Joe Welstead, Co-Founder of Oshun, returns to In The Money for a deeper conversation on the systems behind one of the fastest-growing hydration brands, still just two people, still profitable, still cash generative, and now launching a second brand.

Since launching in April 2024, Joe and co-founder Jack Atkinson have built Oshun to mid-seven figures with no institutional capital, an unflavored electrolyte concentrate in a pump bottle, positioned closer to skincare than sports nutrition. This episode gets into the decisions most founders never talk about publicly.

We cover:

• The profitability versus growth conversation: how Joe and Jack decide between paying themselves more and funding the next phase

• The stage-based framework: why percentage margin matters early and hard cash margin matters later
• Seasonality in hydration: when to push aggressively and when to harvest profitability
• Why Joe is skeptical of brands that claim they've "chosen" a $300 CAC and what the Meta machine actually controls
• Running 110 ads while competitors run thousands: the case against the AI slop game

• The three content verticals Oshun plays in and why adding a fourth is the biggest growth bottleneck

• Why TikTok and Amazon are downstream from Meta and what that means for channel strategy
• The whitelisted ad from June 2025 that's still their number one performer and gained the creator nearly 100,000 followers
• How Oshun pitches creators without Unilever budgets: build your audience with us
• Introducing Dirt: the new premium olive oil brand with 1500mg of polyphenols, nearly 4x Bryan Johnson's Snake Oil

• The four-part framework for launching any new brand: product differentiation, micro and macro demand signals, competitive advantage, and demand response versus demand generation

If you're an early-stage founder trying to build profitably, think clearly about channels, or launch a second brand without losing focus on the first, this episode is a masterclass in disciplined operating.

What's the difference between brand and branding and why is confusing the two one of the most expensive mistakes a consumer founder can make?

Rick Desai, Managing Partner at Listen Ventures, joins In The Money to break down the investing philosophy behind one of the most concentrated consumer portfolios in venture. Listen manages $130 million across four funds, backs just twelve brands per fund, and has been behind some of the most recognizable outcomes in modern consumer, Calm, now valued at over $2 billion, and Factor, which HelloFresh acquired for $277 million after Listen backed it from inception to exit.

Rick also teaches entrepreneurship and digital marketing at Kellogg, and what he's seeing across the portfolio right now is shaping some of the sharpest perspectives on brand, TikTok, AI, and what separates consumer companies that last from ones that just had a great launch.

We cover:

• Brand versus branding: why they're not the same thing and why the confusion is so expensive
• Why brand is internal before it's external and what that actually means in practice
• Customer service as a brand signal, not a cost center
• Why the best founders don't seek risk, they mitigate it
• Scrappiness as the thing you have to protect most aggressively as you scale
• Why TikTok is the new Facebook circa 2014, and what the arbitrage window actually looks like
• If you're not AIing everything right now, you're already behind: what Rick means and where to start
• Inside the Listen Ventures model: twelve brands per fund, up to $5M per check, capital plus creative under one roof
• The Factor story: what Listen saw at inception and how the brand was built to a $277M exit
• What Rick looks for at the moment of change: new trends, new frontiers, new channels
• Lessons from Calm on category creation and staying power
• What founder psychology reveals about which companies succeed at very close range
• What Listen is looking for in new investments heading into the back half of 2026

If you're a consumer founder, operator, or investor trying to understand what actually builds durable customer love, this episode is one of the clearest frameworks you'll hear.

What does it actually cost to hold an uncompromising product standard in premium homeware?

Joe Parenteau, Co-Founder and CEO of Fable, joins In The Money to break down how a former accountant with no design background built one of North America's most design-forward homeware brands, and why they've walked away from roughly 30% of supplier relationships mid-development rather than ship a product that didn't meet standard.

Fable designs in Vancouver and crafts through family-owned artisan makers in Portugal, Belgium, and Japan. Dinnerware, glassware, flatware, and rugs built around a thesis the rest of the industry ignores: you shouldn't have to choose between beautiful and durable. Full wool rugs that are machine washable. Glassware elegant enough for a dinner party and tough enough for a Tuesday night. B Corp certified, backed by Listen Ventures, True, Sandpiper, and Techstars.

