Hello and welcome to NewsClick, this program is Real News. We are discussing what is happening to the Indian economy post the demonetization taking away 86% of the money in circulation and also not being able to put it back quick enough. We have with us Prof. Surajit Majumdar from Jawaharlal Nehru University Department of Economics. Surajit putting it very simply, it seems the pace at which notes are being printed are slow. We have printed 2000 rupee notes which between the 2000 rupee notes and the next denomination which is widely available is 100 rupee notes. So, we do not able to see seem to be able to use the 2000 rupee notes and we are not printing 500 rupee notes fast enough. From all accounts we are going to take anything between 5 to 6 months to be able to put back the 500 rupee notes in circulation which means that we still see shortage of cash in the economy. What is going to happen to the Indian economy if this shortage persists which it is now likely to do for the next 3 to 6 months. Well, as far as the shortage of cash is concerned it is one very simple way in which one can look at it that suppose you were to say that all the vehicles on the road today at this point of time have to be replaced with new ones. Would the production capacity of the country to produce those vehicles be able to replace them in a short period of time? No, because that existing stock of vehicles has been produced over a long period of time. It is essentially the same thing with the currency. The currency in use today is something that has been produced over every year you add some bit to it. So, you basically have a capacity to print what you need to add every year and now suddenly you are having to replace practically the entire currency and from the figures that have been put out by the RBI it is quite clear that more than 55 percent of the value of the new currency put into circulation is 2000 rupee notes. That is the minimum it is probably even higher than that. So, which is not going to be sufficient. So, you really have to now add currency of smaller denominations in the coming years which means more units and therefore, the fact that it is going to take a long period of time is absolutely clear. I think the government has also accepted that they will not be able to reach even more than 50 percent replacement of the currency by 30th December and that is why I said they do not seem to be they it does not appear they will be able to print the 500 rupee notes within require about 15 billion of them and that would take given the fact that they can only print all four presses put together can print only 3.3 billion pieces of notes per month. So, therefore, the shortage of cash is going to be felt for a period of time except the extent that the requirement of cash comes down because economic activity itself has shrunk in the meanwhile. The consequence of this shortage is that at least one important mode with which people make payments is not available to them in the requisite quantity and beyond the point it is not possible to shift to alternative modes of making payment. Surajit, we have looked at the non-cash transactions in the last month, November even that has come down. So, it is not that it has increased to compensate for the lack of cash transactions. Actually, because if you have a situation where economic activity contracts because of the shortage of cash is going to affect all transactions that means the total volume of transactions or value of transactions themselves have come down and therefore, even non-cash transactions may shrink as a result of the shortage of cash. So, essentially the problem is this that the amount of money that is available with people with which they can make payments is less. If the total value of payments that people can make is reduced, then the total value of payments people can receive is also correspondingly reduced because ultimately you receive what someone else pays which means that the total economic activity which involves buying and selling that can be sustained with this particular level of income has to shrink. Are we looking at the economy in recession? Right now do you expect November, December which is the two months which has felt the demonetization the economy to actually shrink? I think definitely the economy will shrink and may shrink very significantly. I am not so certain whether our statistics about the economy will fully capture this effect. Let me give an example of that. Suppose there is a rickshaw puller who used to transport people from one point to another point and because of the shortage of cash someone people decide to just walk that distance and do not use that rickshaw anymore. So, there is that particular service it is total production of that service and the income that would have accrued to the rickshaw puller as a result of that activity virtually disappears completely for a period of time which statistical measure is system is going to actually capture that fully because a lot of our data comes from very organized kind of units and we assume that there is some normally some relationship between a set of transactions which we can record and the transactions that we are not recording but those ratios may not be valid for this particular part. So, services part people more difficult to capture services like this but if we look at industrial production and we have looked now in Firuzabad, Bangles, in Aligarh, the lock industry, we looked at Moradabad, the brassware industry, Agra, the footwear industry, precipitated drop in production. Aligarh at 4000 crore annual income there is 90 percent of the factory seems to be shut down. So, we are really seeing already even what is captured is also being also shut down, are we therefore also looking at even these organized forms which are captured in some statistic or the other also showing much lower production and therefore actually capturing that we have already entered into recession. Well, let me put this with that the organized units they are also taking a hit it is not that organized units don't take a hit as far as the industrial sector is concerned the industrial index of industrial production figures that came for October which is before devaritization themselves showed that compared to the previous year production was down by 2.5 percent. Now this and this has been going on for some period of time. So, these sectors are also going to take a hit what I am saying is in addition to that even in the industrial sector there are unorganized units and the distribution of the extent of downturn between organized and unorganized sector units may not be in the same ratio in which normally production is distributed. And since we are going to estimate what is going to happen in the unorganized sector often from what is there in the organized sector our data may not fully capture the extent of the decline that will take place in the GDP. But you are sure that the GDP decline is going to take place in this quarter. Absolutely, there is no compared to what would happen in a normal year this has to there is no way in which you can withdraw such a large part of the currency from circulation and not see the effects of that in terms of contraction of GDP because after all the production of GDP depends on the use of money. We have already discussed the black money coming back into the banks it is this is going to be a long process money not coming back to the banks which is initial expectation has it happened. So, the black money side the ledger seems to be rather bleak for Mr. Modi.  Yeah, so largely the opinion amongst economists is pretty unanimous and exceptionally so it is never normally so unanimous and opinion on any matter but this time it is because everyone can understand that there are on the one side serious consequences that you are going to derail a process of economic activity through which people generate their income through which in which people find their work and employment. So, you are going to have that derailing effect as I said that on that there is no dispute you can quibble about what is the degree to which that will happen but you cannot dispute that particular effect. On the other side everyone realizes that the possible hit that the black economy could take from such a move was always minimal that was a given before the demonetization exercise you did not need the exercise to know that that would be the result for the simple reason that the amount of cash that is held by people is very small fraction of the total income that is generated in a year it is a very small fraction of the total wealth that are held it is held by people. So, even if you do something as far as that cash is concerned the effect on the black economy was not going to be severe that was in any case a given right at the beginning and what you therefore can only do is to disrupt the particular process. After all black incomes are not generated from a process which is completely delayed from the process by which other incomes are generated. So, they are all they are not two distinct parts of the economy they are interlinked parts of the economy. So, it is not just so those who earn black incomes they may not be that severely the black income may not be that severely affected as the white income may be and the white income that is going to be affected more severely are of those who are the most vulnerable. We have already seen that none of the riches standing in queues or spending sleepless nights while people are. So, that that is already there the poor have returned lot of the daily wage workers have returned from the towns to the villages this has been going on. But what kind of economics sense it was there in the government whoever planned it do you think that singularly bereft of economics or basic economics or is it that they have a different kind of economics which you and I do not know about the world does it know about well if they have then of course we do not know about it. But what I would say is this that more realistic way of looking at it is that you knew that the effects on the black economy were not going to be significant that was not the error but perhaps the certainty with which you took that action you knew it was not going to affect the black economy significantly because that was not your intention in any case you knew the effects on the majority of the population in India would be pretty drastic and adverse. If after knowing that these two things you undertook such an action then perhaps it reflects an attitude towards the Indian people which is that the belief is that these Indian people you can hit at their basic requirements put them into the in conditions of adversity and you can still fool them into thinking that what you're doing is for the benefit of the nation. So it requires an understanding of true contempt for the people of this country for you to undertake this kind of an action. Thank you very much this is all the time we have for news click today please keep watching news click do subscribe to our website our newsletter and also our facebook page.


