บทถอดความฉบับเต็มของ SpeakEasy E4: Ben Wan

people's homes for the first month completely for free, just to validate the idea. And then at the end of that month, which was September 2019, we... launched the program and said, we're going to be offering memberships if anyone wants to continue, it's going to be $20 and love. And that was, that was our start. speaker-0: And that's interesting because what you did there, if I think about it in terms of traditional product development and marketing, you did some initial market research based on a perceived need in the marketplace. You followed up with ⁓ some thinking about what would the service be that would meet that need. And then you worked with some pilot people to find out how it would land. And then you did your pricing model, essentially, I'm assuming. I'm maybe giving it lot of, ⁓ you know, NBA type terminology. And do the motions that are prescribed. Yeah. Which is amazing. So here we are, however many years later, and six years later, I think, and you have grown. You've grown a lot. Want to talk about that and how. speaker-1: A little bit, but I totally agree. Yeah. I, we started as a side project and then I decided to go full time in 2021 after I graduated. And that summer was pivotal. We needed to turn it from a small project into a real business. And so our first form of marketing that we got the most amount of traction from, and we're lucky that we're this successful with it, was that summer of 2021, we went to a farmer's market every single week. And it was... probably multiple farmers markets. were going to all the local towns and we were trying to find who were our customer at the beginning. And we knew that obviously environmentalists, but where do we find them? speaker-0: And so you had a hypothesis that you then went out and did some field research to validate. speaker-1: And it works great. added 150 members in about three or four months of doing it. we went from having 15 members in 2019 to slow growth up to 50. And then all of a sudden we kind of started taking off. speaker-0: $20 a month. ⁓ speaker-1: So the pricing changed a little bit, which I can go into, we realized the key thing with the pricing was we could lock people in for a year. And we are completely bootstrapped. And so how are we going to fund getting a truck and getting a storage space and getting all the inventory? And so we decided very quickly after offering $20 a month, let's offer three month contracts and six month contracts and then annual contracts. And the annual contracts is what ultimately gave us our own little preezers, our seed, in order to get off the ground and purchase the things we need from a capital expenditure. Yeah, there you go. Let's get everything. speaker-0: Do you see it? So in terms of branding, did you find you needed to, I mean, nowadays it's easy to get a brand at anything, but did you find you needed to do branding very early on or how did you approach that? speaker-1: Back when we started, feel that branding for us was really about trying to get something that was super straightforward and understandable. And I think that's most small businesses, you know, it's not about having the one word, like, what does this mean? It's more of just like, this is what we get. And so we originally went by Hudson Composers. speaker-0: because it's the kiss. Keep it simple stupid. mean that's like so old school but it still works. speaker-1: Yeah, exactly. And so we didn't want to do anything fancy with the name. We wanted to make it so people understood what we did right away. And so we were Hudson Compost Services. And that's how we started. we eventually transitioned to just doing Hudson Compost as we became more of a household name in Westchester. ⁓ But yeah, I think for that beginning with just going to farmers markets and having conversations and learning What are people's wants and needs? And what do we need to either add to the service or what don't we need to add to the service we can take away and making it as distilled as possible? speaker-0: Okay, so product development is one side of it. And then go back to brand, how did you extend your brand to get more customers? Did it fall in your lap or was it a lot of hard work? speaker-1: I'd say every single customer that we had for the first two years, we at least had a five minute conversation with them. There were very few people that just signed up by themselves. And even if they signed up and we didn't know who they were, we would reach out to them. And we would say, how did you hear about us? Or how can we help you? How's your first week going? Is there anything else that we can do for you? And it was super catered because we didn't have product market fit. We were just trying to figure out. Like what should we be providing the customer? So yeah, so the first 50 customers, ⁓ when we had no marketing, no brand, was basically, was just the 50 customers that we had. I'd say those customers with all within Hastings. And then when we expanded that summer that I went full time, we decided to open it up to the