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Hilary Dubin and Caroline Vasquez Huber, co-founders of Jones nicotine mints, on the Honest Ecommerce podcast
May 25, 20266 min read

Jones Nicotine Mints: Rebranding a Regulated Product for Modern Consumers

$200 in Ad Spend, 600 Waitlist Signups, and a $1.25M Pre-Seed Round

Before Jones had a physical product, before the FDA had approved anything, and before the supply chain existed, co-founders Hilary Dubin and Caroline Vasquez Huber put up a simple landing page with a waitlist and spent $200 on Google search ads targeting terms like "quit vaping" and "quitting pouches." Within one week they had 600 people on that list. That proof of concept, combined with hundreds of customer interviews and early social traction, helped them close a $1.25 million pre-seed round without a single unit to ship.

The product they were building sits in one of the most regulated consumer categories in the United States. Jones is a nicotine replacement therapy mint, an FDA-regulated product, paired with a behavioral support app and community. Getting from idea to first sample took a year and a half. That gap between concept and product forced the team to develop disciplines that most consumer brands skip entirely.

How to Validate a Product Before You Can Ship It

The Jones founding process started with what the team calls "getting out of the building." Dubin and Vasquez Huber spent a full summer conducting hundreds of customer interviews, including standing outside vape shops and asking strangers about their habits and spending. They went through an accelerator at NYU where the framework required generating hypotheses each week, testing them through direct customer conversations, and rebuilding assumptions the following week. That process ran for roughly two and a half to three months before they settled on the product direction.

What they learned changed the product significantly. They originally planned a nicotine mint. Customer conversations revealed that users felt isolated, were confused by dosing instructions written for smokers rather than vapers, and wanted community alongside the physical product. Dubin ran a manual text-message simulation, acting as a chatbot to test what support people actually needed before any technology was built. Customers kept asking whether they could connect with other people going through the same thing. That feedback drove the decision to build a full app with a community layer. A first version of the app was live within about a month and a half of finishing the accelerator.

Building an Audience Before You Have a Product to Sell

While the FDA review and supply chain work stretched over more than a year, the team kept building their social presence. They posted content about nicotine culture, relatable vaping moments, and harm reduction conversations rather than product information they did not yet have. By the time the website went live and the product launched in November 2023, Jones already had 20,000 followers on TikTok.

Dubin's direct advice: start your social accounts before you have a product. The organic content that performed best was either genuinely funny or educational. Viral memes about vaping anxiety, road trip craving emergencies, and relatable nicotine dependency moments drove top-of-funnel awareness with near-zero spend. That approach kept their marketing budget very low in the early months and gave them an engaged audience ready to convert on launch day. August built 6 million organic followers before spending on paid ads using a comparable content-before-product strategy.

They also did things that do not scale and cannot be repeated. Every email address either founder had ever used, from ex-partners to middle school teachers, received a personal blast. That alone generated 600 Instagram followers almost immediately.

What Happens When Your Customer Is Not Who You Expected

Despite launching with a Gen Z-focused social following, the buyers who actually purchased Jones skewed significantly older. The core demographic turned out to be millennials aged roughly 30 to 40, people who were serious about quitting and ready to commit to a structured program. The Gen Z audience that had driven the social following was engaged with the content but was not converting to paying customers at the same rate.

This mismatch between social audience and buyer required a real shift in content strategy and paid media targeting. The team hit their month-one revenue target three months late, which was a hard lesson after the confidence of having 20,000 pre-launch followers. Their first hire, a head of marketing, helped them figure out how to bridge that gap with limited cash.

Rebranding a Medical Product as a Wellness Product

Nicotine replacement therapy has lived in pharmacy aisles for decades in clinical packaging designed for a clinical context. The Jones approach was to reposition the category entirely as a wellness and beauty product. The connection is real: quitting nicotine has documented effects on skin quality, hair, and other health markers. Framing the product through a beauty and wellness lens rather than a clinical or cessation lens opened up a different retail and marketing strategy, one that does not route through pharmacies or physician referrals.

