StarZero All shows Try the podcast clipper →

Justin Mares

Founder & CEO, Truemed · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderexecutiveauthorinvestor@jwmares ↗LinkedIn ↗justinmares.com ↗

Justin Mares is the founder of health brands including Kettle & Fire, Perfect Keto, and Surely, as well as Truemed, a platform enabling HSA/FSA spending on preventive health. He also co-authored the startup growth book Traction.

10statements → 3claims → 1claims resolved → 3.5/5average certainty → 1.6/5average debate potential → 1said about them ↓

1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 2 not checkable as stated how the 3 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

3 assertions · 5 insights · 2 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 3 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 2 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Justin argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Justin Mares grew Kettle & Fire to over $100M in annual revenue
“By the end of the episode, people will understand the day one steps, really the day zero steps that I took to start Kettle and Fire, which is now a nine figure annual business.”
Justin Mares Apr 7, 2025 ▶ 1:11 How to Validate Your Startup Idea for $50 (Same Method That Built a $100M Brand)

How they sound: not measured why? →

We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Justin Mares on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.

Everything Justin Mares said on the Startup Ideas Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight
Pre-orders on sketchy landing pages are the ultimate proof of demand
“If people are willing to spend 30 bucks on a product they've never heard, tasted, smelled, whatever, that doesn't exist on a landing page that looks like it was a scam, that is probably a pretty good sign that this is a thing that people really, really want.”
Justin Mares Apr 7, 2025 ▶ 8:03 How to Validate Your Startup Idea for $50 (Same Method That Built a $100M Brand)
Insight
Solo founders using AI now have an advantage over multi-person teams
“Someone that has a big, or has like a strong opinion on a product they want to make, or a direction the world is moving, They're almost at an advantage with these AI tools relative to like a small or even medium sized team, because if you are someone that like…”
Justin Mares Apr 7, 2025 ▶ 19:28 How to Validate Your Startup Idea for $50 (Same Method That Built a $100M Brand)
Insight
Founders should build in domains where their interest is top 0.1%
“I think that generally people should probably go to wherever they are, like, on the frontier and they are among the most interested, like, top .1% of people interested in a topic. I think that that frontier for most people is where you end up having a lot of g…”
Justin Mares Apr 7, 2025 ▶ 14:54 How to Validate Your Startup Idea for $50 (Same Method That Built a $100M Brand)
Insight
Becoming a top 1% user of frontier AI models is high leverage
“Playing with just the frontier models, Claude, GPT, Gemini you know, it just makes a lot of sense, in my view, and becoming a, like, top one percent user, there's probably a few things that you can do that will be as high leverage as that.”
Justin Mares Apr 7, 2025 ▶ 16:31 How to Validate Your Startup Idea for $50 (Same Method That Built a $100M Brand)
Insight
Mares: Core barriers to building CPG brands are steadily falling
“I think that there's all of these barriers to building CPG brands. It's basically like, Can you make the product? Can you design it? Can you build a good brand? Can you market it well? And I think that the barriers are just more and more coming down.”
Justin Mares Apr 7, 2025 ▶ 24:08 How to Validate Your Startup Idea for $50 (Same Method That Built a $100M Brand)
Assertion Supported
Justin Mares grew Kettle & Fire to over $100M in annual revenue
“By the end of the episode, people will understand the day one steps, really the day zero steps that I took to start Kettle and Fire, which is now a nine figure annual business.”
Justin Mares Apr 7, 2025 ▶ 1:11 How to Validate Your Startup Idea for $50 (Same Method That Built a $100M Brand)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Mares generated $500 in bone broth pre-orders from $250 in Bing ads
“After the entire test was over we had about a 30% conversion rate where people ended up clicking the order now button, and so over the course of the two-week test that I ran to this janky checkout flow, to this bad landing page made almost 500 dollars in reven…”
Justin Mares Apr 7, 2025 ▶ 9:16 How to Validate Your Startup Idea for $50 (Same Method That Built a $100M Brand)
Disclosure
Mares offered early pre-order customers a 50% discount to wait for manufacturing
“I sent this email to every single person that had placed an order and basically just said like, Hey, I'm the founder of the bone Brasco. I wanted to reach out and say, I'm very excited. We don't have the product in stock because I'd never made it and we had no…”
Justin Mares Apr 7, 2025 ▶ 11:01 How to Validate Your Startup Idea for $50 (Same Method That Built a $100M Brand)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Mares: Most Kettle & Fire pre-order buyers accepted a 50% discount delay
“Most of them decided to take the 50% off deal.”
Justin Mares Apr 7, 2025 ▶ 11:41 How to Validate Your Startup Idea for $50 (Same Method That Built a $100M Brand)
Disclosure
Kettle & Fire paid an agency $60,000 for its initial brand design
“You know, my day we paid an agency, I think, 60 grand to come up with this vibe and look and all these sorts of things.”
Justin Mares Apr 7, 2025 ▶ 24:24 How to Validate Your Startup Idea for $50 (Same Method That Built a $100M Brand)

The other half of the tape: Justin Mares's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 1 time in 1 episode on the Startup Ideas Podcast. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Erik Torenberg 1

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
0011112024episodesmentions
0112024episodes it came up in
000.50.5112024episodesmentions per episode
2024 1 mention in 1 episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
How to Validate Your Startup Idea for $50 (Same Method That Built a $100M Brand) Apr 7, 2025 15m
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 300 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.

Try the podcast clipper Learn more