[Perspective Series] From Mom’s Kitchen to Millions With Brandon Castaneda

Brandon Castaneda is the Founder and CEO of EZ Bombs, a Hispanic food brand known for its seasoned meat bombs that turned traditional Mexican recipes into a viral sensation on TikTok Shop. The company achieved over $20 million in sales within its first year by leveraging creator-driven engagement and viral social strategy. Brandon scaled operations rapidly — transitioning from fulfillment out of his mom’s kitchen to co-packing and outsourcing logistics to 3PL partner ShipBob — saving around 1,600 labor hours per month. His leadership reflects a family-first ethos and keen digital growth acumen that transformed a homegrown idea into a breakout CPG success.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [1:58] Brandon Castaneda discusses how EZ Bombs helps busy people cook traditional Hispanic meals easily

• [5:46] Launching EZ Bombs on TikTok and going viral within 10 days

• [7:24] Overnight surge to nearly $20K in sales and the shift to weekly product drops

• [12:54] Role of family in building the brand — mom as the recipe source and face of the company

• [15:25] Brandon shares customer experience lessons and challenges in food products

• [18:43] Expanding internationally with strong demand in Australia, Canada, and the UK

• [21:50] Policies for customer satisfaction, refunds, and handling shipping issues

• [24:16] Using AI for website design, branding, and operations efficiency
  

In this episode…

Cooking traditional meals at home can feel overwhelming for busy families. Many lack the time, skills, or even access to the right ingredients, leading them to rely on fast food or packaged options instead. How can people reconnect with authentic flavors while keeping meal preparation simple and enjoyable?

Brandon Castaneda, a seasoned entrepreneur and business leader, shares how his family transformed cultural recipes into convenient seasoning bombs that make cooking easy and flavorful. He explains the trial-and-error process of developing a product that dissolves seamlessly, the viral strategy that turned a kitchen experiment into a social media phenomenon, and the importance of building a brand rooted in authenticity. Brandon also highlights how customer feedback, international demand, and smart use of AI have guided decisions, showing that rapid growth is possible when innovation meets customer experience.

In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker interviews Brandon Castaneda, Founder and CEO of EZ Bombs, about creating a viral food brand from family recipes. Brandon discusses building trust with customers, scaling into thousands of retail stores, and expanding into international markets. He also explores lessons in customer satisfaction, the role of AI in operations, and future plans to diversify flavors and reach new audiences.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Quik!

• Richard Walker on LinkedIn

• Brandon Castaneda on LinkedIn

• EZ Bombs

• Mike Jalonen on LinkedIn

• "[Perspective Series] Streamlining Franchise Success and Operations With Matt Goebel" on The Customer Wins

• "[Perspective Series] Secrets to Retention and Revenue Boosting With Joseph Loria" on The Customer Wins

• "[Perspective Series] Scaling a Franchise With Simplicity With Bennett Maxwell" on The Customer Wins

Quotable Moments:

• “We get to share the recipes that my mom has cooked, from her mom and grandma.”

• “So within about a week and a half, we had already started gaining traction with sales.”

• “Every single week for weeks, we would sell out in five minutes or less.”

• “Within two and a half months, we became the number one selling product for that month.”

• “We've crossed that threshold, which is super awesome. Now, where we're at today, more exposure.”

  
  

Action Steps:

• Test your idea online before retail: Launching on digital platforms first validates demand quickly and attracts retailers with real sales data.

• Build around authentic storytelling: Sharing family traditions or personal experiences builds trust and drives customer engagement in a crowded marketplace.

• Adapt fulfillment models as you grow: Moving from home production to co-packing ensures scalability and consistent quality as demand accelerates.

• Use customer feedback as a growth driver: Reviews and comments highlight strengths and improvements, keeping customers satisfied and boosting credibility.

• Leverage AI for efficiency, not shortcuts: Thoughtful use of tools streamlines work and saves time while preserving authenticity and quality.

Sponsor for this episode...

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Episode Transcript:

Intro: 00:02

Welcome to The Customer Wins podcast, where business leaders discuss their secrets and techniques for helping their customers succeed and in turn, grow their business.

