The G.O.A.T.s of Kindness on Bootstrapping a Purpose-Driven Company | Dr. Brent Ridge & Josh Kilmer-Purcell

Everything can have value. It may not be the dollar value, but it can have value of some sort. And that's how we always try to think about decision. Like, okay. Is this decision I'm going to make going to help bring dollars in the door now, or is it going to put me one step closer to that bigger vision that I have? And sometimes you have to look really hard and think, how can I use this opportunity to get to that bigger vision? Welcome back to the Eric Ries show. Today, something a little different. I'm talking to two founders today, Doctor. Brent Ridge and Josh Kilmer Purcell. They're the cofounders of a skin care company called Beekman eighteen o two. Brent built a career healing people as a physician, while Josh had a career as a writer and a marketer. But together, they turned a small farm in Sharon Springs, New York into a multi $100,000,000 skin health company that sold everywhere from QVC to Ultima. Their story is kind of wild. After the global recession forced them out of their high flying Manhattan life, they went to live on their farm in Upstate New York. Their business story started with a letter from a neighbor about 80 homeless goats and a need to find a home for them. Agreeing to house the goats on their farm, the next step was this Google search. What can you make with goat milk? That unlikely beginning became Beekman eighteen o two, built around two core ingredients, goat milk and kindness. In this conversation, you're gonna hear how these founders bootstrap for a decade without outside funding, crack the luxury market by cold calling 5th Avenue buyers, and scale this incredible business with the help of their own neighbors, literally wrapping tens of thousands of bars of soap in their kitchen. We also talk about what they learned from the time they won the Amazing Race, yes, the reality show, which they used to pay off their million dollar farm mortgage. And while they believe kindness, not niceness, is the real operating system of their business, It's a candid inspiring look at resilience, purpose, and building a company where values aren't just words on a wall. They are the product itself. I hope you'll enjoy this conversation with the founders of Beekman eighteen o two. Alright, guys. Thank you very much for coming on and and and sharing your story. I appreciate it. Thank you for having us. Happy to be here. So, yeah, I think for a lot of people, this will be, you know, not the typical start up story that they're used to hearing. And so I I think it's I think it's it's utterly fascinating. So maybe, talk a little bit about where the company is now, what it does, and then we'll kinda rewind the tape to see how you got there. Absolutely. Yeah. We definitely do not have a typical founding story. That's …