The cold-brew coffee market is hot, and Bizzy Coffee has found success in this mature industry. However, it wasn’t always smooth sailing. Founder Alex French joins Startup Savants to discuss his company’s latest developments and lessons learned.
- Startup Savants is a business podcast that tells the stories behind up-and-coming startups.
- Alex French joins Startup Savants to discuss his cold brew coffee startup Bizzy Coffee and what he has learned since its founding.
- French talks about fundraising strategies, growing sales, and other topics of interest to entrepreneurs.
Fundraising ‘Not for the Faint of Heart’
During his interview with Startup Savants, Alex talked about several important lessons learned since Bizzy was founded in 2013. In particular, he learned how to raise funds, which he described as “tough and not for the faint of heart.”
Alex has several fundraising strategies, but arguably the most important is to time his efforts with seasonal cold brew coffee purchases. “We sell more cold coffee in the summer. People typically drink cold in the summer and hot in the winter,” he said. “So I know that when you fundraise, you have to fundraise on momentum because an investor is always going to want to wait to get more information. They’ll want to see what happens next month and how your financials look next month so that they can mitigate their own risk. So you have to run a pretty tight process.”
Because cold drinks are a tough sell in the winter, Alex said he has to finalize any fundraising deals for the year by Thanksgiving. “Once Thanksgiving hits … investors that don’t need to work. And so you can’t get anything done in that time period.”
The Chicken or the Egg?
Alex has also learned how to increase sales as a young founder. He found this difficult at first because he didn’t have the proof of sales performance that vendors wanted.
“In the early days, it’s the chicken and the egg of like, ‘Okay, well, how do you show performance without being on the shelf?’ And that’s where it gets really tough,” he said. “And so the first several years are a real slog, especially in our category, because you don’t just present it to them and then they put it on the shelf a week later.”
Alex overcame this and other barriers through sheer persistence and hard work, and now more than 4,500 vendors sell Bizzy’s cold brew around the US. “So we started with one store, and then we got into a 10th store, and then we got into a 26th store, and then we got into the 80th store. And then all of a sudden those stores start to compete with the other stores that are in their region,” he said.
One future goal, naturally, is to increase sales even more. However, Bizzy also wants to become more sustainable and achieve carbon neutrality by 2025. This will require a lot of work, including introducing a 100-percent post-consumer-recycled plastic bottle. “We really want to drive some change and lead the charge in the beverage side of just being as sustainable as possible and really forcing our competitors to follow suit,” he said.
Startup Savants Podcast
The Startup Savants podcast is a business podcast created by The Really Useful Information Company (TRUiC). Listeners can hear the stories behind startups, as told by their founders who are in the midst of growing their companies.
Ethan, an entrepreneur, and Annaka, a branding expert, host the Startup Savants podcast. They bring disparate skills and life experiences to their interviews, providing listeners with important business insights and a holistic perspective on the startup ecosystem.
Hear from a variety of real startup founders from around the globe and with varying backgrounds, making their startup idea a reality. Learn from experts sharing their industry knowledge on venture capital, securing funding, and more on the Startup Savants podcast.
Final Thoughts
In his interview on Startup Savants, Alex talks about his journey founding and running Bizzy. Hear his tips for founders on raising funds, growing sales, becoming more sustainable, and other topics.
You can find the Startup Savants podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
