The Startup Ideas Podcast - How he finds $1M+ CPG startup ideas before anyone else using Ahrefs and Manus AI

Episode Date: March 19, 2025

I’m joined by Ashwinn Krishnaswamy, an expert in launching and growing consumer brands, where we discuss how he evaluates market opportunities and creates unfair advantages. We discuss various tools for market research including Ahrefs for keyword analysis, Particl for competitor sales data, and AI tools for product design. Ashwinn emphasizes that entrepreneurs should work backward from distribution channels rather than focusing solely on product development.Timestamps:00:00 - Intro03:45 - Ahrefs tool for keyword research15:08 -  Particl for analyzing competitor sales data18:52 - Why start a CPG brand21:05 - How to stand out in crowded categories24:57- Opportunities in Branding for Older Adults28:40 - Bootstrapping Your Product Idea33:56 - Researching Your Market and Competitors36:52 - Manus AI for automating market research39:58 -  Distribution is everything.Key Points:• Ashwinn shares tools and strategies for evaluating market opportunities for physical products and brands• Tools like Ahrefs and Particle provide valuable data on search volume, competition, and sales trends• AI tools like Manis can now automate much of the market research process that previously cost thousands• Distribution strategy should come before product development, not vice versa1) First, understand that DISTRIBUTION is everything."First-time founders focus on product, second-time founders focus on distribution."The hard truth? Many subpar products CRUSH IT because they nail distribution and operational excellence.Always work BACKWARDS from how you'll acquire customers!2) Use Ahrefs to evaluate category demand and competition Type any keyword to see:• Monthly search volume (market size)• Keyword difficulty (competition level)• Seasonal trends• Geographic distributionThis helps you VALIDATE demand before building anything!3) Look for geographic OPPORTUNITIES in the data When Ashwinn checked "electrolytes" he found:• 74% of searches from English-speaking Western countries• Only 3% from India, PhilippinesThis reveals potential to build "Element for Germany" or other untapped markets where trends haven't diffused yet!4) For physical products, use Particle to spy on competitorsThis tool shows:• E-commerce sales data for brands• Best-selling SKUs• Category trendsCrucial insight: Often 90% of revenue comes from just 4 SKUs!5) The REAL opportunity in physical products?They force you to become EXCEPTIONAL at marketing."The bleeding edge of marketing happens in consumer products because it's SO HARD to get attention and convince someone to part with their dollars."It's a marketing masterclass in real-time.6) How to stand out in crowded categories:Study the competition obsessively! Ashwinn showed how most magnesium supplements look generic and medical.But brands like Moon Juice and Lemme differentiate through:• Distinctive packaging• Custom bottles• Clear positioning• Targeting specific demographics7) The BIGGEST opportunity right now?Find UNDERSERVED demographics!Most brands target coastal millennials or Gen Z because that's who creates them.But what about products for older adults with:• More disposable income• Less saturated marketing channels• Different aesthetic preferences8) AI is your UNFAIR ADVANTAGE for research• Competitor analysis• Market sizing• Customer needs• Design trends"It's putting together a report Nielsen would charge $20K for!"99% of people aren't using AI this way yet.9) Before building ANYTHING, become a "relentless researcher":• Study every competitor's positioning• Read all the 1-2 star reviews in your category• Visit stores and talk to owners• Contact potential customers directlyNotable Quotes:"First time founders focus on product, second time founders focus on distribution." - Ashwinn"Building a physical product business is very hard and by most people probably just shouldn't be done on a whim. But if you can do it in a somewhat low stakes way or low risk way... I think it is a phenomenal way to get really good at marketing." - AshwinnLCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/BoringAds — ads agency that will build you profitable ad campaigns http://boringads.com/BoringMarketing — SEO agency and tools to get your organic customers http://boringmarketing.com/Startup Empire — a membership for builders who want to build cash-flowing businesses https://www.startupempire.coFIND ME ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/FIND ASHWINN ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://x.com/ShwinnabegoInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/shwinnabegobrandBrand Brothers Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/2wgTQ7mXBngdiNzcJ2cUJZ

In this episode, we go through H-Refs and Particle to learn about how to create a CPG business that uses data and trends. I brought on Ashwin. Ashwin works with some of the top brands to figure out how to create a product that people love.

