A Founders Tale of Growth by MUD\WTR's CEO Shane Heath

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When I started MUD\WTR in May of 2018 I didn’t know what a co-packer was. I put a site live and, you know, jumped off the cliff and built the wings on the way down.

People responded.
The name, copywriting, and positioning turned heads.
People liked the product.
There was virality and it started to take off.

I saw an opportunity, so I worked my ass off.

I’d be at the commercial kitchen until 1-2 am, mixing dozens of kilos of powders together and putting them into sealed buckets.

I’d go to bed, wake up and go to work.

While at work, my roommate’s (Harrison Checkley) girlfriend and friends would wrap labels on tins, fulfill powder into the tins, seal them, put them in a box, slap a label on it, and put it in a bag with all the others.

On my lunch break, I would drive over fill up my van with bags of orders, take them to the post office and then go back to work for the rest of the day.

Get home from work. Repeat.

7 months after launch I was shipping out thousands of orders per month and doing well over $100k in revenue. I had a good handle on the data, we had great traction, testimonials, kpis, etc.

But we weren't profitable, and I didn't have any personal funds to invest.
So I couldn't buy ingredients in bulk let alone consider a co-packer's MoQs.

Instead, I had to spend hours a week in a kitchen, like brutal, inefficient, dusty not-in-my-genius hours, to hopefully raise enough money to get there.

I was able to raise a little over $1m from some amazing investors and humans. Folks like Zach Coelius, Alex Malamatinas and Melitas Ventures (Nebari at the time), Industry Ventures, Able Partners, 25madison, and M13 🚀.

Finally, I could get a co-packer and scale it!
Relief was right around the corner I thought.

Not so fast.

You see, our product was fulfilled in these black tins.

Though we were shipping >100 orders of product per day, co-packers weren’t biting at the bit to set up custom fulfillment lines for our measly startup. They all said we should (and eventually would) fulfill in plastic bags like everyone else.

Call me irrational, but I didn't want to be like everyone else.
The tins were sacred to our brand.

So I kept working, growing the business by putting in the time myself in the kitchen until we got big enough where someone would commit to us.

Finally, 13 months since I started the company, we got a co-packer. 
It was easily one of the best moments of the journey.

With a co-packer, those tins, and my time freed up to focus, we scaled the company close to 5000% over the next 3 years. (And Emma Nelson turned our manufacturing from startup to world-class.)

If you’re a founder fighting to preserve that piece of the brand that feels sacred to you, keep fighting.

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Reposted by Zen Hustlers, from Shane Heath on Linkedin here