In the studio for tonight's health segment, Caroline Meehan, she is a dietitian and nutritionist with University of Maryland Medical Center. Caroline, it's a pleasure to welcome you here to our studio. Thank you, it's great to be here. So you're the bear of all bad news. I mean, is it true that people can gain as much as 10 pounds from Thanksgiving to New Year's Day? Yeah, unfortunately this time of year there is a lot more sweets around, heavier foods, we see a lot more heavy cream and butter and sugar. So it can happen. So what is it about this time of year that makes us over-indulge, eat a little extra pie more than we should? So I think it's a couple things. We certainly have more of the heavy foods around, but I think people also might not be getting as much activity, they're not sleeping as much, stress can increase this time of year. And then often during the holidays we see people kind of lose track of their consistent schedule. So the meal patterns might be off, people are skipping meals, saving their calories for the end of the day, but really we shouldn't be doing that. We should be living a consistent meal pattern and sleep schedule as often as we can throughout the week. So is there such a thing as a food hangover? So that can happen if we do over-indulge for that celebratory meal and often it has to do with a lot of added sugar. I mean there are times when I just I wake up in the morning and I'm like I mean not even having a glass of wine will make me feel as bad as like the three extra pieces of cake I had, but so that is something normal that we experience. Yeah it can happen and what I would recommend is going for a walk that'll help improve blood sugar a bit and hopefully help people feel better. So is it the excessive sugar? I mean how do you avoid it when it's everywhere during the holidays? So I recommend building a balanced plate and I think that'll help prevent overeating. That means including a little bit of protein and some fiber and then definitely getting those vegetables on your plate. And when you're eating your meals make sure you're having water with your meal and not drinking some type of sugary beverage like soda or tea or juice. And then if you're having a piece of pie go for it and just stick to one and know it'll be there maybe the next day if you want to slice again. So are there any particular foods that you say we should just all out avoid sugar obviously in moderation? Yeah. But I mean the fried stuff too many carbs I feel like I'm a carb girl. So I really think moderation is key and if you are going to have something that's maybe on the heavier side it's not the healthiest thing in the world be sure again you're getting those vegetables on your plate to your choosing a little bit of lean protein and then with your starch you're keeping it to about a quarter of your plate or the size of a fist and really just practicing good portion control with those heavier types of starch foods. The portion control the other the other tip that I learned was to try to fill your plates you mentioned this a little veggies. Yes. And everything that's like mostly green and not yeah we went lots of color on the plate. Not good tasting. Yeah.  Yes we want to try to start with the vegetables because veggies and fruits give us good fiber and fiber keeps us full so the more fiber in our diet the more likely we're going to feel satisfied protein also helps us keep satisfied so that's things like chicken and fish eggs beans and then if we go towards the starch last we tend to not eat as much as if we go for it first. So you mentioned earlier about not skipping a meal why is that so bad during the holiday season like I find myself okay I won't have lunch because I'm going to the holiday party. Yeah so that's going to lead to overeating later on in the day. Okay there you go. Yeah that's the big no-no so we definitely recommend still having breakfast and lunch maybe even a couple snacks practicing good hydration during the day getting to walk in and then going to that meal and just acting like it's any other meal and again practicing good portion control and enjoying yourself. What about the idea of going back for seconds perhaps thirds all of that I mean we all know it's not what you should be doing but how bad is that for us to do during this time of year. So if you are going to go back for seconds I recommend going back for the veggies or maybe some fruit and you know again if you really want that slice of pie a second slice if you have it try to go for a walk after dinner and you'll probably feel a little bit better. What about some other tips because oftentimes I'll find myself kind of eating what I have and then waiting do you feel a little more fuller if you talk to me about that. Yes that's a really good point mindful eating is super important so sit down at the table when you're eating your meals making sure you're taking your time ideally we want to give ourselves about 20 minutes for meal times and then again taking it slow so just sitting down relaxing maybe laying a candle having friends and family over and that you'll probably slow down a bit and feel more satisfied. So with the new years right around the corner obviously that's the big thing for everybody to lose the 10 pounds they gained over the holidays right but you do want to be more physically fit health and wealth we talked about that anything we should do forward thinking about the new years about keeping ourselves together. So this time of year definitely want to make small goals so they should be small and realistic nothing too lofty or big kind of take it one step at a time so maybe creating maybe one to two goals to work on and again making them specific so that could mean I'm gonna walk 15 minutes a day Monday Wednesday and Friday during my lunch break or on Saturday and Sunday I'm gonna make sure I cook a healthy meal for myself trying to make your goals that are centered around lifestyle versus weight and I think that is a really good way to go about it. So what happens if we sort of get stuck in a rut you know we're trying to do these things and then we you know fall back and very regressive nature of like gotta have those salt and vinegar vinegar potato chips like what do you do at that point? So one thing to keep in mind is you know that can happen it's all normal and part of the process of making changes but reach out for help there's so many so so many supportive communities out there that can help you whether it's your health care team or a friend or a family member that's also trying to make changes having a buddy alongside when you're making lifestyle changes can really help just make this a lot more fun and easy the accountability factor yeah exactly yeah that does make a difference so do you see any food trends in 2019 things that we might be eating more of or seeing more in the grocery store shelves? So I think one thing that I have noticed the nutrition facts label now has added sugar on the the label so I think food companies will start to rebrand their products to have less sugar which is great I also think there's a big push towards more sustainable and environmentally friendly packaging and products in the supermarket so we might see more farm to table products more local and third I think we'll see a mix of all different types of plant-based proteins and alternative proteins that are coming onto the market and I think this goes hand in hand with trying to make more environmentally friendly products available to customers. Did we talk in the we talked in the green room about food being produced in labs what's that about again? So that is one thing that I have seen in the media lab-based protein and meat and who knows if we'll see this in 2019 but it could be out there another thing I've seen is bug and insect-based protein powders so that could be another exotic kind of weird food trend we will see but more yeah stay tuned stay tuned on that one so when your clients come to you what exactly is it a wide range of issues that they're trying to resolve to use a dietitian? Yeah so I see patients that are coming for diabetes or weight management heart disease and we primarily work on making small changes in the right direction making lifestyle changes focusing on long-term no 21 day fixes or 30 day changes it's all sustainable lifestyle changes well since you brought that up let's let's cover that there's a lot of like lose weight quick fast programs that are going on you said those are really the worst that you can do mainly because why? Yeah so we normally don't recommend that they tend to be very restrictive and we find that people if they do embark on these restrictive diets they tend to regain the weight or maybe gain more back and it doesn't set the tone for long term sustainable lifestyle changes when we're thinking about diets and dieting we really need to stick to a plan that we're going to stick to for our entire life and it shouldn't be just kind of a quick thing and then we go back to our old ways and you and I were talking about making adjustments along the way like I crave diet coke but it's really the carbonation from the diet coke yes so a good alternative is the flavored sparkling water or sparkling water is a really good alternative so you have to find those kinds of options for you yeah what do you do during the holiday season to make sure you don't over indulge? I so I keep a consistent meal pattern I think that again is super super important to making sure you're having breakfast and lunch and maybe a couple snacks and then enjoying your your dinner meal activity is very important so getting in walks and maybe getting some fresh air it's a really good way to go about it sleeping well and stress management so it's really multifactorial just taking a little bit of everything and working on it and know that we're all a work in progress so you know if I slip up that's all normal and and and part of it we've only got a minute or so left I want to ask you a little bit more about the carb thing because I am curious about that you hear all the time about stay away from anything white how bad is that yeah so to be eating bread and pasta and rice is that as bad as they're saying it's all about the type of carbohydrate so when it comes to the white grains as long as we're primarily doing those in moderation and more so choosing the whole grains so those are our brown grains like whole wheat pasta whole wheat bread brown rice and oatmeal for choosing those it's it's much much better more fiber a little bit more protein and more heart health benefit the last 30 seconds anything that you would recommend I mean if it's cold outside do some things in the house to compensate for that bag of chips you just ate right yeah cleaning dancing um whatever it might be in the house you could you could do something like that but um yeah staying active it's it's not too bad out I think getting some fresh air is still realistic yes absolutely all right caroline me and it was a pleasure to speak with you thank you so much for your time and I'm gonna have to think twice now when I see that pumpkin pie or you know what it is for me it's actually it's a red velvet cake that happens to be the thing that I can never say no to but thank you very much your health segments are a co-production of Maryland public television and the University of Maryland medical system