surrounding towns. And really it was Dobbs Ferry, Irvington and Tarrytown. ⁓ and. speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: Yeah, as we progressed, think those conversations were so essential. Yeah, so we went to all those farmers market. speaker-0: Ian Dobbsferry and Irving... ...farmers markets again. Okay. So your primary selling vehicle was farmers markets. How about word of mouth? Because I think one of the things that was very good for us at Catalysis is we got lucky with our first few projects, but then customers saw it and said, ⁓ I want that. ⁓ I want that. And so word of mouth marketing was very successful for us when we were bootstrapping. How about for you? speaker-1: Absolutely. ⁓ Word of mouth marketing for us was pivotal, but we had to reach a certain critical mass. And the reason that we realized, or what ultimately started pushing that word of mouth marketing was our bins being left out on the curb once a week,

every week. so certain neighborhoods we realized, once we had one or two customers, they would all of a sudden quickly jump up to Viber 6. speaker-0: you use your bins as a marketing vehicle? you put a website on? speaker-1: And so we had a sticker with the website. We had a nice little tagline. It said who this bin belonged to. It also said our pricing was less than a dollar a day. And so there were all these little things on the bin that we tried to add because we realized in the how did you hear about us quack, right? On the sign up form, I think it over 35 % of people said they heard about us from the bin. Yes. And those, and those neighbors. speaker-0: So being in people's And neighbors that they trusted. was community based. Exactly. So community based marketing and being very clear about your offering and getting the name and an easy access model for signing up. Yeah. Did you do anything else ⁓ like for non-customers, any kind of guerrilla marketing activities early on? speaker-1: Yeah, so we, as I think most small businesses try to do at some point, did door-to-door marketing a little bit. Being from the neighborhood that I grew up in, we didn't have too many door-to-door marketers coming when I was a kid to my house, and so we did it, but people didn't like it. It wasn't the best idea. It gave the privacy. Yeah, exactly. And so we had to transition a little bit. speaker-0: front door spam. speaker-1: Yeah, you know, and we're always like, what time is best to go? It's like, if we go at dinner time, they're pissed where they're at. We're knocking on their door at dinner, but if you go a different time, they're not there. So we transitioned away from door to door marketing and started to do another classic business strategy, which was everyday direct mail. And so through USPS, we tried to just get more awareness. Once we had a little bit money in the bank, we said, okay, let's put $1,000 toward this let's make some really nice compelling flyers Yeah And send them out and see how does that affect our web traffic? How are people talking about us and does it increase the amount of trial members that we're getting? And it did it definitely did that was one of the things that worked out pretty well in terms of getting web traffic But the thing that was missing was it wasn't necessarily turning into conversions as much as we hoped. Okay, and so speaker-0: just say OK and div it. speaker-1: Just last year, we decided to put a decent amount of money, a true dedicated marketing budget. We had about $10,000 to spend over the course of two months. we wanted to see if we went about doing maybe five or six different channels from everyday direct marketing, paying for farmers markets as we have in the past, ⁓ doing things like getting little league sponsorships. It was a handful of things. How does that start to convert? And we realized that a lot of the marketing we did Even if we had those specific things on the, did you hear about this question? People were still selecting friends, neighbors, seeing the bin on the curb. ⁓ And so we realized that we could try to do all this direct marketing to get people to sign up passively without having that conversation. But ultimately it was our members that were closing the deal. ⁓ speaker-0: as a primary. Sure, I think that you also, you were creating awareness, which is necessary often. You create the awareness and then you have something or someone that can close the deal. You're priming the pipeline for your sales channel. speaker-1: Yeah, and even at the small level that we were at with only a couple hundred members and we were just in my hometown and the surrounding town, she still needs to that primate. ⁓ it was essential because when people came up to us at the farmers market, the highest likelihood that they were gonna sign up is if they already heard about us. They'd heard about you. And so we had plenty of people come up and just say like, ⁓ I heard about you, perfect, you're here, I'll sign up. speaker-0: So any fun things that you did because now you're in seven towns and almost a thousand? Well, towns. Twelve towns and almost