And what are some unfair advantages to create products that millions of people are going to use? We learn about SEO, we learn about trends, We learn about branding. And even if you're not building a CBG product, a lot of these lessons could be applied to your software startup. So I enjoyed myself in this episode.

I think you're going to enjoy it too and let me know. We got Ashman on the pod. We don't often have people like Ashwin on the pod. And what I mean by that is Ashman's my go-to brand and physical product guy. So not many people know this, but he uses a lot of tools and software to come up with ideas, opportunities, and ways to create unfair advantages with building any of the startups that he's built and he's built a bunch of successful ones.

I wanted to welcome you here. And I wanted to ask you if you can just give like a one or two liner about who you are. And if you can tell people what they're going to learn if they stick through this whole episode. Yes. So thanks for having me on. So my kind of like in one sentence, what I do is I launch and grow consumer brands. And so I've, you know, gone through this process of going from idea to launch and growing both in the consumer space and then prior in the software space. Right now I do this through an agency that I have. That's a branding and design agency.

We help to launch a lot of kind of physical products. I have a couple brands of my own. And then I just make a lot of content around branding and marketing and distribution and how people, whether you're building software, or whether you're building physical products, should think about this and kind of reverse engineer it because now the cost to create things have become so easy, and it is much harder to acquire customers. Yeah, I think today we're going to get into some of the ways

that I evaluate opportunities, how to think about it if you are building something new, what some resources is and how to look at this data and consider opportunities so that you don't get to a place where you build something and then you're like, oh shit, how do I get customers for this thing now? Like, is there demand for my product? I'll tell you why I wanted to have you on the pond selfishly. Okay.

So Ashwin is, you know, people have their friend who's just like always the best dress, always the best well-spoken, always knows like the most upcoming trends. We all have one of those friends. That's Ashwin for me. So what I want to do is get inside your head and just see how, like when you say how I evaluate opportunities and how, you know, we've been throwing around this word taste. Everyone's talking about taste, right? Taste is the ultimate mode. Distribution of the ultimate mode. I basically want to see how unpack how you, how you think about taste. And, and yeah, let's just do a lot of screen sharing today and just. and see what we cook up. Yeah, I love it. Okay.

So I'm going to start in here because I was having a conversation with someone yesterday where they were talking about a product that they built again in the kind of like physical product world. And they wanted to think about how they should invest their time from a digital marketing standpoint. Should they do Facebook marketing? Should they do SEO? Should they do Google? Email marketing. There's like so many channels, right?

And I think, especially for an early stage business, again, whether it's software, physical products, you're going to get most of your leverage from one channel. And so it's a question of like, which of these channels should I invest in first and what's kind of worthwhile? But kind of taking a step back here for a second, are you familiar with ATREFs? I am, but self-admittedly, I haven't gone deep on it. Okay. So I love HRFs. And the person who put me on to, so let me give context for what we're looking at here.

Let's type in. Like to me, honestly, HRF feels a bit overwhelming. It is a little bit overwhelming, but it's one of those tools where there's a few key ideas for you to understand from here. And when you can understand those numbers, like forget this chart, right?

What is this insane, like, you know, graphic down here? I have no idea how to parse this. But there's like two key things. that are helpful here. So H. Ref's is a tool where you can, it is a tool really used by people who are in the SEO world. But what one of its really useful kind of features is, is you can type in any keyword. And it will give you a general sense of what the search volume is on Google for that keyword or term or brand, as well as the difficulty in ranking for that term on Google. And so that's what we see up here.

keyword difficulty in the left and then search volume in the top right. And why I bring this up is because this is a really good way. So first, it's a really good way of evaluating category demand and trends in certain spaces. So for example here, you know, in the physical product world, electrolights, I mean, you've probably seen Element and all of these brands get super popular. you know, Element probably came out in 2016, I want to say, where there was, there was like some demand there, but it wasn't explosive. But then over the years, there has just been like a rising trend and kind of demand in electrolytes. So there's kind of two things here. There's good search volume, but there's also this like seasonal trend around it, right?

