Okay, this is proof you can make millions off your weird hobby. This company is called Carnivo and they sell expensive plants that eat things.
— So, what is your sales target for this year?
— We’ll do 1.3 million this year. In 2 months, we did about $50,000.
— What’s the most expensive like single plant you’ve ever sold?
— I’m actually in the Guinness Book of Records for this.
— $7,000.
— The question is, does the business make money?
— We’ve got over a million dollar in inventory right now.
— If it does, I’ll offer to invest on the spot. So, I have to be careful I don’t make an offer here that I regret, right? Cuz I have to make money on this thing, too. We’re going to go in here into the green houses, meet Drew, the founder, who’s an ex Google executive, which is crazy. From software to plants. All right, here we go. Hey, you must be Drew.
— Hey, Nathan.
— I’m Nathan. It’s really, really good to meet you.
— Tell me sort of what you do in here and where we’re standing.
— This is Carnivo. We are the country’s premier carnivorous plant nursery. Uh we ship plants all around the world.
— What is a carnivorous plant? What does that mean?
— They attract prey. They capture prey and then they digest the prey and use it for something useful for their growth.
— Interesting. Can you I’m seeing these like these look like a violent kind of plant. Can you maybe like this is the carnivorous part, right? Like they eat things, huh?
— Yeah. Yeah. I mean these are tropical pitcher plants is one of our specialties here. And you can see right here um that it’s it’s basically like a a jar, right? So at the bottom there’s digestive acid, very similar to our stomach contents. Whenever um water activates the lip right here, it’s one of the most slippery substances in the world.
— Interesting. And why is that important? Like what might slip in?
— Uh so one of the things that they eat in the wild are ants. Just a couple drops of water activate this whole trap and then you got an entire colony of ants falling into the picture.
— Wow. Okay. And so what would something like this sell for? Uh this thing um this one’s marked at $150 generally. Like we we produce hanging baskets of of these tropical pitcher plants for like 60 to 6075 range generally. This one is shaped like a toilet because that’s what it is. These guys right here are famous for producing this sugar right here. See this white stuff? This tastes like lemon sherbet.
— Who eats it? Like
— tree shrews. So tree shrews. So there’s these little rodents. Along the way they’re going to get full. They’ll have to relieve themselves. And they do so by pooping into the pitcher. So 70% of this plant’s nitrogen comes from shoo.
— This is a very unique hobby. I mean, what got you into this?
— I was 12 years old. My aunt was stationed uh in San Francisco Bay area and the godfather of carnivorous plants, Peter Diamato, was a nursery owner there. Uh we took a trip over to the nursery small, much smaller than this nursery even. Never been so excited about something to this day. I’ve done a lot of cool things, you know, science related and and and everything like that. There’s nothing that interests me more than than these plants.
— So I did ended up studying uh physics and biology. Um ended up working in biotech for many years.
— Any companies that we would know?
— Uh yeah. So I mean Pack Bio actually um they they’re a large DNA sequencing company.
— Pack Bio.
— Yeah. Yeah. Formerly Pacific Biosciences. They’re they’re one of the big three um DNA sequencing companies in the world right now.
— Okay. Was that your first big sort of personal money event? Did you get equity there or?
— Uh yeah, I did have some equity, but you know, I was I was a college grad, right? So I didn’t get get that much.
— Yeah, fair enough.
— Yeah. I moved over to Google X after that. Um, and I was a member of their R&D team. Actually, Google Glass was my project.
— Specifically, what was your role there? Were you a project manager, an engineer, or what was your role?
— I was an engineer. So, so optical fabrication engineer. So, it was my job to go and make the stuff um to uh you know to to put into the device.
— And this sounds like it would have been like a pretty highpaying job.
— Yeah. You know, it was I was a senior engineer there.
— Yeah. I mean, are you comfortable sharing like a range there just?
— Yeah. You know, I mean, I was with with stock and everything like that. probably like, you know, 250 a year.
— Okay. So, what convinces like a really smart guy making 250k a year building Google Glass, you know, a huge company to give all that up for poop plants.
— Yeah. I would take my vacations out where where these plants were growing. And I was just seeing all this concerning stuff, man. Just like habitat destruction.
— And when did you quit Google?
— Quit Google in 2016. First moved out to Austin 2016. Bought thing 2015. We bought this property right here. Right.
— Um, can
— you share how much?
— An acre in Austin was going for about 85 90,000.
— That’s a deal today.
