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Austin Robinson, PhD and Sofia Sanchez, RD co-founded Beet Strong, a company that makes protein brownies with real ingredients like dark chocolate and almonds, contain no added sugar and about one serving of beets. Beets contain a compound that promote blood vessel health, Austin’s area of research.
City where you’re from: Originally from Chicago, now re-located to the Philly area
Hobbies: Exercise!, cooking, gardening
Favorite quote:
“Whether you think you can or you can’t – you’re right” – Henry Ford
Twitters:
- Austin @ubuntu_fitness
- Sofia @sanchezsofia
Why did you decide to become an entrepreneur?
During Austin’s doctoral studies, he and Sofia began making protein chocolates for themselves to cut costs on buying pre-made protein bars and to avoid junk in popular protein bar products at grocery stores. “Our school was hosting a startup competition, so we thought ‘What the heck, let’s enter our bars.’ We ended up winning second place out of 60 teams and decided to make it into a real business,” says Dr. Robinson.
Who were your biggest influences? Was there a defining moment in your life?
Gary Vaynerchuk, an NYC entrepreneur has some incredibly motivational, inspiring and hilarious content on YouTube that we’ve come across, and his work has been pivotal in our business decisions. We’ve had a terrific support system through friends and family, and winning 2nd place in the startup competition led to many great Chicago-area business connections for feedback and advice.
Now
What are you working on? How did you come up with this idea?
We’ve been tinkering with our protein brownie. Right now we’re focusing on marketing and getting our name out there. As a nutritionist, Sofia understands the additives, oils and preservatives in many protein bar products and Austin has the expertise in exercise. They teamed up to create a delicious tasting nutrition product as something that they’d both enjoy.
How is your product/service different and unique? What has been your favorite moment with it? What’s the vision?
Beet-based nutrition products have been on the market for some time as a means to promote blood vessel health and exercise performance. However, many of these products don’t quantify how much beet is in their product (needed for athletes to dose for their exercise) or contain a lot of sugar or not enough protein. Our products uses responsibly-sourced ingredients like fair trade 100% dark chocolate, non-GMO and organic ingredients, and no added sugar. We use the highest quality, cold filtered beet powder that is lab-certified.
We love seeing the product go from conception to finished product and sales. Our alma mater, University of Illinois at Chicago, featured our product in a story, which generated our biggest sales to date. It was such a surprising experience to have real customers order from us across the country.
How do you uniquely market your company?
We’ve been experimenting with Instagram, Facebook ads, and creating short, captivating videos. We will also be launching an Influencer campaign in the next month or so.
What was your biggest failure and biggest success? What did you learn from them?
Perfecting our made-to-order operations has been more of a challenge than we thought. From changing our recipe to details on our packaging, we learned create mass numbers of bars was hurting us because if we changed one thing, we’d end up with a lot of leftover old inventory, which is not a good thing. Especially in the food business.
Value-add questions
Give the readers the best entrepreneurship advice you have.
Be open to feedback from others.
Teach us something about {internet marketing, social media ads, fundraising, sales funnels or another topic} Can you recommend any favorite websites to learn that topic?
Gary Vaynerchuk is an excellent, free resource on this subject.
While working on your project, have you come across any interesting bit of knowledge that you’d like to share?
Austin: “As a researcher in cardiovascular physiology, I am always coming across new scientific studies that give me ideas on new ingredients or flavors we can add to our healthy protein brownies”
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