WORTH WATCHING:
Build the Audience Before You Build the Product
The Advantage · Mike Wystrach × Addison LaBonte · ~56 min
Addison LaBonte was a math major and a walk-on Division I soccer player at the University of Maine who graduated straight into a finance job she did not want. Today she runs Sweet Addison's, a multi-million dollar gluten-free dessert brand she bootstrapped out of her apartment kitchen and still self-manufactures. What makes the episode worth your time is the order she did things in. She built the audience first, and the audience told her what to sell.
WHAT I LOVED ABOUT IT:
The old playbook was to make the product and then go find the customers. Addison ran it backwards. She started @organicallyaddison to document her own gluten-free cooking. It grew for years and then took off during COVID, when everybody was home baking, and only then did she build a company for the people who were already there.
The turn is my favorite part of the conversation. In December of 2022 she posted a different cookie recipe every day for twenty five days. A few of them hit five million views, and the DMs started coming in asking where people could buy them. She had proof of demand before she had a product.
She was also her own first customer. That is the pattern in every business I have started. I did not start them because I had the most domain knowledge. I started them because I had a problem I wanted fixed. Addison went gluten-free for her own health, could not find a cookie worth eating, and ended up flying home to Maine with batches of her own cookies packed in her suitcase. She got stopped by TSA, and her answer to the agent is the whole thesis of the company.
Then there are the numbers, which I love because they are so unglamorous. Five thousand dollars to start. Seven to eight thousand dollars in month one, out of the apartment, with zero paid marketing. Commercial kitchen and the first paid ads at month six. No outside capital.
THE LINE THAT STUCK
"I can't buy these anywhere. They don't exist on the market."
MY 20-SECOND RECAP
if you do not have the full 56 minutes
→Build the channel, then build the product. An audience is a standing focus group and a launch list at the same time. Addison had people telling her what they wanted before she had a Shopify store.
→Twenty five days of one thing beats a year of everything. The Christmas cookie run worked because it was narrow, daily, and specific enough that the algorithm and the audience both knew exactly what she was.
→Ask for twenty minutes, not for a mentor. She cold messaged people in her industry on LinkedIn with a short, specific list of questions. Most said yes, and almost every call ended in an introduction to somebody else. We did the same thing at a food equipment conference when we were starting Freshly, and that guy stayed in our business for ten years.
→Higher intent and higher volume are two different budgets. Google converts better for her. She spends more on Meta. Both of those are correct at the same time, and the mix is the answer.
→Being early to a label costs you nothing. She launched leading with wholesome ingredients because gluten-free and dairy-free still felt too niche to lead with. Two and a half years later she leads with all of it.
PRO MOVE
Go back through ninety days of your own comments and DMs and write down every time somebody asked to buy something you do not sell. That list is a product roadmap, and it is free.
