Thrive Market

“So coincidentally, I had been an early investor in Thrive Market, which billed itself as Costco meets Whole Foods Online, a membership organization where you could go get all the things you could find at Whole Foods, but at Costco prices, But not at Costco Qua…”

“Yeah, so we're running the business profitably, operating cash flow positive, and back at that, those early days, you know, we were losing money on every order.”

“So we raised a million and a half in the seed round.”

“When you hire that quickly, you can't integrate people effectively. You make mistakes in hiring in terms of fit. And that really caused us to suffer because it's a lot easier to hire people than to fire them.”

“It costs a lot, especially when we had to shut down the coconut oil program a few months later and got stuck with a million and a half dollars of coconut oil inventory.”

“She's in her mid-twenties, and she wrote a post about Thrive, and within 24 hours, we had orders coming in from All 48 states in the continental US.”

“So, you know, our number one acquisition channel today is unpaid. It's referral. It's members telling members.”

“So the pillars of curated assortment membership model to enable better pricing, And then private label to cut out steps in the supply chain and introduce higher quality products that are also better pricing. That was kind of the trifecta.”

“I think we see a really clear path as a standalone business. The membership renewal rates are over 70%. We're still bringing in new members at a really rapid clip. And we're still very early in that journey, so we don't see any need to become part of a larger …”

“So one of the first things we did there, what, and like maybe one of the only good decisions we made at that stage of the business was to start working on private label. And so that rapidly grew to, you know, 15% of our sales.”

“And so we raised thirty million dollars.”

“Well over half a billion in sales last year.”

“I think it was in the thirty million dollar range, so tens of millions of dollars.”

“We had gotten just ridiculed left and right by investors when we went out with our projections, and I think our projections had us doing fifteen million in the first year.”

“The other big benefit was that had we had VCs they didn't care about the mission. So their focus would be, how do you make the business model work? And I think they would have looked at that in a very short term way. The influencers cared only about the missio…”

“The valuation was 20 times higher than it had been six months earlier.”

“I mean, at that point we were burning more than a million dollars a month, and so that was a challenge.”

“The membership renewal rates are over 70%.”

“He in about 10 weeks built for a fraction of the funds what we had failed to build over the prior, you know, four to six months.”

“At the time we were actually losing money on each order that went out the door, which means the more that you grow, the more money you lose.”

“We thought we knew what we needed, but the reality is we didn't. And we probably didn't pick the right partner. So kind of on every level, we set ourselves up for failure. And in retrospect, predictably it was a complete train wreck.”

“At a certain point, we had to sort of tell them to stop promoting. Because we couldn't handle the volume. So we were at that point just operationally really compromised, and as the business sort of continued to grow, we were approaching a hundred million dolla…”

“We went to a bunch of VCs in San Francisco. We took a trip out to New York. We visited every VC that we could find in LA, and we got intros to most of them through Launchpad, and we were rejected every single time.”

“60 dollars at the beginning, 60 dollars today.”