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hey what's up everyone today we're going to be speaking with Steven vigilante from alipop he's their director of growth he was also their first employee and a big contributing factor from taking alipop to pre-launch to over $200 million in Revenue last year we spend about an hour talking to Stephen about Tik Tok Amazon out of home all of the different growth strategies that is propelling the brand to basically encroach on Pepsi and Coke's market share today um if you like the episode

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subscribe uh down below and stay tuned for more content hope you [Music] enjoy dude it's great to catch up with you though it's been a little while um ollipop has done a ton of things um you're obviously on the founding team at alipop I'm excited to talk to you today talk through growth I was just in Miami I saw all of the out of home stuff that you're doing there it's actually Le Lexi who produces the podcast she lives in Miami too Lexi I'm sure you've seen a lot of the out of home stuff that Olli

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poop's running all over Brickle we're going we're doing a marketing offsite down there next week I haven't seen any of our Billboards in person yet because we did Chicago in October um and we have four more cities we're doing this year so I'm pumped it's it's it's cool they look really good the creative is awesome so creative is great what I what I want to talk to you about today is like kind of how your perspective on growth has changed as the business has expanded into different

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sort of retailers it's kind of grown out of you know the original Grassroots Str IES that you guys had and you know how you've adapted to that um give us a quick update on like where alipop is today just to kind of Center the conversation and then we can kind of move from there yeah business grew you know two years ago 30 million last year or two years ago 30 million a year ago 73 million then we just finished at right around 200 for um 2023 and by our research and estimation it's the fastest growing

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Beverage Company in America and the most Revenue any beverage brand has done in that in the footprint that we're in so a lot of you know most of the brands in the last decade who've hit like 200 million in sales have been in 60 to 80,000 stores we did it in 28,000 and so our kind of efficiency and velocity per account is you know has never as as my by my estimation has never happened before um and you know it's been wild and I still think we're just scratching the surface we've got like 10% household

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penetration like 18% uned awareness and you know there's still so much white space out there and we're you know this year the big push is going to be the club Channel Costco Sams and um and convenience so we 30% of soda in the country is bought and sold in the convenience store Channel and you know for us it's great that we're doing so well in Whole Foods in Walmart and Target but to really scale and hit that mass audience and really prove that we can be a a real player on the in the

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beverage landscape we've got to show that convenience can can work for us and just describe to us like your role at at alipop and how that's changed over time yeah so I was the first employee I came from Venture Capital world so I was kind of brought in to do fundraising originally um had never worked at a beverage startup before and um I've kind of got this like head of growth role I feel like I'm the tip of the spear pushing the business in New Directions every year and kind of helping thread the needle

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between sales and marketing to make sure the marketing efforts are really driving the sales initiatives of the business and um I think every business needs good connectivity between sales and marketing I think a lot of businesses actually fail at that and so um I've overseen everything I feel like that a lot of people have seen out in the world whether it's when we launched Ecom a couple years ago right before covid and then got into the world of influencer marketing podcast advertising and then

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the world of celebrity I brought Camila in as an investor and helped kind of architect that deal in the brand campaign we launched with her last year and then um yeah we leaned in really heavily on Tik Tok two years ago I launched that for us um and still kind of oversee it and then the last 18 months have been really pushing us into what I would call channels that have been really historically owned by Legacy soda brands and have been impossible to reach for better for you Brands so that's you know sports venues fast

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casual restaurants uh the music industry kind of broadly and so I don't know I almost kind of view myself as like director of culture to some extent like just looking where the world is going and where we need to go as a business and how we continue to reach new audiences in authentic ways and then who the right partners are to help us tell those stories in these different channels so you know director of growth and talent is the role but it's ever evolving every every six months yeah I

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mean so basically you know OIP poop's been on this crazy growth trajectory some of the fastest sales velocity in recent history in the United States um and you're basically leveraging marketing to help guide and accelerate those sorts of sales initiatives I'm just curious coming from the investing world how did that shape your view of like the sorts of marketing activities that alipop should be doing um you guys have been a market leader in a lot of different Avenues I would say you guys

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have definitely like owned Tik Tok as a channel and done really well there um and now you're doing more of the traditional out of home type initiatives that a Coca-Cola or Pepsi would do um yeah how how was your kind of perspective changing as you guys have grown yeah so to the first question on the kind of investing background so I worked at a seed fund investing in better for you consumer so I was meeting with you know 20 to 30 entrepreneurs a week for three years I was at every trade show and I was just like a sponge

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honestly for like how the successful Brands were growing and what they were doing and then you know I also saw a lot of brands that like grew really fast 20 or 30 million of Revenue at Whole Foods and then made the jump to Target in Walmart and fizzled out and I think a lot of Brands you know fall victim to that a lot of better for you Brands just from a price or a taste perspective or just a Communications and marketing perspective like can't reach that mainstream audience um and you know we