— Yeah, I know it’s a deal today. Right. So, so got the piece of propert on it except a shed. The the initial greenhouse here I actually I got it used from a Palmer True Value that was closed down in Indiana and got it for pennies on the dollar and got it trucked down here.
— How much did was that cost all
— um it was like it was less than $10,000 for commercial greenhouse which is amazing.
— Buy it and get it down here.
— Uh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. like that that that would be usually yeah about a quart million
— and wow okay so you’re 100k in at this point and this is all your own money at this point
— can do you mind me asking I mean one of the big things with founders when they launch a company it’s like man when do I quit the cushy corporal gig and go all in how much had you saved up personally
— I didn’t have very much at that time I got on a plane on Monday and went out there and basically lived out of a car for like a year while working at Google I was I was grinding at work and then at night I was working on I was working on this
— so fast forward to when you generated your first dollar of revenue from this location. What year was that?
— Uh 2018.
— Okay. So 2018. And you own 100% or did you raise some capital?
— No, I own 100%.
— Okay. And today you still own 100%. Do you remember first year sales all in?
— I think it was like 50,000 but that was like launching in like November. In two months we did about $50,000.
— What was your best seller? Is it in here somewhere? Can you point it out?
— So generally the tropical pitcher plants have always been our best sellers and in particular this species and its hybrids. And how much does that one sell for up there?
— Um, this one would probably go for about 300 bucks or so because it’s you see how big it is. It’s flowering size. We use it for breeding. But like these ones right here, this is a little one. This is actually the progyny of that one. And we sell this for like 40 50 bucks.
— Do you breed here on site? Like how does that work? Is this something you can maybe show us?
— See that one climbing up that kind of um built tree up there?
— Yeah, that’s a big one.
— Yeah, that’s a big one right there. So those are those are the seed pods actually right there. I actually collected the seed of that plant in 201.
— Holy mackerel. Okay. And how how much revenue do you think you’ve generated just from that plant and its offspring?
— That plant and its offspring? Probably about 10 to 15,000.
— I mean, so is it fair to say that’s that’s a $15,000 plant?
— I guess you could say that, right?
— Oh, okay. I’m actually in the Guinness Book of Records for this.
— Okay.
— Best seller was $7,000 and I’ve had these VTI in 2019.
— That’s insane. Do you have any of those that species in here anywhere?
— I I’ve got that exact plant still here, right? Cuz
— I thought you sold it, though.
— Well, the way it works um with plants is is you can clone them, right? Like
— Okay. I have to see this.
— So, this is our tissue culture lab. It’s a clean room. So, we’re actually going to go shoes off when we go in here.
— Oh, okay. All right. Great. Let me flip these off. I’ll follow you in.
— All right.
— So, tell us what’s going on in here.
— We essentially make a Jell-O with fertilizer in it. That’s what the seed or uh plant parts are going to grow in. This is a flask full of seeds that was just done uh recently. And these are just germinated seeds. They’re starting to grow like really hit their groove. Some bigger plants right here. So, okay, this plant has grown so much um it’s actually been divided. So, you actually after they get going um you can split them up and you can have multiple plants uh from from the initial source.
— And how much money are you holding right now when these all sell eventually? How much will that go for?
— Yeah. Um this one right here about $50 each. So that’s about it’s about $300 in this flask right here.
— What’s next?
— We’re heading to the library right here.
— So why what is the library? How does this work?
— The bulk of our propagation stock is all housed here. These grow out and then we’re able to um uh make projections of like you know how many we’re going to sell in the year.
— So what is your sales target for this
— We’ll do 1.3 million this year.
— How many of these do you need to hit 1.3?
— Uh okay. So average sales price of a plant here is like $42. So 1.3 divided by 42, right? So it’s about 31,000 plants.
— How many variants are you breeding right now?
— We’ve got hundreds of parents in the greenhouse. This is a collection that’s over 30 years old. Um we have at least on our our own different crosses, hybrids, things like that. We’ve got well over a thousand at this point.
— How do you know what’s going to be the million-doll plant?
— It’s multivariant right there. It’s like there are there’s attributes um associated with attractiveness. Um, also attributes associated with ease of growth. Okay. And also portability, right? Like so this right here is are young plants that are just about finished and ready to go to the next stage.
— And these will sell on average for how much each?
— They would sell for somewhere around $3 to $4 each.
— Okay. So this is like $4 and this is $4. Yes. Okay. Why did I think that these were like 50 each in the other room?
— Um because they they’re finished over there and Yeah. They’re bigger.