Richard Walker: 00:16

Hi, I'm Rich Walker, the host of The Customer Wins, where I talk to business leaders about how they help their customers win and how their focus on customer experience leads to growth. Today is a special episode in my perspective series to bring strategic and different thinking to our audience. Some past guests in this series have included Matt Goebel of Woven. Joseph Loria of RetentionCX. And Bennett Maxwell of Dirty Dough Cookies.

Today I get to speak with Brandon Castaneda, founder of EZ Bombs, and today's episode is brought to you by Quik!, the leader in enterprise forms processing. When your business relies upon processing forms, don't waste your team's valuable time manually reviewing the forms. Instead, get quick using our Form Xtract API. Simply submit your completed forms and get back clean, context rich data that reduces manual reviews to only one out of a thousand submissions. Visit quickforms.com to get started.

All right. Brandon Castaneda is the founder of EZ Bombs. The bath bomb for cooking, an idea created out of his mom's kitchen, has scaled up to being a number one seller on TikTok and Amazon and all sorts of platforms, breaking records on all these platforms as they go through it. It's an amazing story. I can't wait for him to share.

Brandon, welcome to The Customer Wins.

Brandon Castaneda: 01:36

Hey Rich, thank you so much for having me.

Richard Walker: 01:39

Oh, it's my pleasure, man. So for those who haven't heard this podcast before, I'd love to talk to business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win, how they built and deliver a great customer experience, and the challenges to growing their own company. So, Brandon, I want to understand your business a little bit better. How does your company help people.

Brandon Castaneda: 01:58

So when it comes to cooking, I think cooking is becoming a little bit more of a harder to do thing for the busy person. You know, you look at how everybody's lives are being lived right now. They're going to school, they're working a job, trying to raise a family and trying to keep that traditional meal from the Hispanic culture alive isn't really translating very well in the newer generations. So one of the things is, is that our product helps people with is we get to share the recipes that my mom has cooked for, from her mom and from her grandma, and she's been able to pass those down, and she's been able to put all of that flavoring into these seasoning bombs. That just makes cooking easy and fun.

So that's how we are able to help our customers out.

Richard Walker: 02:45

Dude, I love that story because it's so true. I've been married for 15 plus years, but before that, it was really actually hard to find a girl who knew how to cook. And thank God my wife loves to cook and she's amazing at it. But you're right. I mean, imagine the generations who are growing up with packaged food, fast food, just get it from a restaurant.

They never learned how to cook. So it's such a lost art. I'm really curious, though, you know, taking taking a recipe and turning it into a bomb, a seasoning bomb. That sounds like impossible to me. How did you guys achieve that?

Brandon Castaneda: 03:19

You know, it's actually kind of funny because normally when your spices and seasonings cake up and they become all clumpy, that's the opposite of what you want out of your spices and seasonings. It usually means they've been in the pantry for way too long. Right. That also brings up another problem is that you can't just buy just enough. You have to buy a whole big bottle of this one ingredient to try a new dish out.

So to get the bomb to actually hold and to to stay in its form. It took us a little bit of time to take the traditional way that my mom makes it. Use all those same ingredients, but then now use them in this ground up form and then on demand. Try to get these to stick and to hold and to be able to be strong enough to ship, but not so strong that they're not going to dissolve when you go ahead and go to cook them. So there's definitely some science behind it that it took us a little while to figure out that right formula and how to get them to solve all of those problems.

Richard Walker: 04:17

But there's also the other side of this, too. Like, look, I've never cooked birria. I love eating it, but I've never cooked it. And I'm just imagining your mom, I don't know, probably puts broth and water and then some seasoning and a little bit of this, a little bit of that. How do you dial it in to be like, okay, now it's this powder form that that's part of the magic that I just don't get.

Brandon Castaneda: 04:37

Yeah. So you actually bring up a good point. And this is probably true in a lot of cultures, but Hispanic culture 100%, like if you ever asked your grandma to give you a recipe, she doesn't give you measurements. It's not like spoons Teaspoons of this, four tablespoons of that. It's always just by feeling and by how much they think needs to go into this ratio of water, because they can cook in a pot that will feed four people, and then they can cook in a pot that's going to do ten people, and it always comes out the same.