Where June and July, there seems to be this like huge pops for electrolytes. So just right off the bat there kind of like tells you two, things. All right, if I'm launching an electrolyte brand, sure, there's probably going to be some seasonality here. But the second thing that you see here is that the keyword difficulty is ranked super hard, right? It's ranked 88. So this is a scale from zero to 100. And what this tells you is if you wanted to go on Google and like really play the game of SEO and rank in the first three slots for Electrolites on the first page, it's going to be a near impossible endeavor for you. It is going to take an exorbitant amount of time, money, effort and like SEO expertise

for you to get up there, probably like a 24-month effort and like a ton, a ton of money. So it's, you kind of just look at this and you're like, okay, even not knowing anything else about the brands that are out there. Say I only know that Element exists or Liquid Ivy exists. This, like, categorically should just tell you there's a lot of competition in here. There's a lot of people vying for this keyword. So this is the kind of like first place that I look for something. I will say one thing, though, which is interesting.

So when I look at the global search volume, U.S. 45%, UK, 19%, Canada, 6%, Australia, 4%. That's, what is that? 74% is basically U.S., UK, Canada, Australia. What does that tell me that this is really big in English-speaking Western countries. But electoralites seems to not be a thing in other places. So there's probably an opportunity to build like an element for Germany, for example. 100%. Quick break in the pod to tell you a little bit about startup empire.

So startup empire is my private membership where it's a bunch of people like me, like you, who want to build out their startup ideas. Now, they're looking for content to help accelerate that. They're looking for potential co-founders. They're looking for tutorials from people like me to come in and tell them, how do you do email marketing? How do you build an audience? How do you go viral on Twitter? All these different things.

That's exactly what startup empire. is. And it's for people who want to start a startup but are looking for ideas, or it's for people who have a startup, but just they're not seeing the traction that they need. So you can check out the link to startup empire.com in the description. You know, yeah, you have 3% India, Philippines go build like, if you're, you know, watching over there, it's like, okay, how do we, how do we build this in these countries? And there tends to be these, you know, these like patterns of diffusion of how long things take to spread to other cultures. And I remember there's this famous German tech startup

that basically raised a ton of money and their whole kind of schick is like, what are the big U.S. tech companies? Okay, like Grubhub got super big there. Great. We're just going to do that in like Germany and EU more broadly. And I think it's smart because you've a proven business model and you're like, okay, this is probably going to be big here

in the next five years or so. So I think that's a good call out. But how to how else I kind of use this or I'll kind of tell you why I became so interested in this is I have a buddy. Let me type it in here. I have a buddy who was really good at SEO. And so he had a company that was like built off of SEO. He sold it. It was very successful.

And then he was like, hey, I. I want to buy kind of undervalued web properties. And I'm going to see where there is existing demand for that search term or that kind of asset. So he was looking in astrology for a while. He was looking in religion. And he would go to all of the, he'd say, okay, if they have a search volume of more than one million monthly visitors, I'm going to go find like the fourth and fifth result on Google, try to buy their website and then know that I can pump them to number one.

and it's basically like he's like the SEO like home renovation guy, you know, where he'll like come in and get this like undervalued asset. So he did, he saw there was a lot of opportunity in Solitaire because you have 8.5 million monthly searches here. And if you were the first result on Google, especially for a highly targeted key term, you're probably going to get 40% of the clicks there, right? So he tried to buy like every Solitaire site that was. already up there. And no one wanted to sell because they were just like cash cows, right? They

make all of this money just running Google AdSense. And so he's like, damn, I'm just going to like build my own from scratch and out SEO these guys. So he built his own from scratch and out SEO'd everyone for 24 months. He just like invested like a dog into it. And now he ranks like number one or two depending on what you search. And that business, I like I won't share the numbers, but like you you probably know like some of the figures just like looking at this he makes a preposterous amount um doing that so um there's there's there's there's really good ways to use a tool like this for if you're thinking about an app idea say like hey i want to build um you know tax for uh for vets or like tech you know uh software for vets or like accounting software for vets like