Right this business is about people and when a market when we have a downturn Transactions may go down temporarily, but people are here to stay You know my journey has been a little different for most I got in business in 2002. I was 20 years old and I made a million before I'm 23 Okay, so the market completely exploded. All right, then the market crashed on me. Okay, it crashed on me I lost everything. I lost everything that I had I had to go back to roofing houses and working on an oil rig For a little while and I was bankrupt. I was sleeping on friends' couches. I was sleeping in my car and During that time that was the greatest time of my life right there It was the turning point for me it taught me everything that I needed to know about myself about the business about You know life in general and what I did was is I took that opportunity Just like you need to take the opportunity right now. You need to take advantage of this opportunity I took the opportunity back then to take a step back Re-evaluate what I was doing in my business and I took that moment to read a hundred books Because I was so curious about why I failed and why other people were still succeeding it didn't make sense to me I mean, I was the hardest working most honest professional agent out there in my opinion So somewhere in one of those books. I realized that what I did wrong and this is what I want This is my big. This is what I really want you to take away here. I Really want you to take away that that went what I realized Where I went wrong was that I was focused on transactions, I Was focused on money. I was focused on closing. I was focused on getting the contract signed I was focused on getting the listing getting the appointment. I was focused on all those result oriented actions and results and What I what I realized that I needed to be focused on something in a book made it click and I realized that wait a minute This business and really life in general in all businesses are about people Right this business is about people and when a market when we have a downturn Transactions may go down temporarily, but people are here to stay Right the population does not wither. Okay. We were people are still here Properties are still here people still need to buy and sell properties. Okay, so I want to get to into my philosophies of You know market downturns and market crashes and market pauses we're in a market pause right now People are kind of have put on the brakes and they're just kind of waiting to see what's going to happen This is completely normal completely natural completely predicted. Okay, we've we've been through the one of the best Bull markets one of the the longest runs of a market that we've seen and in modern history Okay, and so you can't just sit here and say to yourself that was going to last forever Okay, so what you have to do is you have to put in perspective All right, and this is what I really want you to get this because I want you to take this with you Through the next Cycle of the market and the next cycle in the next cycle and every time something happens that makes the markets React to the way that it's reacted with coronavirus I want you to remember this and I want you to take advantage of every opportunity to every little stage in the market Okay, there's always an opportunity so Let's just think about it in a general sense for a second. Okay What makes a market crash? What makes a market have a downturn? What makes a market pause? Okay, it's because something happened that no one was expecting No one was expecting for a pandemic Okay, 9-11. No one was expecting for airplanes to hit the world trade Okay, no one was expecting those things and it creates fear when something this large Happens it creates fear creates fear in the market. It creates fear, you know for buyers for sellers. There's a lot of fear out there Okay, and that makes people sell stocks It makes people push the pause button when they're looking to buy or sell properties Okay, so what we have is we always this is this if you go back through all the different market cycles When that moment of scaring this happens when everybody gets scared and and push the pause button They sell they sell they makes them make I would think irrational decisions, you know to sell stocks People they take a second. Okay, so if you're in the middle of buying a house Okay, maybe you're under contract or maybe you were looking and you're not under contract yet And then the pandemic started. What would you do? You would push the pause button you would say wait a minute. Let's wait a minute Let's let's step back here unless you're in a situation where you need somewhere to live Okay, but if you were just upgrading because you want to upgrade or it's an investment property or something of that nature Then you're gonna push the you're gonna push the pause button for a second Okay So what happens is is when a real estate agent is working through these cycles and they have buyers and sellers that are Looking at properties or maybe under contract and then that scary moment happens in the market that that makes everybody push The pause button the current buyers they have the current sellers They have most of them will push the pause button and it scares the agent The agent thinks that you know, we're done for you know We're never gonna sell property ever again, and it scares them out of the business Okay, and there's been a lot scarier crashes than this, you know, you take the 2008 Crash for example, which really hit real estate extremely hard Okay, that that was that was a moment where you might look at real estate and say I don't know if I really want to be in This business, but I'm telling you that was the best time to get in the business So after I lost everything And read those hundred books and realized that it's about relationships over transactions actually got back in the business in 2008 2008 in the in the middle of the crash That's when I got back in the business and I started to build my business on people not deals I started to focus on people and what I did was is that There were a lot of foreclosure real estate agents out there who were making tons of money Everybody was jealous, you know, they were getting all their listings from the bank They were just processing and making tons of money and everybody wanted a piece of that pie and was kind of jealous That you know those those listings were already spoken for I sat back and I said, you know what these foreclosure agents They're they're they have zero customer service. They don't answer the phone when I call them about their listings They're just sitting back and they're not really working. They're just processing.  I'm going to find buyers for these foreclosure properties I'm going to sell these foreclosure buyer these foreclosure properties. I'm going to be on the other side representing the end user I'm going to create a lifelong relationship with this person I'm going to sell as many of these foreclosures as I can sure it seemed like a lot of work at the time But I would develop a database full of people who love me because I went over the top to help them as Time went on I said to myself before I did this I said to myself as time goes on and the foreclosures go away and prices rise The people that bought those foreclosures from me are going to turn around and sell that foreclosure for a profit and then Upgrade to another property and refer five of their friends to me And I'll be the number one agent in my area and all the foreclosure agents will be on the sideline And within three to five years after that moment. That's exactly what happened So you have to take a hard look at different business cycles and market cycles and real estate how the game really works One thing that's really cool Okay, once we enter that scary moment where where everybody jumps out of the market and pushes the pause button It's only going to be a two to four month period go back and look through history There's a two to four month period where there's a lot less transactions for a second because everybody's sitting on the sideline Waiting to see what's going to happen once we get through this right now. That's where we are right now We don't know what's going to happen. We don't know when the economy is going to open back up exactly We don't know what's going to happen once the economy does open back up This is all unknown to us right now So no one knows really where the economy is going short term. And so everybody's just kind of sitting back now once We do open the economy back up Okay, and we do get our feet up under us and and you know the water is under the bridge with this thing for the most part We're gonna enter into a new market All right, we're gonna enter into a new market and this new market is going to be in your favor Okay, it's going to be in your favor. Why because prices will just adjust To the to the price point that buyers are willing to buy What does that tell us? There's going to be a lot of transactions going on So when we get through this pause period, I want to call it When we get through this we get to the other side. There's only three things that can happen Right prices are they're going to stay the same Okay, prices are going to go up or prices are going to go down Now you can take it further prices could go up really fast or really slow or prices go down really fast or really slow Okay, so there's a lot of different scenarios there But it's only going to be one of those three to five things Okay, and it doesn't matter which way the market goes our consumers our clients the people buying and selling properties We just need to know which way it's going so they can make informed decisions on how they want to operate in the new market Okay, now, what is our job as a real estate agent at this point during this period right now? Our job right now is to take full advantage of the moment that we're in that we have time Because we're not out there showing property. We're not out there going to listing appointments We're not out there, you know hustling bustling and doing our thing at the office We're at our house and we really have all the time in the world to sit there and call as many people as humanly possible And no guys this is coming from someone who is actually in the market doing this, right? I've been selling for since 2002 Okay, and when it crashed on me and I came back and I built my business I've been selling a hundred properties a year as a single agent since 2014 Okay, right here in Alabama go shores Orange Beach So you're the I'm telling you this from experience That when the market crashes the first thing we need to do. Okay, and