So when I sat down with my mom to actually get this dialed in, what we did is I said, okay, before you put it into the pot, put it into this bowl. Let's weigh out how much you put in in grams. And then we're going to go ahead and dump it in. So it's like almost like you're throwing it into the pot anyways. But throw it on this side so we can at least get some measurements.

So that's how we at least established a baseline of how much ratio of each ingredient she was using. And then after that, just dialing it in with some math, we were able to get that perfect formula every time.

Richard Walker: 05:37

Wow. Wow. That's incredible. All right, so tell the audience a little bit about your story. How old is your company and what has happened so far?

Brandon Castaneda: 05:46

So EZ Bombs is approaching two years in business. So November of this year we're going to be reaching our second year anniversary. And you know, when we started, we didn't really know what would happen. We felt like we had a great idea.

We felt that TikTok was the perfect platform for this, because there's so many ideas that can go very viral on TikTok. And I knew that if we brought this product to the platform, it was easy to explain. You know, you just drop this in with meat and water and it cooks. And then now you got a Mexican dish, birria. So I felt like it checked the box there.

Then when it comes to that virality aspect, I felt that it would get some viral traction just because it's such a new form factor. Nobody had ever seen it. So we go ahead and we decide we're going to launch on TikTok, and ideally it would have been TikTok shop, but we couldn't even sell on TikTok shop as a platform because we were making a food product from mom's house so TikTok wouldn't allow the listing to go up, so that kind of derailed our initial thoughts. But I said, you know what, let's just post videos anyways and send them to our website and see what happens. So within about a week and a half, we had already started gaining traction where we were getting sales consistently every day.

And those sales numbers were growing. But about a week and a half in, that's when I think things just really changed for us. Some of our videos that we had posted that previous week started to trend and go viral, where one of them actually almost got 2 million views, like very quickly.

Richard Walker: 07:20

A week and a half in.

Brandon Castaneda: 07:21

Yeah, about a week and a half in.

Richard Walker: 07:23

Wow.

Brandon Castaneda: 07:24

This is an account with zero followers. Brand new account. The business was brand new, like nobody had ever heard of us before, so we didn't even get any reviews just yet. And all of a sudden things just started to go viral, where that Friday I wake up and it's, you know, 8:00 in the morning and I'm like, wow, we're already off to a good start. We're at like 200 bucks in sales and then by the afternoon that same day, we're at 3000 in sales.

Fast forward to Saturday morning. I wake up at 7 a.m. because my phone is just ringing from the Shopify orders. We're at like $6,500 in sales at like seven in the morning. And I'm thinking, what is going on now in this 24 hour period? We've done almost 20 K in sales.

We have to deliver over 2000 of these bombs. We don't even have them ready yet. How do we even do that? So I had to shut down the website to make sure that we were able to fulfill all those orders before we just dug our hole even deeper. But that was probably one of the best things that we did, because when we shut it down immediately, we started collecting emails and phone numbers, and we moved from a always open model to a drop system where every Saturday we would open up the website at 10 a.m. and whatever we had available was available.

And the moment it sold out, we were closed off until the next week. And every single week for weeks we would sell out in five minutes or less. I mean, we would have thousands of people hit the website to try to buy these. And every time we would push the drop a little bit higher and higher and higher all the way till we got to somewhere around February, where we did about 150 K in less than ten minutes of of online sales. And that was just only our website.

We hadn't even been on TikTok yet. We hadn't gone anywhere else. So by this point, we got into a manufacturing relationship where we were able to co-pack this with our vendor that was supplying us with all our spices. That allows us to ramp significantly and finally get onto TikTok shop. We ended up just having a great audience.

Already got onto TikTok shop, and that's where we just blew the sales out of the water very quickly. Within two and a half months, we became the number one selling product for that month on TikTok shop. And still to this day now, we still hold the most sales for a food product on TikTok. We just passed a million sales a couple of days ago. So it's.

