How using social media to show ‘the good, the bad, the ugly’ of building a business helped Mid-Day Squares reach $30M in revenue
The founders of Montreal-based chocolate brand Mid-Day Squares describe their approach to social media content as a reality show documenting what it’s like building a startup.
“That means showing the humanization of it, including the drama — the good, the bad, the ugly,” said co-founder Jake Karls. Since launching in 2018, Mid-Day Squares’ founders — including Karls’ sister, Lezlie and her husband, Nick Saltarelli — have led the content strategy and are the most frequently featured on-camera talent across its social pages. Some of the brand’s videos give a tactical behind-the-scenes look at how Mid-Day Squares is approaching certain aspects of building a business, like launching into new retailers. Others are comedy sketches or motivational talks showcasing the personal lives of the founders.
For instance, the most recent series was about the brand’s three-year journey of trying to get into Costco. Costco and Mid-Day were going back and forth on the price point — Costco wanted Mid-Day Squares to enter its stores at a lower price point than what Mid-Day Squares wanted. So Mid-Day Squares issued a call to action to its customers on social media, asking them to purchase its products at the higher price that was proposed to the retailer. The stunt ended up breaking Costco’s Roadshow first-week sales record. Another recent video featured the founders crashing a customer’s wedding and dishing out relationship advice.
Mid-Day Square’s unorthodox approach to advertising has helped the brand hit $30 million in revenue. It has sold more than 47 million chocolate bars and is growing at a rate of 40% to 50% year-over-year as it expands its production capacity and adds retail partners. In April, the Mid-Day team shared on social media that the company was finally profitable after five years in business.
According to the company, while the personal and raw content the trio puts out can take a lot of energy to execute, the move has helped the brand attract more interest from investors and retail buyers over the years and build a loyal relationship with customers.
The brand is available at 9,000 doors across the U.S. and Canada, including Sprouts and Target. The brand launched in Whole Foods nationally in November, and earlier this year did the Costco Roadshow sampling event.
Growing the business through social media
Karls told Modern Retail that the reason why Mid-Day Squares has invested so much in social media content is because “the chocolate bar space is one of the most saturated in grocery, and we knew just having a good product and market fit wasn’t enough.”
When Mid-Day Squares launched in 2018, the founders filmed themselves making their chocolate bars by hand in a condo kitchen. At first, the content lived on Instagram and Facebook, then TikTok and eventually Karls’ personal LinkedIn.
“We talk about things like stress and burnout, and the consumer feels that relatability,” Karls said. Sometimes, that includes telling followers about dealing with injury pain or the risk of working with family; Lezlie Karls recently posted about taking a sabbatical from helping run the business after experiencing burnout.
Karls said that his biggest learning from creating content is that it has to feel authentic to the founders. That means being honest about how they are feeling about the business’ trajectory at any given time. “We’re being authentic and kind, but we’re not getting involved in world events or politics,” he said.
Some of Mid-Day Squares’ most popular videos include a recent explainer on the rising prices of cocoa and its impact on brands, which generated over 32,000 TikTok likes. A behind-the-scenes vlog of what it’s like to build a chocolate factory garnered over 438,000 views and 30,000 bookmarks.
Mid-Day Squares also tries to stand out by finding humorous ways to announce new milestones. For example, when Mid-Day Squares launched at Sprouts, the company filmed a skit “where there are zombies running up a mountain to get the squares because they’re finally at Sprouts,” Karls said.
This approach to content has endeared Mid-Day Squares not only to customers but also to retail buyers and investors. Many of them have become familiar with the brand through LinkedIn, where Karls said he drove around 17 million views on his LinkedIn profile organically last year. To date, Mid-Day Squares has raised a total of $17 million in venture capital, and Karls said that much of the money raised came through “building out loud on LinkedIn. That got investors curious.”
Content is hard
When it comes to scalability, Karls said it takes a lot of energy to keep up with content creation on top of building a business.
“You’ve got to be willing to constantly put yourself on camera and be vulnerable, and you need to be able to take content sometimes when you don’t want to,” Karls said. Sometimes, that means pulling out a phone during an investor or board meeting and asking the room for permission to film, said Karls. “It’s made me a better performer on stage, where I get opportunities to speak to massive crowds to build our brand.”
When asked about the ROI on this personal content, Karls said, “You’re not going to get the results overnight, but you do feel the impact and reach over time.”
But there are some other ways to track the influx of fans-turned-customers. For instance, the brand website’s store locator page typically experiences a spike in traffic when a popular campaign or video is published. “That means that people are searching for a place to find the product,” Karls said.
Ashish Dalal, co-founder and CEO of marketing agency Sapphire Studio, which focuses on paid user-generated content on social media, said more brand founders are creating personal content like Mid-Day’s to stand out online.
“It’s a good approach and it definitely gives you an edge in this space because a lot of people aren’t doing it,” Dalal said. “It tends to attract more customers compared to just relying on paid ads.”
Alongside a diverse marketing playbook, Dalal said, “If a brand can thread that needle properly it can be really effective,” he said. At the same time, he added, “There are only so many founders who can be great on camera to make this work.”
For Mid-Day Squares, Karls said the plan is to continue creating this type of content but slow down the rate or incorporate other team members as the brand grows. “We chose to build the community slowly over the last six years by using storytelling and authenticity as the forefront.”