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had this inflection point in 2022 where we launched you know we were nationwide at Whole Foods sprouts and like half the Kroger but we were in q1 of 2022 we launched Target and then Publix and then HB and then Walmart almost all doors for all of them so jumped from like 8,000 to 20,000 accounts within a six-month period and it was really scary to be honest I I wasn't sure if we were ready for that consumer yet and you know serendipitously we had like just dove into Tik Tok at the time and um I think

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personally Tik Tok is what has really helped us in those channels like we kind of shifted away from your what I would call typical influencer marketing which is is excuse New York La Miami the wellness kind of crowd discount code swipe up buy this now and then when we went started looking at Tik Tok I was like you can't really do that type of advertising on Tik Tok the super salesy stuff doesn't work discount codes don't work at all and Tik Tok and we kind of found this Lane of like unhealthy

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Foodies is what I would call it where you know creators who are you know generally 18 to 24 live in random parts of the country they're not in main major cities and they're shopping at Walmart and Publix and Target and they're doing mukbangs and fast food reviews and grocery halls and you know my whole strategy with that was like I don't want an ad from you I want to sponsor your content so I want to just show up in your normal videos because you're making content that we want to align with like

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we like pairing ollipop with unhealthy food it kind of it makes the connection that you you know viewers head that like this isn't just a health product right it is a health product but we view it as a soda and like a product that tastes like a soda and acts like a soda and has a full flavor experience and so pairing it with like less healthy people is actually part of the strategy and it's um you know we've done two billion views on those type of videos across Tik Tok Instagram and Facebook in the last two

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years and um you know I think the velocities at Target and Walmart kind of speak for themselves at this point it's it seemingly has worked very well for us and so you know just growing the brand up and trying to reach a broader audience than just that kind of Health Wellness focused label reader at at Whole Foods okay and you would attribute a lot of that success and your success moving into retail to how you guys approach Tik Tok as a channel can you just touch on how important you think that that channel is for Consumer Brands

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and cpg it's critical yeah it's it's actually wild to see how correlated Tik Tok views are to Google search traffic um it's it's it's actually insane it's almost a perfect correlation like a month where we have you know some months We Do 50 million views on Tik Tok we've had months we do 250 million views average month is like 100 million call at and the Google search traffic moves directly in lockstep and to me personally I think Google search is the best especially organic search is the

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best measure of just like overall brand awareness and it's where the journey starts right they see it on Tik Tok they search for the product they learn a little bit about it online and then hopefully they go into a store and pick it up or they're shopping at the aisles and like oh that's a thing I've seen on on Tik Tok and um you know we had a period of time last year where we like cut back spend on Tik Tok and we were doing some other things and it was you know it was it's very clearly correlated

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to me um and you know for us it's like Tik Tok seems very good for top of funnel but we're not doing a lot of Storytelling on there it's really product placement just like showing up in videos and you know a hash using a hashtag in the comments but where we're kind of moving to this year and where we started to do some last year was a lot more of the like middle the funnel consideration more brand building storytelling stuff with creators where they're actually talking about the

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product and talking about how good it tastes and you know doing blind taste tests with their partner at home or whatever and so you know I think we have a lot of people who' have seen it online but like don't necessarily know how good it tastes or that there's all these functional benefits and so I see this big opportunity for us in the middle of the funnel to work with people in a bit more deeper way whether it's an influencer music artist or an athlete and actually like tell the ollipop story

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a little bit more and get the point across that it does taste good because I think there's this inherent skepticism with consumers that they see something all over the Internet there's lots of marketing like they feel like they're being sold to maybe and um there's also an inherent skepticism around low sugar drinks right I think a lot of low sugar drinks don't taste great or make all these promises about the benefits or what it's doing for you and you know don't necessarily deliver on it and the

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products are always higher price so you have this like hurdle and for us the hurdle is just getting people to try it and so you know we're going to lean in pretty heavily in that like middle of the funnel bucket this year that's smart that I think logically that makes a lot of sense so when you first approached Tik Tok the strategy was just like volume like let's just get this can into as many hands as possible so people can see it it was like brand Affinity brand awareness um how did you part of it

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honestly but my initial thinking was like you can do all you want on creators pages but people don't leave the app so if they click through to your brand and they come to your brand account and they see terrible content or no content in some cases you lose them right and so we had to figure out the organic stuff on our page first first and that was like a six-month journey and met this girl Sarah crane you know she was doing stuff on Tik Tok and I was trying to find someone with like you know five to

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15,000 followers posting constantly maybe not a full-time thing but they were in platform a lot and really understood the lingo and the trends and the audios and um you know was very serendipitous I like commented on one of her videos from the ollipop account and it blew up and reached out to her and she had a bunch of good ideas for content for our page and turned out she worked at an agency that did Tik Tok content content for other cpg brands so was like kind of found a needle and a Haack um and so brought her in and she