We cover:

• How a Bench Accounting operations director ended up building a premium homeware brand
• The founding insight: why buying quality home goods was so frustrating it became a business
• Designing in Vancouver, crafting in Portugal: how the supply chain came together
• Seven manufacturers across seven materials and what it takes to manage that complexity
• Why Fable has fired roughly 30% of suppliers mid-development, and why Joe would do it again
• The premium-but-durable white space: form and function as the category gap everyone else walked past
• Building taste into a fully remote, flat organization
• The marketing team of one: how Fable runs lean
• Why Joe would think twice before joining Techstars as a DTC company and what accelerators actually offer consumer brands
• The path to profitability: thirty incremental operational improvements, not one big unlock
• Negotiating shipping rates down and the unglamorous work that actually moves margin
• Balancing an uncompromising product standard against next quarter's revenue number
• Retail expansion, new categories, and what's next for Fable

If you're building a premium consumer brand, managing a complex multi-country supply chain, or trying to figure out what quality actually costs, this episode is an honest look at the decisions most founders never talk about publicly.

Sahand Dilmaghani, Founder and CEO of Terra Cafe, joins In The Money to tell one of the more quietly impressive origin stories in consumer hardware, a founder who spent months recording conversations with strangers in retail stores, carried espresso machines door to door across New York City, and built a relationship with a Chinese manufacturer just weeks before the world shut down during COVID.

Terra Cafe makes premium automatic bean-to-cup espresso machines, 400-plus moving parts, a hardware-plus-consumables ecosystem, and a customer base where nearly half are converting directly from a pod machine to a $2,000 device. The category had been full of machines nobody could explain, priced anywhere from $1,200 to $6,000, with no brand making the transition from pods feel accessible.

Sahand saw the missing link. He spent three years building the product to fill it.

We cover:

• Why Sahand moved to New York, lived on one meal a day, and carried espresso machines door to door before spending a dollar on ads
• Recording conversations with strangers in retail stores and how that unscalable customer research shaped every marketing message Terra Cafe has ever run
• Building a manufacturer relationship in China just weeks before COVID shut the world down and how he maintained it for three years without a single visit
• The bean-to-cup category: why it's been misunderstood, undermarketed, and wide open for a brand that could make it accessible
• Hardware plus consumables: how the economics of a recurring revenue model change everything about how you think about CAC and LTV
• Why nearly half of Terra Cafe customers are converting from pod machines and what that means for category sizing
• The $2,000 considered purchase: how to nurture leads, overcome objections, and convert customers who take months to decide
• Scaling to eight figures while staying obsessively close to the customer at every stage
• The marketing stack that's working: what channels are driving acquisition and why

If you're building a hardware brand, a considered-purchase DTC business, or anything where the customer research phase is the most important thing you'll ever do, this episode is one of the most honest accounts of what that actually looks like in practice.

What happens when a former consumer brand founder gets tired of the working capital grind, spots a broken format in adult recreational sports leagues, and decides to engineer the conditions for adults to actually make new friends?

Tommy Flaim, Founder of Silly Pickles, joins In The Money to break down one of the more unexpected growth stories in the consumer space, a pickleball league that started as a side hustle managed on Microsoft Excel, hit a waitlist of over a thousand players in its first few seasons, and is now in 75 metro areas across the US, Canada, and Australia doing $6 million in run rate on just $750K raised.

We cover:

• Why adult recreational sports leagues have a broken format and the dynamic ladder system Tommy built to fix it
• How to engineer a social outcome: skill-based matchups, repeat exposure, happy hours, and the magic of a great local host
• Why 50% of Silly Pickles players have never played in another adult rec league and 30% had never even played pickleball before their first night
• The bottom 90% thesis: why most competitors target washed-up athletes and why Tommy is going after everyone else
• How Silly Pickles went from one Chicago bar to 75 metro areas with a decentralized hub-and-spoke model
• Brand partnerships: Waterboy, an alcohol brand, an iced tea brand and why Silly Pickles is becoming one of the most interesting IRL activation platforms in consumer
• What CPG brands get wrong about IRL activations and the two ingredients that make the difference between a great event and a forgettable one
• The non-technical founder's guide to building software: the agency route, the tradeoffs, and why Tommy chose the most expensive option on purpose
• The math to a billion: 200 metro areas, 10 sports, $500K per metro area per sport
• Pickleball as the wedge and what comes next as they layer on volleyball and additional sports
• Lessons from his consumer apparel brand: what he'd do differently and why he's now a little jaded about inventory-based businesses
• The holy trinity for consumer founders: brand, community, differentiated product, and catching a wave before incumbents catch up
• Why TikTok is still the most important platform for consumer businesses and what to do if you're not good at it yet

If you're building a consumer brand, thinking about IRL community as a channel, or trying to understand what catching a category wave actually looks like from the inside this episode is packed with hard-won lessons from a founder who's done it twice.

