She Threw Rap Battle Parties for Thousands of Students. Lost All Her Money on a Supplement Brand. Then Built a Marketing Agency That Got a Response From the CEO of Caterpillar.

Bianca McDownriver showed up to the Startups with Stu retreat in Highland Park, Idaho, wearing heels. In the mountains. In the dirt. She'd also spent seven minutes the previous night cooling off in a lake that had sixteen inches of ice under it, couldn't sleep until 2 a.m. because she was too energized, and then delivered one of the sharper conversations this show has produced.

She runs Box Voice, a marketing agency she's operated for eleven years out of Texas. Her clients range from stormwater compliance software to termite control to ERP systems. Mr. Beast's team called. She took the meeting. She doesn't do niches.

And before all of that, she was a freestyle rapper, a supplement brand founder who went broke, and a college party promoter who figured out that the real money wasn't at the door. It was from the apartment complexes.

This was recorded live at a Startups with Stu retreat in Highland Park, Idaho. It's the kind of episode you don't fully appreciate until you go back and catch everything you missed the first time.

The Car Wash, the Piano, and the First Taste of Selling

Bianca's first job was teaching piano in high school. Not because she was passionate about music education. Because she refused to ask her parents for money. She's always been that way. "I've never felt like it was anyone's job to provide," she said. She moved a lot growing up, picked up students wherever she landed, and just kept teaching.

Then came Forever 21 and Victoria's Secret. Fine jobs. Unremarkable. But the one that changed things was a car wash.

She was supposed to stand at the register and check people out. The owner pulled her aside and asked if she'd go out to the lot and upsell customers to the highest detail package. She was young, high school young, and said sure, why not. The base wash was $39. The full detail was $200. She started closing people on the upgrade, over and over, and something clicked. If she could convince a stranger to spend five times more than they planned to spend on their car, what else could she do?

That's a clean origin story for a career in sales and marketing. Most people don't find that thing until their late twenties. Bianca found it in a parking lot.

Driven Supplements: The Business That Cost Her Everything and She Still Won't Throw Away

At BYU Idaho, she noticed a gap. The school was in Rexburg, students were serious about the gym, and there was nowhere to buy supplements. She'd grown up around athletes. Both brothers competed. She understood protein intake, pre-workout, creatine. So she started a brand called Driven Supplements and went to work trying to formulate her own product.

Here's what nobody tells you about making a protein powder: it is extremely hard to make one that tastes good and stays high-protein and low-calorie. She burned through money trying. She was the only one putting in cash. Her business partner Nick knew all the gym guys, so he had the connections, but the financial investment was all Bianca. She went to manufacturing for clothes when the supplement formula wouldn't come together, thinking margins would look better there. She was wrong again. She manufactured in the United States, which crushed her profit margins, even though she kept selling out every run she made.

And then Nick took the cash they'd made together and bought an engagement ring for his girlfriend. His explanation: "Oh Bianca, you always know how to make money."

She nearly signed a lease on a storefront that was running five grand a month. Had a gut feeling. Walked away. Driven eventually died after she left BYU.

To this day, she still carries the Driven merchandise when she moves. Her sister-in-law asked her once why she lugged around a failed company's gear. Because it's a reminder. Of why she failed, what she learned, and what she'd do differently now. She wears the logo and means it.

That's not nostalgia. That's respect for the fight.

Hundreds of Students Paying $10 to Watch Other Students Rap

Here is something the transcript reveals that is genuinely unexpected: Bianca McDownriver is a freestyle rapper.

She organized freestyle rap battle events at BYU Idaho when there was essentially nothing like it happening in Rexburg. Her first one was at Northgate apartments. She packed the space. Students paid $10 to watch other students battle on a mic. She got Kiwi Loco to bring ice cream. She got a local shop to sell drinks. It was scrappy and loud and people loved it.

That one night at Northgate grew into block parties. She blocked off streets near Sammy's ice cream, brought bands and rappers from Utah, rented venues like the Zone, and spent five years throwing events almost every weekend. Thousands of people at the peaks. She brought a waterslide to the sand dunes once, pumped water to the top, and let it run. She got fined for putting a grill on the sand because she didn't know that wasn't allowed. She made friends with the park ranger, who took her on ATV rides around the dunes while the party ran itself.

She charged entrance fees. But the real money was somewhere else entirely.

Apartment complexes wanted to be in front of students. So she sold them tables at her events. They'd set up, offer move-in discounts, get signups on the spot. She charged them by the semester. That became the actual business. Five years of it. And somewhere in the middle of all this, she also did five corporate internships. Because if you're going to run two businesses in college, why not add five internships.

She says it started her love for marketing, but the framing she uses is better: she's not in the marketing business. She's in the business of people and attention. Learning how to get someone to say yes. That's the whole thing.

