Cobalt Co revenue, CEO Elle Shelley Black, team size, customer count, churn, and more in 2023.

hey folks my guest today is elle black a serial entrepreneur she launched her first company during her junior year of college and then built and sold her second company by early 30s today she's building cobalt dot co which helps connectors create to vet connect to vetted suppliers are you ready to take the top let's do this all right do you have some horror story here why is helping creators find good suppliers important to you oh my gosh i have so many horror stories uh actually just ask anyone who's ever tried to launch their own product um and i'm talking about things as easy as candles jewelry etc etc there are so many brilliant ideas that creators have getting them out of their head seems to be the easy part right everybody has figma everyone can spin up a design the hardest part is finding a supplier or a manufacturer that actually one wants to work with you and two can actually make your product and three is not in china um and so that's the problem that cobalt is solving um we're bringing manufacturers and suppliers from the us canada and latam to one place um vetting them and making it easy for anyone with an idea to launch their product by working directly with suppliers i want to make cap candles that smell like coffee so i don't have to drink as much coffee preserve my health who would you recommend that i use right now well we have so we have over 2500 suppliers in the platform um and when a creator wants to do that it's very easy to search for supplier based off of all of your unique uh requirements so what we learned about creators and quite frankly about the world that we want to create is that who makes your products really matter and so as we're vetting our suppliers we're pretty picky about who we let in we like suppliers that have humane working conditions that are in the u.s that are vegan that organic that are supply uh supply chain transparent uh that are family run that are proven uh that have unique products that aren't just another product that you're gonna find on amazon and so it really the how you find the right supplier for your coffee scented candle we've really made it easy for the creator to decide how much they care about those factors and then sort and find and connect and chat and order samples and get your product made all in one place interesting okay so it was obviously a marketplace motion do you just mention 2500 suppliers what does it mean like is it a lot of work first fire get on board and if it's not like how do you convince me get on board when you don't have a lot of volume yet coming from craters i don't know oh great question so what's unique about cobalt is that we offer low moq suppliers moq is the thing to know that's minimum order quantity um and that's really the question that everybody asks okay i want to launch a product how many do i have to buy in my first run um and low moq suppliers are pretty hard to find um and so we've done the hard part of aggregating all of these suppliers negotiating price points negotiating the terms getting them into the platform and offering low moq's for creators um and so our low our low low moq's are you know to the order of 25 right you want to do a custom cbd bath bomb um you can do 25 at you know 750 a bath bomb it's completely drop ship end and fulfillment you never touch the product um you actually work directly through the platform with the supplier to get the product delivered to get the product made and it goes directly to your customers all without leaving your house how many creators are signed up today yeah so what's fun about cobalt is we're still in this like waiting period right uh and we're we're still building all of the infrastructure and we have over 77 uh waitlisted creators slowly getting people off the wait list um and you know for everybody who emails me every day i'll get to you i promise uh but we like just we just like just show people how easy it is to actually you know launch your own brand and that's really the magic of what we're doing when did you start coding this l when did you start getting all this together what year we started doing it actually right before uh right before covid okay so like 20 late 2019-ish late 2019. yep and then of course it happened and uh we got lucky cobalt got lucky um because of everything that happened with kovid um what ended up happening is suppliers that used to not be willing to work with you know smaller brands creators because trade shows aren't happening because market isn't happening because of supply chain problems in china all of a sudden suppliers are totally willing to work with lower moq's um and so we're you know we're again aggregating all those suppliers doing the heavy lifting doing the research doing the vetting uh doing the negotiating on pricing doing the contracting pieces all the stuff that's really hard and makes it impossible for anyone to get started doing their own product we did all that for you and we're putting it right into the platform to connect directly with the suppliers got it so i totally understand the product i don't understand how you're building now today so it sounds like your pre-revenue when is launch when do you get your first paying customer well so yeah great question so we've been we've been having paying customers um it's just not in an open market place where anyone can do it um so we're we're vetting our customers and making sure that uh we can make them successful okay how many customers you have today we over the last year we've done over 177 product launches oh wow across how many creators 177. oh it's one to one yeah well right now it is yeah interesting why don't i i mean if you do one with one creator don't they want to come back and do another one a month later they yes you are exactly right they do but why is it a one-on-one ratio why haven't creators used you more than once over the past 12 months oh no no no no so sorry i thought you said how many customers do you have so we've done 177 customers that have launched their first product um 36 of them have launched a second product and of that 36 percent another 80 percent have done three or more oh got it you said 177 product launches that was not right got it got it how many how many product launches over the past year oh boy i'd have to i i know the percentage is in the funnel i'd have to go back what was just don't name the creator but i'm just curious what was like the best if you can share what was like the best selling thing is it a bath bomb a cbd bath bomb yeah you know it's sort of sort of defend this is what's the fun about this conversation it depends on how you define best selling do you define it based off of quantity or define it let's use quantity well let's let me let me pressure test that with you right because what we actually really care about is that the creators and the emerging brands are capturing as much brand value as possible but how do you measure that out come on based off of how much the creator can sell the product for okay so what's okay so let's do that what's the highest price point thing you've sold uh for a product we've sold a product well creators have sold products that have come out of pla out of the platform for up to 150 and products that they sourced for 30 percent that so you can do the math on that yeah yeah so that's what i mean right um the example that we like to give here because it's easy to understand is kylie jenner right kylie jenner has a baby what does she do she launches a baby product line that has a bubble bath in it she is kylie a customer no she's not a customer um and if she was i couldn't tell yeah um but uh she launches this it's basically essentially the same product as johnson and johnson you know the best-selling johnson johnson baby bubble bath um it's the same amount six ounces but it has her name her brand and a little bit of a different fragrance on it um otherwise the formulation is nearly identical um and she can sell out in 24 hours and sell it for 2.5 x more than johnson johnson sells it for that's the future and that's what we're doing so when you talk about when you talk about like where is the value you know in my mind it's the fact that kylie jenner can sell out this product for two and a half more than johnson and johnson can i understand it yeah uh trust me the reason we have you on i get the space like i love the space i just understand like how you are going to win the space right so um talk to me a little bit about how what you think your revenue model is here how do you make money oh our suppliers so it's free for creators to use um and the suppliers pay uh any transaction fee okay interesting so what does that mean okay so they pay eight percent so if i let's stick with my coffee candle example if you find that supplier and i'm gonna pay that supplier ten bucks to make one coffee candle you're going to make two you're gonna make uh what is that 20 cents on that 10 sale or that yeah or just yeah this goes back to the minimum order quantity right so um the minimum order quantity is let's for easy numbers let's say it's a it's a thousand dollars right so a creator is going to place an order for a thousand dollars in the platform that order is going to go to the supplier and the supplier is going to pay us 80 because we gave...