Allison Ellsworth, co-founder of prebiotic soda brand Poppi, has a story that should reset how operator-investors think about marketing spend. Sitting down one Friday night with wet hair after a shower, she filmed a single TikTok telling her own story. The script was simple: “Hi, I’m Allison. Poppi has 5 grams of sugar. And I was on Shark Tank 9 months pregnant.”
The result, in her own words on the Masters of Scale podcast: “It connected on such another level that it went viral, did a million views while we were sleeping. We did $100,000 while we were sleeping that night on Amazon.” That single video now carries 300 million views.
Why This Matters For Operator-Investors
The reflexive playbook for emerging consumer brands is polished paid media: agency-built creative, performance marketing dashboards and incremental ROAS optimization. Ellsworth’s experience argues for the opposite default. Authentic founder storytelling, filmed on a phone, outperformed budgets that scaled brands historically required years to deploy.
Her advice to other founders captures the lesson: “The most underexplored emotion for an entrepreneur is embarrassment. Get online and make a fool of yourself.” For investors evaluating early-stage CPG bets, the implication is direct. Founder presence on camera is now a measurable asset, and brands without it are carrying a hidden liability against TikTok-native competitors.
The Hidden Affiliate Flywheel
The growth mechanic underneath the viral moment deserves equal attention. Poppi directed TikTok traffic to its own website first to capture emails and phone numbers, then routed customers to Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN | AMZN Price Prediction) for checkout through an affiliate link. Co-founder Stephen Ellsworth described the economics: “Amazon was actually paying us to direct traffic from our website to Amazon while also collecting the customer’s data.” Host Jeff Berman called it “ultra hack” territory.
That structure turned Amazon into a paid customer acquisition channel and a first-party data-collection moat at the same time. Most DTC brands give up margin to Amazon and walk away with no customer relationship. Poppi inverted the trade.
What To Take Away
Brand awareness was Poppi’s #1 KPI for the first four years, and the founders’ Super Bowl ad was reportedly created without that placement in mind initially; they only pursued the slot after falling in love with the creative. The full conversation is worth a listen on the Masters of Scale podcast, where Ellsworth walks through how Poppi grew into a brand the episode title frames as worth $2 billion.
For investors screening private CPG opportunities or evaluating public consumer staples conglomerates eyeing acquisitions, the framework is straightforward. Look for founders willing to be embarrassed on camera, then look at whether their funnel turns a marketplace into a data asset rather than a margin sink. Those two ingredients changed the trajectory of a soda company. They will change others.
Top Gaining Stocks
Top Losing Stocks