Unfinished Business

Unfinished Business
  • 5.0 (11)
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Updated Weekly

Meet the operators behind Hulken, a brand that's done $100M+ in sales since launch with a team of seven and no VC funding. Before Hulken, Alex Schinasi and Lee Rotenberg each built and exited software companies. Now they bring that builder mentality to consumer: fast, lean, unconventional. Every week they get into the parts of scaling a consumer brand nobody posts about: inventory tradeoffs, retail margins, collab terms, and what AI actually replaced. For founders and operators who want specifics, not theory. Presented by Structured Agency and Horatio, both used by Hulken to scale.

  1. Jul 28

    The Minimum Viable Company: How We Run a $50M Brand With Just 7 People

    For most of their careers, Alex and Lee believed a bigger team meant a stronger company. Now they believe the opposite, and they've got the receipts: $50M in revenue last year with seven full-time employees and payroll running at just 4%. In this solo episode, they make the case that in the AI era, headcount has flipped from a status symbol into a warning sign. They break down what they call the "minimum viable company," where maximum revenue per employee beats a swollen org chart every time. The model runs on three layers: lean in-house leadership, a network of agencies for specialized work, and an AI layer where every team member has their own assistant handling the project management that used to go to junior hires and interns. The engine underneath it all is a company "brain" built in Notion that their agents plug into. In this episode: - Why Alex and Lee now read "I have 30 employees" as a sign a company is doing it wrong - The exact numbers behind their claim: $50M, seven people, 4% payroll - How the AI layer replaced the junior hires and interns they used to rely on - Why they built their company "brain" in Notion, and how their AI agents plug into it - The hiring rule they live by: wait until you literally can't, then demand a clear ROI - Why speed, not headcount, is the real driver of winning (and losing) - The honest downsides of a tiny team, from taking out the trash to dropped balls Subscribe to Unfinished Business for candid conversations with founders who've actually done it. 🎧 Watch on YouTube, listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

  2. Jul 14

    How This CPG Founder Went From a Kitchen Experiment to 7,000 Stores

    Katie Lefkowitz was a lifelong Snickers fanatic when a colon cancer scare and a doctor's orders to cut sugar should have ended that relationship. Instead, she went home and started experimenting with date-based caramel in her own kitchen. Katie is the founder of Harken, the better-for-you candy brand now in nearly 7,000 stores including Walmart, Costco, Sprouts, and Kroger, with Whole Foods launching this fall. Before Harken, she was COO at CAULIPOWER, the original cauliflower-crust pizza brand, and that food-world network is how a printed-out prototype with stickers on it turned into Harken's first national retail deal. In this episode of Unfinished Business, she walks through how that deal happened (including a calendar invite with no explanation attached), why she skipped the usual direct-to-consumer playbook entirely, and what she's learned running a five-person team through a Costco launch. Our biggest takeaways: - How a colon cancer scare turned into a national candy brand - The unmarked calendar invite that got Harken into Walmart - Why she walked into her first retail pitch with fake, printed-out packaging - The case for skipping DTC and going straight to retail - Running investor relationships through a monthly two-hour office hours block - Why Harken is overhauling its packaging in Q3, and what drove the change - The fiber stat she says is moving more product than any ad Subscribe to Unfinished Business for more unfiltered founder stories. New episodes weekly on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

  3. Jun 30

    The Hidden Cost of Scaling Our DTC Brand Without VC Money

    Every episode, Alex and Lee talk about how fast Hulken is growing. This one is about what that growth actually costs. For the first time, they get candid about the messy middle of scaling a bootstrapped, vertically integrated brand: chronically out of stock on their bestsellers, rerouting inventory away from their own website to protect retail relationships, and discovering that the model that built them is now the thing holding them back. They get into why being sold out can be both a brand asset and a real liability, why their lowest reviews have nothing to do with the product, and how they're testing new products outside their own factories to keep the core team focused. It's an honest, mid-sprint debrief on omnichannel growing pains, told from inside the company, with no VC safety net and a Q4 they can't fully announce yet. What you'll take away: - Why "we're always sold out" is a harder problem than it sounds - How they decide which channel gets limited inventory when there isn't enough to go around - Why retail partners now come before their own DTC customers - The real reason great products still get three-star reviews - How tariffs and shipping costs reshaped their inventory decisions - Why they're launching new products with outside manufacturers - How they're planning 2027 while fighting to stay in stock this yearNew episodes of Unfinished Business drop weekly. Follow on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts so you don't miss the next one.