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started making content for our page and then actually another Creator we were working with his sister was just graduating college and she was making Tik toks and she sent me some videos for us and they were great so we brought her on as well and so we had to get our page dialed in before we really leaned into the Creator stuff because it all works in a circle right it's like and we get all comments a lot like when a big Creator video pops off we'll get comments on our page like came from

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Kayla's video came from Mia's video and like if your content's not good they're not going to stick around right so having that full kind of loop in there where our content are page is good and funny and educational and relevant um and then you know we have this kind of always on Creator Network posting ollipop constantly and it all kind of works together okay cool so just walking that back in terms of how you architect architected it it's like you start with basically creating your own page that

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you know actually has good content it play plays in the space then you actually go out for they're not even Affiliates it's just other creators who want to engage and you know create other content for the brand and now you're getting to a place where the next layer is storytelling and are those paid are those paid engagements how are you thinking through like budget for Tik Tok for the brand and for you do you consider Tik Tok like a level of Performance Marketing for ollipop um so the creators who are constantly posting

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ollipop we do pay yeah um we always include the ollipop partner in there so you know we meet the uh legal guidelines um I can tell you that because we're just doing product placement instead of like a scripted ad it is much more cost efficient for us like I'll get five product placements for the cost of what one ad would cost because it's not they're not doing anything different it's like they're able to make money on a video they were going to post anyway basically just by including us in it so

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it's kind of a win-win for both sides um and I I don't actually view it as I think what your audience would consider a performance Channel where not ever running any messaging towards our site or buy this now we're doing plenty of mentioning of where we are in retail so it's maybe a retail performance Channel I guess um but I view it more as like an awareness like we I measure Tik Tok every month based on what we're spending and how many views and Impressions we're driving so it's really like a CPM

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channel for me um and those two billion views we've done have been at a sub dollar CPM which like really blows people's mind like we do it very efficiently um and and you have scale too which is crazy yeah it could be a lot bigger to be honest I think we're we spend a decent amount but it's a lot less than I think people would would uh imagine it is based on like what I know about what other brands who are smaller than us spend on Facebook every month trying to acquire customers we're

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spending a fraction of that we're we're not you do you guys spend or do you spend at all uh anymore on uh meta or any traditional digital acquisition channels like paid social yeah we we do um I did an M age interview like a year ago where I kind of said we had shut down every other channel and gone all in on Tik Tok and we had for a period of time um but we brought in like a legit media director Sarah who's awesome and she kind of owns all things paid social out of home TV YouTube and you know we

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obviously are doing Google we do a lot of boosting of stuff on Tik Tok and Instagram we do some like geofence paid around retailer launches and specific markets we're trying to focus on as well as these like Blitz is right we have at a home we're doing in Miami right now so we're doing some paid down there um none of it is really driving to the site to be honest it's more like 90% of the business is retail at this point and it's really name of the game so it's all various forms of paid that help drive

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you know traffic into into stores so going back to Tik Tok real quick so these storytelling initiatives these are like more traditional Creator Partnerships where you're actually scripting things out with them or you kind of just just placing it you're you're kind of just engaging with them and say hey come up with a concept but you need to talk about these certain things yeah we have a bunch kind of buckets we try to play in there we've got the people who talk about digestive health and can lean into the functional

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benefits and the fiber and prebiotics and then we've got your more like traditional foodie creators who were just talking about food and fast food and are talking about how good it tastes um and then you know we have this like kind of ever overarching strategy of like at the end day we are trying to get people to switch off of like traditional soda or diet soda and so we're always looking for creators and maybe talk about their love for that product and getting them to switch to ollipop and so

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there's a there's a number of different um variables and then I we have a g internally who manages kind of the influencer side of that and then I kind of focus a bit more on like talent and music artists and athletes and um professional sports teams and that's like a different type of Storytelling right and oftentimes we're doing a production or you know if an artist has something in their life that perfectly aligns with one of those buckets we're going after well you you know kind of

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try to come up with the concept we're uh about to launch in a big convenience storeage chain based out of Philadelphia so we're working with a a music artist who's pretty big now who's based out of Philadelphia and her audience way over index is there and she's gonna make this like really cool video featuring The retailer and ollipop and kind of showing love for Philadelphia so there's like varying degrees of it but always with the notion of like trying to be as organic to their feet as we can we often

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try to work with their creative teams on these things instead of like plugging in our team um because we want it to feel native to their platform right it's got to work on on their page I see so many brand deals where it's just like can in screen and it looks so PA and forced and it it works I'm sure it works for for some Brands I just I try to keep everything as I don't think people want to be sold to I just think more so than ever people are aware of it and so if you get a good organic partnership right

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people love it and they like recognize that it's an ad but um yeah we had this baseball player named Alec monoa who plays for the he's a pitcher for the Blue Jays a kind of saw young k but he's from Miami he trains during the offseason he's a huge lollipop fan and he actually came to us with this idea like hey these Billboards like what if I was like walking down the street in Brickle holding a strawberry vanilla and I started chugging it and the camera panned out and the strawberry vanilla