This is a replicable framework. Dubin notes that walking the aisles of any major retailer reveals categories that have not seen a design, positioning, or product update in a decade or more. The opportunity is not to invent something new but to find an existing product, identify what the modern consumer needs that the current market is not delivering, and rebuild around that unmet need. Jones did not reinvent nicotine replacement therapy. It modernized the packaging, the philosophy, and the support system around a product that already worked. PS Condoms faced a similar challenge navigating FDA approval and building consumer trust in a regulated category, taking a comparable brand-forward approach to a product that already existed.

Key Lessons From This Episode

  • A $200 ad spend that generates 600 waitlist signups can anchor a pre-seed pitch. Proof of demand does not require a finished product.
  • Hundreds of customer interviews, done systematically over weeks, will change your product in ways no internal team session ever will. Jones went from a mint to a mint plus app plus community entirely through this process.
  • Start social accounts before launch. Having 20,000 engaged followers on day one is the difference between a launch and a soft open nobody sees.
  • Your social audience and your paying customer base may not be the same demographic. Validate which group is actually buying before you scale content or paid spend toward the wrong segment.
  • Repositioning a clinical product as a wellness product can open entirely different distribution, marketing, and retail channels.
  • Viral, relatable content that is funny or educational outperforms product-focused posts at the top of funnel, especially when your budget is close to zero.

Hear the full conversation with Hilary Dubin and Caroline Vasquez Huber, including how they structured their app MVP and what their marketing pivot looked like in practice, in the complete episode and transcript below.

In This Conversation We Discuss:

  • [00:00] Intro
  • [02:34] Creating products from personal pain points
  • [06:52] Sponsor: Klaviyo
  • [08:59] Meeting potential customers where they are
  • [10:47] Adapting products based on user feedback
  • [13:48] Testing market demand with waitlists
  • [16:02] Sponsor: Electric Eye
  • [17:10] Maximizing personal networks for growth
  • [18:34] Gathering behavioral data in early days
  • [19:52] Callouts
  • [20:02] Launching a product to engaged audiences
  • [22:09] Sponsor: Intelligems
  • [24:09] Pivoting marketing to bridge early limitations
  • [26:24] Driving organic traffic with relatable content
  • [30:33] Adding modern value to traditional products

Resources:

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Transcript

Hilary Dubin

My advice to anyone out there would be, start your social accounts before you even have a product. Because then when you actually have the product ready to go, like when we're turning our website on and everything's ready to launch, like we already had 20,000 followers on TikTok. 

Chase Clymer

Sometimes there's expectations like the website itself will solve all these problems and create a demand for you. And it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. When you get to this level of the game, you're basically buying a race car. But if you don't know how to drive it and there's no track, you just spend a lot of money on something pretty. 

Honest Ecommerce is a weekly podcast where we interview direct-to-consumer brand founders and leaders to find out what it takes to start, grow and scale an online business today. 

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. Today I'm welcoming to show not one but two co-founders of Jones, a nicotine mint designed to support people in creating healthier relationships with nicotine or quitting completely. Caroline Hillery, welcome to the show. 

Hilary Dubin

Hi, Chase. Thanks so much for having us. 

Caroline Vasquez Huber

Hey, Chase. Great to be here. 

Chase Clymer

Awesome. Awesome. Well, take me back in time. Where did this journey start? Where did the idea come to get into the nicotine cessation space, I guess? 

Hilary Dubin

I can take that one. So Caroline and I have been friends since we were 8. We both unfortunately got really addicted to the JUUL and we had a really hard time quitting vaping. And what we realized as we started talking about it more was that JUUL had come in and modernized smoking, but no one had modernized quitting. 

The tools we were using were embarrassing. They were outdated. I was taking the same nicotine that my grandma chewed and we were like, this is crazy because there are so many millions of young people out there who are looking to quit or cut back and no one had updated the tools. 

And so we both quit using nicotine mints, but we realized as we started talking to medical experts that the most effective way to quit is actually combining those FDA approved nicotine mints with behavioral support. So when you have that combination, it increases quit rates by another 40%.

