[00:00:28] Jay: Hi everyone. Welcome to The First Customer Podcast. My name's Jay Aigner.

Today I am lucky enough to be joined by Jason Vego, co-founder and CEO of Bevz. Jason. Hello my friend. How are you?

[00:00:38] Jason: I am good. How are you?

[00:00:39] Jay: Good. If you're just listening to this, you're missing out on, Jason's sweet mustache. I gotta say it's a solid 'stache. You got there, brother? is that the LA 'stache?

Is that you're in California, right?

[00:00:49] Jason: I am in California. It is a girlfriend-likes-mustache mustache. So that is what you're saying. It's grown on me though, and

[00:00:58] Jay: Literally,

[00:00:58] Jason: kept it. So it's literally pun intended, grown on me and I.

[00:01:03] Jay: you go.

[00:01:04] Jason: while I think

[00:01:05] Jay: I do the cl

[00:01:06] Jason: investors hate.

[00:01:07] Jay: I do the classic thing where like I'll shave my beard into like funny configurations and show my wife and she never settles in the mustache. Like she's always like, just get that off your face so you, can pull it off very well though. man.

tell me where did you grow up and did that have an impact on you being an entrepreneur later in life?

[00:01:24] Jason: I don't think the location necessarily made me want to be an entrepreneur, but I think the way I grew up did. My dad is an entrepreneur, my mom is not, but seeing my dad own a small business, he does rehabilitation counseling, so very different from what I'm doing in tech today. But seeing someone own their own business dictate their schedule.

Handle pressures and excitement and challenges definitely I think was the key for me. But not necessarily Los Angeles in and of itself, though. I can't say what it's like to live somewhere else, so I don't know.

[00:01:57] Jay: There you go. Well, and your business could maybe lead into your father's business, right? Like you got, if there's they drink enough alcoholic beverages, they might need your dad. So we're all a family, you know, keeping it together. I like that.

[00:02:08] Jason: And real quick, just 'cause I have to, based on that comment, is my brother. It ends up being a workers' compensation counselor and literally does what you said. So they do share business and I guess I just need to keep this going long enough so I can be part of the family, I guess.

[00:02:24] Jay: Yeah. You'll be like the top of funnel guy. You know, you're

[00:02:27] Jason: Yeah,

[00:02:27] Jay: do we get new, people from? And you're

[00:02:30] Jason: yeah.

[00:02:30] Jay: I'm working on it. I'm doing

[00:02:32] Jason: Yeah.

[00:02:33] Jay: well. I love the convenience store tech. I love the, you know, alcohol distribution tech. I think it's very interesting and different, and I love kind of the niche approach to it.

but tell me like, how did you get there? How did you come up with this idea? Like, what made you wanna start it? And you have a story about the Firefox browser that, maybe we can go into at some point. But, where did it all come from, man? and what made you decide to start it?

[00:02:58] Jason: Yeah, so I won't give the whole story of I was selling lemonade on the corner when I was a kid, though I was selling lemonade on the corner when I was a kid. But it really sort of, the kickoff was I worked at a large company called Citrix, big Technology company. I. Great experience, but I got bored pretty early on at Citrix and always wanted to start something.

What I was really enticed by and excited about was bringing large scale technology to small businesses and like the stores right around my neighborhood. So I start walking around seeing who, who needs help. Is it the coffee shop? Is at the retail shop? Is at the dog grooming shop. That's where I landed actually.

So I decide I have a dog. It is not that easy to do normal things like book my groomer, pay and tip, all of that. So I did start a software platform for local dog groomers that failed for every reason you could think of. I take most blame, mainly skillset. Experience, dunno what I'm doing. A big lack of. Of skills in this space.

So I know what it's like to have a dog. I don't know what it's like to run a dog grooming shop. So that led me to my next company, which is Bevz. And my co-founder owns and operates s liquor stores and convenience stores. I've known him since I've been six years old, and he's the one who really came up with the idea of no one's building technology for liquor and convenience stores, and it's mainly mom and pops.

And that aligned obviously really well with. What I always wanted to do and then filled the gap of one. I knocked my failure out of the way. Hopefully, that's my biggest one to date. Hopefully I keep Bevz going, but have the missing piece of the industry knowledge, and that's how I got to Bevz.

[00:04:36] Jay: Maybe we should, maybe it should be titled, you know, from. From, corner Lemonade to Mike's Hard Lemonade or something. You say you've sold lemonade, in many forms over the years. well, so tell me specifically what is the problem that Bevz solves with these mom and pop shops?