Yeah, it's been about a year and some change on the platform, and we've crossed that threshold, which is which is super awesome. Now, where we're at today, because of all the exposure we've gotten online, it's really propelled us into more online channels like Amazon, Walmart.com. And that has also branched into retail, where now we're selling into retailers like Walmart, Costco, Albertsons, Ralph's. I mean, I think where it stands right now, we're probably at about 2500 stores, and we started at zero at the beginning of this year.

Richard Walker: 10:16

So that's unreal. That is unreal. So eight, eight months, you got to over 2000 stores to hold your product. Yeah, I mean, Brandon, a lot of people don't know this about me. I mean, I'm an entrepreneur.

I started ten businesses since age 12, but I've always I've always steered away from consumer goods. But I still like them. I still think about them from time to time, and I've dabbled with it. In fact, I thought about coming up with a smoothie bomb idea because I make smoothies all the time. Years and years ago.

Then I realized everybody wants something different. You had a magic formula with one key food item, like one outcome every time. That's highly consistent, which makes sense. But but you know, think about like, oh, I want to import a product from Mexico and put it in a store or whatever. You got to go get the store to agree.

You must have stores hounding you at this point. I mean, I'm just guessing because this fast growth.

Brandon Castaneda: 11:07

Yeah, that that actually brings up a good point. So if, if we would have gone with creating the idea and then trying to get it into retail, it would have been a much slower climb to make this product happen, because retailers don't want to take a huge risk on something that they don't know is going to sell. So if you're coming with no data on a brand new form factor, they're going to tell you to go validate that the idea is going to work. Right. And not only that, but if we would have gone that route, the amount of work it would have taken to find a co-packer that's going to agree to do this amount of units, find the funding to be able to fund those first orders.

Like so many other things just needed to happen versus us going to online first, testing and validating if people actually want this. And because we were doing online sales, we were way more profitable right out the gate just because, you know, we make all the margin from our website. We don't have to deal with any brokers or in between people, and we can really validate that there is truly something here and build a social following around it. So I think that is the only way that I can consider approaching a consumer packaged goods item, because you're not going through those expensive, lengthy processes in the beginning, you're testing early, and if you have something you know that's truly special, retailers are going to want it.

Richard Walker: 12:28

This is similar to publishing a book, by the way. Writing a book and hoping it sells is not a strategy. You got to build the following and then you get the publisher. Then you get the distribution. You have to have the demand for it.

You're right. The distributors don't want that risk. Okay, let's go back to this viral moment. I mean, a week and a half in, did you have any concept that this viral moment would happen so easily, so fast?

Brandon Castaneda: 12:54

So we had we have we had a couple of things that I think really came together just right. So I was the one that thought of the idea of this company, but then I didn't know what recipes it would make. So that's where I brought my mom in. And I was like, you know what, mom, you're an awesome cook. I need your help on helping me make this.

And then when it came time to deciding how we're going to run our social medias, my sister, she's built several accounts. She has a couple of personal accounts, like up over 4 or 500,000 followers. So she's really, you know, good at the strategy behind using TikTok and Instagram and how frequently she should post and all of that stuff. So we brought my sister in to help out with all of the social side of things. And very quickly in the beginning, we decided it just makes the most sense to make mom the face of the brand.

It's her recipes. And yes, we're playing a huge supportive role on the back end, but I think people would connect with her way more than me. Like, if you look at me versus my mom, it's you're not going to believe that I know how to make this traditionally versus the way my mom does it.

Richard Walker: 13:59

So 100%.

Brandon Castaneda: 14:00

So I think by tying that in, having the, you know, person with us that can help strategize all of the content around what we're going to post and how we're going to post it, and then picking the videos that we went out with first, I think was was really made the strategy work. And we picked the first video on purpose because it was just an eight second clip. It was just my mom super nervous, picking up one of the the bombs, and she said, you're just going to take one of our birria bombs and drop it in. And she drops it into a pot. and then the video just cuts.