  4. Jun 16

    How TUSHY Turned a Taboo Category Into One of DTC's Strongest Brands with Justin Allen

    Justin Allen co-founded TUSHY a decade ago to solve a problem most Americans didn't know they had. No roadmap, no comparable brand, no playbook… just a bet that if you made toileting joyful enough, people would come around. They did. Now, ten years in, Justin is asking harder questions: What does brand even mean when the media landscape has completely fractured? How do you build creative at scale without losing what makes you you? And when do you trust the data, and when do you just flip the table and build? In this episode: - How TUSHY created a category from scratch and what the "toothpaste out of the tube moment" actually means for retention - Why Justin went "kicking and screaming" into founder content and what made him change his mind - The performance creative orchestra: what it is, why volume isn't enough, and what strategic diversity in creative actually looks like - What brand meant in 2015 vs. what it means today and why Justin has stopped pretending he knows - Learning velocity vs. just "moving fast" - When failure is an option, and when (with plumbing under pressure 24/7) it absolutely isn't - His take on retail, TikTok Shop, and how to innovate for a channel instead of force-feeding itSubscribe to Unfinished Business on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. New episodes every week.

  5. Jun 2

    Going From $50M to $100M: How We Use Partnerships As Our Biggest Growth Levers at Hulken

    Two things have been true at Hulken since year one: no dropshipping, and only say yes to collabs that actually earn it. On the eve of launching their most complex product development yet (a full pattern collab with Posh Peanut), Alex and Lee sit down to work out, on camera, what they actually think now. This is a solo episode. No guest filter, no rehearsed takes. At $50M, the playbook isn't finished. The most honest thing you can say is that we’re still breaking rules we set when we were smaller. If you're building a product brand somewhere between "we're figuring this out" and "we've figured this out," this is the real version of that conversation. What's in this episode: - The reason Alex and Lee said no to dropshipping for years (and the exact conditions that finally changed their minds) - Alex's 3 non-negotiables for every brand collab - Why Lee won't say yes to any retailer that won't buy inventory upfront - How the Beautyblender collab landed Hulken backstage at the Grammys and the Oscars (the bag, not them) - The "position of power" test that tells you when your brand is actually ready to dropship Subscribe to Unfinished Business on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

  6. May 26

    The DTC Trap That Built Juliet Wine's Retail Empire | Allison Luvera

    Most founders building consumer brands think DTC is the goal. Allison Luvera knew from day one it was just the testing ground. Getting into Whole Foods, Costco, Safeway, and Total Wine with five employees and a patented box wine format was a three-year plan built on intentional price testing, customer research, and unit economics priced for retail before she ever walked into a retailer. Allison is the co-founder and CEO of Juliet Wine, one of the fastest growing wine brands for women in the US. She came up running luxury marketing for some of the biggest names in spirits, and took everything she learned about how big brands operate to build something they couldn't easily copy, a patented cylindrical format that creates a brand moat in an industry that's notoriously hard to protect. This conversation covers the full journey: why beverage alcohol never had a DTC golden age, how she navigated the skepticism from distributors even after proving DTC traction, the copycat wine brand that literally used her co-founder's hand in their marketing photos, and why she thinks fundraising should come with a warning label. Highlights: - Why Allison priced Juliet for retail margins on day one, even while selling DTC only - How 70% of Juliet's customers had never considered box wine before they found her - The three-tier alcohol distribution system and why it makes DTC structurally difficult at scale - The story of a major wine corporation stealing Juliet's photography and her public LinkedIn response - Why exits in alcohol happen earlier than most industries and how that shapes her fundraising strategy - What it actually takes to get into Whole Foods as a five-person team - The Sephora analogy: why women in wine have always been forced to choose between quality and brand Subscribe to Unfinished Business wherever you listen to podcasts and if you loved this episode, make sure to leave a review. Learn more about Juliet Wine at julietwine.com.