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billboard is right behind us I was like boom done we you know turned that around in three days and he shot it and posted it last week and it was super cool and there was like tons of good comments on it about about Alig pop and um people liked it right so it's content it was his idea it was great well that's a flywheel I think just on the brand Market marketing side where when you kind of really are comfortable in your own skin and who you are as a business and there are these organic Partnerships

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that really work well because that other person can interpret your brand and then integrate it into the content it just performs better umt I think to your point the brands that are forcing things people don't want to be sold to anymore um it feels inauthentic and you know that's where you get new brands who are super fast growing because they're you know better selling to people in these like d Toc Brands I think are all running into trouble is like you know e-commerce is huge but the majority of

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people still shop in store and you know they tap out on their customer acquisition funnel online and then they got to go to retail and it's a completely different game and they don't know how to play the CPM game and they've been running so much Performance Marketing for so long that they never really built a brand and they were always selling to their lowest hanging fruit and they weren't hitting those people that are like two and three standard deviations outside of their core customer base and you know it's a

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tough Hill to climb right like and you really need a brand to win in retail like it it has to and you have people that you have to hit seven eight times to get to pick it up and when all you've done doing is this like Performance Marketing drug and then you've gotta invert the business overnight it's really hard to do that um and I why a lot of these DC Brands don't work in in retail well there it's a philosophical difference too like it's it's just a different school of thought um and I

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think to your point yeah paid media becomes a drug I was just talking about this the other day um but their idea of like brand building is developing a direct response ad that performs well on the channel and is scalable but there's really no depth in that so ads right and there's not usually much emotion in them or humor or the things that people really remember and it's a good way to get people to buy something once but then it's like how do you keep them coming back even the best direct

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consumer Brands today I think you know ones that we've spoken to on this podcast like uh actually we have arjin from Jolie next week like you know it was really like a brandbuilding effort and building Jolie and I think it's very similar to what you were talking about in scaling Olli poops Tik Tok just like how do people want to create ugc and just create it for the sake of creating it to create more conversation that's that that in turn is driving e-commerce sales so couldn't agree more there I'm

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curious what your take is on on Tik Tok shop are you guys on it um how do you think about marketplaces um we can I want to talk about Amazon as well but just since we've been talking about Tik Tok how are you guys thinking about Tik Tok shop um I have maybe if it's I don't have good Insight we're on there I don't know a ton about it I know it's doing okay for us um we played around on flip and I would say Amazon's something we underinvested in the last couple years and are aggressively trying to fix that

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I think under investing in the place where 45% of online shopping starts was maybe not the smartest move on our side and just a combination of like a lot going on and not enough resources and all that jazz but it's something we're putting a lot of focus and attention into this year yeah for sure Amazon's crucial for beverage um I'm sure there's so much demand already for your product there too yeah yeah there is it's I wish we had put more effort in earlier but it's okay we can we can fix it yeah I

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mean you guys got a lot of irons in the fire I don't think you're I don't think you're doing too bad 200 million plus much higher on a run rate perspective and we only have 110 employees I think it always surprises people a lot of Brands our size have two to 300 employees and you know we've had a laser focus on you know getting to profitability the last 12 months and um that's not part for the course in in beverage as as I'm sure you know so you know we've had to make tactical

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decisions and I think it's made us a lot more efficient like people are always shocked investors when they see our marketing Spin and our trade spend we're actually run a pretty tight ship here and you know now the world has shifted and capital is more scarce and the strategics are not buying things as early as they used to like you have to be able to you know not rely on the drug of venture capital to keep the thing alive so it's been a strategic decision we've made that some of our competitors

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have have not made and we'll see how how it pans out for them so profitability is a big Focus for this year what else is kind of um on your mind in terms of having another break breakout year for ollipop um I mean so we got a couple case studies last year we launched with sweet green uh that was kind of our first big fast casual partner it's exceeded expectations by 3x I would say based on you know what they wanted us to do in there um both sides are very happy we've got we're looking at some really

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large Partnerships in that space that could be very interesting for us Sports has been interesting to dive into I did a deal with the or we did a deal with the City women's soccer team last year which I think some people felt was random but hi ve is based there which is like kind of the Wegman of the Midwest and um candidly they had an opening in beverage and um they're building their own stadium that opens in you know this upcoming season here in March and it's the first women's only soccer stadium in

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the country actually so we got in with them last year as a marketing partner because we weren't blocked out yet by a Coker Pepsi and we're now grandfathered into their new stadium that's opening so it'll be our first you know in stadium distribution opportunity but that then you know opened up the doors for me in the Sports World once we announced it you know I got flooded with emails and Linkedin messages from other sports teams and most have a Coker Pepsi contract that precludes us from working

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with them but I found two others that do not um and I can't say exactly who they are yet because we haven't announced it but they're major and they are to me massive wins for the business and will really help us tell the story that alipop is is a player in the sports space and as more Coke and Pepsi deals you know come you know most of those deals are three to five years so once something expires or is expiring we have an opportunity to kind of get in there and so um you know that's we're gonna make a lot of noise