there's you should I would first use this tool because a lot of people start with an idea and they're like, oh, I think that'd be great. Like I know four vet clinics and they all say they have an issue with like their accounting software. I want to go build it. Then they build it. And then they're like, oh, damn, was their demand for it or was it too crowded already? And so I love first just like gut checking with a tool like this. Hey, what is the search volume for this category look like? Can I organically capture some demand here? And then it also just shows you the competitors that are kind of in this space. that's my my my my my my my refs kind of walk through and and what I love here I think the mistake a lot of people make when they're playing with ATRFs is they just look at the data and they don't ask why basically they're not acting like analysts yeah so so and this is like a future business

idea like someone should go and create an agent that basically is that re you know research agent that says, you know, oh, I've noticed that there's an opportunity in Korea for CBD, you know? Yes, I mean, let's look at this, right? So we have CBD that was explosive in 2019, and then it's kind of like declined steadily ever since. And you say, okay, well, why was it explosive in 2019? It was explosive in 2019 because the 2018 farm bill passed, and that basically allowed, like, the manufacturer and sale of hemp. based products. So you have everyone in the industry kind of pumping it up and talking about it. Okay, so there was this like peak when people were super interested in it. There was this like secondary

peak. Okay, I have to figure out what happened there. But it's been declining. And then why has it been declining? And if you look at that and you cross that with this thing called Delta 9, which is basically like legal THC, right, kind of like gets you high because it's derived from hemp, well, that's been growing since 2020. And that's kind of like been explosive. So it's kind of the D9 took the place of like what people were looking for from CBD because it's like, oh, I can get it legally and I still have this, you know, experience from taking it. You still kind of have to know how to prompt it though, right?

You still have to have some, you know, market information to know, you know, for example, I didn't know anything about Delta 9, you know? Yes, yes. Yeah, so I think to your point, if someone can package, like, it's always SEO agencies that interpret this data for you and they know what to do here. But yeah, if someone can make something like agentic here that like parses some of the data, category trends and gives you some insight, I think super useful. Cool.

what other tools do you use? So I use, and then again, this is in the physical product space. I use this tool called Particle. Particle basically allows you to type in a brand, type in any e-commerce brand. So I was looking at, today I was looking at vital proteins. It allows you to type in an e-commerce brand. This data isn't public typically because these aren't public companies. And it allows you to see not just their sales over time.

like vital protein sales just from their e-commerce website over the past four weeks, but it shows you the categories of which they have products in and what their best-selling products are. So a couple of ways that I like to use this is I like to see, number one, what are the numbers that competitors are doing in my space? But then even more importantly, what are their best-selling skews? So oftentimes people will think, hey, if I'm launching a brand, you know, I need to to have, I'm going to grow by expanding the set of skews or flavors or options that I have. And then you come in and you look at some of the sales data and it's like, hey, 90% of this company's revenue comes from like these top four skews. And they actually come from these two

flavors. So if I'm a product in this category, making flavored supplements, for example, let me not go make a, you know, whatever, like, crazy concoction flavor. Because let me look at like the biggest, a few of the biggest players here. And, okay, if I look at four of them and they're all selling chocolate and vanilla, it's like, all right, I should probably just make a chocolate and vanilla one. So kind of enables you to like de-risk some of the product decisions that you make. But this is a super cool tool because you can be intentional about searching certain brands. but you can also just look at they have their own kind of like trend explorer,

trend explorer and insights here. There's certain like products and categories of products you can take a look at and see how they're kind of trending up and down. So I kind of like to look at both things on particle as well as HREFs and just like get a position of where things are in the market. I know you're a big TikTok guy. How much do you think about TikTok shop and looking at how much revenue people are doing on TikTok shop and stuff like that? I'm guessing Particle doesn't incorporate that.

Particle does not incorporate that. Particle does not incorporate that. But browsing on TikTok shop, they show you all the sales figures. I mean, even Amazon shows you. some sales figures where it used to be how many they sold in the last month but now what do they show you

yeah 100K bought in the last month so I like to look in certain categories okay this like this you know magnesium is super hot right now so this brand is selling a ton of a ton of this but you know let's look over here this brand is probably okay this brand is selling 40,000 but then that

kind of goes all the way down to supplements selling, you know, 50 units a month. So you kind of get a sense of how competitive a space can be. But so I do a similar thing on TikTok shop in like physical product categories too of, hey, there's a lot of people talking about this one supplement or this product category. It's selling a lot. And again, they make that sales data public. So it's helpful to see. And can you make the case for why someone listening to this should start a physical product

business. I mean, one interesting piece of that could be the same tools or similar tools that we're using for coming up with, you know, AI startups, you know, rappers, that sort of thing. You could use to create physical products. And a lot of, there's just a lot of competition right now in software. But I'm curious, your perspective, like, what is the case for why someone should go and create a physical product business when it feels like a bit, it just feels harder in terms of like supply chain and stuff like that.

