EMBRACE EMBARRASSMENT

“I remember it was a slow month, and we had all of this overhead and really no revenue to back it up. And our mortgage was due, and we had our first kid at this point. And I was like, man, what are we gonna do? I was standing in the kitchen. I opened up this letter. I didn't know where it was from, but it was a tax return from the government. Because we had had our first kid and we didn't claim a dependent on our tax return, we got a refund back. And it was almost for the exact dollar amount of our mortgage.”

“Honestly, what worked is one night I sat down. It was a Friday night. I just got in the shower. My hair is wet, and I just told my story. And it connected on such another level that it went viral, did a million views while we're sleeping. We did a $100,000 while we're sleeping that night on Amazon. That video now has, like, 300,000,000 views. It's just, like, wild. It was just like, hi. I'm Allison. Poppy has five grams of sugar, and I was on Shark Tank nine months pregnant.”

“I always say, like, the most underexplored emotion for an entrepreneur is embarrassment. Get online and make a fool of yourself. So I danced. I made taco videos. I put our kids in it. I was doing transition stuff. Steven was making TikToks.”

“And I was like, anybody have a Super Bowl ad? And he's like, I think I do. And it was the M Group. And at the time, I called our CMO, and I was like, I think I found us a Super Bowl ad. This is the Wednesday before the Sunday game. What was crazy about it too is it was a floater ad, so we had no idea when it was gonna air. It ended up airing one minute before Usher went on right before halftime, which is the most premium spot that anyone could ever ask for at the Super Bowl. We tripled our awareness overnight.”

“We really like to win. Both of us have that that drive, but we also wanted to have a family. Right? We didn't wanna pick, and we did decide very intentionally to do it at the same time. And so we, at that point, decided that there's three things, marriage, kids, and business, that we were like, hey. We're good. Let's not focus on the marriage so much. Like, I don't care if I get flowers for Valentine's Day or if you forget the anniversary or we don't have a birthday dinner.”

“So we signed up for the local farmer's market to do it as a hobby on the weekends. I think a lot of people start at the farmer's market, and we just started selling it. And week after week after week, we kept selling out. And then we would spend the week bottling it and making it in our kitchen and then selling it on the weekends. Well, he's working a job to support the mortgage of the house that we just bought. And really quickly, a Whole Foods buyer came by our booth. Her name was Kelly. She's still at Whole Foods to this day. And she gave us her card.”

“I literally opened Instagram, and Mark Cuban posted that Shark Tank was coming to town that weekend, and there was tryouts to be on the show. I was three months pregnant, so it's 2017. And we went and stood in line for eight hours. I think it was, like, the first time we got a real babysitter with our first, and we just pitched our hearts out. But it still took six months from that moment to actually get on the show, which made me nine months pregnant on the show. But I was like, I'm gonna be I I don't care. We'll have this baby on TV.”

“Another little crazy hack, this is like a pro tip, because we were directing traffic to our website to Amazon, we actually made it an affiliate link. So Amazon was actually paying us to direct traffic from our website to Amazon while also collecting the customer status. That's an ultra hack.”

“I think what a lot of people don't realize is we sold 100% of the company. A lot of times, you'll do a two step deal where I would say if it was that situation, we would have stayed in our roles and kept going. But you don't sell your company for $2,000,000,000 and then say, hey, here's your Pepsi employee badge. It's just not the way those things work, and we were very aware of that going in and had lots of conversations.”