The renegade method for achieving hockey stick growth in the midst of a CPG bloodbath

In the wake of so many brands that I loved going out of business in April, I wanted to share an inspirational story with the CPG founder community. In a time when we’re all wondering “how the hell am I going to make it in this investment economy,” and hearing “we’re pausing all new investments” from so many potential investors, sharing success strategies seems more important than ever.?

Little Saints has grown over 575% from the time that we launched our first non-alcoholic spirit one year ago. But that’s not the inspirational part.?

The inspirational part is that we figured out how to grow the business like renegades, without a dime of VC funding, a PR firm, a celebrity endorser, a roster of influencers, boatloads of cash, or any of the other things that founders have been taught are necessary for hockey stick growth.?

Our renegade way of achieving hockey stick growth requires just two main ingredients: (1) cutting the noise, and (2) trusting your intuition.?

Cutting the noise comes in many different forms. In some ways, it can be as simple as staying focused. Founders get pitched constantly - we could spend 12 hours/day on calls with people who promise to grow our email revenue by 600%, give us an 8x ROA and/or introduce us to everyone we need to know. Stop wasting time on promises that seem too good to be true, because they probably are. The answer to our problems is rarely to add something new; cutting what’s not working is the best first step.?

The second step in cutting the noise is within your current structure. For this one, I’m going to share some hard facts. When we launched our first non-alcoholic spirit in May 2023, we were averaging about $90K/month in revenue YTD. We were paying two PR firms, one sales consultant, and one marketing agency to execute our launch, along with an internal team of me, our CMO and an events/ops assistant. We threw a $10K launch dinner party on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and we sent out $10K worth of PR boxes. We spent what felt like one million hours on Zoom calls going over every little detail of the launch.?

We ended up getting a little bit of press, but that buzz didn’t generate sales – our May 2023 revenue was just $102K (i.e., just 10% over where we were before we added all of the noise and a new product launch). Worse still was that our burn was astronomical – it was over $150K in May (I just puked a little bit in my mouth when I wrote that).?

Those painful facts lead me to the second main ingredient in hockey stick growth: trust your intuition. My intuition told me that everything we were doing leading up to our May 2023 launch was wrong. It didn’t feel right that we were spending more time managing agencies than doing the work ourselves. Our messaging didn’t feel authentic after it had been passed through multiple agencies before it saw the light of day. And I wasn’t having any fun, which was a major red flag given that I love Little Saints like my child.

There’s nothing like a month of dismal revenue plus a $150K burn to snap you into action. Right away in June 2023, I started out by cutting the noise, by terminating our contracts with our PR and marketing agencies, and committing to focusing on what was working: email marketing and Meta ads.?

I am very blessed that our CMO, Katie Green, was game to roll up her sleeves and adopt the strategy followed by most successful C-level executives who learn how to do the work of everyone on their teams. In practice, this means that Katie was creating or directing all of our Instagram content, we were both responding personally to all DMs and comments (which made some of our ads go viral) and Katie was writing emails.

Without all of the noise, we were able to learn our business more intimately than ever before. We learned exactly what marketing efforts were working and where we needed to focus our energy (i.e. email and Meta ads). We were able to get a better handle on our operational costs and cut our COGs. And best of all, we were starting to have fun again.?

The experiment worked. In July 2023 we broke $150K/month for the first time, and we ended the year at over $1.55M in revenue (burning just $45K/month by the end of 2023). In 2024, the hockey stick got a little steeper - as of March, we had beat our total 2023 revenue, and we are on track to 5x our 2023 revenue by the end of 2024. And we are nearly profitable– our March 2024 burn was $13K.?

Will there be tough times in the future? Of course, this is business. But no matter what happens, I know that the “cut the noise, trust our intuition” framework will always serve us well.

As I mentioned in the beginning, I wrote this as a service to the founders out there who are feeling lost in a sea of hopelessness after the CPG bloodbath that was April 2024. There is still so much hope. We can succeed in unconventional ways without millions in VC capital. (I am currently funding the business through inventory financing and could write a book on why raising VC too early is a death sentence, but that’s for another time.)

I would love to hear from other founders who are succeeding in unconventional ways. Hit me up at [email protected] . And keep going!