How One Startup Built a Multimillion-Dollar Food and Beverage Company Using bnotes

4 min readMay 30, 2019

“90% of Americans don’t get enough vegetables in their diet.” — Time.com

One company set out to solve that problem by creating products that combine whole organic foods, including sweet potatoes, carrots, cauliflower, spinach, and beets with positive nutrition to help families eat better and enjoy their vegetables.

Food and beverage company Sneakz Organic started using bnotes in 2017 and has since scaled product distribution to more than 4,000 retailers nationwide. The team of entrepreneurs, creatives, and food and beverage experts behind Sneakz adopted the bnotes web app as a communication tool before the app’s release of version 1.0 on the App Store last year.

Overview

Since 2017, the Sneakz team has created 11 Channels, invited 14 team members to collaborate, curated 25 Tags to serve as filters, and has shared more than 1,200 notes.

In terms of organization and structure, Sneakz has 1 Workspace called “Sneakz” with 11 Channels (topics).

Research
Blog Posts
Social
Corporate — (3 team members in this Channel)
Marketing — (7 team members in this Channel)
Design
Product Development
Public Relations
Branding
Sales
Website

bnotes has been an incredible tool to help us streamline day-to-day business activities. With our operations, sales, and marketing teams located across the US and 3 other countries, we needed to find a platform that allowed us to bring fluidity to projects, and give realtime access to notes, details, and timelines. — Supply Chain Manager, Sneakz

How Sneakz uses Channels and Tags

A lot of the above Channels run parallel with their Slack Channels where they use bnotes for long-form information and Slack for messaging.

bnotes link showing how bnotes is used as a repository of information

When it comes to workflow management, bnotes has replaced email for internal communications, it serves as a lightweight project management tool, and has quickly become the knowledge hub for the business.

Inside the Public Relations Channel, team members publish Boilerplate content, Media conversations, P.R. opportunities, and ideas, as well as meeting notes. They use tags like #celebritymentions, #inkindsupport, and #productplacement to organize and filter their notes.

Our public relations efforts at Sneakz involve a lot of outside conversations with media, influencers, potential brand partners, sponsorship managers, etc., the details of which the entire team needs to be kept apprised as we consider each opportunity. With bnotes, I’m able to organize notes on each project easily, provide updates, next steps and action items, external links, and logistical considerations, as well as engage in discussion and respond to inquiries from the team within each note. It allows our team to work from the same shared information and ensure that we are collectively making the most informed possible decisions around each opportunity on the table. — Sneakz Public Relations Strategist, Carli Brinkman.

showing search inside the Sneakz “Marketing” Channel

Our team used to be bogged down in meetings and swamped with emails. bnotes allows us to efficiently communicate so I don’t worry about having to be in every meeting or missing out via a lost email. Now I review our team notes each morning over my coffee and I’m fully caught up with each project. — President, Sneakz Organic

How Sneakz uses Discussions to Communicate Feedback

bnotes “Discuss” function was created to eliminate lengthy email exchanges and to keep dialogue contextually relevant so that it doesn’t disappear in a waterfall of Slack messages.

Sneakz uses bnotes Discuss feature to start conversations on notes and give feedback to the owner of the note. The team has found this experience to be more effective than trying to communicate thoughts about a doc (as an attachment) in Slack. Because bnotes keeps discussions contained inside each note, context doesn’t get lost, and the team can always go back to reference the dialogue.