Will Nitze: Founder & CEO of IQBAR
Episode 793
On today’s episode, we welcome Will Nitze, Founder & CEO of IQBAR — the functional nutrition brand built to support focus, energy, and performance with clean, science-backed ingredients.
Will’s journey started with a personal challenge: persistent mental fatigue in a demanding 9-to-5 and frustration with carb-heavy, ineffective food options. That experience led him to launch IQBAR in 2018, creating plant-based protein bars, hydration mixes, and instant coffees formulated with meaningful doses of brain-boosting ingredients. Today, IQBAR is a fast-growing, nine-figure brand with national distribution, including Costco.
In this episode, Will shares how he turned a performance problem into a category-defining business, what it takes to stay relevant in a crowded functional food space, and why efficacy, simplicity, and focus have guided every product decision. We also talk about crowdfunding, scaling with a lean team, and what’s next for functional nutrition heading into 2026.
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https://www.linkedin.com/in/will-nitze/
https://www.eatiqbar.com/
Transcript
Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. I want to be you. Just want to make sure you will get knocked down. But just make sure you don’t get knocked out, knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control. Control. Control. Hi everyone, and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs and really, some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go. Let’s go. This episode of the Kara Goldin show is brought to you by LinkedIn. Jobs. Hiring can be one of the most important and time consuming parts of running a business. As you think about what your team needs heading into 2026 whether that means growing or getting more focused making the right hire matters more than ever. LinkedIn jobs helps take the guesswork out of that process. With LinkedIn jobs, AI assistant, you can identify strong candidates faster and higher with confidence. You’re not just filling open roles. You’re building a team that sticks. In fact, LinkedIn hires are 30% more likely to stay at least a year compared to the leading competitor, and that kind of retention really adds up. And finding the right hire doesn’t have to feel overwhelming with LinkedIn jobs AI assistant, you can skip the guesswork and jargon. It filters candidates based on your roles specific criteria and highlights top matches, so you’re not wasting time digging through endless resumes. When you’re running a business, you need a hiring process that’s fast and focused. LinkedIn is AI assistant delivers 25 strong candidate suggestions each day, giving you the chance to invite the right people to apply and keep the process moving. It’s a smarter, faster way to hire, and it’s why I rely on LinkedIn jobs. Hire right the first time, post your job for free at linkedin.com/kara Goldin then promote it to use LinkedIn jobs new AI assistant, making it easier and faster to find top candidates that’s linkedin.com/kara Goldin to post your job for free, Terms and Conditions apply. Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Kara Goldin Show. Today, I am so excited to be joined by Will Nitze, who is the founder and CEO of an incredible, incredible company products called IQBAR, a functional nutrition brand that’s grown into nine figure business in just a few short years by doing something surprisingly Rare, making products that are actually effective, clean and accessible. So will didn’t set out to chase trends. He started IQBAR in 2018 after struggling with fatigue and a traditional nine to five role and realizing that most convenient food options were working against his focus and energy. I cannot wait to hear more about that. And since starting the company, IQBAR, has sold over 100 million bars, expanded into hydration, mixes, coffee, lots of good categories and also available and Costco in a very small, short time, partnered with Michelin starred chefs. So much going on will is really taking the bull by the horns and making IQBAR stand out in a super crowded not just one category, but multiple categories. So, so excited to talk to will a lot more about what IQBAR is doing. So thanks so much for joining will. Thank you for having me absolutely so. So to start in 30 to 60 give or take, how do you describe IQBAR and the problem that you really set out to solve. Sure?
Will Nitze 4:24
Well, how I would describe it now is we’re a brain and body nutrition platform. Bars are our hero line. But like you said, we do hydration, we do coffee, but everything we do has to check a bunch of boxes. So has to be good for the brain and body, and functionally good for the brain and body has to be clean label. It has to be affordably priced, and it has to taste good, and then there’s a bunch of more unit economic based stuff has to ship efficiently, has to be small, cubic inches, yada yada yada. But that’s how I would describe it. Now, what I set out to do was just create brain. Food like that, as simple as that. And I can get into how all, how that changed in the evolution from A to B, but that’s long and short
Kara Goldin 5:08
of it. So yeah, so I’d love to have you take us back to those pre IQBAR days. What was happening in your own life and and how did this all come about? Yeah.
