or building out a proposition because it really gives you a taste for what the brands are going through and experiencing these business owners are experiencing.

It's one thing to sell advertising services to other brands. And ultimately not having a tremendous amount of skin in the game unless you have performance models.

And it's quite another thing to launch your own dog food, your own agency offering and test whether it actually works. So I truly love that part of our agency. 

And we've kind of got a little bit of a lab system, a skunkworks system where we're always working on new ideas that we can test. New little brands that we can test and use our own services to see if we can scale it out. 

And  we can A/B test our own service offering and see where are the holes. So it's super useful for both our agencies.

But also it's great to see a brand scale that you've worked on yourself.

Chase Clymer  

Absolutely. Now if I'm listening to this show and I'm curious to learn more about Mojo, where should I go?

Peter Reitano  

You can go to mojo.shop. It's probably the easiest spot. 

We're on Amazon as well but mojo.shop if you want to see the website and all its glory.

And there's a welcome discount: WELCOME20 [so] that you can get 20% off.

Chase Clymer  

Awesome. And if your advertising agency sounds curious to somebody, where should they go?

Peter Reitano  

You can go to madebyacademy.com. 

Chase Clymer  

We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes. 

You can subscribe to the newsletter at honestecommerce.co to get each episode delivered right to your inbox. 

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Lastly, if you're a store owner looking for an amazing partner to help get your Shopify store to the next level, reach out to Electric Eye at electriceye.io/connect.

Until next time!