a thousand subscribers. Yes. Which is amazing because if you think about that as a sustained revenue model, it's coming in unless their credit cards fail or however. So anything fun that you've done that you think that you would be proud of talking about? Any all-nighters? speaker-1: ⁓ Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's one crazy all-nighter that we had where exactly to the point that I was talking about before, we realized we needed to really instill those kind of community, like, tactics. And so we realized the bins were great. People would put them on their curb once a week. If you walked around on that day of week that we were collecting in a certain area, there was a crazy amount of visibility. But how about the other six days of the week? ⁓ and so we designed some yard signs. are these tiny little yard signs, just like security signs, cause we didn't want to be too, ⁓ like, Like an, Mayor. And so these are much smaller. They're only about eight inches across. and we. Texted every single one of our members. and we asked them, Hey, we have this cute little sign. We'd love to put it outside your yard. If you were okay with that. speaker-0: I'm like, yeah, running from- speaker-1: And it said, home, waste less. And it didn't even have sign up for Hudson compost. This is our pricing. It just had our Hudson compost bin in the middle. it was a way for our members to say that they were a part of something without forcing a brand or a company. speaker-0: Community of users or recognition. And a humble brag. Exactly. ⁓ speaker-1: And so the execution of getting that out was a little bit crazy. We had a supplier that we were buying all the signs from and ended up coming late. And we realized that it would be such a great opportunity to have these signs up and present for Halloween, being such a community. He walks around.

Everybody's walking around and kids are a great, ⁓ motivator and motivator. ⁓ and so speaker-0: Yeah, baby. speaker-1: We decided that we needed to have all these yard signs up before Halloween happened and they didn't come in until the Thursday before Halloween and Halloween's on a Friday. So we got them, we had dinner, we loaded everything into the truck at eight o'clock and we were putting yard signs out in 12 for 12 towns until six a.m. And then we made it and it was a little help from some coffee and Red Bull. speaker-0: pounds. Wow, but you made a So that's a couple of weeks ago. Have you seen any increased signups from that since then? Or have you seen any other benefits? speaker-1: So there were a couple sign ups from it, but the biggest benefit is realizing that your customers are incredible to market to. There's always more people to market to than your customers. And so most recently we had someone who is in an adjacent industry who we're thinking about partnering with and trying to offer maybe their services or work with them in some way. We're having a conversation with them just over email and they're like, ⁓ we saw your signs and loved the design. And it was. speaker-0: And were they a local company that you knew about? They're a national company. speaker-1: We're a national company. Crazy. Who happened to be in the area and of all the things that they saw, said, ⁓ yeah, we saw your signs. We even took a photo of them. speaker-0: So broader business ideas. So your good marketing ideas are having an impact beyond just your company. speaker-1: And it was very lucky, obviously, for this to happen, but I think it goes to show when you put in the crazy hours, sometimes it just, you know, the dice roll in your way. speaker-0: But you have a channel to home or from home, I guess I would say that's pretty amazing. Yeah. Cause that's something like look at Amazon, they're all subcontractors and they're always dropping things off and you're not a municipal trash company. You're a subscriber based profitable service from doing pickups. So anything that you have done, ⁓ otherwise marketing wise that seemed kind of, yeah, duh. After the fact, that head of the time. not? mean... speaker-1: Yeah, I think the biggest thing that we realized in the past couple years for a while, I had a sentiment of we're such a local business. We're so small. Instagram and Facebook marketing isn't going to work that well. We did a little bit of it and we didn't put enough time into it and did not get any results. ⁓ But what we realized is if we do a good job and invest time and resources into making Instagram and local content. It has such a high effectiveness rate for these small towns in terms of cost per impression. ⁓ And we didn't ultimately realize it, because I think we had some bad ads to begin with. then we finally spent some time. I got, barred a friend's pair of meta glasses and we made a POV video of the route. And so we were driving around, showing people what is actually being done. whole chain. Exactly. And really showing... what the service is that you'd be signing up for. And that video did incredible. We had about a month campaign where we were putting $20 around on average $20 a