Modern Breakfast for Busy Humans

Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey in food and beverage but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Alex Fitzgerald, co-founder, and CMO of Eat Brave, located in Brooklyn, NY, USA.

What's your business, and who are your customers?

Brave is a plant-based food company that provides convenient and healthy products without compromising on taste and quality. For go-getters who demand products that live up to their ideals of self-improvement and environmental stewardship. We started Brave to give people more time and energy for the things they love.

Tell us about yourself

I've always been passionate about food and entrepreneurship. I grew up in Maine, where my Dad started his fish farm. I got to see how business and, in particular, the business of bringing food to people's dinner tables brought him into close connection with the community. Brave is the opportunity to combine my passion for the food business with my passion for promoting healthy, active lifestyles. Some of my favorite experiences in life have been skiing, surfing, and hiking. I started Brave to make it easier for people to get outside and do what they love with the proper nutrition to fuel them through those adventures.

What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?

Navigating the past two years, beginning with the pandemic in early 2020, has been incredibly difficult but rewarding at the same time because we've had to adjust quickly to circumstances that threatened the life of the business. We're able to come out on the other side. First, we adjusted to the closing of our packaging supplier during the initial outbreak in Wuhan by negotiating a contract with a supplier in the US. This relationship re-risked our supply while providing the added benefit of quicker turn-around time and reduced freight. Next, we adjusted after several shocks to the supply of our key ingredients, chia seeds, and oats. Most disruptive was Apple's IOS-14 privacy update, which decreased the effectiveness of online customer acquisition. We adjusted by focusing on growing the lifetime value of each customer and expanding sales channels into Amazon.

What's one of the hardest things that come with being a business owner?

Particularly in the last two years, it's been the uncertainty. We build models to anticipate the future as best we can, but they're inevitably wrong, so you're constantly adjusting in real-time.

What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?

When considering if your product idea would make a good business, I encourage you to really think about the sale channels for your product. Most successful companies have one major sales channel so consider what that method of getting your product to market will be its cost and its potential volume. The most profitable companies decrease their cost of customer acquisition as they grow; consider if your product facilitates the type of growth where each new customer reduces your cost of acquiring another customer.

Early on, try to talk to as many of your customers as you possibly can. As you get bigger and those conversations become more difficult to have, put in place scalable solutions for collecting customer feedback.

It's tempting to hire expert contractors to execute your business tasks, but your business will be better off if you invest the time to learn and execute these tasks yourself before passing them off. The knowledge you gain in this process is critical for understanding how the various aspects of your business work and interconnect.

We just released a new flavor called Vanilla Dragon Berry! It's exotic, refreshing, and definitely unique in our lineup. We gathered some incredible organic ingredients from around the world to make this flavor pop.

Where can people find you and your business?

Website: https://eatbrave.co/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/eatbrave.co/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eatbrave/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-fitzgerald-0734076a/

If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solopreneur that you'd like to share, then email community@subkit.com; we'd love to feature your journey on these pages.

Feel inspired to start, run or grow your own subscription business? Check out subkit.com and learn how you can turn "one day" into day one.