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in that space I will tell you this year um and then music so Camila is obviously our first iteration there we've had a number of music artists on our cap table you know I've gotten to know the record labels really well I've got a better understanding of just how the music industry works it's very comp uted and complicated but we're going to lean in pretty hard in the country space actually this year we're sponsoring a big country music artist who's going on tour um in a few months I'm really

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excited about that it's totally new and different for us and it's a whole creative challenge but uh and then we've got kind of this like upand cominging gen Z country artist we're working on something else with so new world for me I'm not a country fan but I am I'm learning my way through it and I think it's going to be an awesome new audience for us you have any Frameworks for this Steve because you know since I've known you too you've always been pushing the

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envelope in terms of like what the business should be doing from a marketing perspective without like you know necessarily knowing how it's going to perform you're taking risks so I'm just curious if you use anything to kind of guide you in that decision- making process yeah actually somebody asked me that question the other day and I kind of put some thought into it um I feel like there's like call it the Coke and Pepsi Partners out there that are like the the thing that's the biggest thing

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right now and is the top dollar thing you can do and has the op you know chance of moving the needle a lot but also is a huge expensive bet for a brand like us and you know would chew up like most of our budget we have for talent and that's like I'm talking about celebrities that are like three to five million plus dollars to work with and I'm kind of looking for the next big thing whether it's in NASCAR or in music or in you know even in sports right soccer is having moment right now and

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it's it's really grown both men's and women's and you know we can't really afford to do a deal with like an NFL team to be honest and I don't think it would make sense for US Dollars and cents wise but soccer's exploding and the World Cup's coming here in two years and we've got you know Messi's first full season and you know I'm looking for the next big thing right I want the artist who's got an awesome you know kind of Niche Community right now that

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loves them within their Circle but is not a household yet and candidly is someone that we can afford and do something really interesting with at a price point that doesn't break us um but is not so big that they've got like a huge team around them already and you know is gonna cost a zillion dollars even just to get to a shoot and all those things so I'm kind of like it sounds really basic I guess but like I'm looking for there's like the Coke and CRA the alop deals it's like I always

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try the frame I used as like what's the ollipop p po on this right and even like I've noticed obviously in the last five years I'm sure you've seen it there's lots of Brands who copy things we do and we've done things and other brands do them and you know I'll talk about something in the media on social and people run that direction then I'm looking at the next big thing so it's like or I'm thinking about what's something unique that people can't copy

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or it would take six more months for them to copy and um even our Tik Tok strategy I was very vocal about a year ago and I've seen a lot of brands try to emulate that and we're you know obviously diversifying away from that we ran our first big TV campaign with Camila last year that performed really well so we are definitely gonna have a very balanced approach to to the to the to the plan this year so you mentioned Coke and Pepsi they're obviously the two major players in this space how has your

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relationship with them changed as you guys have like grown and become a major player in the in the soda space and I think when you first started you kind of shied away from being soda from a message perspective and now it's like no we're we are a soda we're coming to to take you know to eat your lunch basically yeah we I mean we launched as like the packaging said sparkling tonic because we didn't think people at like arowana and Whole Foods would pick something up that said soda on it it was

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very quickly apparent that that was not the right messaging because it didn't it doesn't mean anything to anyone if anything it sounds like bitter or gross like what does it sparkling tonic mean like I don't know and it definitely doesn't invoke like cocacola and root beer and grape I didn't mean to say Coca-Cola like classic Cola um and so you know we change the packaging you know we call it a new kind of soda now very much leaning into the Nostalgia Vibes but I've always said like we don't

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have any sort of grand ambition to like take Coke and Pepsi to zero we know that's not going to happen we ultimately will like likely need to partner with one of them at some point but um I can tell you in these like sports deals I'm I'm looking at and some of these music videos we've done like they have blocked us you know like they there's teams that have wanted to work with us and have tried to carve our category out of an existing contract with one of those two and they flat out said no whereas a

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couple years ago they maybe didn't even know who we were we weren't on the radar we're definitely on the radar now um and we're I think getting under some skin somewhere um they probably still view us as rounding era right 200 million in a category of 40 billion in the US is is nothing um but you know every day we chip away and hopefully we'll be on you know airplanes and in movie theaters and hospitals and all these places that you know we've been more or less blocked out

00:30:08 - 00:31:07

of either by a contract or you know just pricing right we're never going to be able to sell the product at as low a cost as um as give us an idea of the give us an idea of the price discrepancy right now I mean you can buy on a per unit basis when you're buying multi packs of quality Diet Coke it's generally like 60 to 80 cents a can um and then if you're at like a 7-Eleven right you can buy a 44 ounce big gulp for like a dollar which is wild and ollipop is generally around $2.50 per