it's something that I Couldn't do for a long time because I'm so busy selling Like I have such a big clientele of people who love me. It's it's repeat its referrals It's referrals of referrals and it's so massive that it keeps me busy I don't have time to really chase any deals deals are just coming to me because the way that I built my business But when the market takes a downturn like it has what does that do for guys like me and for you It opens up your time that you can spend Talking to more people right and the first thing you need to do is call your entire database Need to call your entire database and just check on them right that conversation looks like hey It's rookie crew. How you doing? You know yeah more I've been working out of my house for the last month. It's crazy, isn't it? You know, this is this is a past client. This is someone who is who is supposed to be your friend You know this person should look at you as an extended part of their family Okay, well your your number one job as a real estate agent is to make people feel comfortable with you Okay, that's your number one job in real estate. Yes, it's to close deals It's to do transactions to get listings to do all those things But you're not you're never going to get to that part of the business until you can first Create comfort or ability between you and your prospects. Now. How do you do that? It's how you communicate with them right if you talk to them like their friend or family Then they're going to feel like they're a friend or family member Right if you if you talk to them with the intentions that you don't care if they buy or sell a property today All right, you just want to help them if they do and if not now you want to help them later when they decide to because the fact Is this they're going to buy or sell something at some point? They are going to buy or sell something at some point It's just a matter of which agent they connected with the best who they felt comfortable with who they felt would work The hardest was the most dependable did everything they said they were going to do when they said they were going to do it So these are the types of experience that you need to create an incredible experience For your customers okay and your clients so when you're calling your past clients these people should they should feel like you are family And you you know this is long-lost Ricky calling them to check on them and see how they're doing through the pandemic And you know what they're always going to remember that you called them during the pandemic to check on them They're gonna they're gonna remember that you called them during the pandemic and they're going to think wow You know That's my real estate agent You know they're not gonna leave the business a pandemic is not gonna scare them out of the business Nothing's gonna shake this agent You know this agents out there calling me talking about we're still selling a couple properties didn't know if there's anything I could Do to help you You know so I'm a pretty firm believer in not necessarily asking people if they want to buy or sell I'm a big firm believer in asking just listen I don't want to take up too much of her time But a house around the corner sold or I just listed a house or you know whatever the case may be You I saw your property expired off the market did know if there was anything in the world that I could do for you


I feel like I'm in Silent Hill.  I'm out here and I'm walking. I'm in a pretty good time with it, too. Okay, so what you just saw is a video of me walking in the rain with a much shorter beard, much shorter hair, all that, because that video was back in December before I fell off my porch and injured my back and my leg. Actually, I just injured my back. My leg is part of the back injury. What I have is something called Quata Iquina, which literally translates to horse's tail. It's the branching of the nerves, the S1 nerve root in the back and the coccyx right there at your tailbone. The L4 and L5 discs, they rupture and they pinch the nerve and it paralyzes my right leg.  But when that happens, when the back injury happens, then it exacerbates. That's a funny word. But anyways, it makes the leg worse because the leg won't act right. And the stuff that you're about to see after we get done with this stuff, which is something that I've been putting off for a while, my apologies to everyone when we are not even there yet. But this is very awkward for me to talk about. I don't like talking about my personal life and my health and all that stuff. So the walkie-talkie vlogs are well outside of my comfort zone. So the stuff that you are seeing is from May to June, I think, and the stuff coming up after this part. And then right now it is currently the end of June. But we're going to get into a letter from my buddy Jim Herbert. Another thing is I wanted to apologize to Steph over there at Wicked Junior Reads, to Angela, to Mark Pelletier. I can't remember. I got all of your guys' letters written. I even got some back melody. Several of you, I started a pin pal thing. And unfortunately, right after I started it with you guys, I ended up getting a project come through that I actually had to do and I just don't have the time for it anymore. I ended up with writing the project and the YouTube stuff. I just don't have the time. But Jim's letter especially says, suggestion, open on camera. I asked everybody if they would mind, I was going to do like a pin pal project, whether or not they wanted to or not, I was going to write back and forth to them. But what I was going to do, I just wanted to start something tactile, you know, something that I actually, is that even the right word? That I could actually hand write letters to people. And once life slows down, that may happen again. I don't know. But my apologies to anyone who asked to do it, either I didn't get to you or I didn't return the, I'm trying to get this out of here, or I didn't return your letter.  I'm going to open this, attachment, oh my God. Okay. This is Jim, Jim Herbert, if you don't know. It says attachment, GIF on the back, it says attachment GIF. So I can just picture this as a GIF. Oh my gosh. What does this, what does this look like? Oh no. It's happening. I don't know. This is so weird. Can you all hear the rain? It is pouring outside. Oh no. Not this one. This is one of his best. That's me putting on it, or David Caruso and me putting on the, the thug life, well it's not actually thug life. I mean, depending on what generation you grew up in, you would, if you knew, know this from, what is it, CSI Miami, if you knew it from there, the music would start playing. Oh my gosh. This is great, Jim.  Look at that. Jim, that's awesome, man. That is absolutely amazing. Now if it cuts out here, I don't know Jim's letter is, is something that he once read. So I'm going to go ahead and read the letter and then we're going to, if it's something that I didn't, that I shouldn't be reading to you guys, then I will cut the video and you'll just never see this part. Hey, E, hey, this is from 5, 3, 19, so May 3rd, 2019. Sorry I didn't get back as quickly as I said I would. Dude, you ain't got anything to apologize for.  I feel you. And our letter exchange has been no exception. Enough preamble right to your questions first. One, I've always been into animation since, since a kid. When I first saw Monty Python at the age of 12 on TV, how did I know they were an inspiration for you? My favorite parts were Terry Gilliam's animations. It was always an unfulfilled dream to do my own until three years ago when I realized I could use Windows Movie Maker to create cartoons. I will put a link down to Jim Herbert's channel. He does fantastic, like really quicky reviews. The animations are amazing. One of my favorite ones is one involving me where I blow his head off. It's amazing.  He wrote that on the third. Then on the seventh, four days later, he says, I destroy all the pins in the house because of my constant sketching and note taking. Sorry. In my research for, in my search for a pin, I found another, I found other distractions to focus on. Two animations that elude completion. Anyway, I don't use any animation software. I use the computer to create images but compile them manually in Windows Movie Maker. It's labor-intensive, but I like the grubby, beat-to-hell look of them. Very garage-ban for a band that practices in the garage with the door down and the car engine running. That was great. And then the next part of it is I actually dislike puns as a form of humor, but social media, especially Twitter, lends itself to it, and I lower myself to the occasion. Less so in a personal letter, which is witty, which is, I think it's witty, which is why, I'm sorry, which is why, which is why I haven't asked you to forgive my messy penmanship. Feel free to read this aloud and feel free to share the attached gift I'm sending as well. This should be fun, best Jim Herbert. I'm so sorry, Jim. I hope you watch this. I hope you get to this. I know social media isn't for people like us. It isn't. It's for the extreme-minded people.  So I feel you, man. I understand completely. We've discussed this in private. It's just one of those things where, for me, it's a nature of the beast. I have to be a public persona, and there's been several times when you told me that I'm the only, one of the only reasons. One of the only is a bad, is a bad, bad, don't write that. One of the only. Don't write that. Don't put that in your writing. Anybody. But you're, that I'm one of the reasons that you hang around Twitter as much as you do, which isn't anywhere near as much as the rest of us do. But anyways. What's coming next is an extended video tour of parts of my town, a cemetery, and a park. So I hope you enjoy it. Jim, once again, man, I'm sorry that I didn't write you back to everybody else who wrote me a letter. I'm sorry I didn't write you back. It doesn't mean that they're never coming. I still have them. But yeah, I'm just so far behind right now that I can't actually find the time to sit down and write to you guys a letter, and I don't want to have to type it out, which is, you know, it's much easier for me to do that. I want it to be more personal. So yeah. So have some patience. It may be coming. It may not. I must stand on the side of wishy-washy. Anyways, on with walkie-talkie. I'll see you guys on the road. Bye-bye. Oh.  That's the way I came in. Every day you mess around, just come across a cemetery. The walls are all falling down. Nothing but woods over there. I think I know where this is. Yeah. I definitely know where this is. Hey look. Listen. Hello. This is a gage. The gage. It's not creed. Let's see. Let's go over here. That big one says Northington. I think the road into here says Northington. Pretty sure. Samuel Northington. All these are Northingtons. William Northington. This one has a fence around it. It says something nummy. That's weird. There's a car way out of the distance. And that's the entrance way over there. That's where I usually come in. I had no idea this had a back root. It's very cool. Let's go check this out.  