For more than 15 years, right up until this year, I built other people's dreams.
I started BuzzShift in 2010. Sold it in 2016. Bought it back in 2017 because I wasn't finished. Sold it again in 2021, that time to private equity.
Everything from men's skincare brands like Jack Black to salad subscriptions like GardenCup, where I came in as fractional CMO and helped take that business from zero to a $29M run rate on Shopify in 18 months.And yes, a salad subscription. Sit with that one for a second.
Five degree window in transit. Can't freeze. Can't get warm. Shelf life measured in days. Perishability as a full time job. Most people look at that and see a logistics problem wearing a marketing costume.It isn't. It's a habit business.
If you can build a salad subscription, you can build anything.
Skincare, food, beverage, supplements. Categories with nothing in common on the shelf and everything in common underneath. The category was never the point. The only thing that mattered was whether the product lived inside something people already did every single day, and whether anyone had bothered to build a real brand around it.I loved that work. I'd do it again. But I'm not a consultant and I never was. I'm a builder and an operator, and the thing I'm obsessed with is a loop. Build the brand. Acquire the customer. Get them to come back. Again. And again. And again.That last part is the whole game.
Not products. Habits. Find the ritual people already have, then build something they woulddefend.
In marketing speak, the reason is lifetime value and repeat purchase rate. A habit product doesn't have to win the customer once. It wins them on a schedule. That one difference changes every number downstream. You can afford to pay more to acquire, because you aren't underwriting a single transaction. You can survive an ugly month of CAC, because the revenue is already on the calendar.
AOV is nice. LTV is the business.In plain speak: one time purchases are a treadmill. Habits are a flywheel.Most brands get built around the first purchase. The ones that last get built around the second.TESTZZZQQQ
Candy was mine
Nerd Gummy Clusters. Classic gummy worms. Every flight, every late night, every drive. The bag that never lasted as long as it should have. I wasn't casual about it. I was a repeat customer with a punch card in my head.
Then I started actually reading the thing I was eating.
The sugar count. The dye list. The waistline that came with it. Full dad bod, creeping in one bag at a time. The food dye headlines were already loud by then and I couldn't unhear them.I'm not a scientist. I'm a founder who reads labels and looks in the mirror.
January 2024
Flight to Cabo for Ashley's birthday with friends. Same ritual. Same bag of gummies before boarding.
Somewhere on that trip I caught myself in the mirror and did not like the guy looking back.
Cusp of mid 40s. Three kids. A wife I'm lucky to have. A life I actually built on purpose. And a body and a snack habit that did not match the man I wanted to be for any of them.I love candy. I needed a better way.The protein rabbit holeSo I hired one of the best trainers in Dallas, Alex Brusiloff.First real conversation, he looked at me and said: bud, you need to eat more protein.
I got obsessed. Daily target. Tracking every gram. Reorganizing meals around a number. And I still could not get enough of it in.I also still wanted my sweet treat at the end of the day. That part never went away, and I stopped pretending it would.
Expo West
I go every year. It's the Mecca for CPG. The Super Bowl for emerging brands. Twenty thousand steps a day and a hundred conversations about what people are actually going to eat in eighteen months.
And protein was everywhere. Or at least protein was being added to everything.
Most of the supplement stuff tasted like chalk. The protein candy was worse. Somebody had clearly decided that if it's good for you, it's allowed to taste like punishment.
Nobody was making the thing I wanted. Not one person.
Then it clicked
I didn't need less candy. I needed better candy.More fiber. Less sugar. More protein.
Win. Win. Win.
GLiTCH was born in that gap. Cheat Code Candy. High protein sour gummy worms for people who want the ritual without the crash.
Real candy. Not a lecture. Not guilt free cosplay. A cheat code.
The year nobody sees
Then I spent the next year making it real.
Formulation rounds that failed. Co-man conversations. Texture. Sourness that actually hits. Packaging. Supply chain. The boring middle that never makes the highlight reel and is the only part that decides whether you have a business.End of 2025, I got introduced to the co-manufacturer behind Grüns. A few months later Unilever announced it was buying Grüns for $1.2 billion, less than three years after the brand launched. I went all in with that co-man as my primary partner.
That was not a cost decision. In gummies, your co-man is your product. Texture, sourness, shelf stability, whether 11g of protein tastes like protein or tastes like candy. You can out-market a mediocre manufacturer for exactly one purchase cycle. Then the reorder rate tells the truth.I picked best in class and built around them.
Building from zero, in public, with the exact obsession I spent 15 years renting out to other founders.
And then the headlines caught up
Two years after that flight, Florida's health department published testing on 46 candies and flagged elevated arsenic in 28 of them, with a warning about long term cancer risk in kids. Nerds made the list.
The industry pushed back hard on the methodology and I'm not here to litigate a lab report.
But when the exact thing you eat on every flight shows up in a state health warning, you stop needing more convincing.
I was already gone by then. The mirror got me two years earlier.What I'm actually doing here
I still work with founders and I'm not walking away from that. Fifteen years of reps don't turn off.
But this one is personal. The habit was mine. The mirror was mine. The product had to be something I would actually eat on the next flight to Cabo.
If you've spent a long time building other people's dreams, eventually you have to answer the question. What would you build if the only customer who mattered was you?For me it was candy. Better candy. Habit candy.
Cheat Code Candy.
Preorder now at glitchcandy.co
Cam
And yes, a salad subscription. Sit with that one for a second.
Five degree window in transit. Can't freeze. Can't