[00:04:52] Jason: Yeah. So one last piece of maybe that journey I consider Bev's two companies in a way. The first company was a marketplace, so think DoorDash for liquor stores and convenience stores. So literally a copy of that. So that problem I. I would argue there wasn't really a problem. Consumers wanted to buy these items.

There were preexisting apps at work. We were trying to be a little bit better. When we pivoted, we found the real problem, which is convenience stores have about five to 10,000 unique SKUs. They get changes to those SKUs on a weekly basis. Hundreds of cases of items delivered. They have no infrastructure tools, technology to track that inventory.

Typically one clerk working there on a day-to-day basis, and they always have few of those items. 'cause that's the whole point of a convenience store, right? Which is a lot of different items, but a small shop and they lose out on business all the time. So that is people coming into the store, they run out of items that the customer wants, items they should have had, that the customer wants e-commerce orders that they're not taking advantage of.

And so the real core problem is stores are losing, at least across the US billions of dollars in missed opportunity. 'cause they don't have the right items at the right time.

[00:06:01] Jay: And how does Bevz solve that problem?

[00:06:05] Jason: We're in progress. I would say. We haven't fully solved the problem just yet, but what we're building is a digital inventory management and e-commerce platform. So we're trying to essentially track and automate the way they buy inventory from their distributors. They sell it in store through a point of sale system, and then they sell it online through e-commerce and delivery apps.

And so doing math here, if we can really efficiently and effectively track and automate the way they buy and sell goods, then we know what's in stock at all times. We can automate reordering. It's been a complicated process to get there. Honestly, first off that. Pitch I just gave you did not resonate with our customer.

So talking about the first customer, they were not sold on it, it was just it over complicated things. What they really wanted in the early days was e-commerce. So we started off in what I just said out loud, the re reverse. We started off giving them other e-commerce and delivery ups, helping them make more money online.

And over the last few years we've been adding the, what I call the three-legged stool. What do they sell in store? What do they sell online and what are they buying? And so that's what we're trying to solve today. Still not fully there. A lot of different pieces of technology, both software and now hardware.

But we're, we're chipping away and we have about 700 plus stores across the US and so, we're doing something right. I think.

[00:07:23] Jay: Doing something. I mean, I think you know, shortcutted a lot of market research and just looking for the pain points by having a co-founder. Right. I mean, how much has that, how much have you leaned on him for kind of your pro, you know, what your product should be and what your customers may eventually end up wanting?

[00:07:44] Jason: Yeah, so in the early days. 98%, right? Like it would just be picking his brain and seeing his store and learning from it, especially when we started off in just California. But over time, that actually became a tricky method where I frankly probably started to rely on him too much, which was, wait, now that we're at 100, 300, 500 stores.

He's a savvy retailer, but you can't rely on one single retailer to represent hundreds, if not thousands. And then this is a compliment him. He's maybe too savvy sometimes, which is, he doesn't represent the average mom and pop liquor convenience store owner across the us. And so we still always take his feedback.

We do all the testing in his store, a hundred percent. Early days, absolutely. We skipped a lot of those steps. Of course, we did like market research, we found stats, we figured out inventory, pricing, all of that. But ultimately, like having a co-founder that is your customer and being able to utilize a real existing retail location was an edge for sure.

No question.

[00:08:49] Jay: Yeah. A lot of people don't have that, luxury. How long you guys been in business now? How long you been building this thing?

[00:08:55] Jason: So started building in 2019. Went to market in January, 2020. So interesting time to be an alcohol related business, which also confused us because we were doing too many deliveries in 2020 thinking we just got product market fit. We nailed it, but there was the pandemic confusing us. And then we really took 2021 to.

Kind of figure out what we need to do and then relaunched in 2022. So I consider the new business of BES as summer 2022, but we've really been working on it since 2019, so going on six years now.

[00:09:30] Jay: And how are you guys kinda competing with the existing players in the space? I mean, there has to be something off the shelf or something that somebody's built over the. Decades or, you know, whatever the internet's been around that we've had businesses like how are you guys this new guy in town making any sort of, in a dent in an industry that's probably had some pretty big players in it for a while?

[00:09:52] Jason: Yeah, so the actual answer is there's not a lot of competition in our very specific space. So there are operating systems, there are inventory management systems, there are e-commerce solutions that exist all over. But like, let's take point of sale systems, for example, square toast clover. These are not.