Will Nitze 5:20
I mean, so it was a confluence of many things. I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I always wanted to be my own boss. I didn’t know how to do that or what my calling was, and I couldn’t figure it out by the end of college. And so I took a job in software sales, sales and marketing, and so I was selling B to B software to oil and gas companies. So just about as different from what I do now as possible, but it was a great thing, because I learned what it’s like to work for someone, and how does a company operate, and how do you write a good email, and how do you run a good meeting, and how do you motivate employees. And just like all that bedrock stuff, I’m so glad that I did that, and I did that for three and a half years, but at the same time, I knew I can’t do this. I can’t do this for 3040, 50 years, like I will never be happy doing this. And I read a couple books that also changed my trajectory, of my thinking. One was mission in a bottle by Seth Goldin and Barry nailbuff, the Honest Tea guys. And I really related to Seth. We both went to Harvard undergrad. We had the same major. He his first job he was not really passionate about and then he started honesty. And they had all these ups and downs, and then they had this beautiful exit to coke. And I was like, I just want to be that guy. Like, I just want to do it. That guy did. And so I started tinkering around with beverage ideas. And, you know, this farm out better than I do, but quickly it became apparent that the economics were challenging, to say the least. And so I then morphed into food, and I was always mostly interested in the brain gut connection, how the things we eat affect our brain much more so than what most people focus on, which is, what does it do to your waistline, building muscle, things like that. I was more interested in how well do I think after lunch? And then, what is my brain like, like in 40 years when I’ve consumed diet, X versus Y versus z. So yeah, that just sort of gave way to this obsession over brain food, and had no data that that market wanted it, that it was a good idea, nothing. But yeah, did a Kickstarter, and that was what launched it and quit my job and the rest is history.
Kara Goldin 7:43
This episode of the Kara Goldin show is brought to you by LinkedIn. Jobs. Hiring can be one of the most important and time consuming parts of running a business. As you think about what your team needs heading into 2026 whether that means growing or getting more focused making the right hire matters more than ever. LinkedIn jobs helps take the guesswork out of that process. With LinkedIn jobs, AI assistant, you can identify strong candidates faster and higher with confidence. You’re not just filling open roles, you’re building a team that sticks. In fact, LinkedIn hires are 30% more likely to stay at least a year compared to the leading competitor, and that kind of retention really adds up. And finding the right hire doesn’t have to feel overwhelming with LinkedIn jobs. Ai assistant, you can skip the guesswork and jargon. It filters candidates based on your roles, specific criteria and highlights top matches, so you’re not wasting time digging through endless resumes. When you’re running a business, you need a hiring process that’s fast and focused. Linkedin’s ai assistant delivers 25 strong candidate suggestions each day, giving you the chance to invite the right people to apply and keep the process moving. It’s a smarter, faster way to hire, and it’s why I rely on LinkedIn jobs. Hire right the first time, post your job for free at linkedin.com/kara Goldin then promote it to use LinkedIn jobs, new AI assistant, making it easier and faster to find top candidates. That’s linkedin.com/kara Goldin to post your job for free, Terms and Conditions apply. So what was the first idea that you had for, I guess, using ingredients in IQBAR, but what was kind of the form that you decided to go with first?
Will Nitze 9:46
So the RX bar case study was a great one, because it happened right as I was starting, and it got me interested in the bar category because I wanted to build something big. And so bars were certainly a big category, and I didn’t. Really know where to start. So I just, I just went and I bought a bunch of bars and looked at the back of them. I mean, this is the beauty, beauty of food and Bev. You know, the answers to the test are, to some degree, just sitting right in front of you. And I got a starting point of, like, how do you create a bar? How do you create a base of a bar? How do you make a bar stick together? How do you make a bar last a long time? And then I But then, of course, I you have to be different. And so I started thinking through, okay, if this is going to be brain food, what does that actually mean? That could mean 10 different things. You could be a nutraceutical, you could be a supplement, you could be a food product. And and so my approach, for better or worse, was, okay, just look at the data of what nutrients, micronutrients, as well as macronutrients, have been shown to be good for the brain. And so there are just things like omega threes, magnesium, flavonoids, et cetera, that there’s just quite a bit of data suggesting that it’s good for the brain. Okay, cool. So I have these, like 10 things. What are the whole food ingredients richest in those 10 things? So for vitamin E, it might be almonds or sunflower seeds. For flavonoids, it might be blueberries or matcha, you know, so on and so forth. And then, so I had a list of ingredients, and then I was like, Cool, can I mash those together and make a bar out of it? Like my thinking was as simple as that, and it was very like, spreadsheet based. I have no idea how other well, I have some idea now, but my sense is that’s very different than how most people formulate products. But it also created a lot of early like false positives. So for example, Curcumin is a grape for your brain. It’s a derivative of turmeric. The problem is, it stains your fingers yellow when it’s in a bar and it costs way too much. Or resveratrol is a derivative of grapes. That’s why people will sometimes say grapes or wine or whatever is good for your heart and can be good for your brain and but really it’s resveratrol they’re talking about. Well, that’s great, except it makes your bar to cost $10 so you run into these economic realities and unit economic realities, and start having to think through, okay, I can include this, but not that, you know, and that’s still, that’s a never ending journey, by the way,
Kara Goldin 12:29
constantly looking for whether or not a certain ingredient will actually, for a variety of reasons, be good or not so good for what you’re doing. Yeah.