I think it's like one of the hardest business models to like to act on because there are so many of these pieces that you have to be really good at. And you've probably seen people who are, you know, in the many millions of dollars going, trying to go from like seven figure brand to an eight figure brand where they're like, hey, at this point, it's like not even really about

the product and like even the marketing. It's about like having a really good supply chain and being maniacal about the finances of the business. Right. So you end up learning a lot more about like your cash conversion cycle and like the margins that you need to operate well and like inventory forecasting and all of these other things. So let me say this. Building a physical product business is very hard. and by most people probably just shouldn't be done on a whim. But if you can do it in a somewhat low stakes way or low risk way where you're not like throwing a ton of cash into it or like betting your entire career on it, I think it is a phenomenal way to get really good at marketing.

Because like the bleeding edge of marketing is happening in the consumer product world because it is so fucking hard to get people's attention, to get a single person each time to part with dollars to buy something. It is much easier to go to a company, give them software and say, hey, can you buy this for 500 bucks a seat per month? And it like saves you guys, you know, 30 minutes a month. And they're like, yeah, sure. So can we talk about that?

So, you know, now we understand two tools around trends and what to, what products we should create. But can you talk about, okay, great, I want to create this. this magnesium glycinate product. Yeah. But how do I get people to actually buy it? Yeah. So if we look at, so here's a kind of, I think this is a good example.

Magnesium is becoming very popular in the world of people who care about performance and recovery and productivity. And I think it's probably like, there's probably like a Huberman Lab episode or like a Peter Ortea episode on magnesium glycinate. and like now it's this thing, right? So you have all of these brands creating magnesium supplements, like tri-magnesium supplements. Now, just because there is category demand

and it is a popular thing does not necessarily make it easy to like go into. It's actually somewhat easy to create a supplement, but it's very hard to stand out. So the first place that I kind of look is, okay, we'll go on Amazon, we'll type this in like magnesium glycinate, and we'll take a look at these brands.

And a lot of these brands, just kind of as I'm scanning here. Okay, these look, like, these look fairly medical. These look kind of generic. Maybe, like, Nature Made is a brand I recognize from, like, being at CVS and Walgreens, and it's, like, distinctive, right? It stands out with, it's, like, yellow cap and yellow coloring here.

Everything kind of looks, like, they're all kind of, like, stock white bottles. They all look a little medical. They look, like, a little bit, like, generic and weird and not terribly appealing. So I look at this and I'm like, okay, there could be an opportunity to stand out here and like do something different.

And so then you come across a brand like, I was just going to say, that's what I, this is the product I have. Yeah. So you look at Moon Juice and it's like, they're probably sourcing their powder from the same place as like 600 of these other brands, you know? But it's like they have this amber jar.

They have like, they're building a different kind of like, brand around it, but just like visually it's striking and it stands out relative to things here. So there's one place in which you can differentiate. And that's on the look and feel of the brand. And there's this brand. This is like Courtney Kardashian's brand that I really like from how they've differentiated. So they're a supplement.

They make gummy supplements. And what they did is they invested in kind of like this custom bottling. So it's this kind of like hard plastic, feels like glass kind of bottle with these cool ridges, they have these cool custom caps. The whole thing is this like purple. They are very much positioning to women here and making it like much more fun and much more like accessible, right? Take a look at the Lemmy products versus pure encapsulations, which is like that is straight from like the compounding pharmacist, right? There's no branding on that. So, so Lemmy is kind of coming in and saying, hey, we're going to differentiate on look and feel and the language that we use,

