Poppi co-founder Allison Ellsworth shares what it really costs to build a beverage brand, and how founders can turn customers into community.
For someone who’s right now experimenting with a product idea in their kitchen, garage, or spare room, what’s the one piece of advice you’d give them about building something meant to last?
Don’t go niche. If you want to build something that lasts, you need a big total addressable market — a product for the masses, not a small slice of them. Poppi works because it’s not “healthy soda for health-conscious people.” It’s just better soda. It’s the drink we all grew up loving, minus the sugar and the bad-for-you ingredients we’ve all gotten smarter about. That’s a completely different pitch than trying to convince people to try something new. You’re inviting them back to something they already love, just done right.
The bigger piece of advice underneath that is to get people emotionally and culturally invested in your brand, not just interested in your product. Anyone can make a sale. Building something that lasts means people feel like they’re part of the story, that buying from you says something about who they are. That only happens if you’re playing the long game on branding from day one, instead of optimizing every decision for the next sale.
Are there any productivity or creativity tools you wish you’d known about earlier that would have helped you grow?
Honestly, yes. In the early Poppi days we were duct-taping things together with spreadsheets and group texts, and it cost us time we didn’t have. If I were starting today, here’s what I’d have in my toolkit from day one:
- Claude: For everything from drafting emails and social copy to thinking through pricing, ops questions, or a hard conversation before you have it. It’s like having a smart, tireless second brain when you can’t afford to hire one yet.
- Canva: For founders who aren’t designers but need packaging mockups, pitch decks, and social graphics that look like they came from a real brand.
- Monday.com: One place for your roadmap, your investor updates, your recipe and formula notes, and your to-do list, instead of five apps that don’t talk to each other.
- CapCut or Descript: For shooting and editing your own short-form video content without paying an agency. This matters more than people think. See my answer on content below.
- Later or Planoly: For planning and scheduling your social content in batches instead of posting in a panic every day. Once you have money, move over to Dash Hudson.
- QuickBooks, or Wave if you’re truly bootstrapped: Get your cash flow visible early. You don’t need to love spreadsheets; you just need to not be surprised by your own bank account.
None of these replace hustle, but they buy back time, and time is the one thing you never have enough of in the early years.
What’s something about funding, cash flow, or financial risk in those early years that surprised you? Did you pay yourself a salary, or did everything go back into the business?
What surprised me is just how much of yourself you have to be willing to risk. It’s not a metaphor. It’s your credit cards maxed out, it’s borrowing from family, it’s putting your business in front of a panel of strangers on “Shark Tank” because you need the capital and the exposure. Starting a company takes everything you have, financially and personally, before it gives anything back.
At Poppi, we paid ourselves modest salaries, around $50,000-$60,000 a year for the first few years, which felt like a lot of pressure to justify at the time. At Mother Beverage, we didn’t pay ourselves anything. My husband, Stephen, took on a second job nights and weekends just so we could cover rent and groceries while we kept building. That’s the part people don’t see in the highlight reel: The early years aren’t glamorous; they’re just about staying in the game long enough for the business to be able to support you.
How did you turn early buyers into people who felt invested in Poppi’s story, and what’s the smallest-scale version of that a solo founder could realistically try this week?
Social media, and TikTok specifically, is one of the best tools ever created for building real community, and it’s still underused by a lot of founders. We used it to let people into the process, not just the product: the wins, the struggles, and the actual humans behind the can. People don’t get emotionally invested in a logo. They get invested in a story they feel like they’re watching unfold, and maybe even helping write.
The smallest-scale version of that any solo founder can try this week costs nothing but time: Post one video that shows the real, unpolished process behind what you’re building, and actually respond to the comments like they’re conversations, not metrics. That’s it. It’s not about going viral; it’s about the first 50 people feeling like they found you before everyone else did.
Looking at the landscape today, what’s a marketing trend you think small businesses can’t afford to ignore right now?
Being content-first and digital-first, full stop. The businesses that win over the next decade will be the ones that treat content like a core function of the company, built in-house, not outsourced and not an afterthought, because that’s what compounds. A single ad buy disappears the moment you stop paying for it; a library of content you own keeps working for you.
The second piece is embracing AI as a real operating tool, not a novelty. Using something like Claude to help with the parts of running a business that used to require a team you couldn’t afford yet — writing, research, planning, and even thinking through strategy — levels the playing field in a way that didn’t exist for founders a few years ago. Small businesses that build both of those habits now — content in-house and AI in the workflow — are going to move faster than competitors who don’t.