The $4,000 Purse, the Ex-Google Guys, and the Body Language That Closed the Deal

After college, she started her agency. It was just her. No clients, no portfolio, no office. She was finding leads on Craigslist. Actual Craigslist, where people would post that they needed someone to run a marketing campaign. She'd pray the person wasn't a serial killer and go meet them.

Two former Google employees were starting a consulting firm in Dallas. She found the post, set the meeting, showed up to a breakfast spot downtown. She had nothing to show them except herself. No case studies. The rap battles weren't going to close this one.

So she dressed for the meeting. She'd bought her first real purse, a designer bag that cost close to four grand, with her own money. She walked in with it. One of the two men had studied body language and human psychology. He noticed everything. She sat open, palms visible, posture receptive. She closed the deal.

She's been teaching body language ever since. The basics: arms crossed signals you're closed off, even if you don't mean it. Open palms read as receptive. Power stance before a pitch changes how the room receives you, because there's real psychology behind how people process your physical presence before they process your words. She read Influence by Robert Cialdini. She studied Chris Voss, the CIA hostage negotiator who talks about negotiating with terrorists and why your body often communicates before your words do. She came across the Amy Cuddy TED Talk on power posing that went viral.

Her point, and it's a good one: these things feel minor until you realize the other person is reading them whether you intend them or not. You can ignore that or you can use it.

The Unscripted Video to the CEO of Caterpillar

Three years ago, Bianca started doing video outreach. Not produced, polished, scripted video. The opposite. She walks outside, holds her phone up like a selfie, and talks to whoever she's trying to reach. No ring light. No script. Walking and talking.

She was working with a client that builds agile software development pods and wanted to get in front of large enterprises. Their target was Paul, who was then CEO of Caterpillar. They'd been trying to reach him for a long time. Nothing worked. Bianca said she'd send a video.

The CEO of her client company laughed. Called it unprofessional. Told her not to do it.

She did it without telling him. She sent the video from her own email, not the client's. Walking outside. Selfie angle. She stumbled over words, messed up the pitch, thought about re-recording, and decided against it. Human error is relatable. Perfection is not.

Seven minutes later, Paul replied. His email said he'd never seen anything like it. That the format caught his attention specifically because it was different from every other polished sales outreach he received. He corrected her on his name and on a word she'd gotten wrong. He told her they couldn't move forward because they had an existing third-party vendor for software development integration.

But he also told her: don't stop what you're doing. Keep being different. Keep making the videos.

That email is framed in her office. She looks at it when she feels like she's failing.

The tool she uses is Hippo Video. $49 a month. The email shows up in the recipient's inbox with a small animated GIF preview of her face. It's slightly strange. That's the point. Strange gets opened.

65 Miles an Hour. A Drunk Driver. And Three Things That Flashed Before Her Eyes.

When Bianca was 18, driving from Texas to BYU Idaho, she T-boned a drunk driver who ran a red light in Farmington, New Mexico. She was going 65 miles an hour. Her best friend was in the passenger seat. The airbag wrecked her face. Bloody nose, black eye. Her friend broke her nose. The man she hit went into a coma. She walked away with a banged-up knee.

In the seconds before she knew how it would end, three things went through her mind.

First: had she told her mom, dad, brothers, and sisters how much she loved them? Second: when she crossed over, would God accept her, or had she spent her life going the wrong direction? Third: her bucket list. All the things she'd wanted to do and hadn't done yet. It would have died with her in that car.

She's been living differently ever since. Not recklessly, but urgently. She travels. She does the things on the list before she talks herself out of them. She crossed most of her bucket list off before 30.

Her advice to the younger people in the room at the retreat: "What would your business look like if you chose to wake up tomorrow and live with urgency in everything that you do?" She's not asking it as a productivity question. She's asking it as a mortality question. And those are different things entirely.

She also said she believes in 360-degree success. Not just business. Family, health, friendships, all of it. Business success that costs you everything else is just a different kind of failure.

What Stuck With Me

Most entrepreneur interviews have a version of the same arc: humble beginning, struggle, breakthrough, lesson, success. Bianca's story hits those marks, but she keeps stopping to talk about the people around her. The students who came to the rap battles. The park ranger who took her on ATV rides. Garrett, her husband, who texts back "ok." with a period. She keeps noticing people, and that's not incidental to her success. It's the whole engine.

The other thing that stuck: she carries the Driven Supplements merch everywhere she moves. That failed company from fifteen years ago. Her sister-in-law thinks it's strange. Bianca thinks it's necessary. There's something worth holding onto in that, about how you treat the things that didn't work. Whether you bury them or carry them forward as evidence that you showed up and fought.

She said she could die tomorrow and have zero regrets.

That's not a motivational line. From everything she described, she means it.

Recorded live at a Startups with Stu retreat. More at startupswithstu.com.