This week, I want to explain two things. Arbitrage, and bullshit.

Arbitrage is how some brands are scaling to $50 or $100M in revenue. You think these brands are massive, but it’s really a performance marketing machine. They put in a $1, get out $1.1 - so they keep putting more and more and more into the bucket, Zuck takes his 95% because the consumers are free to sell, and you get a product that after 10 ads, you were so beat down you were like fuck it, take my money, I’ll give it a try.

Brands struggle to get off this bus. When I sold my business, we were spending tens of millions on customer acquisition, and as the marketer, if I could tell the CEO the direct correlation from spend to customer acquisition, I can back up asking to spend more. But spending on brand, it’s not 1:1. It’s not easily measurable and no one wants to wait 3 months for a brand lift study to show what some researchers process from 2008 tells you about how your brand awareness is growing in a new customer segment. Please….dont.

But if you want to exit, your buyer wants to buy a brand, not an arbitrage play on Meta’s acquisition engine. Anyone can do that with enough money and the right agency. But being a part of culture, having a line out the door, having celebrity notoriety who proudly wear the brand and welcome the photo op, thats brand. The Meta machine can support it, but you have to find a way to get off the ecomm drug and think long term. Otherwise, whatever you build, someone can out innovate, and outspend. But a community of customers, well thats earned by purposely building it.

OK, so on to bullshit. I’ll make this quick. I’m fed up. Maybe my expectation are too high, or maybe I’m surrounded by the wrong people. But I believe I can do anything. No matter what you put in front me, I’d find a way to solve it. It’s not ego, I’ve just trained myself to figure shit out, and I’m running into lots of people who simply throw their hands up and say, “well that’s the way it is”.

Well, my response to that will forever be “maybe for you, but not for me.” I think about business a bit like a horserace, although I’m poor, so I really don’t know how this all works. When that horse or jockey doesn’t perform to your expectations, do you just sit back and accept well… that’s the way everyone else trains their horse or that’s the way everyone else outfits their jockey, or whatever bullshit happens in horse racing, I dont know, but clearly winners dont.

Because the guy sitting in the box knows that if he or she wants to win, NOTHING is sacred. Everything is in am adjustable lever to give you an advantage; to be better than everyone else on the field. And if you do not have the power or the willingness to look past what everyone before you has done, and not see all of their learnings as your own stepping stone to springboard from, then you and will always be the horse or the jockey…. But you will never sit in the owners box.

→ Every Founder Must Know: Alix Earle cashed out her Poppi equity when PepsiCo wrote a $1.95 billion check. Then she spent two years quietly building her own skincare company from scratch. The name on the bottle isn't hers.

→ The Exit: Danone just paid $1.15 billion for Huel, a brand that never needed a grocery aisle to grow. It needed a subreddit.

→ The Garage: Tarte's founder Maureen Kelly launched a nootropics brand from her renovated garage with her 18- and 19-year-old sons as co-founders, their own savings on the line, and 50,000 people on the waitlist before day one.

Say hello to Owners Only, the a show where Jeff Frommer (you know him, right?) breaks down the creators who aren’t just building audiences, they’re building businesses. Check it out, subscribe, and if you want to hear from a guest (or be a guest), just reply. I’ll be your bar mitzvah DJ….I take requests 😘

Alix Earle has 14 million followers across TikTok and Instagram. A year ago, most brands would have written her a six-figure check to hold a product and post about it. She said no.

Instead, she spent two years building Reale Actives, a skincare line designed for acne-prone skin, from the ground up with Imaginary Ventures and Andrea Blieden, the former CEO of Kiehl's and The Body Shop. Four products. $28 to $39. Launching March 31.

Here's the detail that tells the whole story: she left her name off every bottle.

"I wanted to create a brand that will expand and be beyond me," Earle told Fortune. "I wanted to build something from the ground up, and I wanted to have a say in every little detail."

That's not influencer marketing. That's founder behavior.

And it didn't come out of nowhere. Earle took an equity stake in Poppi as part of an earlier partnership. Not a flat fee. Equity. When PepsiCo acquired Poppi for $1.95 billion, that stake paid off. She saw exactly what happens when a creator bets on ownership instead of a check. She did the math. Then she went and built her own thing.

The launch strategy was pure owned distribution. Earle created a mystery Instagram account, @wtfisalixdoing, that attracted hundreds of thousands of followers before anyone knew what the product was. No paid media. No press embargo. Just a creator with a captive audience choosing when and how to reveal what she built.