Will Nitze 12:40
Or can I make this organic? Well, I could, but then that would shift things 20% in this direction, and that would shift this on shelf price point in this direction, and this number of people are not going to be cool with that. And so it’s just, yeah, I’ve just found it’s, I mean, there’s 1000s of these sort of mental tug of wars around inputs, positioning, etc, and then there’s the positioning of it, right? So that was probably our biggest learning, was we, like I said, I positioned it as brain food and very but we then surveyed all of our customers and say, Why do you buy this? Why did you buy this? Why did you buy this? We kept expecting them to say, oh, because it’s brain food, and that’s so cool and different. And no one said that. People were like, I buy it because it’s low sugar, or I buy it because it’s clean label. I buy it because it’s affordable, whatever. And then we had that kind of come to Jesus moment, of like, who are Wait, who are we? We can lean into what we thought we were and create a small business, or we can listen to the market and listen to data and listen to survey results and lean into those and create a very big business. So we obviously chose the latter.
Kara Goldin 13:54
So how many SKUs Did you launch with three, three SKUs, and are those still your SKUs today, or have those shifted and in some way
Will Nitze 14:08
now they’ve shifted massively. So I mean, I I’m like, any bushy tailed, bright eyed entrepreneur, I’m like, How do I make something for Whole Foods that’s, like, trendy and blah, blah, blah, and so almond cacao and blueberry, walnut and matcha sunflower, you know, like those were the first three skews. What are they now? Like, what are our top flavors now, chocolate, sea salt, peanut butter chip, almond butter, chocolate chip. So it’s like, you have the again, this is like you come in with this one concept, and then the market just punches you in the face, and you’re like, Hmm, why am I calling this almond cacao? Like, if I just simply took the same product and called it chocolate sea salt, would I sell 100% more? And the answer is yes. So yeah. Yeah, it’s just been a data data aggregation plus acting on that data exercise over and over and over again.
Kara Goldin 15:09
Yeah, I think it’s your your ability to to change right and go with what you’re actually seeing and looking at that data is so critical. I remember when we were first starting hint that very similar, you know, we were trying to create products that were different, because all the buyers want different. And what we realized is that blackberry and cherry and raspberry, in the case of flavored waters, those were the ones that were actually they were going to pull off the shelf. It didn’t mean that hibiscus wasn’t a terrific flavor, but the consumer has to imagine what it’s actually going to taste like, especially if you’re not sampling it in stores. And so that’s going to make a big difference, especially when you’re just getting started, and you need the turns in order to expand your presence on any shelf, or, you know, get into other markets as well. So it’s it’s totally critical, and it’s also key not to leave one kind of odder flavor, even if it’s great on the shelf, because buyers also think that, you know, it’s not moving in it could just be that one SKU that’s not moving. But they’ll judge your entire brand based on whether or not totally that one product is is moving or not so. So what was the first store you got into and and like when you saw it actually moving? What was that day like for you?
