Episode · 2026-07-11
“Don’t Start a Creatine Brand.”
“Don’t Start a Creatine Brand.” | Hydration Breaks: $250M | Sam’s Club GLP-1s
Rundown
Chris and Colin open with hiring shoutouts before diving into Recharge founder Oisin O'Connor's warning not to launch new creatine brands given subscription data favoring pre-2023 entrants. The episode also covers Fox's massive hydration-break ad impressions from the World Cup, Sam's Club expanding Weight Watchers/GLP-1 membership perks, and two guest segments — one on paid search/LLM traffic economics and marketing testing discipline, another on an AI-powered gift-recommendation tool built from Instagram scraping.
Takes from this episode
Recharge's subscription data shows the creatine category is now too saturated to launch a new brand profitably, since pre-2023 entrants earn 8.5x the monthly revenue of later ones.
Don't start a creatine brand. Don't do it. Not now... brands that launched before 2023 do eight and a half x more in monthly revenue than the brands that entered in
Cheap, undiscovered ad inventory on LLM/chat platforms like ChatGPT won't last because ad budgets will find and bid up any cheap clicks almost immediately.Prediction
I don't think we're going to get all of a sudden cheap clicks because the budgets are going to find it quick enough that there's not going to be, hey, we're going to find 5-cent clicks on chat GBT
Brands over-focus on big marketing levers (ad spend, email cadence) and under-invest in testing smaller levers like always-on discounts and product-feed naming, which are underrated and easy wins.
I need help for testing all of the various things that we should always be testing... let's just roll out like a always 15%... on the feed side I never think about my feed
Fox likely would have earned significantly more sponsorship/ad value from hydration-break placements if the USA team had advanced further in the tournament.
it's too bad that America didn't make it a little further in the tournament because I think Fox would have probably made even more monies on these hydration breaks
A guest believes personalized gift recommendations can be automated by scraping a person's public Instagram and using AI to build a tailored 'gift board,' solving the problem of being a poor gift-giver.
you can drop it and then... you can also answer a bunch of questions if you want or it can just build it off the Instagram link doing a bunch of cool AI stuff and then it just builds a product board for you
To reach top-tier athletes for partnerships or gifting, the best approach is to treat the athlete like an 'account' and find the lowest-level intermediary (agent, assistant) who can be penetrated, rather than going direct.
I would see the athlete as an account and then like what's the lowest layer I can penetrate that account at, do a bunch of deep research on that