Effective solutions for liquor and convenience stores. Almost none of our stores have those. They use other POS systems. So we tend to find, even today, a year or two ago, even less today, our biggest competition tends to be the store doing nothing. Not really. Doing any sort of operating system. They buy goods.

They don't put them in the point of sale system. People walk in, they sell what they sell. If they run out of things, they run out. That is our core competitor. Is the store not doing anything? What we are starting to find my biggest competitor that is. Starting to bubble up is a lot of the point of sale systems who have uplevel a lot of not.

There are a lot of bad point of sale systems out there. The ones who are starting to embrace e-commerce, try and digitize their inventory, really sort of automate stuff. If you have a great POS already, we do have a few pieces that are better, but we don't dramatically transform your business if you're doing nothing.

There's that, and then there are a few competitors who have specifically popped up that are basically doing exactly what we're doing. The last piece that I think gives us an edge or maybe a wedge is no one's really targeting the independently operated small chain stores. They're just really hard to get to.

They're primarily one off, two off, right. And so we had a competitor that we were competing and they decided to go up, market, sell, mid-market, and we never see them ever. We think we're in a cooler spot, which is. 71% of the market is independently operated in small chains. So there's bigger market opportunity and they probably are looking at us like, what are they doing?

Trying to sell to one-off convenience stores with venture capital money. But we like where we've chosen, I think.

[00:11:49] Jay: I like that. Do you put any stock into like your personal brand yourself versus kind of the company? Like do you try to promote, like what are you doing as a business owner, whatever, just you know, Jason, you know, being Jason online, like how do you attack personal brand and like is it something you give much stock in.

[00:12:12] Jason: Yeah, this podcast, just this one. No other podcast.

[00:12:17] Jay: you. I appreciate I'm your only vehicle for anyone to know about you, so I'll make sure everyone has a great, version of Jason in their head.

[00:12:25] Jason: Thank you. I'll do my best today. So earlier career, I was trying to do that a lot more, especially when I was pivoting out of big tech and I wanted to be more entrepreneurial. over time I've kind of, I. Done less. And I think it's mainly due to our customer. So like our customer, liquor and convenience store owners are not heavy on social media.

If they are as individuals, not as, like, their company does not have like an Instagram page. And the more I post on LinkedIn, Twitter, et cetera, it does not help me get more customers. So for a long time I did very little. Where you'll catch me doing more podcast or speaking events or things like that.

We'll be a little bit conferences, conventions, things like that. But still, even then, we don't wanna go to the big convention where seven 11 is. We're trying to find these small ones where the mom and pops are not a ton of 'em, or we just haven't found the right ones. What I'm doing now is as I raise money, I try and at least present myself and Bevz as a very strong, viable business.

So. I am doing more of this now because investors tend to find me on the LinkedIns of the world, but I don't do a ton of it. And I think maybe I'll look back and regret that a little bit on branding myself outside of Bevz. But for now it is, I live and breathe Bevz and that is my brand. and, I know a lot about convenience stores.

[00:13:49] Jay: I mean, you had a. You have the best answer for not doing it Probably that I've ever heard, which is like my customers aren't there. So like that makes a lot of sense, right? I mean, you talk to

[00:13:56] Jason: Yeah.

[00:13:58] Jay: Tech companies or whatever and it's like, oh well you gotta be on there. 'cause you're like, I'm on there 'cause my customers are on there, but yours aren't.

So it makes a lot of sense to spend. I mean, it's the number one thing anybody will tell you that successful is. Just be where your customers are. Like, it doesn't, you're never gonna sell something if you're not directly to your customers. Like, it's the simplest, probably scariest, but like, you know, just number one rule that everybody says over and over again.

I like the fact that you're not focusing on it if that's not, you know, where your customer, do you find that the guys that are doing nothing, the guys that are just, you know, having people, they stock up, they sell out, they do whatever. That would've to be more of like an educational sale, right?

Like you have to like ex, you have to very explicitly tell them why they'd even be bothering talking to you, right? Because they're just, I would assume most likely gonna just be like, get outta my face. I'm trying to sell stuff as much as I can. 'cause that's all we do, right? I mean, how do you break down that barrier of like, I actually have something that may provide you value.

Like how are you getting through the door and getting to these people to actually get them to pay you attention?

[00:15:06] Jason: Yeah, so there's gonna always be this like bottom 10% of our market that's just not ready. They need to hand the keys to their. Son or daughter, they need to sell the store. they will be sort of phased out, taking away the 10%. There's still a big chunk of, I'm not doing anything. My store's doing fine.