When you use nicotine replacement therapy, it doubles your chances of quitting. So it was really through our own struggle to quit. And just looking at what was out there and realizing that nothing better existed. So we wanted to make it ourselves. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. Now, I guess, where does the journey start to build your own product in this space? Was it always... I guess, was the concept always to go to market with this? Or was it just to be like, could we make something better for ourselves and our experience? 

Caroline Vasquez Huber

I think it was pretty immediately. We want to bring something better to market. Both of us had been entrepreneurs at heart. We have been best friends since we were little and we always wanted to start a company together. So there was a real eagerness to tackle a big problem. We just hadn't found it yet. And so when this was something we were both struggling with and felt so personally impacted by. 

It really led to this conversation of like, this could be super impactful for millions of people. And it's something that we're really passionate about. And so we decided to, Hillary left her job. I was in business school and we decided to dedicate our full time focus to building Jones. And both of us still use the product daily. So I think an important piece of Jones is really, this idea of quitting as a spectrum. 

Part of modernizing quitting is not just the tools available, but it's also how it's discussed. So cessation up until this point was very black and white. Like either you've quit, or you're a failure, basically. And a lot of how we wanted to bring the product to market was through a judgment free lens. So quitting really is whatever you need to make healthier decisions. 

In the same way, you know, people eat sweets sometimes. It's okay to use nicotine as long as you're happy with your relationship with it. So whether it’s [about], “I'm okay to have an occasional cigarette on the weekends, but during the work week, I don't want to smoke.” We will support you. 

And you absolutely are considered a quitter because you're making healthier and better choices for yourself. So I think that's been a big part of Jones is like creating a real umbrella of acceptance to different people's journeys and where they are with their relationship with nicotine. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. I mean, just from the psychological, philosophical lens, that is a fantastic way to view everything in life. Any vices you have or whatever. I think people get caught up in that binary thing where if they fall... Even building healthier habits, going to the gym, “Oh, I didn't go to the gym. Now I'm done with that. I'm never going to do it again.” 

No, your goal should just be getting better. And I think that I applaud that you're trying to do that with what your product is looking to solve. But I just think in general, everybody should definitely give themselves a break. And as long as you're making strides to do things better in your life, you're doing it.

Caroline Vasquez Huber

Totally. I mean, that was a big piece of it as we use these products. And so we saw a huge improvement if we were just not vaping every single day. That was a massive win. And the fact that we are being told like, “This is a massive slip up, it's a failure with something that just did not resonate with a modern user.” Rewards for progress are definitely part of this. And one of the things we say a lot at Jones is, “progress, not perfection.” So it's a big part of the brand. 

Chase Clymer

I love that. 

Hilary Dubin

Yeah. And I would just add that that whole philosophy is really built into our community and into the daily questions that we ask our users. We have our nicotine mints, which are really effective, but we also have this whole community inside of our app. And it's built off of exactly what you said, Chase, of taking small steps, celebrating your wins. Going to the gym once is better than not going to the gym at all. 

One day that you have not vaped is still a win. And something we say is like, baby steps are still steps and your pace is the right pace. So, I think that it's really resonated with our community because they feel like they can just share more vulnerably. They're not going to be judged. They're in it together with all of these other people who are also not perfect and just trying to get better a little bit at a time. 

So I think that that strategy has just made people feel more open and just really engaged in the community.

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Let's talk about the beginning. How to start a business 101? What were we doing? What were those actions that we were taking? I don't want to even begin to guess, especially with a product that's probably regulated like nicotine. 

Caroline Vasquez Huber

So we like to call it, get out of the building. So from the moment we started talking about this, Hillary and I decided the best place to start is getting feedback that's not just our own echo chamber. So starting to talk to potential customers. So getting outside of our own apartments and really meeting young people where they were. 

Shopping for vape, standing outside of vape shops, asking people like, what are you getting today? How much are you spending on that? How frequently do you get a vape? And really starting to talk through, do you want to be vaping? Do you want to be smoking? Are you using pouches? Collecting as much information as you possibly could about all of the people and all their struggles with the products. 