And people were super intrigued. Like, wait, what? Did you just drop into it? But more importantly, like, why did you say birria instead of birria? Like, that's not how you say it.

So with an accent, she was nervous. So what ended up happening is she just got so many comments that people were like, that's not how you say it. And it just stirred the pot. And so that that was a really unique strategy that we did in the beginning. We just knew that it wasn't a perfect video.

 So we said, let's go forward with this one, because I think that's going to engage a lot more people.

Richard Walker: 15:04

Oh, that's so cool. That's cool. And I love seeing her videos, by the way. I mean, I've seen her making things when you guys were doing in-house manufacturing. I saw, I think, her talking about the 200,000th unit shipment, something like that.

She's. She's amazing. Like, honestly, it looks super natural for her to be on camera, like, this is her thing.

Brandon Castaneda: 15:25

She had never done it before, and she was terrified at the very beginning. But now she's super comfortable with it. She loves doing it. And it's it's been so great to see her grow in that role.

Richard Walker: 15:35

Yeah. Well, I mean, congrats to you and your entire family working on this. The success you're having is just amazing. I don't even know if it's rivaled by others because it's just so fast and how big it's going. Tell me a little bit more about your perspective on customer experience.

I mean, you built a product that's really easy to use. How do you translate that? How are people receiving it? What are the challenges you've had with it that people have complained or told you about? Give me some understanding of how the experience works in your business.

Brandon Castaneda: 16:05

So I would say that one thing that is just really hard in any type of food product, it doesn't matter what food it is, somebody always has tasted it and said, oh my grandma makes it this way, or I just grew up with it tasting a little bit more like this versus that. So it's really hard because when you when you go and claim like, we're going to make media, there's so many different ways that people will prepare it that the flavors will be naturally, you know, but overwhelmingly, people love the flavor. I mean, we've sold hundreds of millions of them on Tick Tock. I think we have like almost 60,000 reviews on TikTok. And we were holding like a 4.64.7 star rating.

So people love the product. They think it's great. Maybe your grandma might make it a little bit different or a little bit better to your palate, but you also don't have to go through all the hassle that your grandma did to make it. So I think from that customer experience standpoint, people are loving that the flavor is good. It tastes authentic.

It reminds them of home, and they don't have to go through all the headache of making and preparing all that stuff. And you know, another comment that I'll make on this too, is that I just recently moved from Southern California to Florida. Now, and all my life I've grown up where you can walk into almost any grocery store, and they have all the chilis, all the spices, all the ingredients that we normally use to cook Mexican food. And out here I'm like, dang, this is a whole different set of items here. Like, I can't even find the guajillo chilies.

I can't find the ancho chilies that we use. And I you know, I've heard about this through customer feedback, but now I'm actually getting to live it and experience it. Is that even if you knew how to make it, it's still not easy to get all the ingredients that you need based on wherever you live in the country or even in the world. So by delivering this, all this ingredients just packed in one, I think that's what the customers have loved, is that they gain access to something that maybe they did used to live closer to California or Mexico, and they just lost that when they moved.

Richard Walker: 18:14

I am very skeptical of Mexican food and other countries. My wife is South African and we went to a beach town in South Africa and they had nachos and we're like, okay, let's try the nachos. Doritos. Doritos chips. Not normal tortilla chips with with no nacho sauce.

I mean, it was just terrible, terrible, terrible. So I can only imagine how easy it is. You're making it for people all over the the place. Are you shipping internationally?

Brandon Castaneda: 18:43

We are. We do. There's probably easier ways that we can do it down the road, but our focus just isn't international just yet. But people basically just have to eat the shipping cost on it. But yeah, Australia, believe it or not, has become a pretty hot market for US, Canada and the UK.

So we've we've talked about maybe positioning some inventory there so they don't have to pay such extreme shipping cost.

Richard Walker: 19:06

Yeah. Well that's great. And as you grow you'll be able to do those things more easily. Yeah I remember my mom going to England. My my aunt was living there with her kids, and she wanted to make the Mexican food.