but we are also going to differentiate on the positioning of the brand and the audience that we're going after. We're going after like a Gen Z woman and it makes sense, you know, with like Courtney being behind the brand. You know, Seed is differentiating in the category, both from how they speak to consumers, how they look, this kind of like audience that they go after. And I think both in, again, physical products as well as software, you have to. to, especially in the early stages, figure out what niche you're kind of positioning to and how

you're speaking to them and go hyper-targeted to them and then get to a certain scale and then you start to expand that niche more and more. I was just, the aha moment I had is while you're talking and seeing some of this is there's a lot of really, it seems like in products for women, it's getting more and more popular to have just like well-designed, well-branded products. I don't think that's ubiquitous yet. Like, you know what I mean? So I feel like there's maybe there's more opportunity in creating products for not women,

which is highly branded seed style or lemmy style. Like I think that this branding is really beautiful. Just curious what your thoughts are on that. So if I kind of recap that, you're saying there's a lot of products that are kind of geared and branded towards women. My point is like, so seed is a, it's a, well, actually

it says it's probiotic for women and men, right? Yeah, but it's like, in all of their influencer marketing, it's like really for women. Because women are the buyers of these products. I guess my point is, I think that there's probably a lot of opportunity in doing this style branding for older adults, not young females.

Yes. And there's probably an opportunity to do it for, well, older adults, let's just say. That's the one that first came to mind is the older adult, you know, the 65 or older male or female, you know, just because they're older doesn't mean that they don't want great, beautiful products that make them feel, make them feel good or excited about it, right? They're just like us. Yes.

Yeah. Okay, yes. This is a extremely important idea and a problem that like everything that is in the consumer packaged world runs into this kind of like issue, right? Where it's, we had this like era of like millennial blending with consumer products, which is like everything kind of looks the same. You can kind of think of like Harry's or Casper and their design sensibilities trickled into like every product set in category, right? like our pans, our cookware, like our rugs, our furniture, everything kind of looks the same. And now we have the same thing happening for Gen Z because it's like they're the next generation of buyers.

So like let's make everything super bright and vibrant and saturated and look like a brand called I'll just show you like a good example of this. Like Starface, right? And all of this is a byproduct of the people who are building these brands tend to be mostly like coastal people between the ages of 22 and 35. So they just make stuff that they and their friends want to buy. But it turns out when everyone's doing that, it gets like extremely crowded and hard to compete or stand out.

So I always say like, hey, when you're thinking about a category or building a brand in the space, yeah, sure, maybe you're like friends need the product. But like, I don't know, do let's look at Surface. Do older men and older women have pimples? Do they, like, could they, like, benefit from these patches? Okay, is there a way to just, like, take this concept and apply it to a totally different demographic that is not really targeted with the current product category?

And especially when you go older, like, they have more disposable income. They, like, you know, consume information from these different channels that are not super saturated with advertising dollars and brands and products and influencer seating. So it can kind of make your life a little bit easier. finding these opportunities elsewhere. Okay, so say, say I'm a listener to, you know, I'm listening to this and I'm like, you know what, I want to create the star phase for older adults and you've got like a good vision in your head for, you know, the positioning, the marketing and the actual physical product

and boxing and stuff like that. Is the only way to actually go and create the website, create the Shopify, create the product, going to an agency to do it? Is there like a bootstrapped way to start like sketching out your idea and putting something out there before like investing half a million dollars or whatever in an agency? Yes, 100%. And I think there is, so there's two things. I think like, you know, if you look at a brand like Mighty Patch, for example, that's pretty like straightforward. There isn't this like incredibly fancy design with it. It's like nicely. done seems like kind of clinical seems effective, but it's really just like communicating the information. You could probably figure out how to make that in Canva, right? Whereas Starface, like, okay, probably like bring in a graphic designer to like make this whole like brand and

world feel good. There are there are categories where design matters more than less. So a good example of this is in the in the spirit's business, right? In like wine, alcohol, beer. You can't really say, hey, I want to make a new wine brand that like tries to position to this audience and I'm going to like really like bootstrap the design and like try to get some traction for it because that's one of these categories where like you're building a kind of lifestyle brand and the most important cues for the success of those brands comes down to intentional design choices that's reflected on the packaging as well as the overarching brand. So there are some categories where it's just kind of like a non-starter. You either