00:30:38 - 00:31:28

can so and we don't have a fountain soda offering it but you know so we're generally like three to four times the price per per unit and that's retail price right when you're talking about these Partnerships we're talking wholesale pricing but it all ladds up to the same thing yeah damn wow I had no idea Koke was that cheap um I mean it's like look at the ingredients plus the scale of the companies and you know the math starts to M we're using like there's nine grams of plant-based fiber

00:31:03 - 00:32:03

there's six prebiotics in every ollipop like that's stuff is not cheap it's not fake it's not subsidized by the government yeah for sure um no it's different um so I guess like in terms of you in terms of you you were employee number one at the company obviously things have changed a lot has it SC I mean I just want to understand like your expectations going into the Venture and how how it's gone it's obviously been super successful but can you just opine on that for a second yeah I mean I the

00:31:33 - 00:32:27

the number one theme I kind of noticed when I was in the investing world was like better for you junk food is is a thing right and it's you're not changing consumer Behavior you're not asking them to you know swap out Doritos for kale chips right it's like the things that are close analoges to the historically terrible things but have better ingredients whether it's Halo top and ice cream smart sweets and candy bonsa and pasta simple milk and cheit like you're not changing consumer Behavior

00:32:00 - 00:32:49

you're just giving them a better mouse trap and so when I first kind of saw ollipop I was like oh this is like a no-brainer like no one everybody wants a root beer but there's so many people who don't drink it anymore or who are drinking it and like upset about drinking it and you know if someone made something that was not only like less bad but actually functionally beneficial and tasted like the real thing I think it's a it would be a huge idea you know hitting 200 million in Revenue in five

00:32:25 - 00:33:15

years and less than 30,000 doors if you had ever told me that was the case I would have told you you're crazy because beverage Brands don't grow like that so I I would say it's like surpassed all of our wildest expectations and I can tell you like internally you know we always thought it could be you know a billion dollar brand one day but now it's like I actually think a billion in revenue is is possible at this at this point like we're there's like 200,000 plus convenience stores in the country we're

00:32:50 - 00:33:38

not you know we're in 20000 of them right now and we haven't sold a can outside the country we don't even really have multi packs we just launched an eight pack at Costco but most soda is bought in multi packs we're doing it all through like single cans in the refrigerator which is is insane and so when I look at like the white space and the upside and the business like Mexico and Latin America is the biggest soda Market in the world we're not even there yet I think there's tons of demand and

00:33:14 - 00:34:07

even just like having worked with Camila and a couple people on our team come from the UK including our co-founder like there's a massive demand for this product overseas that we haven't even touched yet so yeah I truly I hate people I hate when people say we're just getting started it's such like a startup tagline but like I really kind of feel like like there's so much more room to room to grow here yo so talk to me about International expansion though because we talked to a lot of Beverage Founders

00:33:41 - 00:34:40

who it seems like they they move to the you they expand to the UK or France or the Europe European markets like pretty quickly um and obviously you guys have focused on density and just like owning the states uh what are your thoughts on on expansion just geographically I actually view it as like a red flag when people go abroad too quickly it's it's very complicated right you either need to ship products from the US on boats or you need to stand up a whole new supply chain in that market neither of which

00:34:09 - 00:35:06

are cost effective um and if a brand is doing it too early I think it's a sign that they feel like they've Tapped Out on growth in the US like the primary reason we haven't done it is we've had trouble keeping up with inventory demands in the US like we have had pretty painful out of stock issues for and we fixed a lot of it last summer but for the 18 months before that it was like under constantly under producing and overselling and we were just growing so quickly like built a plan and you run

00:34:39 - 00:35:38

you know you built a forecast and you build inventory to a forecast then you come in 2x over that demand wise like what do you do and so why would we even consider going abroad when we had to figure out our supply chain here in the US and we've gotten that all under control now but um you know we have to win in sea store here I think before we even look at any other overseas Market besides Canada um it just we just don't need it and to the some extent you need to leave growth drivers on the table for

00:35:08 - 00:36:05

a potential acquir or whatever and so if you like go and Gobble up all that space it makes it harder to buy the business because they need to make a case that they can grow it right so all those kind of factors play into it but we're obviously looking at it we've got really good partners ready in Latin America we want to go there I don't think we've really looked that hard at Europe yet but you know we've Grew From 70 to 200 million last year without it we think we can you know grow you know triple digits

00:35:37 - 00:36:35

again this year in the US so we just it's a whole another thing to deal with that like if you don't have to deal with it yet just save it for the flip side says there's competitors and if they get their first what does that mean for us right we obviously think about those things but the reality is the US is the biggest market and the most important so how big do you think Amazon can be as a channel what is what is it like like what's the revenue mix for you guys on Amazon right now it's it's pretty small

00:36:05 - 00:37:09

to be honest I think dtoc plus Amazon is 15% of the business um I go back and forth on this because our you know we're in one of those weird categories where it's you know single digit low single digit dollars to buy in store it's 40 bucks online and people are trained to think everything is cheaper online and we're obviously like much more expensive not on a per unit basis but just the total dollar number and so you know I struggle to see a world where there would be like a massive Amazon business