There's a little urn right here. It says H. See him? We got another one with a fence around it over here. Wow. Oh, did you see the squirrel? Squirrel. I mean, kind of pointless to have a fence around there. It's just going to fall apart. Falling down. You want to go in there? Let's go in there. Is any of this good to step on? I hope so. My leg gives out of me now. I don't know what I'm going to do. This dirt is soft. We got a huge step down. Hang on. Down with the good. Oh, it fell. And here. Y'all see this? That's creepy. I don't know what that says. I can't read it. In Edward T. Miles. An obelisk over here. Let's get out of here. It says public notice. Cemetery maintenance and improvements to begin November 2nd, 2016. Okay. The obelisks. All right. Interesting. If you come up real close, you all see that? See the chain link? Sacred to the memory of Dr. H.C. Hillhouse, who was born July 4th, 1820 and died. He was only, what, 35? He's a doctor? May 17th, 1855, erected by the members of Autumn Lodge. I can't read that. Number 17 I-O-O-F. Interesting. All right. Let's say that's all. I'm going to walk us out of here now. If you turn and go this way, that's the way out to the main road. I'm going to take us the back way. So, that's the way I came in that I didn't even know existed. All right. Oh. Down the hill. Hang on. I'll follow. That's where we're going. We're going out that way. So, another thing. I don't know if you guys watch my old walking vlogs or not, but this bamboo is just everywhere in this town. Very weird. Prattville, Alabama. It's just bamboo everywhere. Anyway, this is the back way. I'm going to go ahead and go just in case. I don't want to film somebody on accident. Who that is? No fishing. I see. Yeah. Tire swing. How'd you conquer it? Did you murder it? Cool. All right. No fishing. Dang. Cold-blooded. Oh, that's nice. That wasn't here last time. They put a bench around the tree. So, no fishing. No fishing.  I mean, not that I ever went fishing here, so, I will. So, this is Pratt Park. This is the walk. Not the walk, but the which we call it. This is the trail in the darkness. Down there, you guys can see, is, I don't know if that's a creek, a river, or what, but let's go down there. Y'all want me to go down there one of these days, show you. I mean, there's a whole bridge and everything down there. Y'all gonna have to let me know. But right now, we're going down this way. This goes pretty far. I think this is about a two-mile trail. It starts at the Prattville Public Library or upwards around there, around downtown. And then, it goes all the way. It just keeps going. Let's see, but also, we can go over here real quick off the beaten path. And you can look down here as I walk by. I'm not going to pay too much attention because I don't want to fall down off the side. So, we can just go back around. Family's over there. Way over there. We can keep going. This is where the Prattville Lions play. I think it's a high school. I could be wrong. But we got all these bird feeders and whatnot. The main thing is this really cool path. So, I don't know, it's not a nature trail, I don't guess. But it goes back. Mine's around back there. Once I get to some place of note, I'll stop and let you guys see. But right now, that's where I'm headed. I'm going to be a kitty. Did y'all see it? Look. Look at your kitty. Hey, kitty, kitty, kitty. No. I don't get hellos. Oh, there they go. All right. I'm not coming after you, demon. All right. I didn't get very far before I saw the kitty. So, I'll be right between them in a minute. So, maybe you're wondering, hey, why are you able to walk so well? Well, legs just started working. It's been doing pretty good. And I'm not taking a risk coming out here. This is I got someone who can come pick me up just a phone call away. So, if I get to a point where I can't no, look at it. If I get to a point where I can't walk anymore, which eventually will happen, my leg will just give out of me. At least it's been happening. After about 30 minutes, an hour roughly around there. Then I just call and they come pick me up. It's got a low battery. I'm going to go ahead and go, but yeah, I'm going to turn around anyways. This is where I'm at. The trail keeps on going, but I'm going to turn around and head back so they don't have to go too far to come get me. Chris, we just bought those shoes, man. This boy. Say hi, Dan. I'm coming. What you find? A mini cave. They found a turtle. Where is it? I think it's dead. I don't think it's dead. It's such a vlogger. Look at its face. It's a goldfish. I think massive. It's got to be as long as my arm. Okay, so here I am and there's my car back there. Since my leg was working, I went ahead and decided I was going to come down to and drove down to the track. If you guys have been watching, if you guys have watched, get my hand out of the way here. As I watched the walkie-talkies, the first three, this is the same track that I always come to. It's a gazebo. They train horses out here, ride horses out here. Then there's the restroom and the old church. Then there's the new church. So, yeah. So that's where I'm going. I'm on, I think, lap 11 right now. Every five I've been checking on my app. Every five revolutions is a mile. But I'm going to stop here. And we're going to go sit down. I don't know if you guys can see it, but at that bench, I'll talk to you guys more in a minute. Alright, so we're going to chill out here for a minute. Sorry if I wasn't looking at the camera then. The sun was in my eyes. I didn't know where the camera was on my phone. But, yeah. This is the third day I'm walking this week. I did Monday, no. I did Sunday and Monday. Sunday is the day that I got out of bed. And I just wanted to go for a walk. And I didn't take the phone that had the good camera on it. I didn't feel like trying to enhance like 2 megapixel camera on the phone that actually works. I'm actually really glad that I, what was that? I think it was a spider. Anyways, I'm really glad that I took the other phone with the crappy camera because that one has cell service. It's actually shells, it's not mine, but I just knew I was going to give out at some point. So, and I did. Is this tilted? It's tilted. Whatever, let's talk. It's not like this is a Thursday theorist or anything. It doesn't have to be framed up. But, so I'm just going to take so far it's a minute. I'm going to take a 2 minute break and then I'm going to do 5 more laps. Finish up this lap and do 4 more. So I will total out at 15 laps and 3 miles. So that's what I'm doing. I did 4 miles on Sunday, 3 miles on Monday. I went into town on Monday. On Sunday, I walked. I just left my house and just walked and stopped when I got tired. You guys have been following the blog, I've been talking about this. If you follow me on Twitter or Instagram, you know all this stuff. But I figured I'd do these also because some people, hi Wayne, hi Sarah, some people have been asking for them and if not everybody likes them oh well, that's fine. But, yeah. Also, I'm listening to an audio book as you can tell. I'm not listening to it now. I also have my wire tucked under my shirt. But I can't listen to the audio book and record at the same time. So I figured I'd stop and give you guys an update. We are exactly at 2 minutes as of now. So, bye. So I did my copyright so I did my I did my 15 laps you can look at this one. It is currently it is currently May 22nd I've done my 15 laps you want to check I guess I can put it up here on the somewhere up here. I don't know. We'll see how I go. Let me try and get my hand out of the way of the camera. I'm trying to balance this joker on the steering wheel. I forgot how to blog y'all and if you hear a hissing in the background that's the air conditioning because it is hot.  Look at that. Look at that hotness.  Oh, good God. I think I'm losing weight like in the top of my head. No, it's just because my hair is like that. Anywho, I did the 15 laps which is 3 miles. I forgot that when I you know it says 2.75 in the picture I'm going to throw over here. But I forgot that when I vlog it pauses every other app. So it uses all of the memory or whatever. It only allows me to use the camera. I did actually do 3 3 miles though but I am extremely extremely tired. I am still listening to usher's passing. This book seems like it will never end. In fact I don't even think I'm halfway through it. I looked at the page count. The book's only like 404 pages man. It feels like it's about a thousand. I don't know if it's the tone that he uses. The really dry tone but it is probably it's, no it's not probably it's easily the worst macammon book I've ever had to read. Oh and by the way before I forget this is Wednesday I know I was talking about how it was I did Sunday and Monday and then yesterday I did strength training so I did the arm workout so that's why the dates might not match up so it's not 3 days in a row just to clarify. sleepy dude no you can't touch my phone it's just far enough away for you you can't touch it why are you so incapable of touching the phone why why he has shit I look like I'm motherfucking dragging yo this is what I really think is hot that's raining today the video I hopefully started off with I was walking in the rain also that was months and months ago before I hurt myself I think that was back in December I'm not sure I haven't been keeping track today it is rainy I just got through walking 2 miles it is Thursday June 6 I think but I like when things go full circle and it feels like it's gone full circle so from the point that I started this video to now I'm back on my feet so I've been walking every single day for the past I want to say 2 weeks and I've been maintaining that so the leg is acting fine and I'm just taking advantage of it while I can I would have shot some video while I was out I don't trust my phone in the rain it's an electronic so that's it for this round of walkie talkie it's nice to be doing these again it's for the simple fact that I am out and I am walking they are a lot of work it takes me anywhere from 6 to 7 hours to edit these so I I enjoy the process but it's a little much so you probably won't get another one for a while probably be I don't know a month if not more also not too much interesting happens in my life and I know you guys some of you guys like these videos there isn't a whole lot that goes on I write and I read and I write some more and I walk when I can family doesn't want to be videotaped and I prefer to respect that anyways thank you guys for watching I appreciate you all my cheerleaders out there you guys have been great to me thank you so much but until next time I have been E, you have been U it's been another walkie talkie I'll talk to you guys later bye bye