have to be like a very well-equipped designer or be able to tap in a design talent or an agency to like find success there. But in these other categories that are maybe a little bit more problem solution oriented, think like the Starface or Mighty Patch or any of these brands, there is a way to kind of like get it done more on a budget. kind of independently. You can hire independent freelance designers. You can look at things like Fiverr and Upwork and look through their catalogs of work and hire these people and be like, hey, I just need like some simple packaging design done. And like, hey, I need a simple landing page set up for this. And you know what? Maybe you spend 500 bucks on that or a thousand bucks on

that. And then you say, okay, well, I'm going to now go run Facebook ads and see if I can drive some leads for this and like see if I can gauge some demand here. So there are wasted. do it. I think you just have to be kind of resourceful around pulling together the right people so it looks halfway decent and credible. Yeah, I wonder if some of the AI tools like V0

Manis could help with some of the design. Yeah. I don't know. But I will say that there's probably a $100 million startup idea in the I want to create V0 for

CPG. That in itself, I think is a huge opportunity for someone to run with as a startup idea. Yeah. I mean, I'll give you good. So number one, yes, I agree with that. Number two, I was talking to a guy who's building a, he's building a way protein, like a protein brand that is geared, geared more towards like a South Asian audience from like a flavor profile standpoint. He is a pretty good audience on Instagram. And so he was talking to me about his like branding and packaging and he was showing me some revisions and he was like, hey, what do you think about

this? What would you change? And he showed me three options and they looked like pretty good. Like if I saw that on a shelf, I'd be like, yeah, that's like, that's like nice. I would, I would buy that. And he was saying he used like a blend of mid-journey and

something else to generate the V1 of it and then hired a designer on Fiver and was basically like, I want you to recreate this kind of thing in a vector and then like change a couple of the elements. And he spent $250 with the designer doing that. So you can kind of like piece these things together.

And yeah, there will be, you can always find people to work with you on that stuff. The cool thing about that is it allows you to really clarify your vision. So I think the mistake a lot of people make is they go straight to an agency without really understanding what it is they want to build. So sometimes just doing the hard work around like, okay, what does a mood board look like? And, you know, how should the positioning look like? What should the copy look like? You know, what is my strong point of view as a first version? Getting that out is super helpful.

Yeah, 100%. Yeah. So I'll kind of share something. So I kind of mentioned wine because we recently worked on a wine brand project from the agency, and something about developing a point of view. So I always tell, if you're building, whether you're building software, you're building consumer products, you have to be like a relentless researcher of the category and the competition. So from the agency side for this non-alcoholic wine brand, they came to us and they said, hey, we're building

a non-alcoholic wine brand. We think this is our position, but like, what do you think? And so, before we ever touch design, we say, hey, well, we don't know anything about the NA wine category. So we're going to, like, read everything that we can. Then we're going to look at every brand in this space, right? So we'll kind of canvas all of these brands and we'll say, okay, here's this brand, here's like this brand. This one looks a little bit more like elegant and sophisticated, whereas this one looks a little bit more like a daily casual drink. Let's take a look at their website. Okay, like very minimalist, very clean here. This leans into like lux. It feels like far more feminine in their visuals and their language. This one is this like German brand. I don't know. It's not

communicating a whole lot to me. And we'll kind of like go kind of brand by brand and do our like, what is our takeaway? What's our one sentence takeaway from this brand and what it's communicating and who they're speaking to? We'll go into things like you'll go into stores and you'll talk to the store owner and be like, hey, what's selling here? What's not selling? What are people looking for? What are they interested in? And this is such a, you get an insane amount of insight doing this where you become so much more confident in the direction that you want to take your brand

and it's it's just it's free to do it's free to do it's free to like go into stores or like go to like just doing research and so this is like how I do it from the physical product standpoint but if I were to do this from the software standpoint okay if I want to build like a better CRM for for vets

or better CRMs for like dentists. Okay, well, like, let me look at the software that exists out there today. And let me look at what the reviews are on that software. And let me look at the one star and two star reviews. And what are people complaining about there? Okay, let me contact three dentist office in my neighborhood. Or like, let me go into them and like talk to the staff about them. And it's like these things that seem kind of hard to do, but you can just go in.