And she went to the store. I find nothing you don't find pinto beans? Tortillas are different. Like it just wasn't close up.

Brandon Castaneda: 19:24

A good point, too, is that, you know, we called the company EZ Bombs for a reason because we figured at some point this could be something different. Not just Mexican food, you know, but like, all of the same things that we're talking about, pain points for us right now. Like, you know, think about the person that maybe just didn't even grow up with this, but sees a viral video of how a taco, a birria tacos made, they've just never tried it. And where do you start? You either go to YouTube to learn how to make it, buy all the ingredients, or you can get one of our products.

So we've been exploring and making a lot of other flavors alongside people that are, you know, culturally like icons in this space. Like we've been working with the chef in some cuisine, we've been working with the music artist with the Caribbean cuisine. And what we're doing is we're trying to make flavors that resonate with them because, you know, I like Indian food, but I have no idea how to make it, nor would I go buy the stuff to do it. So if we can deliver a product like that with a Caribbean flavor and Indian flavor, it just brings people much closer to that culture that just maybe would have never tried to do it on their own.

Richard Walker: 20:30

Yeah. Look, maybe this is a bad joke, but I think I'm actually internally Mexican because it's my favorite food and I'm as gringo as they come. And I didn't even try birria until, like, two years ago at a local taco truck here in Austin, Texas. Unbelievable experience. I was like, so in love with it.

Now I get it anytime I can. But, you know, I like I said, I don't cook it myself. It's a treat out in the world. So you are helping people be introduced to your culture and the background and the history of your culture through the food. And I think that's awesome if you can do that for other cuisines as well, because it can serve that purpose for sure.

 Yeah.

Brandon Castaneda: 21:07

So something we're looking into not not quite ready yet, but we're building a catalog of all these different flavors that we're going to be happy to release at some point.

Richard Walker: 21:15

Yeah. So Brandon, I want to talk something about your policies, because consumer packaged goods probably have different policies than, say, software does, or financial services or whatever, whatever. And I'm curious about not only what your policies are. I don't want to go in super depth, but like, how willing are you to bend your policies like somebody's unhappy with the food? Somebody got sick and claimed it was your product.

Do you refund people? Do you take shipments back? That kind of stuff? How how are you defining the customer experience, interacting with your service team from that standpoint?

Brandon Castaneda: 21:50

So we've always taken the approach that we want everybody to have a great experience when they receive the product. And I would say probably one of the most like negative feedback that we would receive is that the product arrives not in the form factor. It'll be crushed. And you know, when that happens, it's almost always not our fault. It's the transit.

You know, the box is arriving and it's mangled. And I'm like, okay, well, clearly that didn't that that wasn't us. We didn't let it leave the warehouse that way. And another experience that we had is when we started doing fulfillment with TikTok. They were just getting our product and normally we box it and ship it in a box.

But they were getting it and putting it in a poly bag and then just letting it go. So we had thousands of them at one point, just all just get completely crushed. So we've always taken the approach that we want people to have a great experience. So we either refund it, ship you a new one with like expedited shipping, whatever it takes to just basically get you what you needed to have or what you expected to have. So we've done that a lot.

I mean, thankfully not to the point where it's really impacted us, but it's very, very few and far between nowadays because we've gotten really good at how we manage that. But anytime a customer has a complaint, let's say they didn't like it, then we'll just refund you. It's not a big deal. You know the product cost to a very nominal.

Richard Walker: 23:16

Yeah. I was going to say. Was that a hard decision to make? I mean, were you worried about profitability on those sales or anything?

Brandon Castaneda: 23:23

No, I wasn't worried about it. I was more worried about the negative impact that it would have if somebody had a bad experience. And then they go flock to social or to our reviews and, like, leave terrible reviews. You know, so if anything, we we were just always on top of it. And we've continued to stay on top of it where if anybody has an issue, we really just don't ask any questions, just more apologize.

Hopefully we can make it right and try to win them back with maybe a new flavor or giving them not only the refund, but saying, hey, like maybe you didn't like that flavor. Here's a coupon to go ahead and get the other flavor if you want to try that.