— Okay. Got it. a plant this size like this one. This one we probably sell for around 125 150.
— And how many months or years does it take to go from this little pot to something like this?
— Um probably about 18 months to 2 years to go from this to that.
— This is our um nursery where we are finishing plants.
— Um so we’ve taken them from either the tissue culture lab or our seed flats and we’re starting to grow them out. Uh we’re getting them into uh hanging baskets. These guys are all ready to sell. Our fulfillment team will come through here and they’ll pull them uh for an online order um and then they’ll ship them out to the customer um anywhere in the country.
— Do you have an inventory management system? How many how many different sort like how much are you holding in inventory right now?
— Yeah. Um okay. So that’s actually a problem for us. We’ve got over a million dollars in inventory right now um in inventory value. And so what we’re doing is we’re we’re taking our best sellers um and we are we’re slimming that down um to have a more optimized pipeline. We’ve got at least 25,000 plants in
— Tell us what’s happening in here.
— All they’re doing is pulling plants from the greenhouse um packaging it safely and getting it in boxes uh to people all throughout the country, even throughout the world.
— And how many of these might you ship in a month?
— Roughly a thousand orders a month. Mhm.
— Do you have power users that will buy like every month or is this like literally a thousand different buyers on your website every month?
— Our top 10% of our customers account for like 90% of our revenue right now.
— Are these like collectors or I mean what what’s their use case for so many plants?
— The general use case is going to be collectors. People that are just really passionate about this hobby that have made even like lifestyle adjustments so they’re able to grow these things. They’ve built green houses. They’ve got grow rooms in their house.
— First year sales, remind us what year that was and how much you did that first year.
— Okay, so that was 2018 and we did about 50,000. We didn’t open till the latter half of the year. Um 2019 somewhere around like 300,000.
— That’s in That’s like really good. You had the full year, but that’s really good growth.
— 2020 um that was let’s see, we hit about 500,000 and then the pandemic hit
— and it was a really scary time, you know, like I didn’t know we were going to make it through the pandemic, but then guess what? People got bored. Um they they they got really into their hobbies because they couldn’t leave their house. Uh and we grew 100%. We actually did uh we did a million dollars for the first time that year in 2021.
— Holy. How did that feel? You going to the year going, “Oh my god, we’re going to make it.” You leave going, “Oh my god,
— I I I I we’re done.” Like, “I don’t know what I’m going to do.” Like, you know, I’m have to lay everybody off all that. And then people got bored and bam, bam. Like it was
— wild. Okay. So, a million dollars in 2021
— and then take What about 2022 23?
— Uh we kind of leveled off, right? So, like like that’s when it hit its peak. 2021 everybody was stuck in their house. Um, and so like 2022 we actually regressed just a little bit. We um, you know, I think we did like uh 950,000 in 2022. Um, and then uh 2023 we we got back above a million.
— What was total revenue in 2024 last
— 2024 we did 1.1 million.
— Okay. And is the company sort of break even or profitable?
— We’ll do like a little over 100,000 profit in profit. Yeah.
— Do you reinvest that in real estate or you report it all back in the company or what?
— Yeah, I mean traditionally everything that we made we pour back in the
— Yeah. So, what are you going to spend that 100 grand of profits on? You gonna go buy another greenhouse or what do you think?
— Honestly, we’re going to service debt.
— Ah, okay. How much? I didn’t I didn’t catch this part of the story. So, is there debt on the books?
— We’re somewhere around, you know, 750,000 um in notes. Some of these are really really good deals. Like the idol loan, for example. Um that’s like a 30-year loan with ultra low interest rate, you know, like. So, that that’s the bulk of it. But then there’s some other
— How big was that one? The idol loan?
— Uh it was like 420,000.
— Guys, the idol loan is something the government was giving out during co sort of disaster relief effectively. So that was a $400,000 thing paid back over 30 years at like a what interest rate?
— It’s like 3.25 or 3.5 something amazing like once in a lifetime.
— So that one you don’t mind. You can keep
— Yeah, that one’s fine. But then the other ones the other ones have to be serviced.
— So how much dollars are out on those notes and and how painful are those? What’s the interest rate?
— This is one that I really want to want to refy. That’s I think it’s like uh 13 right now.
— Okay. And how much is how much is the 13% one at?
— Uh 13% one that’s like 135,000. Okay. Interesting. And are you paying back principal and interest on that one every month or just interest?
— Uh principal and interest.
