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Vin McCauley is the guest on the latest episode of Reddy at the Helm: the official podcast of Voyage hosted by Voyage CEO Rev Reddy. Rev and Vin discuss how SmoothieBox is engaging their niche market, Vin’s views from being on the founding teams of D2C startups, and much more.
Vin McCauley is the guest on the latest episode of Reddy at the Helm: the official podcast of Voyage hosted by Voyage CEO Rev Reddy. The goal of this podcast is to delve into the stories of leading marketers, founders, and retail executives, to learn how they built unbeatable marketing programs that have spurred innovation and success.
Rev and Vin discuss how SmoothieBox is engaging their niche market, Vin’s views from being on the founding teams of D2C startups, and much more.
SmoothieBox delivers Super Smoothies: ready-to-blend, pre-portioned, frozen smoothie ingredients directly to customers’ doors.
Vin has been a part of multiple founding teams and brands, but what motivates him to keep being a part of startups is how much he learns — and that he has overcome his fear of failure.
“I feel I keep getting smarter. I'm plagued by the mistakes that I've made. I think a younger version of me had a fear of failure, now I lean into it. Now I'm actually trying to fail as fast as I can, get those learnings, and move on. So what causes me to do it again is the thought of maybe I can do it better the next time, maybe I can get there faster. Maybe I can avoid some sort of mistake that I made in the past that jammed me up for a quarter or a year.”
Another reason he continues to seek out founding opportunities is the personal purpose that comes from it.
“I get a lot of purpose out of employing people. I also feel a lot of pressure. I feel the weight of their overhead, if you will. You get to know people on your team. There's a feeling of sort of going to war with them. You get to know them and their families and those weights can be heavy, but they're also richly fulfilling. A gal on our team just recently started to build a house. Another gal helped support her family when COVID was disrupting their family's revenue. We were going strong through it and she was supporting her family. I get an immense amount of personal value out of that feedback.”
The idea of shipping ready-to-blend smoothie ingredients to a customer’s doorstep is a business idea that couldn’t really happen 25 years ago. Vin explains how customers no longer need to rely on big box stores or seek out the one specialty shop within 100 miles of their house. You can be incredibly successful by providing goods to a niche group through the internet.
“The internet not only gives you access to the entire world, but also really small niches. Before you'd have these big box stores that sort of owned everything… If you were into a niche thing like health food, sometimes you had to go a couple of towns over… We support a relatively small population of people that are into whole food, organic, fruit, vegetable, and seed smoothies… So there's just this interesting shift that we see where historically growing up it was Mr. JC Penney's or Mr. Sears' was the one business owner that was selling a ton of goods… So the ability for just small stores, like SmoothieBox, to meet the needs of a small segment of the population, and do it really, really well, is just fascinating.”
We all know that COVID disrupted countless industries, some for the better, others for the worst. Vin explains how SmoothieBox was affected.
“Before [COVID] it was a tougher sell. People said, “What do you mean you're shipping frozen smoothies?”... “Why in the world would we ship frozen smoothies?” Well, COVID hits, grocery stores become funky, fear goes through the roof, and all of a sudden the value proposition of having food shipped to your door skyrockets. We were looking as a company at how China reacted to SARS in the mid-2000s. When SARS hit China, the same thing happened. There was this sort of paradigm shift in eCommerce. What we found also happened with Covid where the percentage of online sales versus brick and mortar just far outpaced forecast and growth.”
SmoothieBox and Vin’s goal is to continually serve their customers better. One way they found to do this is through SMS marketing. Vin explains all the ways SmoothieBox utilizes SMS throughout the customer journey.
“I see SMS as an amazing customer service tool. There's a client acquisition aspect to it. There's a retention aspect because we are a subscription business. There's a management aspect as far as, ‘Do you want to delay your box or exchange flavors?’ There's content engagement where we're conceptualizing things like offering challenges to our customers and serving up SMS reminders, ‘Hey don't forget to have your morning smoothie’ or ‘Do you need a recipe?’ … And then being able to dialogue with our clients at a time that's convenient for them.”
Vin continues by talking about the cultural shift around text and calls.
“I've gotten to a point where phone calls feel intrusive and text messages feel respectful and that's interesting. Before, if you wanted to reach me, call me and a text felt impersonal. Now, I get far more messages that are personal in texts and calls from strangers. And so as these things happen in our culture, as a brand, I need to react. And as a service provider for brands, [Voyage] is at the forefront of really tackling that.”
As Vin said to Rev,
“I get really impressed with Voyage, the team that you've put together, and the way that you are tackling the challenge of how do you squeeze all the juice out of a platform like SMS. And tiptoe through the tulips as far as not being intrusive… That's one of the reasons why I like to work with you and your team.”
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