day. And we got a thousand visits to the websites and 20,000 impressions. And that was from a $600 campaign. That's pretty amazing. And so I think there is a lot of opportunity where if you're a small business where a lot of small businesses aren't doing that. And so even if you put a little time into making a high quality video and you spend some dollars on meta ads or whatever else social platform, there is opportunity. speaker-0: And so, and what I'm also hearing from you is it's hyperlocal. ⁓ Hyperlocal marketing, knowing your audience, knowing your community, and then growing it from there. So have you found as you've moved into new communities, you've discerned quirks that are specific to the other communities that you're working in? speaker-1: Yeah, I think it's a combination. think we've expanded in chunks. So we've had probably four different time periods where we've added different service areas. And I'd say within that batch, we've definitely tested different things, spending a little bit more on our members in one area, or spending a little bit more on just brand awareness. I would say ultimately trying to build the best model for expansion, kind of a one size fits all for these towns, at least within Westchester, is the goal. Because then we understand, okay, if we get an SBA loan for $20,000 this fall, what can we see in returns? And we know we have some type of model for expansion. speaker-0: Well, also that model, have you thought about taking that model and leveraging it for other products and services or helping out other small ⁓ composting businesses that you would never compete with, say in Arizona or Colorado? speaker-1: Yeah, most definitely. think one of the best resources that I was lucky enough to run across was the Community Compost Coalition. ⁓ And it's this group of over a hundred small compost haulers in the U.S. And there's this forum online where people are constantly asking questions and talking about their experiences and answering, what truck did you buy this year? And when you're at this scale, how did you do XYZ? And I think building that Community is really, really essential for trying to figure out what works in different places. speaker-0: So creating and sharing best practices. Yeah. And so I want to just talk, I'm pulling this up because you told me of a campaign that was hyper local ⁓ with post-it notes. And I think you should share that because I sounded ⁓ not very expensive other than labor. And was it effective? speaker-1: Definitely. So last fall ⁓ we were brainstorming and I haven't even mentioned him but my partner right now is Jude. He was a co-founder of the business that was gone for a few years in college and then came back. And so we are brainstorming and

trying to figure out what can we do to get people where they're thinking about trash. It's a very short- Yes, yes. Because we know who we're trying to attract but how can we try to speaker-0: when they're in the headspace. speaker-1: get the specific market exactly in their headspace when they're thinking about something that they could sign up for. ⁓ And so we've realized there are only a few times we're really consciously thinking about trash. And one of those moments throughout the week is when you have to put your trash out. And in Westchester, everyone has to take their 64 gallon bid and bring it to the curb every week to get picked up. And so we realized there's a small window where we could do marketing and we played around, we're trying to figure out how to do marketing on that, but we realized that if we just printed out Post-it notes and we made these oversized Post-it notes, we could put a little bit of ⁓ I'd say sassy ad saying, wow, that's a lot of trash. Have you thought about composting? So we basically went around for two weeks. And in every single town that we had services that we offered, we put a Post-It note right after the trash truck picked us up. speaker-0: you basically you were in an ambulance chase or you were as a speaker-1: We were a garbage, garbage, garbage truck. And so we were staying just far enough behind where they weren't really noticing, but we were slapping a Post-It note on every single house. We handed out like three or 4,000 Post-It notes ⁓ in specific areas that we deemed were our target. And we got plenty of buzz from it. One town called us and said, you're definitely not allowed to do this. So we had to stop truing it there. But the other towns in mind, which is great. Wow, I think that along with the that was one of the speaker-0: So one, was brand awareness, but two, did it lead to signups? speaker-1: Yeah, yeah, definitely and people reached out to us and they were like I got this thing on my trash can like who are you guys? And it was funny speaker-0: ⁓ I mean, here in Seattle, could do that. Well, I think all the bins are owned by, well, we have compost pickup, but I know towns, like Port Townsend, where they don't have compost, but you can go to a smaller bin. And so you could say, you could save money, and it's a win-win. Exactly. you pay to pick up your compost, you'd save money on your bin. And, you know, it's interesting, because some of these things we've done over the years with some big companies, too, but... It sounds like knowing your community, doing the market research, putting things out there that you can test and fail fast, that are not prohibitively expensive. You can tweak on the fly. Those are all good lessons learned. So I guess I would ask you from here, what's next as we finish up? speaker-1: Yeah. So we're definitely looking at trying to figure out what other services we can provide and how can we latch onto this idea that we do pickups for compost every single week and we're