You guys tried to raise money, and so nothing really materialized. Nothing materialized on the West Coast at all. And what were you guys thinking when that happened? We were just trying to find a way to keep it going. It was a matter of like- Did you deplete all your savings? Oh yeah, it was gone. It was gone a while back. Were these dark times for you and your co-founder? They were. Okay, we managed. This is Startup to Storefront. Today's guest is Garv Thomas, a co-founder and chief technical officer of Buttery. Buttery was an on-demand alcohol delivery app that ran in four cities across the US before it was bought by Drizly, one of their competitors. Garv is a skilled software engineer, responsible for developing and coding the app, as well as the backend of the website, which was part of the reason why they were such an appealing acquisition for Drizly. So listen in as we cover everything from dealing with the competition in their early days to sometimes having to make alcohol deliveries himself and the thought process behind selling the company he and his co-founder worked so hard to build. And you can also listen for the occasional on-king from angry Boston motorist stuck in rush hour outside the Drizly offices while we conducted this interview. So with that said, now back to the episode. Welcome to the podcast. We're here in Boston, Massachusetts with my boy Garv. How you doing? Garv was the founder of Buttery, which was acquired by Drizly. Tell everyone what the Buttery, what it was. So Buttery was essentially a marketplace and a way for liquor stores to establish like online presence and have an e-commerce store for themselves. And what year was this when you decided to move forward on this? So we started with the original idea in about 2014 when we are like started exploring this problem. We were like, we wanted to make e-commerce easier for like small and medium businesses. What was the original idea? So the original idea was making things easily purchasable from your local moment pops or like from your local stores. So if you are looking for something, you're right, nowadays you would either go on Amazon or online and find out where it is, but it's probably also available down the street from your local neighborhood store. So we wanted to bring that concept of instant buying, making it easier for you to shop from your local stores. And that's when we started experimenting, understanding different use cases, talking to businesses and figuring out what their problems were, what are they, like how to make this happen. And that's how we had started. So we are like all different types of businesses and we are doing a lot of things for everyone which was like not serving the right use case, not serving the customer properly. So we tried out, we tried and tested a bunch of different things, saw what was working. How many years did you test the different concepts? I think it was probably about a year. And at that time we had quit our jobs, we were like full time into this. Yeah, before you guys were at Verizon, right? Yes, before we were like me and my co-founder, we were working together at Verizon. As engineers, you're both technical. Yeah, we built mobile apps for streaming video solutions at that time. Yeah, and you guys were working out of Boston University, the library. When we were like playing around like test, like initially when we were like experimenting with this idea, we used to work like nights and weekends, go to use like free resources like we use library and make use of all the resources, which is great. When we figured out that yes, there are some legs to what we wanted to do, we just quit our jobs and gave it our full shot.  Oh, it's terrifying. It's absolutely terrifying. Yeah, you're like leaving away a six-figure salary, you're figuring out how do you... Safety. There's no safety net at that point, right? Right. So like, okay, what do you do? Did you guys have a little bit of savings to make your life a little bit easier? Yeah, that's what we relied on a lot. Some of our savings, our wives supported our ventures pretty well. So yeah. What kind of revenue did you have coming in at that point to... Zero. Zero. Yeah. There was no revenue. I said, exploring what's going to work, what's not going to work, talking to different types of businesses, because we yet quickly realized that we were doing a lot of things for like all different types of businesses, but it's not going to serve the end consumer that well.  Yeah, you need to pick either your vertical, you need to pick your niche and figure it out where what you're good at and what is the best use case that you can solve for. At that time, we were working with one like liquor store as well, which was again, coincidentally a friend of mine. So that vertical and that use case, like his store started to get like more orders and people were interested in more products around that and so looking at that little bit of that data, we talked to more liquor stores and figured out like there's a real need for a good e-commerce platform like that in the alcohol space. Well, at the beginning, did you set out to sort of test? Was that always the plan that for a year, you guys would just test different market places and then whatever you saw signals, you'd double down or was it just a natural progression? I think it was a natural progression. Like I'd be lying if I said we had a plan. Like we clearly don't know what we're doing. We're trying out different things and figuring out what sticks, but we quickly learned along that way as well that forgetting out doing a bunch of different things doesn't really work. You have to really test out those things. And so then after a year, you guys said, all right, the signals that we're getting from the alcohol market, specifically that one store are doing well. Let's double down on that. We cut down everyone else. We removed all the other businesses from the platform. Said, sorry, we couldn't continue with you right now. We, our company was called ScanCart before, if you know. And we had rebranded to a bit more like alcohol focus. Did I went through a whole rebrand relaunch? Did you guys hire to do that? No, it was just us. It was just us, like it was two of us. Yeah, we got like branding help from things like like Odask and like freelancers and work with a couple of friends of ours who are graphic designers with helping us with like logos and branding and coloring and things like that. As soon as you have the strategy set, your rebrand is done. Yeah. So just about so that the rebrand was a little bit more a conscious effort as well, where you're like, yes, we need a critical mass of people are critical mass of the businesses to be on the platform for us to go like really go after end consumers and given that this was a lot more like hyper local strategy. So we were like constrained in terms of like where with geographies we would like be able to operate and launch in. So we we made a conscious thing about getting stores in Boston launching in Boston. We are like, yes, we we need about eight to 10 stores to be on the platform the day we launch. And at that time, we got we got a few of those stores. Signed up when I brought them online and think it was sometime in 2015, like August, we launched as buttery. And what was the pitch to the to the liquor stores? Was it, hey, here's a free way of getting you guys out there, secondary marketplace for you guys, free delivery. And were they getting paid a premium to be on there? Like were they, let's say a six pack cost eight bucks? Yeah. Were they getting nine or was it? No, so our main value proposition to them was like, they they had an online presence, but they're all their websites for mostly informational. So they would address, they'll put up a map and they'll be like, these are ours. Here's a phone number. Call us, right? Yeah. But they were not being able to convert that traffic into a buy intent. Right. So they don't have any e-commerce presence like a lot. Some of them had it, but they're all websites were like clunky. It's bad. Yeah. They're pretty bad. So we offered them this new way of like not be not having to manage any of that. Easy sign up inventory integration and be able to offer like instant like one hour delivery as well, because a lot of those stores did deliveries themselves and they did it while we were operating as well. So the value we offered them was instant online presence. No, no management at all. Right. We get them additional orders that they wouldn't have seen outside. They're like a quarter mile radius from like foot traffic or whatever. Right. You're also expanding their delivery footprint to some extent. Yeah. So if they wanted to go beyond their like immediate zip code or immediate like half mile radius, they can do however far they were willing to go. Were they pre-receptive? I mean, they weren't like as many people like not really too concerned about it. OK, it was fine. Like that that wasn't a problem like at all. What's the delivery more of the issue for them? Delivery was an issue. A lot of people were doing delivery themselves. A lot of people wanted to get into the delivery business because of the whole like e-commerce boom in the Amazon and people getting used to getting stuff delivered to them. So they were receptive of establishing their own delivery as well. How are they doing it? They were just like hiring. Yeah, they had their own employees do the delivery. They had their hard drivers. The store isn't too busy. You get in your car and go deliver. Yeah. But then the store gets busy, then people are waiting a long time. That was that was always a problem when there's like in the evenings when the store is busy, they are like, I can't do this order. I don't want to do this order. And they would end up canceling it. What did you guys start with? Was it mostly beer or was it? No, it was the whole entire store. The entire store. Like we integrated with their point of sale system. Pulled out all the inventory from there. And we had a live inventory feed going on, right?  And it was what you see in the store with the same prices at the same quantity, you would see it online as well. And I think you told me this, but you guys were the ones doing the delivery, right? Yes, there were definitely times where when the stores didn't want to and we wanted to keep the lights on, we didn't want to have customers get like bad experience about the cancellations and whatnot. We went and did deliveries ourselves. We signed up with the stores like saying, call us when you want to. Yeah, and literally you. So you were personally driving around? Yes, me and my co-founder, both of us were like doing deliveries from the store to the customer. So did you have a limit to how far you were willing to go? No. So someone's 80 miles away who needs a bottle. 