Will Nitze 16:54
Well, so we were e com first. We always were very intentionally, e com First, and we picked. Part of the reasons we picked bars is they’re they’re so such a good e com item. They’re so compact. The price per weight ratio is so good, the price per cubic inch ratio is so good. And there’s just a lot of people buying protein bars online. So that actually helped us get our first ream of data that then allowed us to change packaging, change packaging again, change the product, etc. So such that when we were ready for brick and mortar, we had already had 1020, reps, but so our first major retailer, it’s a bit of a cautionary tale, was CBS. And I was in Boston at the time, and so it was kind of local or in Providence. And I, I, I made, like, every mistake in the book. I knew a guy who had gotten his products in, and I was like, whoa. These guys have, whatever it is, 12,000 doors, like, just an insane number of doors, and this guy got into a couple 1000 doors, and it’s 45 minutes away, like, let me, let me talk to these people. So I asked him who the buyer was for him. And it was an innovation set. So there were, this was the time when big retailers were pulling in startup brands and trying to stay relevant, sort of like old, old line retailers were pulling in shiny objects. And you connect them to the guy. I talked to the guy, and I sent them samples. They liked it, and they said, Okay, this could work. Let’s try it in, you know, 12 stores. And we tried it in 12 stores, and it and it did well. Now we made sure it did well, if you catch my drift, and then we got plussed out to, like, 3000 doors so, and this was only six months into our existence, and we’re like, whoa. We’re in every city in America via CVS, which sounds very cool when you get into the nitty gritty. It’s like six month you know, payment terms. I think it was like 30 days. You get half, and then the other half you don’t get for six months, and you might never get if there’s too much spoils or what have you. We were in, like the back corner, and we weren’t in the bar set. This was a huge learning for me, was how much set matters we were in, like the brain health set. And so it was us, and then, like a powder, and then some pills. And so if you’re going into the store looking for bars, you’re just not going to find us. You would have to come upon us somehow in that back corner. And so it just, it was a tough lesson, tough pill to swallow early. Luckily, we made it out alive. We, like, basically broke even on it. We had a huge gross margin, and then we lost all of it to spoils, because it was like, you know, in a good store, we’ll move 567, units per. Keeper store per week. Like, that’s a good, quite good in bars. And we were moving point two units, you know, like, laughably low. So we’re like, Whoa, we’re not gonna move to this 12 bar caddy like in the next year at any given store. So that was a good masters in brick and mortar retail that we learned there. But I would say Kroger actually, funnily enough, also another retailer, typically people don’t get to till five years down the line. I was our first major retailer, and went quite well. So long winded way of answering your question, that was a cool moment, but we had to go through a fairly Rocky, bumpy path to get to that one.
Kara Goldin 20:47
Yeah, it’s interesting. I wouldn’t have thought that CVS would be a great one for you guys to go into right out of the gate. But I think the other thing is, you know, it’s somebody’s telling you that your baby is beautiful, and you want to go, you’re an entrepreneur and but it’s, yeah, I mean, I’m glad there’s, I’m glad you guys made it through it, because there’s a lot of people that that could just really sink you by the time, you know, and depending on what your category is, too. I mean, if you’ve got to use distributor as well and trying to make sure it’s getting out of the packer room, and you’re going to get chargebacks on it. I mean, it’s just, it could really, really have, have ended not so great. So I’m glad that that that that worked out for sure. So the functional ingredient market is projected to explode even more. Where do you think, like the disconnect between reality and marketing claims out there? How do you see this, this world, I guess, changing in some way.
Will Nitze 21:53
I think it’s very dangerous. I mean, people in the food world are very disconnected from Main Street America, you know, because we think about, oh, functional mushrooms and this and that and, like, I always say, go do a Costco demo, or go do a Costco road show, and you’ll find out, like, what actually people know about, care about, what actually influences purchase decisions. So functional is an interesting one, right? Because, like, everything’s functional. Like food is functional. It has calories and it serves the function of giving me energy. So it’s a spectrum of sort of functionality. And I would say there are the big ones that are functional. Protein fiber is really having a surging now. But these are like, big functional trends that more or less everyone, or just massive, massive swaths of people, are very, very interested in, and just that’s not going away, all the way down to the micro, which is like, let’s say adaptogens, you know. And so there’s a subset of people who live in San Francisco or Boston or New York or whatever, and they’ll buy this stuff online. And but is it? Is that going to really do well in an Oklahoma City? Costco? No. So it’s part. Part of it depends on, like, what kind of a what size of business you want, you want to build. I would say there are a couple cases. Collagen is probably a good one, where something was niche and then got taken mainstream. Creatine is another good example that’s going through that same growth curve as well. It was niche now it’s mostly mainstream, and I would say in a year’s time it’ll be probably fully mainstream. So sometimes you have these breakout functional and nutritional trends, and if you can catch those, it’s it’s awesome, right? Because you’re arbitraging. It’s not that competitive. And then you get to ride that wave. For us, we’re not willing to bet the farm on something like that. So we, we want to lead with that former category of protein, fiber, clean label, like, these are all key things that we want to have front and center. And then we’ll say, Oh, by the way, like, plus, you know, magnesium and lines man, this and that, but you don’t need that plus to close the sale. Most sales, actually, you close before that’s even a consideration, and it’s like, oh, I don’t, I don’t care, or I do care. Either way, we close the sale because it’s a affordably priced, high protein, clean label, low sugar product. So there’s so much there, right? But I would say, in summary, I believe the best move is to focus on functional inputs that are just here to stay and add as like a kicker, maybe trendier, more niche micronutrients for the people who want to double click on that. Yeah.