We've spent 14 issues tracking this arc. The creator who takes a flat fee. The creator who negotiates equity. The creator who sits on the board. And now: the creator who builds the company, hires the CEO-level operator, and deliberately removes her own name from the packaging so the brand can outlive her fame.

A celebrity brand lives and dies with the celebrity. A founder's brand compounds independently. Earle isn't building a merch line. She's building enterprise value.

That's not a creator launching a product. That's a creator building a company.

The Alix Earles of the world aren't going to take your sponsorship deal anymore. They're going to compete with you. The smartest move isn't to outbid them. It's to partner with them before they go solo. Find the creators who are already using your product, already giving you unsolicited feedback, already building trust with the exact audience you want. Give them equity. Let the alignment do what ad spend never could.

That's exactly what OWM was built to help you do.

Tyler Smith built and sold SkySlope, the property tech platform that processed two-thirds of all North American real estate transactions, to Fidelity for a reported $80M. Then, at 39, he found out his biological age was 47. His own father had died of a heart attack at that same age. Smith spent years building a private longevity protocol and reversed his biological age by 15 years. Then he asked the obvious question: why does this require a concierge doctor and a six-figure retainer?

Hundred is his answer. For $499 a year, members get 160+ advanced biomarker tests twice annually, integration of medical records from 300+ health systems, wearable data from Apple Watch, Oura, and Garmin, and a clinician-built 100-day action plan.

The platform was developed with physicians from Johns Hopkins, Stanford, Harvard, and Columbia. HSA/FSA eligible, accessible through 5,000+ lab locations nationwide.

Hundred is looking for creator partners in the health, wellness, and longevity space who can speak to the product with real conviction.

Ten years ago, if you told a Fortune 500 CPG executive that a powdered meal replacement brand with a cult following on Reddit would be worth a billion dollars, they'd have walked out of the meeting.

The News:

Danone is acquiring Huel for approximately €1 billion ($1.15 billion). Huel was founded in the UK in 2015 and built its entire business through direct-to-consumer digital marketing. YouTube reviews, a fanatically active subreddit, organic social, and a community that evangelized the product without being paid to. It never needed a legacy retail footprint to scale. It needed trust.

The Operator Take:

The traditional CPG exit playbook was clear: get into Walmart, get into Costco, show the revenue, get acquired. Huel skipped the playbook.

It built a direct relationship with its customers, created a community that did the marketing for free, and scaled through trust rather than shelf placement. Danone isn't paying $1.15B for Huel's formulas. They're paying for the audience relationship that no amount of trade spend could replicate.

That's the same dynamic that makes creator-founded brands so valuable. When a brand is built on community trust instead of paid distribution, the customer acquisition cost stays low and the lifetime value stays high. That's compounding value.

The next time someone tells you DTC is dead, remind them that a company with a $94 billion market cap just paid a billion dollars for a brand that grew up on YouTube and Reddit. Distribution built through trust is the new shelf space.

Most intergenerational brand stories go like this: the founder's kid takes over, rebrands the Instagram, maybe does a TikTok. This one went differently.

The News:

Maureen Kelly, who founded Tarte Cosmetics in 1999, just launched Finnsul, a nootropics-and-electrolytes powder brand. Her co-founders are her sons: Finn McDonough, 18, and Sully McDonough, 19.

The brand name combines their first names. Finn built the entire website and TikTok Shop himself and handles customer service. Sully drove 50,000 waitlist signups while juggling finals at the University of Miami.

Both invested their own savings. Bootstrapped from a renovated garage, where the family still fulfills orders. Three flavors, $29.99 to $49.99, launched this week on e-commerce and TikTok Shop. In April, Finnsul packets land inside Tarte x Finnsul co-branded kits across Ulta's full chain.

The Operator Take:

The sons aren't influencers endorsing Mom's company. They're equity-holding operators who built the infrastructure. Finn didn't hire a Shopify agency. He built the store. Sully didn't hire a growth marketer. He built the waitlist. They put their own money in.

All three founders have ADHD, which is where the product thesis came from. They were each taking a stack of individual supplements and realized they could combine them into one product. The brand wasn't born from a market opportunity deck. It was born from a kitchen table problem.

The Ulta play is worth watching. Instead of negotiating a standalone retail launch, they're piggybacking on Tarte's existing distribution through co-branded kits. That's a founder who's been in retail for 27 years using her infrastructure to give her sons' brand a shortcut that no 18-year-old would otherwise have access to.

The veteran isn't just passing the torch. She's co-building with the generation that actually lives on TikTok Shop. That's not succession planning. That's a joint venture between institutional knowledge and native distribution.

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