One of the things that became immediately obvious is, and there's data out there. 86% of people who vape or smoke, self-report wanting to quit. So it's clear that the vast majority of people using these products don't want to be dependent on them long-term, but just don't have the tools available to them to quit. 

I think we started by conducting hundreds and hundreds of customer interviews and really understanding the pain points when people decided to actually take action on that next step. So we know most people want to quit. But what are the turning points that actually make you decide, “You know what, this is now an activation point where I'm ready to quit tomorrow. Tomorrow is the day I want to do it." 

So really starting to understand how people behave and why they behave these certain ways and working towards a product that could help solve those real-life problems. 

Chase Clymer

You said hundreds and hundreds of interviews. How many weeks or months or years? I just want to talk about how much research you were doing before you even started to noodle on what would end up being your mint product.

Hilary Dubin

I can jump in. So we spent a whole summer doing hundreds of customer interviews. We did an accelerator program at NYU. And in order to even get into that accelerator, you had to participate in these startup sprints where you were doing 100 to 200 interviews in two weeks. And then when we did the accelerator, it's just this really dedicated heads down time where you are on a weekly basis coming up with hypotheses of, whatare the biggest risks of the business? 

What assumptions are we making? Who do we think our target customer is? How do we think we're going to reach them? Then you go talk to customers, you validate or invalidate those hypotheses, and then you make new ones for the next week. So we spent like a two and a half, three months doing this every single week. And by the end of that, we came to the conclusion of what our product should be. How big was this problem? 

And that actually set us up really well going into our pre-seed fundraise. And I think some interesting learnings from all of those hundreds of interviews were that initially we thought we were just going to have a nicotine mint. But then as we talked to customers, we realized they were feeling really isolated. 

They didn't know how much they were using or what was the right amount to use. Like the instructions on the mint were confusing, especially if you vape and not smoke, it's all about smoking.

So I think we learned from our customers really quickly that they needed personalized support and a step down plan because having the plan really helped. They wanted community around it. So like, as we started touching on that, we were like, well, maybe it can be a chat bot. So then I'm pretending to be a chat bot because this was before ChatGPT was announced. 

I'm like setting up a little Wizard of Oz texting with customers. And then they kept asking like, “could this be a group chat? Like I want to connect with other people.” So we learned actually this should be an app and a community where you can connect. And then I think we also realized that people just really wanted to quit. And they wanted to do it in a way that wasn't embarrassing. 

That they could still feel like they could take this out at the dinner table, at work, and not feel shame around it. So by the end of the accelerator, we had a pitch deck. We went into our pre-seed fundraise and we had all of these customer insights that we gathered pretty quickly. 

Caroline Vasquez Huber

And one thing I'll add is we continue to do customer interviews. So that was very much not something isolated like those 12 weeks. Hillary this morning sent me like, look at this amazing analysis that we did on all these customer interviews we had last week. So I think it's just important to at any stage of building, continue really making that a priority. Best way to get feedback.

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. This is the second conversation today I've had that's going to end up on the podcast where we were talking about customer interviews. It's such a powerful thing. Everybody, go do more of them. Especially, I'm talking to you, the person right now that has this idea that you aren't moving forward yet. Just go talk to a dozen people you don't know about that idea. That's the next step for you. 

Alright, so you're armed with this pitch deck. You're going out and raising some money. You don't have a product yet. When do you make a product? 

Caroline Vasquez Huber

Yes. We were like, “Okay, how are we going to pitch this? We don't have a product yet.” What we decided we could do really quickly was spin up proof of concept. And the fact that people wanted this. So we made a website with a wait list on it and just started seeing if we drive a little bit of Google spend on search for terms like quit vaping, quitting pouches. 

How many people would actually interact with this website that has a pretty limited amount of information and say, “You know what, I'm gonna give you my email. I wanna learn more.” And within a week, of spinning that up, we had 600 people on the waitlist. 

Chase Clymer

How much money did you spend?

Caroline Vasquez Huber

$200. 

Chase Clymer

And also what you're doing there isn't unique. I've heard many startup stories where it's just like, make a fake thing, put it to a fake page and see if people are interested in it. How much did that $200 spend help you guys land in your pre-seed round? If you're allowed to share those numbers? 