85, yeah, we did like five, five, seven miles. But even like five, seven miles in Boston is like a is like an 45-minute drive. Right. Yeah. So yeah, it's a significant amount of time that you're spending on the road. Yeah. Yeah. The one thing that I'm also curious about is you were clearly you had to card them, right? When you get to their door, so is that a type of training? Like you have to know what to look for. And, you know, yes, so when we signed up with the store, there were a couple of things we had to do it like officially. We had to undergo a it's in Massachusetts. They call it like tips training. Like so you have to be tip certified to be able to validate the idea and make sure like in what conditions you are allowed to sell alcohol to customers in this case, like hand it over or deliver to them. Be able to validate whether it's a fake idea or not. Like all of the all the things around that. Did you have to scan it or was it just an eyeball check? Yes, we had we had we were using an ID scanner as well to validate. And yeah, we got a couple of fake IDs for sure. So in that same vein, I know bartenders are tasked with cutting people off if they're too drunk, same with stores. So did you ever get to someone's house and they were clearly like too drunk to serve in a sense? Luckily, we didn't have that. Yeah, luckily, the only thing was we got presented with like fake IDs sometimes we didn't have to deal with that. But we see that we see that here all the time. For how many years did you guys do the delivery yourselves? We were doing some for for some like we were doing deliveries pretty much seven, eight months before before we got acquired here. Yeah, or at least like two plus years for sure. What was the delivery fee? Like how much were you guys making per transaction? So the so the agreement support transaction in Massachusetts, it's a it's a slightly gray area where either you're not allowed to take any like percentage fee on on an order. So we had like a tiered contract with them. OK, depending on like their order volume they do in during the day and for that order and things like that. So it was like a flat rate based on like the order volume. Got it. So but it was still around seven to eight percent. OK, yeah. So you negotiated that with the consumer with the store. So the customer like the end customer pays the price of the product. They pay five dollars like four ninety nine delivery fee and an optional tip that if they wanted to add.  Also the commission from the orders. And so after a little while of working with the stores, what was the reception where they did they love it? Did they stores that were getting like decent amount of deliveries? They loved it. They had their own website, a personal storefront that they had like linked it up to their static websites as well. So they were happy that now they have an online presence that they could use. They were also able to like merchandise their own products. They're like, hey, I want to sell these as like my top selling items or like my featured items, some stores, of course, depending on the areas and they had like less fewer orders. So they were still like, ah, it's not like as interesting because all they want to see is more more money, right? So if they don't see that and of course, like when you're starting out, you promise them the word. So it's like managing some of some of that as well. And the expectations there. Yeah. And then at what point were you guys, because I'm sure for you guys, you're doing the calculations, right? You're you're in year two, three, four and you're thinking like, all right, is this going to scale? We're sort of educating the market, which is really what you guys are doing to some extent. Yep. Was competition coming on? Was there a lot of competition at the time? There was there was there was good competition. Like, of course, Risley was one of the biggest competitions, both companies being in Boston, the same in the same backyard. So Risley was always like the big name out there in the market. A lot of our stores that we were working with as well, they were working with Risley as well. So they are like what whichever channel gets me like the most order price. Yeah, they were playing both sides. Oh, yeah, they don't they don't really they don't really care. They are like more orders from whatever orders they can get from anyone. They are they are happy with it. Right. And from your perspective, were you guys thinking of raising money to try to compete? Yeah, we had like self-funded this for for a while. We wanted to even when we got to a stage where we rebranded and relaunched as buttery. We were it was all bootstrapped self-funded operations. But yeah, we would right after that, we started out getting money, like raising money. I think once you have launched, you get measured on a different yardstick, right? Like if you if you are a pre if you are a pre product company, if you have not launched, the parameters are different. But after we launched, we were everyone was like looking for like, oh, what's your revenue? How many consumers? What's your traction like? What's your growth? What's your growth? Number of stores, number of consumers, like all those fund metrics. And then did it change your business model at one time? Because were you guys thinking like, OK, how do we make our business look like appealing to these investors with some vanity metrics, more markets? We we did a little bit of that towards like towards the end later, maybe a year, year and a half later, where we are we are having like hard time raising money because everyone wanted to see more consumers, more traction and it was a function of being in Boston or did you think it was? I think it was a little bit of both. It was being in Boston, Dresley being a big presence, right, your main competitor with the name. Yeah. So people listening, generally speaking, it's harder to raise money when it comes to tech in Boston. The Boston investment groups are typically a little bit more conservative when it when it comes to giving out money, specifically around what your finances look like. They want to see sort of a proven revenue model, whereas in, let's say, San Francisco or Silicon Valley, they're really just betting big on the team and the idea. And if the market's big enough and if you have no money and no traction, but they like the team and the market's big enough, they'll just go ahead and double down. Yeah. And so it's a little bit more gambling, I guess, is kind of the spectrum I put it on. But it's been very successful. And so you're dealing with these two different groups. But you guys, you guys tried to raise money out. Yeah, we not as much, not as much on the Vescos. And so nothing really materialized. Nothing materialized on the Vescos at all. And what were you guys thinking when that happened? We were just trying to find a way to keep it going. It was a matter of like... Did you deplete all your savings? Yeah, it was gone. It was gone a while back. Yeah. Were these dark times for you and your co-founder? They were. OK, we managed. We figured out some family savings over there. All right, so you tap into your family savings. And then what were you thinking? Were you thinking, let's just keep scaling it? Yeah, we were trying to figure out a way which made the business more appealing. We're saying, given that when you are trying to go acquire consumers, you need like, you literally need money to go spend on like social media, SEM, SEO... Cost of acquisition. Cost of acquisition is always there, right? But we also tried to do it the other way around. So we wanted to see how fast we can expand into different markets. How fast can we scale our sales strategies and whether that works or not, whether that makes it a bit more appealing as our business to... Yeah, if you could prove like a payback period. Yeah, so if I go into this new city, I inject X amount of dollars. I'm seeing that return in months. Absolutely, absolutely. And even with whatever little marketing dollars we were spending acquiring consumers, having presence in more markets, more geographies always made it a little bit more efficient to acquire that customer, right? So targeting like this one zip code in Boston versus targeting like Boston, New York, LA, Chicago, like it's more efficient. And also we wanted to prove out whether we can go get more stores in other cities and have a remote sales strategies work and inside sales strategy work. So we gave ourselves like two months and saying, what can we do over this summer, right? So that one summer, we are only focused on signing up stores in Washington DC, Austin, Chicago, Los Angeles, and we were able to launch in those four markets by just two of us, signing up stores which were, which provided like our critical mass of that geography and saying like, yes, we have coverage that we can prove this out. And we tried to go back to investors at that time, but then it's like always a moving target, right? Like we have, it's fine. Like we were not successful in fundraising from VCs. Sure. So what happened then? How to go on the expansion? So the expansion was fine. Expansion went below. Did you have to fly there or was it all via phone? No, it was email and phone calls. It was all inside sales. We were sitting in that BU office space that we had and yeah, we signed up about 10 to 15 more stores in those four markets. And yeah, we turned them on. We were getting some organic traffic, organic traction through- Like it was doing the delivery. The stores, the stores do the delivery. Yeah. Like everywhere, like apart from one or two stores in Boston, like all of our other stores were doing their own deliveries. They had their own delivery operations. Did that change at some point where some stores were primarily looking to you guys to do the delivery? Not really. Okay. Not really. Some of them were in Boston leaning towards that. But at that point, we were like, we can't support that anymore with like the scale that we have. Yeah. So we had to cut ties with a few of them. Then at what point were you guys thinking of just walking away from it and hopefully getting a flyer? So we were at a point like in, this was I think, early 2018, like spring 2018 where we're trying to figure out like, yeah, what are the next steps, right? Like if we are not able to fundraise well, if you're not able to grow at the pace that we should be growing and we wanted to grow at, it doesn't make any sense in continuing the business at that point, right? So we're trying to figure out different avenues, talking to a few people to see whether an acquisition makes sense or just partnering makes sense as like growth partners to power somebody's like alcohol delivery and like alcohol as a vertical because we knew that well. We're talking to different people, different companies. Then we got introduced to founders who are at Drizly and we had a conversation. It was great. What did you find out that you guys were doing better, if anything, whether it's the tech? I don't know if I can point to like one certain thing that we were like doing better or worse. This is how I'll put it. I'll say with the amount of stuff that a two-person company achieved in that last three years, I think that was like the best thing that we did, right? Like putting all our sweat equity into building that company and growing that, performing all the functions around like, be it customer support, being delivery, be it tech, be it sales or all of that stuff. With that sort of like limited resources, what we achieved at that point was I think our biggest achievement. Was there any kind of hit to your pride? You'd started this company and you had stuck with it through very thin times. Was there a sense of like, well, this is ours. I want to keep it ours.  