profitable from it. So how can we add other services that this very niche set of consumers who are willing to pay for an accessory service would also like? so we're starting to expand and figure out speaker-0: and you're making money out of it. speaker-1: Are there other items, hard to recycle items? there anything else that you throw in your garbage? What else can we pick up? And potentially, what else can we drop off? If they're ready to go into their homes. ⁓ speaker-0: funny I think about that because you think, well, compost, do I want to buy something that would be clean, like paper towels? Cause the trucks got to be dirty and full of compost. How do you, you know, take your brand, which is compost, which is a very clean brand and we'll put links to it on the site, but like, how would you, you know, how would you square that circle in terms of products? Because you might have some that like, you know, fresh produce from the farmer's market versus compost going the other way. There's kind of an ooh factor, but also. They go together, so who knows? Yeah, how do you square that circle? speaker-1: Yeah, I think... speaker-0: You don't know. That's fine. I don't know. You don't have to. I would suggest that you start with your brand and if there's a brand loyalty and a brand trust, they'll accept that brand extension because they trust that you're going to be there when you say you're going to be there. You deliver what you say you're going to deliver and you delight them and sometimes you deliver more. Yeah. do you have examples of over delivering or providing surprises? speaker-1: Yeah, speaking of over delivering, which is a great segue, one of the things that we just tried kind of as a pilot last summer that we're going to start leaning into a little bit more, is we realized there is a decent amount of our members were asking for event services. And we didn't want to do event services because they're one-off, they're hard to schedule and all these things. And we were like, what else can we provide here to appease and give our customers the same? You solve this problem for them. And so we started building out event kits where on the same route that we're doing their normal collection, which is a five gallon bin that we pick up once a week, we would drop off a 23 gallon bin with signage explaining what composting is and what to put in this bin and a kit for parties. And so it was all your utensils, plates, cups, napkins, anything that you might need for a small party, a dinner party, or birthday party that you would have at your home. You could order from us and we made it free because we realized this is such a unique opportunity where our members will be over the moon that they got this free composting service where they can have their party and not worry about the waste and not worry about the cleanup. and they would be raving about us for all of the local people that are at this party. And so we started offering that. We had about 20 different events last year and we're gonna start ramping it up a little bit more, but we were trying to figure out how do we both push this and get a little bit more branding, because everything was unbranded, it was just kind of on pilot, and also try to get our members to talk about us even more. speaker-0: and turned into word of mouth marketing or sign ups from those events. He lived in the area. That's great. That's amazing, because I could use that service. ⁓ What about cans? I bet you people put those damn flavored water cans half full in your bins. Tell me. I go to a party and they're all left around and picking them up going, this is a dollar fifty worth of liquor and half of it is drunk. speaker-1: So from a cans perspective, did realize that very quickly. People didn't know where to put their recyclables. So we started giving an extra compulsive bag that you could put right on the side of your 23 gallon garbage party can. Recycling put all these here, people love the fact that they can come away from a party, which usually is such a high waste generating event and have nothing. speaker-0: and recycles. speaker-1: We picked up all the compost the next week on their pickup. The recycling went to their recycling and they had no trash. And it was got great, great responses from the people that participated. now it's about silt writing. speaker-0: Not only, but what you're doing there is you're taking something that's your core service