And if people are like more often than not willing to talk to you and like give you some perspective and it allows you to just like develop a much more robust point of view than just saying hey I'm going to do this and I'm just going to like hypothesize everything that I should build. Meaning it's like I'm just going off hunches that this is the right direction. Yeah, you don't want to do that. You don't want to do that. You don't want to do that.

Can I show you something real quick? Please. So let me show my screen. I thought it would be fun to. Prompt Manis. Can you design a CPG product? I'm looking for boxing in the actual product. The idea is a Starface competitor, Pimple Patch, but for older adults.

Amazing. And I wanted to see what it would come up with. And so it's researching competitors in the Pimple Patch market. So it's kind of doing a little bit of like what that Figma was, I would hope. You know, it's starting that research. you can see here, we're watching it live, just going through the Starface website. Oh, you can see here on the right-hand side. Incredible.

Incredible, right? Research Starface product details, analyze competitors in the pimple patch market, research skincare needs for specific to older adults. Like, insane, right? Insane. Insane. Holy shit. Have you played with this at all?

So I have not played with Manus, but I probably run like three or four deep research queries a day. Okay. So I spend a lot of time with that, but this is, this seems amazing. Yeah, look at this. It's going through Credence Research, which I'd never heard of, but it's some sort of research company. Here are the best ones. We tried 17, you know, pimple patches, Battle of the pimple patches. So I think that a lot of people could, you know, your unfair advantage might just be using something like madness.

100%. I was having this conversation with someone yesterday. It boggues my mind how few people are using, like, we're in this bubble on Twitter where everyone's like talking about like the latest bleeding edge stuff in AI. But 99% of people like, they open up chat GPT and it's like, oh, flights from New York City to San Francisco. And it's like, no, no, no, no, no. There's like so much more that you can get from this. And so yes, this is exactly.

This is like an unfair advantage. I mean, maybe a year or two from now, everyone's going to be. be doing this kind of like de facto before building things. But right now, there is no excuse to not, there is no excuse to go into a space and be like, oh man, I was like ill-equipped. Like I don't have enough, like, I didn't do enough research on the category because it can all just be done for you right now. Look at this. How to care for your skin in your 60s and 70s? So good. So good. So good. How long do you think this will take like 30 minutes? I think it'll take 10. No, not even. I I think it'll take 12 minutes.

Wow. Yeah. So we'll have a full-on prototype in 12 minutes. Yeah. And you know what's so crazy is that, like, they're probably putting together a report that Nielsen would have charged like 20 grand for. Yeah.

For sure. So that's a crazy time. All right. Ashwin, this has been cool. What do you want to leave our audience with? I think no matter what you're building, whether software or physical products, you have to start by working backwards from distribution and thinking about the channels that you're going to acquire customers and the channels that you're going to win in and then build the product.

And it's not vice versa. And it's like there's this adage that you probably know. and felt personally, which is like first-time founders focused on products, second-time founders focused on distribution. And I don't think there's anything more true. Like you see a lot of like subpar products in both the software world in the physical product world that are just like worse products. But they crush it because of like incredible like distribution and operational excellence.

I like it. I learned about you, by the way, through your TikTok account. You just kept popping on my feet and you were, or breaking down brands like Star, you know, like Starface. Is that what it's called? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you were breaking down these brands and just kind of auditing them and just learning about your taste.

You're one of those people that I followed you. No, I liked you so much that I then followed you on Instagram because I was like, I need more of this guy in my life. Wow, thank you. I love it. We're going to include in the show notes links to your socials so that people could follow you. even if you're not building a CBG product, I think that it's going to help just inspire people

to create better software products too. And yeah, I just want to thank you for coming on and giving, I want to have you back on. So I want people to like this episode. I want to just let us know if you like this sort of thing because I would love to have you back on for a round two. Yeah, let us know in the comments what types of things we could go deeper

on because I think we covered a lot of things here where we can just probably spend a whole episode. We probably take that Manus thing and like turn that into a full exercise. True. Building building like a new software business on a call. Let's see if we can piece together like AI tools to like build the thing, build the landing page testament. I don't know. Anyway, let us know the comments. But but thank you for having me on, Greg. All right, my man. I'll catch you later. See ya. See ya.