HOLY’s Post

We’d love to invite you to become an investor in Tallow + Ash! 🥳🚀 T+A is growing rapidly, but to keep up with demand and build the best products imaginable for you, we need your help. We need to buy faster bottling machinery to fulfill orders quicker. Make stock deposits for incredible new products, like the Fabric Sprays. Kick off development phases for different formulas, and invest in spreading the word about T&A all over the U.K, and beyond! We believe these initiatives will build a brand we can all be proud of. One that disrupts an entire industry. By investing on Feb 29, you’ll have the chance to own a piece of the brand at this early stage, and make it all happen with us! We currently have £2.2m pledged to invest on the Crowdcube platform. If you want to invest as well, you can sign up for ‘early access’ on Crowdcube, and let us know you’re considering investing! We’ve also created some amazing rewards and benefits for becoming an investor and joining the Owners Club. More on this tomorrow! Thank you for all your support and involvement so far. We hope to have you as a co-owner in the brand! To register your interest, head to https://lnkd.in/gmt_-Sne *You should only make investments if you’re prepared to lose the money. Investing in startups is risky.

The FirstLook 🤑 newsletter went out yesterday covering a strategy on where to find more investors, as well as highlights on the March box brands. Big thank you's go out to these brands for jumping in: A Dozen Cousins Blume Fancy Peasant Innovative Pet Lab Misunderstood Whiskey Noshi For Kids Wishing these brands nothing but success the rest of this year and beyond. Have a CPG VC topic you'd like me to cover in the next newsletter? Drop it below. #venturecapital #startups #founders

BIG NEWS!!!!! .... incoming soon. 😜 It's going to be a big week of news so stay tuned for details of two new industry heavyweights joining our NED advisory board, a new Tom Savano product launch of our "Worlds First" cocktail (that tastes unbelievable), and two major airline launches 🛩 Also our EIS round is now 40% subscribed, so if you are interested in joining our journey to be the worlds number one RTD cocktail brand, DM me for an investor deck! 💰 In the meantime, here's a shot of me this morning at 7:30am with a piece of advice I was given decades ago that has really stuck with me. "Whatever you do, make sure you look forward to the START of the day, not the END of it" After 20 years in corporate 9-5 life, dreading the morning commute and counting the minutes until I could clock off and get my few hours on the couch watching a movie, I was fully enmeshed in the cycle of looking forward to the END of a day. 😴 Now after giving that all up to run my own drinks brand four years ago, every day I wake up excited to see what new developments and wins I can achieve, and what the new winds bring on the currents of chance. To kick off each day, I head out with my one-in-a-billion pup, Loki the Pomsky, for an adventure in the countryside. Today found us overlooking a gorgeous barley field in the Cambridge countryside, the blue sky shining above, and my puppy smiling below as our two-man wolf pack wound our way through the stunning fields. 🐺 If you find yourself looking forward to the end of the day, not the start, I'd challenge you to turn that on it's head and ask yourself what you can do within your current life, so that the START of the day is the part you look forward to. Trust me, it's a game changer! #rtd #cannedcocktails #drinksindustry #invest #investor #angelinvestor #vc #startup #fundraising #EIS #motivation #leadership #business

Some food for thought for your weekend... Dippin' Dots, LLC makes me very nostalgic for summers spent on the Great Lakes and going to Cedar Point in Sandusky, OH. The flash-frozen ice cream is so fun and delicious. Dippin’ Dots filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2011. Scott Fischer, who purchased Dippin’ Dots out of bankruptcy in 2012, started noticing there was interest from businesses who wanted to use the company’s flash-frozen process. Dippin Dots created other revenue streams that have helped it financially as sales to theme parks and other venues dried up during the coronavirus pandemic. You can find Dippin Dots frozen fat globules (yep!) in plant-based meats such as Beyond Meat, and they have also used their high-volume cryogenic freezing in pharmaceuticals, probiotics, and animal feed. I loved this story! It has it all: nostalgia, a failing business, a PIVOT, innovation, and a really ingenious strategy to use brand equity to capture new markets. On Angel Investors Ontario's Knowledge Hub, we have a course titled "Building Great Products" with Shawn Hewat from Wavy. In this session, Shawn discusses product development, product market fit at different stages of your startup, going through a pivot, and how to validate fundraising along the way. Watch here: https://lnkd.in/g_ahZ4bg Stay tuned to Knowledge Hub as we are launching more videos in our "Founder2Founder" series soon! #angelinvesting #startups #entreprenurship #innovation

