“It was this fire that I couldn't possibly turn out.” How Athletic Brewing co-founder Bill Shufelt launched a non-alcoholic movement

One of the most astounding growth stories over the last few years has been the rise of non-alcoholic beer, now the fastest growing sector of the beer market. "Near beer" has been around at least since Prohibition in the US. But its roots tell you everything you need to know: it was a crappy substitute for what people really wanted. And it managed to continue to just about beat that bar since the '20s.

One person is responsible for changing that, for taking NA beer from about 0.8% of the market in 2017 to +2%-and-growing today: Athletic Brewing Co. CEO Bill Shufelt .

His startup is now the No. 1 non-alcoholic beer brand and, in groceries like Whole Foods Market , Athletic outselling all beer. He revived a market that had been considered a punchline and he did it by being obsessed with mission and quality — and did so just as a new generation was rethinking its relationship to alcohol.

I had a few big takeaways from my talk with Bill for anyone who is thinking about starting a business or growing a market:

1. Don’t be an entrepreneur. Be a believer. 

Bill worked in finance before starting Athletic and made a good living at Point72 . He wasn’t itching to start a business. He wasn’t attending hackathons or taking tips from YCombinator hopefuls. He didn’t have side hustles where he was testing ideas on friends and family.

Instead he had passion for one thing: making it easier to drink without getting drunk. “I stopped drinking about 10 years ago for personal health and lifestyle reasons. I was just a busy, healthy, modern adult, and alcohol was kind of a ceiling on a lot of points in my life,” he said. “When I stopped drinking, I was in all those places where alcohol was the only adult beverage that was at all premium and it was such a pain point. But, I also saw the huge positive impact it had on my life.” 

One night, he and his wife were walking to dinner and he was again talking about what he felt like was a hole in his life and in the market: “I was like, someone should just fix this, and make great craft non-alcoholic beer. And she hit me so hard in the shoulder and said ‘You should do that'.” 

For the next two years, Bill researched the market and developed a business plan, but he wasn’t ready to leave his comfortable job. His wife, again, convinced him it was time to go all in. She said it was now or never.

“In my current career I had no chance of having a positive impact on anyone. The potential impact on tens of millions of people and offering moderation off ramps to people in society ... it was just this fire that I couldn't possibly turn out. I didn't sleep for two days, walked into my job, and quit on the second day of the year,” Bill said. 

2. Invest in a partner.

Bill was passionate about the need for non-alcoholic beer. The rest of the industry? Not so much. To them, O’Doul’s had shown the heights of what a NA beer could be: a marginal product serving a niche consumer. His trips to industry events and calls to potential brewers and distributors was met with unreturned calls and discarded business cards.

Bill wasn’t deterred, but he also wasn’t making progress.

“I had gone from one of the world's biggest hedge funds and I had probably 200 or 300 brokers that would pick up on the first ring anytime I called. And so I was so spoiled and lucky to have this amazing network that was super responsive. There'd be no interest in what we're working on,” he said.

That was until he found John Walker . John had won “every award under the sun in the alcohol side of brewing,” said Bill and Bill somehow persuaded him that he should now put his talents toward non-alcoholic beer.

John moved from Santa Fe to Connecticut to be Bill’s co-founder and they got to work. What Bill found was someone who believed in the mission, who had even higher expectations, and who could do the work Bill couldn’t.

“He had said, ‘We're never going live with selling a single can unless it's world-class beer with or without alcohol.’  So he had incredibly high standards.”

And the two of them spent their days together coming up with a formula and dreaming up every aspect of their business. Bill didn’t just tell him to go to work on his dream; they invested in the dream together.

“The nice thing about home brewing an empty warehouse with someone you barely know for nine months is we had a lot of time to talk about what's important in the company," he said. "What do we want the mission to be? What do we want the culture to be? What do you want the handbook to be? And I still walk through the employee handbook with every single person who starts in our company and really emphasize how that's important to us.”

They didn't build their relationship while in hypergrowth — the common advice for tech founders is to build the plane while it's in the air — but crafted it as carefully as they crafted their beverages.

3. Know who your first superfans should be and make them just as obsessed as you are.

Non-alcoholic beer wasn’t new when Bill had his epiphany. People knew what it was and they had voted with their pocketbooks: They hated it. If Bill was going to crack this market, he had to sell not just a product but a movement.

So he started at the finish line. 

“That first summer on the market, I signed up to sponsor 70 athletic events," he told me. "Most of it was just emailing race directors asking if I could show up for free with a cooler and hand out hundreds of beers at the finish line of their race. And it was anything from local 5Ks where 500 people finish in a 20-minute window to half-marathons, ultra marathons, triathlons, Ironmans. And I know our name is Athletic, but I wasn't really going for the athletic relation there. I was going for just where are people, happy, sweaty, thirsty and receptive to me putting a beer in their hand? And just [have] that one- or two-minute interaction where I could put a beer in someone's hand, talk to them about why we are just making non-alcoholic beer, great and tasty.

But it was what happened after the race when he saw that his plan was working. This was how he measured progress: “We would get hundreds of emails back in of people being like, ‘I had no intention of stopping drinking. I'm a total accidental quitter, but I've noticed all these changes in my life.’ Or, ‘I love beer. I'm not giving up my Friday night beer, but all of a sudden I can drink beer seven nights a week and feel great about it.’

“There was just this wave [of customer testimonial]. It’s a pretty high bar to feel that you have to reach out to a company and express an emotion. And so that's when I knew that we had a real groundswell of people who really got what we were doing.”

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If there’s one takeaway that Bill said he’d pass to aspiring entrepreneurs, it’s that you have to be absolutely obsessed with what you're embarking on. If not, you're not just putting your company in danger, you're doing the same for your mental health.

“Work is about a third of our waking life, but it can be 50-plus percent of your waking thoughts,” he said. “Make sure you're passionate about it to go through the tough times and the valleys. Valleys come almost every day, but if you're truly passionate about something or meeting a need for consumers that's authentic, you'll run right through [those valleys].”

And maybe, if you're lucky, you'll have Bill with an Athletic waiting for you on the other side.

🗣️ How have you used your passion to fuel your career or start a new business? Have you pushed past skepticism to achieve a dream? Join the conversation on LinkedIn and subscribe to the This is Working newsletter. And be sure to tune into the latest This is Working podcast for an extended cut of this conversation. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.

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