Why do I need help? Let's also take aside the stores that have struggled through the pandemic that are losing money, that are having challenges. If they already are, then obviously are pitches a little bit better, but assuming they're doing pretty good. The day-to-day the customers walk into the store, but they are just not doing anything.

Really, what we've tried to do is flex around our business model to get them in the door. So I used the word wedge earlier too, which is as much as when I think of. The problem I'm trying to solve, I would've rather started with how do they buy the goods? 'cause you can't sell them if you don't buy them first.

Then how do you sell them in store where a majority of sales happen? And then how do you sell online? We went in reverse order because it was an easier wedge in. We charge a very low monthly fee. We give a monthly to get onboarded, and then we help them make more money, even if it's not a lot. That's really the key, which is give this a shot.

Selling online at a bare minimum. Your other competitors, like your other liquor stores, they're online. So you have customers that come into your store and then they go home and they wanna order delivery, and they go to your competitor. And then they're gonna start going to your competitor in person. So give it a shot.

Be visible where your customers are. You don't have to do anything with DoorDash, GrubHub, we basically do all the work for you. You have to figure out your menu one time, right. But after that, we bring you the customers, basically. You have very little to lose. What I'll finish off with is. We took that a little too far at one point and it backfired.

Meaning we over promise the ability to make more money online. So if I come to you and say, you're gonna make more money online, 'cause the average store at Bev's is making a couple thousand bucks a month. Well, when you're the store who made 12 or 42 or 18 or whatever, you're really upset. So we've tried to tail that back a little is we can't guarantee you e-commerce, but you should at least give it a shot.

And so that's how we do it today.

[00:17:13] Jay: I love that. so how did you get your first customer

[00:17:17] Jason: Door to door selling to liquor store. So, I mean, the cheat answer is Victor, my co-founder, was the first customer, and then our second customer was Victor, my co-founder who owns two stores. So. Valley Liquor in Van Nuys and Ventura, California. Then really the answer is the third customers were his family members, so we went to his family and friends outside of that.

We literally went door to door in California locations. That was really his specialty at the time, and we would pitch them on the idea easier to sell back then. Harder in some ways. We were a marketplace back then. No upfront fee, no subscription. So you really felt like you had nothing to lose. Sign up with Bevz, you make money, you don't make money, but you never lose When we pivoted a little harder 'cause it's pay us monthly to use this software.

But yeah, short answer is door to get these mom and pops to sign up and we still do, about two thirds of our sales. Getting more phone based, but half to two thirds of our sales are still have some in-person component. Even today?

[00:18:23] Jay: Are you out there doing this still?

[00:18:25] Jason: Not anymore. Not anymore. Luckily less of it even back then. I would say I've brought in a good team over the years and so an example is when push comes to shove and we really want a one. You made the comment earlier, something I didn't do enough in the days of bed was talking to more customers. I always struggled because.

Once we hit several hundred, I didn't know how to prioritize it. It's not like one customer was better because the revenue was the same from all of 'em. In a subscription model, we do now have a revenue share model, so there are some stores we earn more, but for years it was, you're a giant store, you're a small store, you pay us $99 a month.

So I really struggled and then I did almost very. Little conversation with customers, but this last week, one of my co-founders, he's a little better at the selling part with retailers. I'm a little bit better at the customer support side, so as we're fundraising now, really trying to get closer to our customers.

He did a trip even though he has not been in the field selling for the last year and a half. And then I am taking more customer calls, as of lately. So about a call a day. But no, I'm not in the field very often and I would argue. Not my best skillset, when it comes to this startup, at least.

[00:19:38] Jay: you told me an interesting story beforehand about. Firefox because I was wondering why the hell in 2020 five's default browser would be Firefox. and you had a great answer for that. what, why do you use Firefox today Still?

[00:19:55] Jason: I use Firefox because I am not the biggest risk taker. When it comes to startup founders, which was, I had a big tech job, it paid really well. I was very comfortable and as I was starting to get to a point where I was really bored in the job, I wanted to do startups, but I was not ready to just do the full plunge, like, I'm leaving my big tech company, I wanna start this company.

Called Bevz and I'm just gonna go all in with no money, no salary, no nothing. That wasn't an option for me. And so I started doing Bevz while working at Citrix, I wanted to keep things very separate, so I was already using Chrome, so that would've been my default. So I chose Firefox to be everything. Bevz.