00:36:37 - 00:37:40

for us but the inverse of that is like Celsius is enormous on Amazon liquid death is a huge online business um so there's case studies that prove that it's possible um I think it takes a lot of time in effort and Amazon is is a flywheel right and you got to build listings and you got to spend money on ads and you know in a world where dollars are scarce we just haven't invested as much in the channel but I I think it could be you know a multi- 10 figure sorry a multi- 10 digigit business for us no

00:37:09 - 00:38:09

that's not the right thing either like multiple T tens of millions not nine figures for us at least um multip on the Tik Tok yeah I know what you meant on the Tik Tok side I'm curious to hear your take on this um a lot of the ollipop content is like like Tik Tok early type stuff when you look at the feed that's probably obviously a function of like your social media manager who is a girl I'm just curious like how you think about that since it's such a large impression driving channel

00:37:39 - 00:38:36

for the business I think a mistake a lot of Brands make is trying to force like brand messaging on Tik Tok I just the way the algo works it's you know 80% of the people who see a piece of content are not your followers right if it hits the fre you page and so I have said this a zillion times like content on Tik Tok has to be educating or entertaining to someone who has no idea who the brand is right that's the only way you can grow it if you're just talking to yourself if you're just talking about the benefits

00:38:08 - 00:38:57

if you're just doing recipe videos like a stranger is not going to care about that Instagram's super different right you're really nurturing your followers and your audience and it's much more about aesthetic and a Vibe and kind of pulling people closer once they're already in the funnel but to me Tik Tok is more for top of funnel growing just overall awareness of the brand and so we have very different kpis very different strategies for both and you know I think why Tik Tok works so well is we've let

00:38:32 - 00:39:19

Sarah like it's her page basically like we let her do her thing and if she has a funny idea or she wants to come film something with me like we we do it but we try to stick more to like Tik Tok native content and I you see brand content so much it's just like cringy and you're like why would any normal person who doesn't know who you are care about this and it's like a hard needle to threat especially when you're first starting you just got to like throw [ __ ] at the wall and see what sticks but um I

00:38:56 - 00:39:49

think we've got done a good job having like Tik Tok and Instagram have like totally different personalities totally different copy for everything Tik Tok is much cheekier and feels a bit more jenzy I think and Instagram is a bit more aesthetic and creative driven and is more like your homepage your site right it's like you want to give like an overview of the brand whereas Tik Tok is a bit more like funny and cheeky and offthe wall yeah I hear you um last question for you you think there's like

00:39:22 - 00:40:24

uh you have like a surprising or contrarian take on building a beverage brand that you'd want to share um if anything comes to mind um I saw that question in your email and I've been thinking about it I feel like I have a lot of contrarian takes I'm struggling to think of one right now you definitely shared a lot today I think just one thing like when I talk to early stage Brands like everybody wants to go really big really fast right and like Walmart wants me and Target wants me but

00:39:53 - 00:40:43

like the reality is selling in is really simple you can hire good good sales guy who can get your woman who can get you in but like getting people into store to buy it is really the hard part and like we didn't sell people are always surprised by this like we didn't sell a can of ollipop outside of California for two years like we spent two years in Market in SF and La doing demos doing events getting to our customer you know we were like trying to figure out like are people going to gravitate to the

00:40:18 - 00:41:24

fruit flavors or the soda flavors are people gonna know what a sparkling tonic is we had our Our Vintage Cola was called cinnamon Cola um and uh I'm just realizing I didn't put my trash out and the garbage truck is coming by um once I don't know was cinnamon Cola though it's crazy yeah and we like totally realized that most people don't like cinnamon and wouldn't even pick it up not most people 35% of people um so I feel like I need to let me bring the the garbage cans out one sec yeah do your

00:40:51 - 00:41:56

thing bro we we got time well you got it bro you make it got it you made it I want house this is my EA by the way want to say hi the consultant my senior soda consultant we're on camera what's uh what what's her his name this is this is Juliet Juliet she was a street dog now she's she's living life it's very marvista Venice so so take us through that contrarian contrarian take real quick Steve yeah I guess and I don't know how cont it is I just think it's good advice is like you have to know

00:41:23 - 00:42:18

your your customer and we spent two years in the trenches doing sampling and demos and like realizing that sparkling tonic didn't make sense for us cinnamon Cola was offputting to 35% of people who don't like cinnamon I had no idea people would always ask me if it tastes like Fireball that was like the feedback we always got um and so you know we changed the packaging we changed the flavor on that one to Vintage Cola which was a little confusing to people they thought it was a different skew it was the same

00:41:50 - 00:42:50

thing just a different name um and like you know we actually like said no to Walmart for three years because we just didn't think the brand was ready for it and you know building the brand Brick by Brick and going into the right channels at the right time is is so important um and I think we did a good job of like staging the business out and doing things when we were ready to be able to support them both with you know dollars but also with people and having people in Market to support those various