13 years with Flockler has come to an end ❤️ It’s one of those happy endings where the new owner is eager to take the company to new heights, and Flockler founders take a well-deserved breather. On July 1, I wrote a monthly report to our team - something I had put together for as long as I can remember at the start of the month. Only this time, I knew it was going to be my last, and it wasn't easy to hold back tears. I've been lucky to work with some of the best tech and marketing nerds, which I'm proud to call my friends today. Looking back, I won't forget the excitement of employing our first team members. With the help of angel investors, we were able to bring together talented people and started building our vision. Finding beta customers for your idea is hard work, but it feels so rewarding when the first invoices are out. But if I could have, I certainly would have spared myself from the almost unbearable stress when the money was running out (multiple times!). I’ve been lucky to have friends, co-founders, board members, and the fantastic London entrepreneur and startup advisor community to support me. A few years ago, the stress faded away, and the happiness of finding the product market fit entered the space. Flockler had become the scalable, profitable, self-service SaaS product we sought to build. The world around us has been moving from one crisis to another, but Flockler’s past couple of years have been an absolute joy. What is left now is the most profound gratitude to all of you who picked me up and pushed me forward when times were tough. I’ll continue paying it forward by saying yes to every entrepreneur needing support. Someday soon, it's time to rinse and repeat. I don't know what, when, and where yet. For now, I'll enjoy the bird’s-eye view of the SaaS business and breather.

When passion and ambition collided, I ended up juggling two businesses - one for fun, and one for real. 🚀 Little did I know, my hobby project would become my main focus, soaring to over $50 million in global revenues. But I also learned the hard way that growth can come at a price. 📉 I lost control and was ousted from the company I co-founded. It was a tough pill to swallow, but I used the lessons from that experience to fuel the success of my other venture. 📈💪 #EntrepreneurshipJourney

The one thing all the top brands that launch on Grommet, as well as the fastest growing new and emerging brands all have in common is... At the early stages this one trait can be found in nearly every founder, maker and entrepreneur I've worked with over the past 20 years. And it's true for every Product of the Week Winner, member of the 1,000 upvote club and the brands that are jumping on rocket ships and cannot be stopped 🚀 #startupsuccess #startuplife #dtc

A lot of the entrepreneurial journey is turning lemons into lemonade🍋… And for black and brown founders turning lemons into lemon drop cocktails😀🍸 So what do you do when you aren’t getting the same funding as your peers? You do what you know how to do, you build the business despite. Yes, conversations about the disparity should continue to be had AND policy like in California to encourage funders to invest in black and brown businesses should be implemented AND (most importantly), black and brown entrepreneurs who exit must become the funders who give back… who give back… and give back. It will be interesting to see what the startup and VC ecosystem will look like in the next 10-20 years. It’s hard today, but remain optimistic despite🌟🚀

PART1.This year, we will be taking you beyond the Cakes and treats to shed more light on how we run as a Cake business.😊 . . . . . . #cakebusiness #cakebusinessmentorship #cakesinlagos #behindthescenes #cakeboss #cakebusinessstartups #businessstartup #womeninbusiness #cakesinlagos #cakebusinessbranding

Had a piece published in Sifted this morning about the failure of my first startup Wine List. If you're early stage and struggling – or contemplating founding a startup or brand yourself – there's probably some interesting bits in there for you. My key takeaways: 💡 DO NOT fall in love with your idea – that'll kill you WHEN you need to pivot 🏬 The market and your consumers change – that means PMF can disappear ⚠️ DO NOT lose risk and optimise for runway extension 🌟 NEVER make revenue your north star metric – it killed us that we did 💰 Live CURRENT unit economics, not your future ones But perhaps the story that makes me smile most now when retelling it is the one told in the intro of the story. I must have a good poker face.