  7. May 19

    What Most DTC Founders Get Wrong About Entering a Crowded Category | Greta Meyer

    Greta Meyer started Sequel in a college classroom. She and her co-founder identified a physics flaw in the tampon that nobody had fixed in almost 100 years, and spent years navigating FDA clearance, manufacturing partnerships, and a medical device regulatory process most founders would have quit on. They launched DTC, spent almost nothing on ads, and built their brand through partnerships instead. Yankee Stadium reached out to them. So did the Indiana Fever. The thing that makes Sequel work is also the thing that makes it hard to copy: radical focus. They're not trying to reinvent the whole menstrual experience. They fixed one fluid mechanics problem and built everything around that. In this episode of Unfinished Business, Alex and Lee sit down with Greta to talk about what it actually takes to break into a commoditized, legacy-dominated category when you can't out-spend the incumbents and the product itself is invisible to the consumer. In this episode: - Why "we're not trying to solve everything for everyone" is the strategy, not just a line - How Sequel redesigned a class two medical device on a retrofit of existing machinery, and why that constraint was actually the unlock - Building brand in a taboo category without making it feel taboo - Why Yankee Stadium and the Indiana Fever came to them, and what that taught Greta about how to find partners worth having - The zero-ad growth playbook: organic social, affiliates, and stadium-as-acquisition-channel - Why going DTC first, before retail, gives you the customer data and the brand credibility you need to walk into a retailer from a position of strength - What she'd tell a founder who's about to do outreach to a partner they want: wait - The team structure behind a 6-person operation running a medical device startup - How Sequel is thinking about Amazon, and why TikTok Shop was the right test before it Greta is the kind of founder who knows exactly what she's building and exactly what she isn't. If you're entering a crowded market and wondering whether you need a huge ad budget to compete, this one will reframe that question entirely.

  8. May 12

    The DTC math most founders refuse to do (until it's too late) | Suze Dowling @ Pattern Brands

    Suze Dowling has seen the inside of more DTC brands than almost anyone. As co-founder of Pattern Brands, a multi-brand home goods portfolio she's been building since 2018, she doesn't just run one brand. She runs five at once on a shared services team, which means she watches the same mistakes play out across categories, price points, and growth stages, over and over again. The biggest one: founders who scale before the math works. In this episode of Unfinished Business, Alex and Lee sit down with Suze for one of the most honest DTC conversations they've had. She talks about what she actually looks for when acquiring a brand, why she's shut down companies that were still profitable, and why the DTC equation most founders ignore is the thing that determines whether your brand survives. In this episode: - The DTC math equation Suze uses to diagnose any brand: revenue = AOV x conversion x sessions, and why most founders try to scale before all three are working - Why profitability was Pattern's non-negotiable when the rest of the industry was chasing growth at all costs - How she decided to shut down profitable brands, and why she calls it opportunity cost, not failure - The thing founders lie to themselves about most: product-market fit - What running five brands simultaneously teaches you that one brand never could - Why she still calls five customers herself every week, by phone - How tariffs forced the hard calls she already knew she had to make - Pattern's global team structure and how she got lean before lean was the obvious move - Where she stands on AI right now, and why not using it is "truly petrifying" to her Suze is the kind of operator who has made the expensive mistakes, learned from them, and built a system around never making them again. If you're building a DTC brand right now and you're not sure whether your math is actually working, this one is for you.

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About

Meet the operators behind Hulken, a brand that's done $100M+ in sales since launch with a team of seven and no VC funding. Before Hulken, Alex Schinasi and Lee Rotenberg each built and exited software companies. Now they bring that builder mentality to consumer: fast, lean, unconventional. Every week they get into the parts of scaling a consumer brand nobody posts about: inventory tradeoffs, retail margins, collab terms, and what AI actually replaced. For founders and operators who want specifics, not theory. Presented by Structured Agency and Horatio, both used by Hulken to scale.

Information

  • Creator
    Unfinished Business
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    44
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Unfinished Business
  • Show Website
    Unfinished Business