We need to accept that it's time to start looking for ourselves. Yeah, I mean, there's always there are always those feelings, right? And yeah, you've put in so much effort to build something from the ground up from nothing. And you're at a point where, what's the future of that company? But yes, it hurt for sure. But I think it was fine. I think it was like the right outcome. I think we found like good partners to merge with like, now we are here, which is we're solving the same problems just on a bigger scale, which I think is good. What was the process like? I didn't know if you like followed any specific process. Like while talking to people, like we started getting introductions and started reaching out to people who could make introductions. So we had conversations, we tried to understand what their vision is of their companies, what their vision would be for us and what are they as a product and us as founders joining a different team as well. Yeah, how was that like, that conversation? Because in some assets, you guys were siloed, right? It was just you and Garra on your own, chasing your dreams. And now you're gonna come into a structured environment. That's completely different. Similar but completely different. Was that, I mean, what did you guys think of that? I don't know. I don't know. I don't think, at least me personally, we didn't have much concerns of going into a structured environment back again. We worked at Verizon for like seven, eight years before we started our company. So we've been a part of a big 100,000 people company going back to a two-person operation coming on joining a 100-person company. So it's not as rigid, as corporate, as someone like Verizon. Sure. We're still a startup here. Still scratching the surface of the problem. There is good opportunity here. Yeah, and then in terms of what roles were you guys given or how did you guys decide what roles were available even to you? We started out in engineering, both of us, but we wanted to do different things. Then Garra slowly moved into leading one of the products here and I'm still in engineering, but I like what I was doing. So I stayed around in engineering, leading a team, got that opportunity. Leading products, like engineering products from the backend retailer side of operations and how to quickly bring them online, how to make them do their deliveries more efficiently and all that suite of products. If you could go back, is there something that you would do different? You have the same source of capital, so the money's the same that you guys had. Yeah. Would you do, what is it that you think might have helped if you did a small tweak here? And I don't know, like right now I'm probably just guessing. Yeah, totally hypothetical. Totally hypothetical, like one thing I would have maybe done differently is probably fund-raised earlier, like tried fund-raising earlier before we actually launched, had a product. Pre-launched fund-raising. Yeah. So Go would help us with bigger team and bring on someone with slightly more complementary skill sets, because both of us were engineers, like product-minded engineers, we wanted to build products. Maybe we could have helped with someone either with sales or with more like business type of a person. I think that would have complemented our team like much more than what we were. So one of the things that I've picked up on in meeting all sorts of startups is it's like heartbreaking but endearing when they talk about their, let's say, I'm gonna call them years two through six when they were so afraid to spend money and they don't realize that if they had spent the money hiring the team or on these certain things they could have accelerated their company a significant amount. Do you feel like that's with your company? I don't know if I'm in a position to make that judgment because we didn't have money, right? We had what we had and we had to spend it in the right thing. So that goes back to that's why you would have fund-raised? Yeah, that's why I may have attempted fund-raising a little bit earlier and trying to accelerate the team growth, the product growth, the traction growth, all of that. Was there one thing that you guys saw that really made the difference when it came to delivering alcohol? Was it like special sales, special promos around events? Did anything like that really? I think what we made easier was for a liquor store to establish their, establish a website at a storefront for them, right? Yeah, they could have gone to Shopify and signed up on Shopify but that's not really like alcohol specific. They would have to manage their own website by themselves. Putting those 5,000 products they have in store online is not an easy task, right? So managing, maintaining that sort of data accurately, representing them online, that's not something that they can do it on Shopify themselves, right? Which is what we made it super easy. We managed a lot of those things for the stores, like we did that. How did you do it? Did you guys just have a template that you set up? Yeah, I mean, all the storefronts were on a similar template. Yeah, one course light is the same as another one. Yeah, so all the product metadata images, description, all of those things are common across stores. So once you get it for one, it's available for everyone else. Right. Which made scaling easier as well when we got new stores online, yes, you have all of these products. I have, we have the metadata for you, right? So you don't have to redo it all over again. Yeah. Yeah, was that valuable in the acquisition? It was, it was absolutely valuable. Like all the experiences that we had, like the way we did like our inventory integration, our tech, our backend, like the operations are very similar, just on different scales. When you guys got acquired, was it stocked?  Yeah, I don't want to go into too much detail about that, but yeah, it was, I mean, we don't really have any like restrictions, like per se, like of course there's like, best things, schedules and options and stuff. Do you guys plan to stay here for a little while? I think so. Yeah, I think so. Do you ever get the itch again to start something else? Any other ideas floating around your head? There's always ideas floating around in our head, right? I don't know if there is a real itch per se, but yeah, you know me, like I like to build products, right? So build things from scratch and see it working. That has a totally different like feeling when you see something tangible working that you've created. So that's always exciting. We'll see. I know, we'll see, we'll see. For people listening, what was the pressure like at home? So you're doing your own startup. It's just you and your buddy. Yep.  I think my wife was great. Didn't have as many complaints at all about like, or like any pressure about like making this work until we had a kid, which then started like, then it struck hard that like, okay, there's now there's, I think the time is running out. It was like, she didn't really say that, but it was always in the back of my mind per se. Yeah, this is. Right. Now you have another life to take care of. Yeah. Now you have to think about someone else as well, right? So. And did that anything change for you when that happened in terms of your mindset around the business? Not directly on mindset on the business, but like, yeah, when you have a newborn, you're spending a lot more time tending to them and making sure they eat, sleep, poop well.  You gotta find the balance all over again. Yep. What would you, what advice would you give anybody listening around either starting a company or scaling a company or even on getting acquired? I mean, what would you? I would say like, if you're, if you're really passionate about solving a problem, just go ahead and do it. Like there is, there is always a, if there is a problem out there at the market, there are, there is always a better mousetrap. Did you think about, if you just lost everything, would you have cared? Lost everything about? Yeah. Like if you didn't get acquired, like if we didn't work out, it was no happy. We, we, we were fine with that as well. Like we, yeah, we accepted that fate. Yeah. We knew that was a realistic option. So we were, we were okay with that, with that decision as well. Yeah. That happens. Were there any backup plans? No. No. No, go find a job. Yeah.  I could easily, I would say easily get a job. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And I guess that gives you the. That, that was, I think, I think that was, that was not as big a worry at that time in, in my head. I wasn't too concerned about it. Yeah. I'll find something. Where, where can they find? Oh, true. Yeah. Where can people find Drizly? Drizly? Drizly.com. And what's the Instagram ad Drizly? I think it's Drizly Inc. Yeah. D-R-I-Z-L-Y. I-N-C. One Z. No, I-N-C. No, I know. But I'm just saying there's. One Z, one Z. Yeah. A lot of people make that mistake. And internally we don't like really enjoy that. But. It's the Drizly Drizly. Yeah. That's another education of the market right there. Yes. Well, awesome. Thanks, brother. Thank you very much. We here at Startup to Storefront would love to hear feedback from you. Reach out and let us know what you think, either through rating us on the podcast app or by sliding into our DMs. You can find us both on Facebook and Instagram at Startup to Storefront. Our theme song is composed by DoubleTouch. If you want to learn more about the products and businesses featured on today's episode, check out the links in the show notes. And if you enjoyed the episode, consider subscribing because we've got a lot more great guests coming up that you won't want to miss. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.


What's the matter, prima? Prima, you're so lucky. You work in a restaurant with a bathroom and air conditioning. I'm out here in the fields again, and we're still having to use that nasty porta-potty. The one that's never cleaned? What did I tell you about that? I know, but... You have rights as a worker. Don't forget that. Rights like a clean porta-potty.  I don't want to hear it. If you're working in the field, your employer may be required to provide clean toilets and places to wash your hands. You need to be better informed. You need to be better informed. I already talked to the boss. What else can I do? Call the U.S. Department of Labor. I'll text you the number. They investigate these types of violations. But I don't want to get in trouble. The calls are confidential. They speak Spanish too. Mil gracias, prima. Thank you.