I did about nine months of both companies. I would argue I was the worst. At both the last few months, I was also in school, which is for another day. I was getting my MBA, and when I tried to do all three, I really sucked at all of 'em. So by the end, I had so much on Firefox that I've already built tabs, links, et cetera.

I just stayed there forever and that was in 2020 and I've been Firefox ever since.

[00:21:03] Jay: That may be like, that should be like an ad for Firefox. Like keep your stuff separate. Like, I don't know, there, this feels like there's something you should reach out to Who? Who even runs Firefox anymore? Is it Mozilla still or do they own Firefox? I

[00:21:14] Jason: I think they still own it. I called it Mozilla the other day and someone said, one, why do you use Firefox? And two, why do you call it Mozilla? How old are you? And so that's the world I live in. A lot of haters

[00:21:28] Jay: I mean, yeah, they probably, that person probably didn't even know what Netscape Navigator was, so, you know, I mean,

[00:21:33] Jason: calling up.

[00:21:34] Jay: gonna, whatever. All right. I have one more question for you. Non-business related. And by the way, you've been very like, vulnerable with your answers, which I appreciate.

You've said a lot of things that you did wrong and that like you learned from. And I love that, in a conversation like this because most of the time people learn from failures instead of success. And like, it's very easy to just brush that off and be like, Hey, I am this awesome founder guy who's done nothing, but, and so like, I appreciate the fact that you've been, you know, pretty open and honest, and transparent about that.

I think people will like that. non Bevz related, non-business related. Just Jason b and Jason, if you do anything on Earth and you knew you wouldn't fail, what would it be?

[00:22:13] Jason: Do anything on earth and I knew I wouldn't fail.

Can I ask a question to your question?

[00:22:23] Jay: Oh my God. allow it. I'll allow it.

[00:22:26] Jason: All right. I think it's a good question is this thing going to pay the bills? can I assume in your question that I can financially be viable and survive regardless of money making in this question?

[00:22:41] Jay: major part of the question, which means you can't fail. So like yes, is the an like, yes. There's

[00:22:48] Jason: All right.

[00:22:48] Jay: here, so is whatever you would want to do that you may or may not be doing because I. You're afraid that you would fail, or maybe it's just something outlandish. Like a lot of people say, go to space.

Right? Like, that's a great answer, but like, where other people are very altruistic and say they wanna do something, so, but like, it's just you being you. what would drive you if you knew you wouldn't fail?

[00:23:07] Jason: Yeah, it wouldn't be far off from what I'm doing now, but more broad and more helpful, so. I would love to make more of an impact to just more people, right? I think the failures, the learnings, the lessons. Like I find a personal pride and energy when I've helped a liquor or convenience store really amp up their business.

I think what we're doing today is minimal. I hope what we're doing long term is gonna be game changing. Where stores that would not have made it will because of us, but if I could do anything, it would be something in the non-profit realm of really helping a lot of people who didn't grow up with the same things I did.

I mean, like I grew up with. Arguably, like I couldn't have asked for a better life, right? Like growing up, parents were, if you need tutoring, we will get it. You wanna play sports, you can do it. Comfortable, safe, all of the above. Interestingly, most of my friends growing up, not at all the case, so I just grew up around that.

And so short answer would be nonprofit in some way. What that would be specifically. I do love helping small businesses. I think they're a pillar of a lot of these communities. I don't know if it would be ones that serve alcohol and drugs necessarily. Maybe some more helpful ones in the healthcare related sector, but that's what I would do, assuming I'm still making enough money to pay the bills live comfortably.

I, yeah, in this fixed scenario. All right. I'm rich too then. Yeah. Count me in. Wow.

[00:24:41] Jay: bro. You're not failing at all. This is all wins for you. All right, Jason, you're fantastic. if people want to find more about you and reach out directly, how do they do that? I.

[00:24:51] Jason: LinkedIn is where I am at the most, so you can catch me on LinkedIn. I'm happy to provide my email, which is jason@bevz.com, so you probably could have figured it out anyways, other than that, yeah, LinkedIn and our website, bevz.com is where you'll learn what we're doing.

[00:25:07] Jay: Beautiful. I love that. By the way, when you go to connect somebody on LinkedIn, they're like, you need the email address. I'm like, well, it's probably Dave at whatever the name of this company is and it always is Dave at whatever. So yes, I think somebody could have figured that out. Jason, you're awesome man.

Thank you. We wish you the best of luck and thanks for coming on. Have a good rest of your week. All right, thanks

[00:25:23] Jason: Thanks, you too.

[00:25:24] Jay: then. See you. 

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