Caroline Vasquez Huber

We raised $1.25 million. So it was definitely worthwhile, those $200. But I think it was proof of concept, a little bit of demand, starting to spin up socials early, and build a social following. Even if we didn't have a product. Showing that people could really relate to the problem we were facing and that we could speak to them really effectively because we had the same problem that they did. 

So having customer empathy, I think really came through on our social channels and helped us build up a bit of a following. And then the other big piece, I think, is really validating the size of the problem. When you see that the nicotine market is growing faster than AI. 

And that it's a $1 trillion market cap, you're like, “okay, there's room for innovation here.” And there's really room to build something really powerful and really impactful that also has potential upside for investors. So I think all those things came together nicely.

Chase Clymer

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Hilary Dubin

In addition to the little bit of spend driving people to that page, I will also add to the listeners out there who are trying to get started. Do things that don't scale. You've probably heard this before, but we also created a mailing list of every single person we've ever emailed. I'm talking ex-boyfriends, middle school teachers, every single person we know. We sent out an email blast and a text message, too. 

So we found some tool that would help us take our contact list. And as soon as we sent that out, we had 600 followers on our Instagram. And so I think it was building out this waitlist and then the next step was building out a social following and just starting to post to our socials. Not about products at all. Just conversations about nicotine, going out on the street being like, “What do think of vaping? What's the craziest thing you've seen someone do for a vape?” 

And over time, as we were trying to build up this proof of concept to go into a fundraiser and to really validate, “Is there a market here?” Those sort of hacky things in the beginning that you can really only do that once. But it helped us get to that first level of validation that like, okay, people are behind this and they're excited about it. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. Now, how far from, I'm assuming it was quite, It was probably around the time of the incubator where this idea really took hold. How far from that moment in time? Did it take you to actually get your first sample of what would be your flagship product? 

Caroline Vasquez Huber

A year and a half. It took a really long time. Of course, you're dealing with the FDA. So I would say there are a lot simpler products that you can get a sample of much more quickly. This is a highly regulated product. That being said, Hillary alluded to her Wizard of Oz text messaging and first versions of the app. And those came together really quickly. 

We had a V1 of that probably a month and a half after the accelerator, like her interacting with real customers on the behavioral support piece, understanding what questions people were asking. What type of support they wanted from community. And then, so that was probably September, October, by the time we had that, we had an MVP of the app live by December. 

So we were moving really quickly on the behavioral support piece and the actual FDA piece took some time. Yeah, I've never heard the government moves fast. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah, I've never heard the government move fast. 

Hey everybody, just a quick reminder. Please like this video and subscribe if you haven't. We're releasing interviews like this every week. So don't miss out. Now back to the interview. 

So once you had the actual product in place. Was the website launched before then with the app and you're getting customers? Or was it still a holding pattern until you could launch with both pieces together and selling it as this collaborative effort to help people quit? 

Hilary Dubin

So the website that we launched with that waiting list, had a game. We had a friend of ours build us a game that's called Quiddil. It still lives in our app today. Nicotine cravings can pass in 60 seconds. And so you spend 60 seconds doing like a pop a shot where you toss a vape into the trash. So that was our website for a year of just building up our actual product and our supply chain and our app. 

We were able to get users on the app just through sort of our social media and friends and friends and friends and like building up. We had a couple hundred beta testers as we were building out the app. But the website, we really launched about a year later when we did our whole product launch. So we launched the products in November of 2023. 

And from there, it was kind of off to the races because we had done all this work while we're building our supply chain to build an audience. My advice to anyone out there would be, start your social accounts before you even have a product. Because then when you actually have the product ready to go, ike when we're turning our website on and everything's ready to launch. We already had 20,000 followers on TikTok

So you have this engaged audience ready for you to offer them a product because we already were making content in that same topic. And I think that really helped us when launch day came around. Because you're not just going from nothing. You already have people who are interested. 