Kara Goldin 25:00
Definitely and also taste right? I’m sure you’ve seen that as well. If it doesn’t taste good, even if it’s the you know, it’s going to give your brain all kinds of you know, focus and make you smarter and this and this and this, if it doesn’t taste good, what have you seen, especially in the Costco consumers, you’ve landed that account nationally.
Will Nitze 25:27
I mean, yeah, that’s absolutely right. It has to taste good. And, I mean, we’re it’s so category specific, right? So bars are just inherently very functional category, like people, when people think of bars, they think of protein bars. And it’s like, versus like, a tortilla chip. No, one’s like, oh, a tort a protein tortilla? No, it’s a tortilla chip that you put in salsa. So you’re they’re already anchored more in the functional direction and less in the taste direction for that category. But it’s never the case that taste isn’t incredibly important. I mean, RX bar, right? Like is a good example of they sacrifice some, maybe texture things and taste things to to truly go full bore on the simple, simplicity angle, and built a huge business. So it’s taste is, of course, not the whole story, and people are willing to give a bit, but not that much, not that much, like if you’re a betting person, you wouldn’t, you wouldn’t bet on that. So, I mean, our challenge is, how do you make something taste good with no sugar next to no sugar? So if we, if we want to include one gram of sugar to two grams of sugar. Well, that’s just, it’s quite hard to make that taste good without using something like sucralose. You know, a lab made sweetener which we don’t use, we use stevia plant extract. So, I mean, that just is extremely hard. But you have to, have to have to do it taste well. And this is especially, I go back to, like the Costco thing. Just picture you’re standing at a table. Someone’s walking up to you say, 12 grams plant protein, one gram sugar, eight grams fiber. They say, cool. Let me taste it. And you give it to them, and it isn’t good. Nothing you said prior matters. They’re just gonna walk right away. So that’s like the real world example of that.
Kara Goldin 27:24
It’s so true. I remember when we were hint is an unsweetened flavored water, and unsweetened was actually not in the dictionary early on, which as it was not sweetened, but we decided to call it unsweetened to make people actually think a little bit more about it. And we kept telling people, it’s not sweetened with anything. It’s unsweetened, and we would get into more conversations about it, like, what’s it sweetened with? Because they would try the product and they’d actually like it, but then they’d be used to actually having flavored water at the time. I mean, Vitamin Water was it right? And there wasn’t even a diet version back in 2005 and we started hint, but we had to sit there and and explain what it wasn’t sweetened with, and more than, than not, and crazy conversations, but if the product didn’t taste good, forget it. They wouldn’t have bought it anyway. It would have it wouldn’t have mattered what we would have been saying to them or describing to them. So 100% what you’re saying. So, so, so interesting. So one of the things that you mentioned briefly early on was the crowdfunding that you did. So what made that strategy work? Do you think, and how did you decide that this is what you were going to do, and how successful were you in that process?
Will Nitze 28:53
It was pretty simple. I had no money, so I was like, okay, my thought process was basically, how do I justify a pretty good valuation when I raise my first chunk of money from investors? And the best I could come up with was I need some sort of sales, some sort of traction in the marketplace. Because I’m a I had never started a company. I had no track record. There’s no reason someone should believe me. So sales, like, of course, tells the story much better than I could and so cool. How do I generate sales with no money? And crowdfunding is a way to do that. I would say, I would argue, a pretty good way to do that. The sort of dirty secret of crowdfunding is you actually kind of need some money to run a crowdfunding campaign to get more money. So I called, I had gotten connected with a guy who was just a very wealthy, successful guy and in the blueberry industry, random, because he was, I was talking about making a blueberry bar at one guy, and he said, Let me connect you with the king of blueberries. I was like, okay, and anyway, one thing led to another, and I was talking to him about it, and he said, are. Are you taking investment? I was like, not really, but I might need 10, 20k for to run this crowdfunding campaign. And so he wrote me this very small check. And then his friend wrote a small check. And so I cobbled together like 30 grand, which I needed. I needed to film the video for the Kickstarter, and I needed to incorporate the company, and there are just all these ticky tacky costs. Then we ran the Kickstarter, and it was we did between Kickstarter and Indiegogo, which was a spillover campaign. We sold roughly $90,000 in two months. And that was a wild I had never sold anything personally, and so we were like, Whoa. Okay, we just sold whatever it was, over 2000 orders. And then we figured out how to make the product. We actually, we had some kitchen prototypes, but we we needed that order, that bullets of orders, to convince the CO Packer we were talking to to get over the line. Say, Okay, we’ll produce this first MOQ run for you. And but by the way, your kitchen samples aren’t going to work for XYZ reason. So there was a couple months journey after the Kickstarter, where we got it. Production Line ready, got the first three SKUs. Production Line ready, made them, shipped them out. I mean, it was a hellish first couple months, because we were just building the airplane on the way down, but got all those out, and then had some excess inventory, and then some subset repurchased, and then the flywheel had kind of started and but it was definitely a cold start problem there, because we didn’t want to go the route of make it in your kitchen or make it in a Commissary Kitchen, and then in two years, we’re like, we want to let’s we’re going to fail fantastically, or it’s going to work, and we’d rather go big early.