Richard Walker: 23:56

Yeah, good for you, man, because one of my biggest pet peeves is when people act as though the policy is the gospel and they won't bend, they won't help the customer be happy at all. Okay, let's switch gears a little bit. How does AI fit into your business? Are you using artificial intelligence for any aspect of your business?

Brandon Castaneda: 24:16

Yeah. So, you know, it's actually funny. The name itself is something that we thought of and it's something that we came up with. But in the very beginning, you know, this was literally just mom helping make the ingredients, my sister helping with the posting. And I kind of spearheaded everything else from the customer service, the website, the logo, everything like that.

So it was literally just me and ChatGPT in the very beginning, doing all of this back end stuff where I put the website together with ChatGPT, all of the copy, we generated different background images, so I would take a picture with my phone of the product and then have AI images for the backgrounds to be able to add some flair to things. The logo itself, the current one is has been updated, but the original logo was an AI generated logo. So I think it was super important in the beginning to be able to have that quick speed, to be able to get things off the ground as soon as possible and just help me out with it. Nowadays, we use AI, you know, for all types of different things. Just because there's so many moving parts, you know, we have really drilled it into the team that we all should be using it to make things more efficient for us.

We should all be using it, not the way that you see, like these college students using it where it's like, write me this essay and they don't even read through it, and it just sounds like AI, because that's a pet peeve for us internally is like, if you send me an email and it just clearly looks like AI, it's like, that's that's not cool. But if you can use it to improve on things or ask it questions in departments that we're all learning about, I think that's what's been really helpful for us, because none of us have dealt with retail before, and none of us have dealt with the scale of this business before. So we run across problems where asking an expert like I can really help you at least think through different ideas that you didn't capture at the beginning.

Richard Walker: 26:14

Yeah. How do you think AI is going to impact your future? Are you seeing it do anything to harm your company or help your company in more ways than you're currently using it?

Brandon Castaneda: 26:24

I think we're actually looking at continuing to improve it. You know, Mike and I were just talking about this the other day that we're considering looking for somebody to kind of be the head of AI at our company, where they would take, you know, some time to sit in on every meeting with every department and just see what is it that we're doing, and how could we use AI to either streamline some things, maybe cut out some processes, maybe automate some stuff? Because I really do think that the answer isn't always just getting more bodies and putting more people on the problems. I think it's how we can maximize all the tools that are out there. And with everybody being so busy with what we're doing on a day to day, it's hard to kind of pick your head up sometimes and think, what can I be doing to make this more efficient?

I just rather get it done rather than trying to optimize it today. So I think it's going to considerably help our company out, where we can probably even get more done without having to add as many people.

Richard Walker: 27:24

So one of the things I've been doing for the past year is recording all my zoom meetings, which gives me transcripts, which I put into folders. And then I have executive coaches I've built in ChatGPT that work for me. My COO, other people in the company, we can take those transcripts and we can ask about our performance and improve ourselves. Like, how could I have handled this conversation better? And it's been a game changer for us.

Brandon. It's been unreal to have that insight. I'm not saying it's perfect insight. Like I think humans can still do a better job, but it'll see trends over time. It'll see patterns of change, and the feedback has given me insights to myself and to other people that have allowed us to have better, less friction in the company, better conversations.

It's just been amazing for us.

Brandon Castaneda: 28:09

I love that use case because we do record every meeting. What we do in the company is we each, each one of us, that is like more executive level, has an assistant with us, and then we also record every meeting. So I would love to do that same philosophy there and take that back. Because although you say it's not perfect, I would agree with that. But at the speed of which you can get, that feedback is just unmatched.

You could wait for somebody to have a full review of it, but you're talking about at the amount of data you're throwing into it, weeks and probably months to get like a real assessment versus clicking a button and 30s later you have a 90% of a solid assessment.

Richard Walker: 28:49

Yeah, I just did this this week. I mean, I went through a conversation 20 minutes later. I ran it through it to give feedback on did I handle this? I was I was actually saying no to a vendor and nobody likes saying no. So did I handle that?

