Brought to you by Attio, the next generation of CRM: https://bit.ly/AttioThePeel Bill Shufelt is the Founder and CEO of Athletic Brewing, the craft brewer that created the non-alcohol beer market in the US. Bill takes us inside the early days of starting the company, including realizing there was an opportunity to make non-alcoholic beer, finding a co-founder, struggling to find early investors, building multiple breweries, and getting into Whole Foods before launching. Our conversation is a case study on creating a new market - I hope you enjoy. Timestamps: (00:00) Preview (04:10) Becoming the #1 beer in Whole Foods(05:54) The history of non-alcoholic beer(10:41) Why an outsider had to create this new category(15:34) Health benefits of avoiding alcohol(17:51) Turner tries the beer(22:49) Bill’s wife pushing him to start Athletic Brewing(26:38) Writing a 96 page white paper on non-alcoholic beer(28:42) Quitting his job to start six months of research and networking(30:21) Meeting the perfect co-founder after 100’s of meetings(32:34) Putting his life savings into a warehouse and brewing equipment(33:04) The importance of setting company values early on(34:23) Brewing the first beer in Gatorade jugs(36:16) Selling the first bottles to retailers(37:42) Explosive growth in 2019(39:39) Why new products and D2C helped them scale so fast(40:39) Using TikTok to sell-out new product launches in 30 seconds(42:00) The value of doing early customer service himself(44:45) Getting to 61% market share in non-alcoholic beer(46:10) Struggling to raise the first angel round(48:34) Using consistent investor updates to easily raise the Seed, Series A, and Series B(50:47) Transitioning to institutional capital for its Series C(52:33) Betting on a new category to expand market size(55:44) Information access is enabling healthier consumer behavior(58:11) Bill’s early strategy for marketing the product(1:01:43) The importance of over communicating with your investors(1:03:44) Why retailers like Athletic Brewing’s unique omni channel approach(1:06:16) How building its own breweries and supply chain enabled its unique strategy and better margins at scale(1:09:04) Getting into Whole Foods before launching(1:11:31) Doing unscaleable things over and over again(1:13:50) Why entrepreneurship is a long game(1:14:22) Most of Athletic’s new products come from the team Check out Athletic Brewing: https://athleticbrewing.com/ Where to find Bill: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bill-shufelt-650059138 Where to find Turner: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak/ Newsletter: https://www.thespl.it/