The Whole Truth & Nothing Else With Shashank Mehta
We recently announced the first round of basecamp — India’s first early stage, consumer brand-focused accelerator; powered by LBB and RPSG Capital Ventures. We have also organized advisory sessions in addition to equity investments, distribution, and marketing for the shortlisted DTC brands.
Here’s what Shashank Mehta, founder of The Whole Truth, formerly known as ‘And Nothing Else’- a 100% clean label healthy food snack brand had to say about his entrepreneurial journey.
The Beginning of ‘& Nothing Else’
“I was obese as a kid & that’s where the passion to know ‘the whole truth’ about what I eat came from. I spent more than 3 years believing that if I stopped eating and started exercising, I’d be thin. According to my understanding back then, being thin was being fit, which isn’t true. I was trapped in a cycle of misconceptions about health” said Shashank.
Starting off at Unilever, Shashank changed courses to serve at a startup called Rebel Foods (formerly known as Faasos). While he was working at Faasos, he also took up writing a blog called ‘Fit Shit’, just as a side hustle. Surprisingly it really took off!
Fit Shit blogs were mostly about what big food companies were doing and how their products weren’t healthy at all. ‘The Whole Truth’ came from a place of passion to serve people the right kind of information, not from “market research”. While he was at it, he realized that there was deep consumer distrust about consumer brands and he was surprised to see that there wasn’t a brand that was talking about the ingredients of the products that they were selling.
He started experimenting with bars after writing a researched article on healthy bars and had some friends try his ‘experiments’. Within no time, he realized these bars were a hit among them. And that’s when he realized the HUGE scope for the product.
The Strategy: Platform & Product
“If there’s one thing that I have learned it is that you always start building your brand from premium customers and then move to the others; not the other way around,” said Shashank. To begin with, TWT focused on fitness-oriented people, who would consume protein bars, to create a market share. But that was not all. TWT wanted to get into the premium circle of this target group. “Twitter was where all the intellectuals were and they were the exact match to start with and that’s where we focused initially,” said Shashank.
Shashank asked all the DTC brand owners to answer certain questions about their audience, and establish their brand positioning accordingly from the very beginning. The questions were:
- Do you want to shift your consumers from where they’re today to a completely new place? This will be super expensive & a longer journey for a brand owner.
- Define what you’re replacing in your customer’s life.
- Define what’s the closest to making the least amount of effort to make the replacement.
Key to Success: Content Strategy
Shashank says, “My content strategy was totally my own experience in marketing over the years, and the focus was always to provide the information that was nothing but the whole truth (no pun intended)”.
Shashank has time and again stressed the fact that brands shouldn’t spend on marketing, but on creating GREAT content — the key to turning your consumers into loyalists in the longer run. “There’s no worse time to create mediocre content”, he added. The three pillars according to Shashank for a successful content strategy are:
- Consistency
- Great content
- Researched information
Shashank’s playbook for creating an exhaustive content calendar is:
A. 1 post a day is more than enough
B. 7–8 posts are heavily researched that you pour your heart out in
C. 5–7 lighter posts but informative as it’s also important to keep it light
D. 5–7 Topical content posts
The Name Change To “The Whole Truth”
“Changing the name to The Whole Truth was more of a personal decision than a strategic one. We knew the kind of content and product we were created to capture the market was not about enticing the customer but by telling them the whole truth. This meant providing them with the right kind of food to replace the not-so-good stuff in the market. It felt natural. But it wasn’t an easy decision to make”, says Shashank. “We all sat over the name for a month and throughout the time we were very scared to go ahead with it because it wasn’t just a name, it was also a strong statement to put out there. But what I have learned is no matter how scared you are, you should (and it’s also important) be comfortable with taking a leap of faith in business” he added.
According to Shashank, marketplaces are complex platforms and you can’t really nail the keyword game no matter how much experience you have. So you need to always focus on the very basic things. One of the foremost things a brand should be paying attention to is the content they put out. Shashank’s very own words are: Make sure you are nailing it with everything you put out; from photos to PDPs.
It was an absolute delight to have Shashank take us through his entrepreneurial journey and give us an insight into what brand owners should be prioritizing when it comes to creating REMARKABLE brands.