What does it look like to send 25 to 30 cold emails to a founder you've never met because you believe in a product so much you're willing to bet your career on it?

Kieran Mathew, CEO of Equip Foods, joins In The Money to break down one of the more unconventional origin stories in better-for-you supplements, an operator who joined an existing business, took over day-to-day functions from the founder, and helped scale it from low seven figures to well into eight on a growth model that barely touched Meta spend.

Equip makes animal-based protein products built around one standard: real food ingredients, nothing the brand wouldn't stand behind completely. No fillers. No shortcuts. A product built for a customer who reads labels and doesn't forgive compromises.

We cover:

• Why Kieran sent 25-30 emails to founder Anthony Gustin before getting a response and what he said to finally get one
• What it actually looks like to join a business as an operator-partner rather than a founder
• How to take over day-to-day operations from a founder without breaking what's already working
• The affiliate flywheel: how Equip built a roster of thousands of partners who became genuine evangelists for the brand
• How affiliate seeding trained the algorithm before a dollar of Meta spend and what that did to ROAS when they finally turned it on
• Why beef protein is having its moment and how whey margin compression is accelerating the category shift
• The animal-based consumer: who they are, what they believe, and why they're more loyal than almost any other supplement customer
• What Equip would do differently in paid if they were starting the channel from scratch today
• Org structure evolution: why the team design that worked at $3M doesn't work at $15M and what needs to change
• How Equip thinks about SKU expansion without losing the brand clarity that made them
• Retention, subscription, and what actually drives LTV in the supplement category

If you're building in supplements, better-for-you CPG, or thinking about how to join an existing business as an operator rather than start from scratch, this episode is one of the most useful conversations I've had on the pod this year.

What happens when a high-protein, clean-ingredient frozen pizza brand spends two years grinding through cold chain nightmares, supply chain restarts, and a fundraising carousel, and then lands at number one in the frozen pizza category at Target?

Michael Rolland, Co-Founder of Yough!, joins In The Money to tell one of the more honest origin stories in better-for-you frozen food, a brand built around a simple thesis that you shouldn't have to choose between eating pizza and feeling good afterward, and the long road it took to get that product in front of the right retailers at the right moment.

700 calories. 46 grams of protein. No junk ingredients. An anytime meal that people are eating pre-workout, post-workout, and at 2am after a night out, without the guilt.

We cover:

• Why DTC was the wrong model for frozen and what Yough! learned the expensive way

• The supply chain issues that forced a full relaunch and why it ultimately made the product better
• How Yough! built into boutique specialty retail first before going mass
• The LinkedIn message they almost ignored and how it turned into a meeting at Target HQ
• What it actually looks like when a national retailer offers you a launch before you've pitched them
• Going from specialty to Target and Sprouts on organic momentum alone, no broker, no traditional pitch
• What number one in frozen pizza at Target actually means for a brand at this stage
• The fundraising reality for better-for-you frozen: what investors want to see and when the timing is right
• Protein in frozen as the next major category wave and why the timing is right now
• What Michael would do differently in the first 12-24 months if he started over
• What's next for Yough! heading into the back half of 2026

If you're building in frozen, better-for-you, or any category where the product has to earn its place on a cold shelf, this episode is a candid look at what the grind before the breakthrough actually costs.

What does it look like to sell a brand to Kraft Heinz for a reported $200 million, and then build the second one with three kids under seven and no social media on your phone?

Morgan Zanotti, Founder and CEO of Waay, joins In The Money to break down what changed and what stayed the same the second time around. Waay is a fizzy, clear sparkling protein water, 10 grams of protein, 45 calories, zero sugar, built for women who are tired of choking down chalky shakes to hit their protein goals.

Before Waay, Morgan co-founded Primal Kitchen alongside Mark Sisson, bootstrapped it to $50M in revenue profitably, and led the company through its $200 million acquisition by Kraft Heinz in 2019.