00:42:20 - 00:43:17

accounts um I probably have so much more honestly like I'm pretty anti- DTC in general I I think like everyone thinks it's like the name of the game and like I don't think a lot of I I think that's I think that's changing though especially in beverage like people buy on shelves I think there's a massive case for Amazon for a lot of these businesses but yeah I mean Direct's just a way to like you know be a better digital marketer and like own the relationship with a customer which you

00:42:48 - 00:43:44

can Flex on organic social so yeah I think you guys learned that it's like meet the people where they are right we have we're available on all these channels we don't care if someone buys from us or Amazon or gopuff or instacart or Whole Foods or Target like it all it all matters I think you have to have an omni Channel business I know businesses that are multiple nine figures and more than half of it's Amazon and you know I don't think acquirers want to buy that because there's too much Channel risk

00:43:17 - 00:44:14

there right if the algorithm changes tomorrow your business could be in trouble so um again I don't know how contrarian any of that is I just think it's like uh strong opinion good it's good advice dude thank you so much for uh coming on I think you dropped a lot of wisdom today um I really appreciate it we gotta link up soon either in LA or when you're back East I appreciate you having me dude this was a fun fun chitchat I've been making pods I've been doing a bunch of PODS lately I saw bro I

00:43:45 - 00:44:43

saw an in-person pod you did I was I was jealous I was like we need to be one with Pro I don't know who who I don't remember whose podcast it was I just saw on Lin true has like celebrity packaged Goods he does like celebrity Brands um but I did this like podcast it was in December I think it's called sporkful I wasn't familiar with it but it's like a Serious XM podcast went to their offices like crazy setup i' never been in a studio like that and you know fun interview came out you know I kind of

00:44:14 - 00:45:14

Judge a lot of these things by like random people in my life who like send me them you know it's like how do you know how big something is and it didn't get much pick up and then the host um ended up on an an NPR show called uh I don't know innovator something and they were like Yay the the podcast is gonna be on innovators tomorrow and I had no idea what that was and it was just like a 10- minute it's like a 10-minute NPR Daily News podcast and like they had him on there talking about

00:44:44 - 00:45:36

his interview with me because they thought it was interesting about ollipop and like my interview got clipped into this NPR thing and like a little that I know it's like a top 10 business podcast and gets like hundreds of thousands of downloads a day and I had like probably like 70 people from all walks of my life reached out like holy [ __ ] you were on the indicator like and I had no idea happening and you just never know like people old people I've worked with five you know five eight years ago reaching

00:45:10 - 00:46:10

out on LinkedIn like sending it to me I was like that's kind of cool that is definitely not going to happen on this podcast let me manage your expectations really quickly we will give you some we'll give you some great clips and uh bro at this point you've done it all man I saw the hbr uh case study so you know this is just this is just good banter I like good banter yeah the Harvard thing was wild that was The Surreal experience honestly you know one of those things you like hype up in your head and you're

00:45:39 - 00:46:31

like is this G to be as cool as it sounds and it was it was cool it was really well done professors were awesome you did a case like in front of the of the students right or is it like a real no it's not as it's not I don't think what everyone thinks it is that they have this like one week intensive course every January where they bring in like I think it's six Founders a day for the whole week so there's 30 companies that come in and each of them gets an hour and they we did a prep call with the

00:46:05 - 00:46:56

professors and kind of like talked them through the business and things that were going right things that we you know had challenges with and like we kind of like they had bu bulleted out a couple like business cases and problems the students were supposed to think about you know going into it but it honestly ended up being like a Consumer Panel so we all we had ollipop there 125 students almost half had had it and half had not and they all tried it at the same time and like gave us live feedback both the

00:46:31 - 00:47:25

people who had it and like knew about it and what they knew about it and where they found it and what they you know understood about prebiotics and stuff and then the other 50% a lot of international students honestly who hadn't had it and were giving us kind of First Impressions on packaging and taste and flavor profile and like that was fascinating like we've never done that before right A Live 125 person crosssectional panel and then Highly Educated like business students what you say no just like Highly Educated

00:46:58 - 00:47:46

business students smart people some some who' worked in consumer some who hadn't so it was like interesting and then Ben kind of told the founder story and they had actually reached out to me originally because they wanted to talk about Tik Tok so I went and like kind of did the marketing Spiel and talked about Tik Tok and how we use it and why we use it and it was they did a really good job of like framing up like founder Mission questions and for Ben and you know I Al I also do all of our fundraising here

00:47:22 - 00:48:18

too so like some of the fundraising stuff and it was just like a good we could have gotten like two more hours it felt like it was like we ran out of time but it was really cool it was a really cool experience and I got a Harvard sweatshirt out of it so most that's what's important well Steve thanks so much man for coming on board I'll uh hopefully I see you soon man I'll send you a text when I'm coming out to LA and uh thanks so much I appreciate it [Music] cool