Chase Clymer

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It's something that we oftentimes are having conversations around with clients of ours that are launching a new business, [or] a new store. We always talk about their go-to-market plan. Because depending on whom you're working with, sometimes these wires get crossed and where the people... Sometimes there are expectations that the website itself will solve all these problems and create demand for you. And it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's...

You get to this level of the game, you're basically buying a race car. But if you don't know how to drive it and there's no track, you just spend a lot of money on something pretty. So it's always something that we're bringing up and talking to people. Like, “What happens when this is done and it's beautiful and it can work? How are you going to make it work?” 

Which is how you are driving traffic? Do you have an audience you're going to launch with? Do you have influencer partners that are going to talk about this? Do you have $100,000 a month to spend on meta ads? What are you doing after this thing will work?

Caroline Vasquez Huber

I think that was something we really learned the hard way. We had invested so heavily in building an organic community and our whole hypothesis was fantastic. Month one, I remember our forecasted revenue goal so vividly. And I'm like, “Of course we're gonna crush it. We have 20,000 followers, like no question.” Month one, it was like we were so severely under the revenue goal that we had.

Given to ourselves and it was like something we really quickly had to learn. It's like, “Okay, you have this captive audience and it's great, but you're still going to need paid ads. You're still going to need an influencer.” We didn't have that much money. By the time you do all of this on the FDA product front, you have an engineering team building this app. 

It was really cash dropped in terms of how we're going to get there from a marketing roadmap perspective. Our first hire was a head of marketing who was really clever about how to get from zero to one with pretty much no budget. And let's think really outside of the box for how we're going to do that. And we ended up hitting that revenue goal three months later. 

But learning a lot of really valuable things about how to market and how to really bring the product to life. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. I'm sure that the listeners will write in if they could. My email is very public. They can find me. But basically, they would want to know what were some of those things that you did as a cash strapped young startup? If you have any ideas from back then of what worked or just the tactics that you tried, I'm sure they would love to hear. 

Hilary Dubin

I mean, when we had no cash, we were really reliant on viral memes. So what we found on social is that the content that performs well for us is either funny or it's educational. And then we layer in the product and brand-focused stuff so that once you're on our page, now you know what our product is. 

But if you're just trying to get started and get some people on your page and eyeballs on your page. Especially the way that the algorithm has adapted to TikTok and just a new way of consuming content, you don't have to have a lot of followers to have content go viral. You just need to have content that is actually engaging that people want to pay attention to and send to their friends. 

And either they laugh about it or they're like, “Oh, this is so interesting. I didn't know this.” So I think in addition to the small amount of digital ads that we were able to do in the beginning, most of our web traffic was really coming from organic viral content. And I think that we were able to produce that content because we were vapers. 

We know what it's like to freak out because you can't find your vape or be on a road trip and be like, “Oh my god, my vape died. Pull over right now. We need to go to the gas station.” So we would make content about funny stuff like that that was really relatable to people who also use nicotine. And so I think that in conjunction with your traditional digital ad strategy, was what allowed us to keep our marketing budget really, really low. 

What we have seen recently. Our company calls it the meta beast, is that digital ads require a lot more content today than they did before. You just need so much variation on content. We would have probably not been able to run digital ads the same way we did back then. But I think if you're going to take away one thing, it's like putting out that top of funnel content that's actually entertaining. As opposed to just talking about the product all the time. 

Caroline Vasquez Huber

The other thing I'll add is something we learned pretty quickly. And something I'd recommend to people who are going out and trying this for the first time is… What we learned after launching the product is a huge piece of the community who had been following us and enjoying our content was totally different than our target customer.

And that was something that we weren't sure of. We didn't know if it was going to lean female or male or who our core demographics were. And we found that it actually skewed much older than we had anticipated when we were building the product. We knew that so many Gen Zers were vaping. That was really our gut was like we're building a social media following of mainly Gen Z

We anticipate that that's going to be the biggest demographic for this, even though Hillary and I are young millennials. We're like, “This is who's going to want the product. This is what all of our social media following was geared towards.” And within a few months of launching the product, it was really clear that our demographic actually skewed much older. 