We cover:

• Why Morgan built Waay after watching the protein trend get sold entirely to men
• The Primal Kitchen playbook: bootstrapping to $50M before the exit
• What she learned inside Kraft Heinz about scale, GLP-1s, and category timing
• Why she pitched Whole Foods with a silver can, no final formula, no co-manufacturer, and no branding, and how they said yes nationwide anyway
• 18 months of formulation: getting real protein, zero sucralose, and a taste that doesn't announce itself
• Building the entire brand identity in three months and launching by October
• Why she went Whole Foods first instead of Target, and how that sequencing shaped everything that followed
• The clear protein category: how it's exploding globally and why the US is just catching up
• Building lean the second time: a small remote team built through referrals, no agency
• Raising capital on traction versus raising on hopes and dreams
• What she'd do exactly the same the second time, and what she's doing completely differently
• Balancing three kids under seven with building a fast-scaling consumer brand

If you're building a consumer brand, thinking about a second act after an exit, or trying to figure out how to build with intention instead of urgency, this episode is one of the most grounded founder conversations I've put out this year.

What does it look like to build a premium hydration brand in one of the most crowded categories in consumer health, and win by doing almost everything differently?

Joe Welstead, Co-Founder of Oshun, joins In The Money to break down how a repeat founder took every assumption about the electrolyte category and threw them out.

No sachets. No citrus. No agency. No VC. Just a pump dispenser, an unflavored formula, and a brand positioning that owes more to skincare than sports nutrition.

Joe built Motion Nutrition before this. He came out of that experience with one lesson above all others: launch one product, nail it completely, and resist every temptation to expand before you've earned the right to. At Oshun, he's done exactly that, and it's working.

We cover:

• Why Joe looked at LMNT, Liquid IV, Nuun, Hydrant, and Prime and saw an opportunity hiding in plain sight
• The pump dispenser decision: why form factor is a marketing strategy, not just a packaging choice
• Why Oshun has no flavor, and how that single decision sidesteps flavor fatigue and the endless SKU trap
• The "clear skin, clear mind" moment: how a single conversation with a friend reframed the entire brand positioning overnight
• Beauty adjacent, not supplement adjacent: why escaping the supplement category unlocks everything
• Three months of real-world conversations before running a single ad, and why that made the first Meta campaigns perform from day one
• How Joe learned to run Meta himself without an agency, and why he thinks the learning curve is overstated
• The seeding to Meta funnel: how Oshun uses creator seeding to train the algorithm before spending a dollar on paid
• Two co-founders, one product, 75-90% of scope focused entirely on growth
• Why Oshun launched a magnesium sleep product, and the surprisingly simple customer reason that accelerated the timeline
• Building in public without sharing revenue: why Joe talks about subscriber count and compound metrics but never top line
• Profitable and growing while turning down institutional investors, what that optionality actually feels like
• Skio's cancel flow as the single biggest retention unlock of 2026
• Why a skip or delay beats a discount every time for subscription churn
• What Joe would do differently in the first 12 months of the next brand

If you're building a consumer brand in health, wellness, or any crowded category where the default playbook isn't working — this episode is one of the clearest arguments I've heard for why doing less, better, wins.

What does it actually mean to invest in brand before it's measurable?

Florian Wojewodzki, Partner at Iris, joins In The Money to break down one of the most distinctive approaches to consumer investing in Europe and the US, a fund that tracks over 5,000 brands, backs founders they've known for years before writing a check, and won't hire anyone who isn't genuinely obsessed with brand.

Iris sits at the intersection of health, wellness, and better-for-you consumer, with a portfolio that includes some of the most interesting brands in CPG right now. Their thesis is built around three things every winning consumer brand needs: product, brand, and community. Miss any one of them and the other two can't save you.

We cover:

• Why Iris describes itself as brand junkies, and why that's a hiring requirement, not a marketing line
• The holy trinity: product, brand, and community as the non-negotiable framework for every investment decision
• Why Iris builds a category view before it ever meets a company, and what that looks like in practice
• How to approach a fund like Iris, and why the best time to reach out is years before you're ready to raise
• Portfolio deep dive: Biomel and the instant feedback loop that removes the biggest barrier to supplement adoption
• Superlativa: clinical credibility in cortisol management and why the stress and recovery category is vastly underserved
• Health: the leading online health and wellness retailer in the UK and what international expansion looks like from there
• Maurten: endurance nutrition out of Gothenburg and how to build a fanatical community around cyclists, triathletes, and runners

• What European consumer investing looks like right now versus two to three years ago

• Stage, check size, and what Iris is actively looking for heading into the back half of 2026

• The categories Iris is most excited about right now, and the ones they're actively avoiding

If you're a founder, a consumer investor, or anyone trying to understand where the next generation of health and wellness brands is being built, this episode is one of the clearest windows into how the best funds in the space actually think.