Unit Economics

On today’s episode, I sit down with Katharine Leitch , Co-Founder and COO of Esspo , a company making espresso soda in a ready-to-drink format. Espresso soda is not a new behavior. People have been mixing espresso with soda or sparkling water at home, and versions of espresso tonics have been showing up on coffee shop menus for years. What Esspo is trying to do is turn that behavior into a package...

On today’s episode, I sit down with Zoya Virani , head of growth at CPGD , one of the longest-running consumer brand discovery platforms focused on emerging CPG companies. We get into what it actually looks like to build a business around curation in consumer, including how CPGD decides which brands make it into the newsletter, what they’ve learned from operating a highly engaged founder and inves...

On today’s episode, I sit down with Clarke Pennington, founder of Lasso , a better-for-you gelatin brand built around protein and fiber. We get into what it actually takes to build a product like this from scratch, including the formulation challenges behind texture, why adding protein and fiber makes the system significantly harder to build, and how many iterations it took to land on something vi...

On today’s episode, I sit down with Tenley Fitzgerald, the creator of Yes! Apples , a consumer brand built to bring clarity and differentiation to the apple category. If you’ve ever walked into a grocery store and felt overwhelmed by the number of apple varieties, that’s exactly the problem Tenley is trying to solve. Yes! Apples is built around making the category easier to navigate, using brandin...

On today’s episode, I sit down with Saif Khawaja , founder and CEO of Shinkei Systems and Seremoni , two companies that together form a vertically integrated seafood business, where Shinkei builds robots that change how fish are handled right after they’re caught (resulting in longer shelf life and better quality) and Seremoni is the brand and standard under which that fish is sold. This was, with...

On today’s episode, I sit down with Gabe Turner, co-founder of Fjord, a floating sauna and cold plunge experience built on the water in Sausalito. In this conversation, we talk about how the business actually came together, from early experiments with a mobile sauna to navigating an 18-month permitting process across multiple agencies and ultimately building their first unit in the Bay using repur...

On today’s episode, I sit down with Noah Phillips , founder of Honey Department , a recently launched brand selling creamed honey in a tube. Honey Department started with a pretty simple observation: everyone uses honey, but almost no one thinks about the product or the brand, and it’s still mostly sold the same way it always has been. But what looked like a pretty straightforward idea quickly tur...

On today’s episode, I sit down with Brittney Cook , co-founder and CEO of Something Sweet , a frozen dessert brand built around pre-portioned, ready-to-bake brown butter cookie dough. In this conversation, we talk about what it looked like to turn a family recipe into a real CPG business with no prior food background, the challenge of scaling something as technical as brown butter without losing w...

On today’s episode, I sit down with Julia Marsh , co-founder and CEO of Sway , a materials company using seaweed to build compostable replacements for plastic packaging. In this conversation, we talk about why flexible plastic is such a difficult category to replace, how Julia went from a background in packaging design to building a company around seaweed as a feedstock, and what it actually takes...

On today’s episode, I sit down with Shay Carrillo , Founder & CEO of Madre Linen , a home goods brand focused on building a fully traceable, ethically sourced linen supply chain from the ground up. In this conversation, we talk about how the business actually came together, starting with hand-sewn napkins and an early wholesale order from Heath Ceramics that forced Shay to figure out manufactu...

On today’s episode, I sit down with Isabel Washington , Founder & CEO of Laurel's Coffee , a canned ready-to-drink latte brand built around A2 dairy. In this conversation, we talk about what led Isabel to bet on A2 milk as a core ingredient, why she saw a gap between what people are actually ordering in coffee shops and what exists on shelf, and how she went from idea to launching in Erewh...

On today’s episode, I sit down with Matt Hassett , Founder and CEO of Loftie , a consumer sleep tech company best known for its design-forward, connected alarm clock aimed at helping people use their phones less and sleep better at night. In this conversation, we talk about how the business actually got off the ground, including what it took to move from an initial concept into a physical product,...

On today’s episode, I sit down with Chelsey & Cassie Maschhoff , the co-founders of Lottie’s Meats , a company built around a simple idea: making sausage feel like a product worth rethinking. In our conversation, we talk about what they saw when they looked at the category early on, why so much of the sausage aisle felt visually dated and operationally stagnant, and how they set out to build s...