No, correctly, did I? What happened? And it gave me feedback like, hey, you let them go too long thinking they could win. So they were justifying and rationalizing and trying to sell you. Still, you could have done this faster up front like, damn, I didn't even think about that going into this.

Yeah, I'll tell you what. And I'll offer this to any of my my listeners as well. I have this really amazing template for building any kind of coach that you want. I'll send it to you, Brandon, because it's a prompt template to build the prompt. So you put in like, what kind of thing?

So for myself, I made it hyper specific. I want you to be a world class, elite executive coach for CEOs, for men in their 50s who are in the USA, who run software as a service bootstrapped enterprise. Like, I narrowed it down so much to build that. And I also have one for sales. Like I have a sales consultant that helps me understand sales calls and how I could do better.

 So it's a really amazing framework. I'm happy to share it with you if you're interested.

Brandon Castaneda: 29:56

Yeah, that'd be great.

Richard Walker: 29:58

Yeah, man, I know I could just keep talking to you all day. And this this happens a lot with me is. I love these conversations. I'm super excited about your success. But I'll have to wrap this up.

And before I ask my last question, what is the best way for people to find and connect with you?

Brandon Castaneda: 30:14

So I would say the best way for anybody to connect with me would be either my LinkedIn, which you could just look me up, Brandon Castaneda or I even have a Instagram, which I'm probably way more active there. And it's Brandon Prophets.

Richard Walker: 30:29

Brandon Prophets. Cool. And your website's just ezbombs.com right?

Brandon Castaneda: 30:33

ezbombs.com. That's right.

Richard Walker: 30:35

Awesome. All right. I get to ask one of my favorite questions, who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style and how you approach your role?

Brandon Castaneda: 30:45

So I would say the person that's probably had the most impact is got to be the one that we work with here together. His name is Mike. Mike Jalonen, he's he's helped me out with a lot of things. So when I first met him, I mean, I was literally 18 years old, but we started to work together probably day in and day out. I'd say almost eight years ago now, it's been about 7 or 8 years, and we've had a variety of different companies together.

When I initially started with him, I had a failed startup that basically had merged into his company, and so he was the CEO at that time. I got to learn quite a bit of his style and all the experience that he brought, and I think that's really helped me in terms of, you know, becoming a better CEO for myself and figuring out not only how to deal with the day to day challenges, but also how to make good decision making when it comes to agreements and these different vendors that we have to work with. So I would say he's definitely been a huge, huge help in crafting my skill level. And I would say somebody that I haven't met yet that I would really like to be able to meet, that I think is just really inspired me quite a bit. Is somebody named Pbd Patrick David.

I don't know if you've ever come across him. He's a great entrepreneur. He has taken what I think. What I've really appreciated is he's taken a business which he's been able to exit, and he's really built a great social presence where now he has, you know, become a big podcaster and really been able to build his company through all of the social aspects. So I'm really intrigued with a lot of that right now.

 And I think that I'm really focused on trying to find ways to take what we're doing, and even for myself, and be able to build a little bit more of a social presence to expand onto future ideas and projects that we work on.

Richard Walker: 32:41

I love that you mentioned somebody that you haven't met. So hey, internet, all the fans of the show. If you can make the connection happen between Brandon and Patrick, do it. Let's make the intro happen. That would be amazing.

Great. Yeah, and I love Mike. He was a guest on my show, but he's also been a good friend of mine for, gosh, 18 years. I don't even know. So yeah.

Awesome guy. I'm glad that you talked about him. All right. I want to give a huge thank you to Brandon Castaneda, founder of EZ Bombs, for being on this episode of The Customer Wins. Go check out Brandon's website at COVID-19.

Amazing flavors and don't forget to check out Quik! at quickforms.com. We make processing forms easier. I hope you enjoyed this discussion. We'll click the like button, share this with someone and subscribe to our channels for future episodes of The Customer Wins.

Brandon, thank you so much for joining me today.

Brandon Castaneda: 33:32

Thank you for having me, Rich.

Outro: 33:34

Thanks for listening to The Customer Wins podcast. We'll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.