— Okay. Do you know off the top of your head what’s that dollar value per month you’re paying back?
— I’m servicing about $10,000 in debt a month right now.
— Including the idol loan.
— Yeah. Including the idol loan. The idol loan somewhere around 2,000ish. Right.
— So there’s 8,000 a month in debt service on high interest loans you’d love to get rid of.
— Exactly. Yes.
— Talk to me a little bit about um about growth. Yeah. Like how big can this business be?
— Carnivorous plants have definitely not hit mainstream. you see the glimpses here and there, but like they really h they’re not at every garden center, you know, like so I think there’s a lot of opportunity there like just with plant breeding easily right there. You you could you could piece together, you know, a $10 million business.
— You think you can get to that level?
— I think we would need some infrastructure investment in that though, right? Like that uh I mean I’d say we we’d need another property and then we need another like two to three commercial green houses. So that’s probably right there is probably about a million dollars. More immediate term growth I see the biggest one ecom, right? And I I’ll tell you why, right? Our ecom is actually down despite this year, like us growing. We did we did something that I never thought was going to shoot us in the foot. We updated our website. Killed our SEO. It’s a much better website. It’s just more more functional. Um we killed some of our backlinks and things like that along the way. It’s been hard to get it back. We tanked our our our SEO by like 40%.
— And you’re certain it was the website change? A lot of people right now are losing traffic because chat GPT and the LLMs are not giving you the clickthrough. It it it it certainly could be a component of it, but like it looks night and day. Like if I look at at any of our analytics from Shopify, um it’s like website update, bam.
— Why couldn’t you just click a button and undo the website change?
— I don’t even know if we get our SEO back if we did that.
— Yeah. What Well, what is the I mean the key to getting great organic traffic is understanding what your potential buyer is going to be searching on Google and in like ChateBT, Gemini, Perplexi, etc. What is that like golden search term for you where if you could rank number one, you’d get a lot of revenue from it? Uh, you know, honestly, like the most searched term if you go into Google Analytics for for any of this stuff, it’s still Venus fly trap.
— So, Google comes up number one right now. If I search I want to buy a Venus fly trap in Austin, Texas.
— Yeah, we might come up in Austin, but it would be competitor nurseries um or Amazon actually. At least half a million dollars of Venus fly traps sold on Amazon every year.
— Do you sell Venus fly traps on Amazon?
— We do, but I have never been particularly good at that. Um, just because we need to have the pipeline already built in.
— How many Venus fly traps could you sell right now? Max capacity per month. 2,600 fly traps per month probably, right? Is is what I could do.
— And could you keep up with that volume month after month? I could then Okay, so you have a system where you could do that over and over.
— Yeah. Yeah, we we could we just we just haven’t hit we haven’t hit the gas on it yet.
— And what could you sell a Venus buy trap for on Amazon?
— $15 to $20.
— So 2,600 per month at $15 to $20, right? So that’s 26,9. So that’s $52,000 a month at 20 bucks a pop on
— Amazon. So what’s the trouble? It’s not production, I don’t think. It’s actually how to get to the number one spot.
— Yes.
— Who’s who’s number one right now for that? Do you know?
— Um there’s there’s another nursery that’s that’s all they do is fly traps. That’s it.
— Could we could we raise some money and go buy them out so that can be our top of funnel for everything?
— Yeah, we probably could.
— What would the price be?
— Um I don’t know. Like um I mean you evaluate you you evaluate small business.
— How much revenue do you think they do?
— They probably do a half million.
— So well we could probably buy that for 1x revenue
— probably.
— Let’s go back to your business because we can’t control this other party and what they might or might not sell for. Um, I hear your capital needs being maybe some SEO strategy and help, maybe an agency. Are there any other sort of growth opportunities that, you know, put capital behind that I’m missing?
— Have you heard of live sales?
— Uh, uh, like online like
— Yeah. Yeah.
— Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
— Okay. So, this
— Are you a Tik Tok star?
— I’m not a Tik Tok star. I’m an Instagram live sales star. Right. If if you can believe that. Like,
— how much do you sell on Instagram?
— Oh, god. I sell quart million dollars a year on Instagram. Thursday nights. I go live every Thursday night. So, I’m I’m in that greenhouse from 7 to midnight every Thursday night. And um yeah, it it is steady. It is steady.
— So, I’m going to start this one off. This is a Trinkata Titan by Tivi Jeff Wong. I’m
— going to start this guy off at 25 bucks.
— Oh, you auctioned them?