On today’s episode, I sit down with Jack Davis and Jacob Tubis , co-founders of Byte'm , a company built around a simple idea: bringing a true bakery-quality brownie to the grocery store in a bite-sized form factor. Jack and Jacob met as freshmen at American University and bonded over a shared interest in food and business. The idea for Byte'm started with Jack’s mom’s brownie recipe and a...

On today’s episode, I sit down with Seamus Menihane , Co-Founder and CEO of Armada , an entertainment merchandise company that works with artists and brands to design, manufacture, and distribute merchandise across e-commerce and live touring. Seamus started his career as a touring musician, playing drums in bands for years before becoming interested in the business mechanics behind the scenes, pa...

On today's episode, I sit down with Lil Tuffy , a San Francisco-based poster artist who’s spent more than two decades designing and hand-printing concert posters. Tuffy's path into poster design started almost accidentally. After leaving the tech world and getting involved in the San Francisco music scene, he began making posters for shows around the city. What started as creating unsolicited post...

On today’s episode, I sit down with Sherri Franklin , founder of Muttville , a senior dog rescue based in San Francisco that has helped find homes for more than 14,000 older dogs. Sherri didn’t start her career in animal welfare. She was a hairstylist who had previously owned several salons in San Francisco when she began volunteering at a local shelter in the 90s. After watching a dog she loved g...

On today’s episode, I sit down with Kelly Bennett , brand strategist and host of the Emerging Brands Podcast. Kelly has spent the last 16 years working alongside founders in the food and beverage space, helping them turn early product ideas into shelf-ready brands. Her focus is pre-launch brand strategy, which means she’s often involved before a founder has finalized a name, filed a trademark, or...

On today’s episode, I sit down with Brian McMahon, co-founder and CEO of Pickle, a peer-to-peer rental marketplace built around the idea that the things sitting in our closets can function as income-generating assets. Brian started his career in finance before teaching himself how to code and launching what was originally a social polling app designed to help people make purchase decisions. But af...

On today’s episode, I sit down with Adam Gillman , Co-Founder of Hiya , a direct-to-consumer children’s vitamin and wellness company built around trust, transparency, and customer education as core operating principles. We talk through how Hiya approached product development without prior experience in the health and wellness space, including how they thought about formulation tradeoffs, manufactu...

On today’s episode, I sit down with Kiki Couchman and Elan Halpern, the co-founders of Sourmilk. Sourmilk is built around a simple but differentiated premise: take something 92% of households already consume and engineer it to deliver measurable gut-health impact. We talk through how they formulated around specific probiotic strains rather than optimizing purely for flavor, what it looked like to...

On today's episode, I sit down with Joe Hollier , co-founder of Light , the company behind the Light Phone — a minimalist mobile device designed to be used as little as possible. We talk about how the company emerged from an experimental Google design program, why Joe and his co-founder chose to build hardware in a software-dominated world, and what it actually takes to bring a new phone to market...

In today's episode, I sit down with Sara Victorio , founder of Hotel Ceramics , a one-person handmade ceramics studio based in Portland, Oregon. We talk about how Hotel operates as a solo manufacturing business, from product design and material inputs to kiln capacity, production methods, and quality control. Sara walks through why she shifted from wheel throwing to slip casting, how that decision...

In today's episode, I sit down with  Nate Mell , founder of  Felt + Fat , a Philadelphia-based ceramics company producing tableware for both restaurants and direct-to-consumer customers. We talk about how Felt + Fat began supplying custom tableware to restaurants, why ceramics made sense as a business from a unit-economics perspective, and how debt-financed equipment shaped the company’s growth an...

In today's episode, I sit down with Jared Klusner, founder of  Erstwhile , a jewelry business built around highly curated vintage and vintage-inspired pieces. We talk about Jared’s path into the jewelry world, how sourcing actually works in a niche, relationship-driven market, and why trust and expertise matter so much when you’re dealing in rare, one-of-a-kind goods. We also get into the mechanic...