and you're extending it not to something new, but you're extending what you already do and making it something that delights your customers. That's pretty amazing too. So adding on to the services that you're already offering and delighting your customers is pretty amazing. Giving ⁓ party supplies and pickup for no charge at this point. Do you think you might charge for it at some time? speaker-1: Right now, it's such a great marketing vehicle. Potentially if we get a crazy amount of people that want to sign up, but right now... speaker-0: That's so interesting, a dilemma to have. Is it a marketing expense or is it a revenue generator? It's like, wow, that's an amazing thing. Anything else you're doing that's delighting your customers or surprising them? speaker-1: Yeah, one big change that we had about a year or two in to our services. We first started by just doing the collection and we had places that we can go drop off the compost, but we weren't bringing the compost back to people. People were wondering, hey, I have this huge garden and I compost, so I obviously into food. Can we get some back? And we said, we don't really have the vehicles or the capacity to do that right now, but we'd love to look into it. And so once we started working directly with a large composter that was actually not even created until 2021. We started getting some of that compost back and the deal was we were dropping off compost for a small fee. They would process it, but they had an excess amount of compost. They didn't know

how to sell it and they didn't know where to put it. speaker-0: So you're paying to that part of your supply chain you're paying to get rid of your... speaker-1: Drop it off. Okay. The huge benefit was we were getting it back for free. For free. And so once we had the right vehicle to move that compost, we started doing compost drop-offs. And first we would have just an event where you said, hey, come pick up your compost dividend for the year. ⁓ so we would include that in the membership. ⁓ that's great. You could come get a five gallon bin. We could get the events out of it, get people talking and excited and members can meet each other. ⁓ speaker-0: make it feel very special. speaker-1: But then ultimately people wanted even more. And some members were saying, Hey, can I get a cubic yard? Can I get two cubic yards? And so we started a program two springs ago that was sign up ⁓ in early, early spring, late winter, February, March. ⁓ And at some point in the next few months, along our route using reverse logistics, once we dropped off the compost, we would build the truck back up with fresh compost and then bring it back to our members. And we started offering that and realizing this is such a great way to do more than just compost pickups. It's closing a loop and making us circular. And so now we even sell the memberships as circular organics memberships. ⁓ speaker-0: nosing the loop. refining your brand as well based on customer input and your ability to work. speaker-1: work it together. And that last piece to really close that loop is we even started a community seed bank. So people got that compost and some of them were like, oh, I'd love to get compost, but I don't really know what to do with it. We're like, you can put in your flowers, you can put it in a small garden. We were like, oh, well, seeds is the last thing that you need. And so if you're a Hudson compost member, not only can you put your scraps in the right place, but you can also get that compost back and grow more food with the seeds that we provide. speaker-0: That's all included in membership. Making the membership better with minimal cost to you. Yes. speaker-1: It's all included in the- focusing on how can we offer the most amount of value to our customers without having to increase our prices and without having to increase our expenses either. How can we be innovative? speaker-0: Right now, think our trash is being picked up while we're having this conversation. ⁓ my God, I love it. So what? You know what is kind of funny? That's a sound effects. Although your truck isn't that loud. So finally, I guess I'd like to say, ⁓ you talked about this as a cost-effective cocktail when you don't have a lot of money. And I think you're doing really cost-effective marketing, which is amazing seeing how your company has grown and where it's going. So here's to... delicious cost-effective cocktails. have a feeling this is the first time I've ever had a Beesney. And it actually seems healthy. Honey, syrup, lemon juice, and some June. speaker-1: And you're doing a great job. Cheers. Cheers. Thank you, Doug. speaker-0: Thanks for listening to this episode of Speak Easy. I hope you enjoyed our conversation or learned something from it. And I have a favor to ask. Please share us, like us, leave your comments. You know the game. And most of all, if you have any guests you'd like to suggest, please let us know. The full transcript and show notes are available at catalysis.com slash speak easy. Keep asking, keep listening, and most of all, keep learning.