I’ve been in the CPG and food industry since 2011, when I first launched Norm’s Farms, an elderberry supplements business. I’ve also been an Airbnb Superhost since 2014, when I first started renting out my home…
Incubators and accelerators can be useful to entrepreneurs who are looking to move their start-ups forward. In addition to mentorship and training, many food startup accelerators will offer funding. (Note that this funding is often…
A reader recently wrote in after reading our CPG Sales Career FAQs. She’s the CEO of a chocolate company and runs a small sales team. She wanted to know how to structure a CPG sales…
You’ve started — or have an idea for starting — a business. You’re ready to make it official. How to form a company in the US? Where, exactly, do you begin? This quick guide will…
Bootstrapping comes from the phrase “pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” While the term is also used with reference to computing and statistics, today’s post covers what bootstrapping means in a startup environment. To bootstrap…
Startups are not simply small businesses. As Steve Blank famously stated, a startup is a “temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.” There’s a lot of jargon in that. Let’s unpack it. What…
As an entrepreneur with four businesses under my belt and with a bunch of time on my hands after my latest venture, The Brighthouse, was largely taken down by Covid-19, I’m thinking about starting my…
I spoke with a young woman today who was curious about CPG sales jobs at plant-based CPG startups. She had a lot of great questions about how the CPG sales industry works. I’m writing up…
I’m currently helping a friend launch her family’s business, Haven Mask. One of the things we’ve been talking about is the effectiveness of crowdfunding for startups as a combined funding and marketing strategy. Depending on…
Most startups are hard to build without some initial cash on hand. Consumer goods businesses, or those that have physical products and associated COGS (cost of good sold) that scale with the growth of the…
Partnership marketing is an easy and powerful way to grow your young food business. In fact, a study by the marketing agency Hinge found that partnership marketing outperforms all other types of marketing. Forget paid ads…
What is a Startup? A startup is a team that is best designed to launch—and then iterate upon—a minimum viable product, all in the in search of product-market-fit. If that sounds like a bunch of jargon, it is!…