Kara Goldin 31:55
Yeah, definitely, definitely. So what advice would you give founders building and crowded categories as as you’ve taken on who feel like everything’s already done. Why bother you know what? What do you think, really, it takes in order to to, I guess, do what, what you’ve done. I mean, I think you’ve done more than just launch a me too product. You’ve spent a lot of time as as you talked about in the spreadsheets, and really analyzing a lot of different products and being unique and being different, and continuing to make sure that you’re developing something that not only tastes great, but also is kind of, you know, hitting the consumer that’s that’s actually going to purchase online or pull it off the shelves at Costco or other stores. But what would you say is, is really key today, when you when you look at what you’ve been able to accomplish
Will Nitze 33:04
totally I can tell you how I look at so when I see a big, crowded category, I think, hell yeah. Like, let’s go straight into that, because there’s a reason it’s it’s crowded there. The market is big. A lot of people buy this stuff. And you can either take innovation risk or you can take execution risk. Innovation risk is like the Airbnb example, right, where the market doesn’t exist. I’m going to go out on a limb, and if I’m right, I’m really, really, really, really right, but if I’m wrong, this is a zero and like, I don’t want to take that risk. I would much rather take execution risk, which is, I’m going to inject myself into this big market, and I think I can out compete everyone. I think I can operate better than other people in this market. I just have a bias towards that. What I would say is every big category has meaningfully big subcategories. So if you look at, you know, water would be another example, but like bars, it’s bars. Isn’t just bars. It’s, well, there’s granola bars and there’s protein bars. And then what? Within protein bars, there’s animal based protein bars and there’s plant based protein bar. And then if we were to drill further within plant based protein bars, there’s, like, high protein 20 plus, dirty label. And there’s mid tier, you know, clean label. And there’s even, like, low tier, clean and dirty. Let like, there’s a whole tree that goes in. And what I look for is basically arbitrage opportunities. So where it’s not so much that how competitive the any spaces, it’s the the competitiveness to total addressable market ratio. So where is the market? Much bigger than it is competitive. Market size much bigger. So in my opinion, plant protein bars has a very favorable ratio. So the market. Is quite big for how uncompetitive it is, and that is where we live. So, I mean, just think of how many like, big plant protein bars are there. There’s like, none. There’s like, you can count them all on one hand. So that’s kind of wild, because it’s actually quite a big market. So I would just say that would be the advice, I would say, like, fall track down that tree that like, sort of sub category tree for any big market, and look for things that have a favorable ratio there. Yeah.
Kara Goldin 35:32
And also be able to explain it better, because I do think that to your point, there’s a lot of marketers, or want to be marketers, out there that are maybe not sort of taking the entire audience into account and speaking on a different level. And can you actually do that better, too, and package it better and do all of the things overall that’s necessary so so will thank you so much for coming on. Really appreciate it. Will Nitze, founder and CEO of IQBAR, such a great product company. I’m so impressed what you there’s so much to talk about. You’ve done this with a very small team as well, and have been able to kill it and available in Costco nationally, as well as online and other retailers too. I love how intentional you’ve been about the focus and doing what’s right and sharing all of this with us today. So really appreciate it. Well. Thank you again, and thanks everyone for listening until next time on the Kara Goldin show, thanks again for listening to the Kara Goldin show. If you would please give us a review and feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit. And of course, feel free to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode of our podcast. Just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms at Kara Goldin, I would love to hear from you too. So feel free to DM me, and if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my Wall Street Journal, best selling book, undaunted, where I share more about my journey, including founding and building hint, we are here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Thanks for listening, and goodbye for now.