It's more, you know, late or young millennials, 30 to 40 year olds who were really serious about quitting. And they weren't like in the throes of their partying youth. And there are those people who want to quit too. But they're not quite as ready to really commit to a program and to working on the behavioral health side. 

And so I think that was a big learning experience, “Okay, great. We have this social following, but the people buying the product are a different age group.” And so we actually have to shift how we're thinking about content and advertising a bit.

Chase Clymer

Before we go, is there anything I didn't ask you about that you think would resonate with our audience? 

Hilary Dubin

I think maybe one piece about Jones that's interesting, that we didn't get a chance to talk about. Is the fact that we took a product that was traditionally a medical product. Like nicotine replacement therapy is in the pharmacy aisle in super clinical packaging. And flipping that into a wellness product. 

And I think that there are other categories where there's opportunities like this of consumers today are really interested in wellness and well-being and longevity. And optimizing it like biohacking. And so we're not necessarily looking at the biohackers. But I think taking that lens of beauty and wellness on something that's traditionally thought of as medicine has been a really unique part of our brand. 

We see Jones as the first step in your beauty routine. Because quitting nicotine actually really helps with your skin and your hair and anti-aging. Like nicotine dulls your skin, dries your skin, sexual wellness like it increases ED, it reduces your arousal like all sorts of things. Nicotine has impacts on your body and the systems there. 

So I think really looking through this beauty and wellness angle has been an interesting approach to our go-to-market. Rather than just going straight into pharmacies and doctors where historically you would have found the product. 

Caroline Vasquez Huber

And the one other piece of advice I give is just go get a co-founder. Find someone you can start something with because you won't know everything. Being the sole person who's completely… Every piece of the business is reliant on you is just such a strain. And not having that partnership or the collaboration of a co-founder, at least for me this would not have been possible without building it with Hillary. 

So I think that a really important piece of starting a business in my opinion. Having someone great who you have a lot of trust in to build with. 

Chase Clymer

Oh, absolutely. I can not imagine doing what I've been doing for the last 10 years without a co-founder. Not only to help pick up the things that I'm not the best at, but also to rein in some of my other tendencies. I don't know if we'd still be in business if you let me do everything I wanted to do. 

But Hillary, [back] to what you were saying, I always like to point out. You don't need a brand new idea. It doesn't have to be the next Facebook. You took a product that already existed. And you took a new approach to it. And you packaged some other value add to that product. 

Nothing you necessarily were doing was extremely innovative. It was just an innovative packaging of this product. And by no means am I trying to belittle the amazing business that you built over there. But I want people to understand it's like, you can take products that already exist right now at Walmart, at Target, at your local grocery store. 

And if they haven't seen innovation in 10, 15, 20 years, there's so many opportunities out there that just we haven't found the people to stumble across them to think about it. Like, “Well, why aren't we doing this? Because now you can do this.” 

Hilary Dubin

100%. And if you just walk down the aisles at Target, you can see like some of them have been disrupted. Like all the branding looks nice. Everything is natural and new and modern. But there are still lot of spaces with ugly old packaging and just unsexy products. Like a friend of ours just launched a senior health beverage. 

Because nobody's really paying attention to the older demographic. So I think it is something that's replicable. It's just understanding what is the core problem for this consumer? How can we make this product offering better? What needs are not being met in the market today?

I think you're right. It's like we didn't reinvent nicotine replacement therapy. But we really modernized it for today's consumer and paired it with behavioral support.. And made it accessible and made it something that you actually feel proud to carry with you. And so I think that that definitely could be done in other aisles. 

Chase Clymer

That's amazing. Now, for those that are listening to the podcast, maybe they want to quit vaping. Where should they go? What should they do? 

Hilary Dubin

Quitwithjones.com. Follow us at Quit With Jones and take our quiz. You'll get a dependency level. It'll tell you how much nicotine you're using. And again, it doesn't have to be cold turkey tomorrow. You can quit at your own pace and you'll get a step down plan and hopefully feel healthier and better about your choices and your habits. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. Hilary, Caroline, thank you so much for coming on the show today. 

Caroline Vasquez Huber

Thank you so much, Chase. It was great.

Hilary Dubin

 Thanks, Chase.