— Yeah, we auctioned them off. Yeah. Yeah.
— $50 going once. Yeah.
— What’s the most you made from one plant sale on Instagram live?
— On Instagram live. I’ve had some $10,000 nights
— from one plant.
— No, not from one plant. You know, for one.
— Give me a one plant sale. One plant 2500.
— You sold one plant in an auction format on Instagram live for 2500.
— Yeah.
— 2500. Okay. This is pretty good. Okay. So, that’s also another growth channel.
— Yeah. No, no, that that one I see is instant, right? I just need to find the right person and um we could we could immediately probably double our revenue.
— So, here’s Matt. I do this show cuz I love finding unique founders with a ton of passion running super cool businesses where my capital plus their ideas could equal like a big return. Here’s what I’m fighting this conversation. You can sense my energy going up because I love SEO. That’s my world and software, right? So, I have to be careful I don’t Because I have to make money on this thing, too. So, I could make an offer which just enables you to pay off some of your current expensive debt, right? I could make a larger offer which is, you know, I asked for a return that’s a fixed debt payment, but also maybe a small equity slug like warrants, speaking Silicon Valley language.
— Um, are you open to that or do you want to hold on to 100% equity no matter
— I’m open to I mean, I’m I’m open to hearing anything.
— Yeah. a a check to help us like kind of get out from like the, you know, kind of the heavy load of like of the um of the debt would be really beneficial, right? That would really give us some some air um some breathing room and allow us to start investing in a lot of these these growth areas that we’re talking about, right?
— So, that’s 130,000 there to take that loan out, right? Um but is that the right amount? If I was going to make you an offer, is 130 grand the right amount or should I make it a bigger amount so that we can do some of these other tests with PPC, SEO, Instagram live affiliates? I don’t know, like half a million dollars, something like that. Like I think that would allow us to quickly like um do all the things that we know are going to make us successful. Um and um and grow for the future,
— I don’t like making a $500,000 offer that’s purely debt cuz your debt load is already so heavy relative to your annual revenues, right? You’re already levered at like 80 70 80%. Right. You know what I mean by that?
— Oh yeah. Yeah. Definitely. Yeah.
— I also think if I told you I’d give you a $500,000 check, but I’d want like a 70% equity stake. You wouldn’t do something like that. Correct. Too much.
— Yeah. I think I think that’s that’s probably too much. I I would like to be somewhere at least have 80 to 90% equity in the company.
— Okay. Yeah. So, you want to keep control. So, here’s sort of what I’m thinking. If I made an offer that wasn’t 500K, right, but it wasn’t 130K either, but it was something in the middle. If I offered $200,000
— with the use of funds being to take out the $130,000 expensive loan, so kill it, pay it off.
— Mhm.
— Then use the rest of the money to experiment on some of the PPC, the affiliates, the SEO, that kind of stuff. And in exchange for that $200,000 check, I would make back a lower interest rate than the 13% you have, right? So let’s say 10% interest rate
— and a small chunk of warrants of the business. So maybe 3% equity in the business. How would you respond to an offer like that?
— I mean, that’s really interesting. That’s a really interesting offer. We’ve got some we’ve got some fuel to to grow, right? So like that that’s going to that’s going to be growth. And then at the same time, too, like you got a stake in this, too. U I know uh I I I know you wouldn’t be that involved, but at the same time too, man, you’re you’re a smart guy. I love your stuff. Um uh I you know I I think you you have a lot of knowledge to offer as well, right?
— So look, I love the business. I want to make an offer. The offer is $200,000, a 10, it’s a loan, 10% interest rate paid back over 5 years, and a small 3% warrant coverage in the business. I want some of the upside if the growth sort of pans out. I love the business. Uh, if you like this offer, obviously we’ll take it offline, make sure the numbers work, make sure you like, make sure you can service the debt, make sure you like giving me a 3% equity chunk, and we’ll obviously sign those docks. But for now, here in this moment, yes or no. Do we have a deal?
— I mean, that sounds incredible to me.
— All right, let’s get into business together, man. It’s good to meet you.
— Good to meet you.
— Thanks so much.
— If you’re looking for capital, go to founderpath.com and create an account for free. Then connect your profit and loss statement so I can understand your cash flows and revenue. Then my AI agent will write a 10-page memo for you all in under two minutes and it will include a capital offer at the end. If you like the offer, just type yes in the chat. Tell me what bank you want us to wire the money to and we’ll get a deal done together. I’ll see you over at founderpath.com.
