- alle zwei WochenErscheinungsrhythmus
- 33 mintypische Länge
- vor 5 Tagenletzte Folge
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.
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The Repeat Customer Playbook: How to Build a $1M Brand | Auroro Founder
Tiffany Chao left an 11-year career to go all in on AURORO, the fine jewelry brand she started with $10,000. A year in, she couldn't pay herself, so she did what she thought a real brand was supposed to do. She hired a consultant, built a c
2026 Black Friday Playbook: How You Can Make Millions in Q4
Hulken made millions on Black Friday 2025, and Alex and Lee are already planning 2026 differently. Their best campaign last year went only to existing customers, and the Black Friday email that beat their Cyber Monday send had no design at
How to Sell Millions in High-Ticket Products (41-Minute Masterclass) | Kevin Chen @ iRestore
Kevin Chen (sells a red light therapy helmet that can cost more than a thousand dollars, takes months to buy, and takes six months to show results. Every DTC playbook says to start with a $30 impulse buy. Kevin went the other way, and he'll
Learn How to Make Millions with Email Marketing in 52 minutes!
Hulken pays Structured $8,500 a month. In Q4 last year, the email and SMS channel Structured runs for them drove more than $3.3 million. Even in a dead summer month with barely any inventory, it still brought in over $540,000. Belynda Murra
How to Go Viral Repeatedly with $0 Marketing | Hot Girl Pickles’ Co-Founders
Leah Marcus and Yasaman Bakhtiar posted about a pickle company every day for months before they had a single jar to sell. The first videos were trends, and the trends flopped in the way that matters: views came in, followers didn't. So they
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%. I
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. K
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: chronic
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, t
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 Le
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
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
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 se
Inside Hulken: How Our CBO Built a $50M Community-Led Luxury Brand
We turned the mic around. For the first time on Unfinished Business, Alex and Lee are interviewing someone from inside Hulken, their own Chief Brand Officer. Tara Seruya has been working with Alex and Lee for over a decade. They first met a
How We Built a $50M Consumer Brand with 7 People
Seven people. $50 million in annual revenue. One brand that somehow manages to feel like it's everywhere. If you've ever wondered how Hulken actually works (the operating model, the org chart, the tools, the strategy), this is the episode.
How Dylan Munro Invented a New $130M DTC Category and Built a Factory to Protect It
They cooked dog food in a rented kitchen in Queens. Their friends thought they were insane. That was 2018. Today, Spot & Tango is a 100% direct-to-consumer, subscription dog food company doing $120-130M in revenue and growing 60% year over
The Bootstrapped DTC Founder's Playbook with Ben Cogan of Beanstalk
The DTC era of "raise money first, ask questions later" is over. And Ben Cogan saw it coming. Ben is the co-founder of Hubble Contacts, one of the original DTC brands, which grew to $100M+ in revenue and earned him a spot on Forbes 30 Under
Why Most DTC Brands Get Retail Wrong (and How to Fix It) with Nate Rosen @ Express Checkout
He's seen the balance sheets behind the brands your feed tells you are crushing it. And what he's found? The gap between the press release and the spreadsheet is bigger than you think. Nate Rosen is the co-founder of Express Checkout: the m
How to Build a DTC Brand That Actually Lasts with Brooke Yoakam
Most marketing decisions aren't driven by strategy. They're driven by ego. That's the honest (and slightly uncomfortable) truth that Brooke Yoakam, founder of AvidAI and the brand analyst behind @thebrandblueprint_, dropped on this week's U
Why the Best DTC Brands Build Slow (with Steph Hon @ Cadence)
She spent two years building one product. Went through 207 prototypes. Filed 4 patents. Heard 2,500 nos from investors. And now has 200 of them. That's Steph Hon, founder and CEO of Cadence: the modular, magnetic, TSA-compliant capsule syst
Season 2 of Unfinished Business: The Truth About Scaling a Profitable DTC Brand from $0 → $50M
Season 2 of Unfinished Business is officially here and a lot has changed since we wrapped Season 1. When we first started this podcast, we were still at Clay. Hulken was growing, but it wasn’t our full focus. Over the last year, we left ven
From Side Hustle to Swimwear Empire: The Andie Swim Story with Founder Melanie Travis
Melanie Travis didn’t go to fashion school. She didn’t work at a legacy brand. She didn’t have a co-founder, a warehouse, or a team. What she did have was a miserable experience swimsuit shopping for a company retreat and a hunch that other
Relationships, Intimacy, and Keeping it Together: An Unfiltered Chat with Alex and Lee
No guests. No prep. Just us. In this episode, we sat down together — two co-founders, two moms, two longtime partners in life and business — to talk about what’s really keeping our relationships strong. And what’s absolutely not. We covered
How Liz Teich Turned Her Side Hustle Into a Full-Fledged NYC Styling Empire
Liz Teich and her brand The New York Stylist is the real deal. A New York fashion stylist with nearly 20 years of experience, a loyal online following, and a sustainable wardrobe philosophy that actually makes sense. In this episode, Liz si
How to Scale a Brand, Manage Anxiety & Stay Offline, with Tieghan Gerard @Half Baked Harvest
Tieghan Gerard built one of the most beloved food brands on the internet. Today, Half Baked Harvest has over 6 million followers across platforms, four bestselling cookbooks, a candle line, a sold-out national tour with Williams-Sonoma, and
From Ballet to Balenciaga: Victoria Brito’s Unfiltered Story
Victoria Brito has lived many lives: ballerina, global fashion model, queer icon, and now podcast host. But beneath the resume is a story of resilience, reinvention, and radical self-trust. In this episode of Unfinished Business, Victoria o
Dating, Branding, and the Power of Being Your Damn Self, with Alex Sall, Founder & Creative Director at ALSALL Studio
What do branding and dating have in common? More than you’d think. This week on Unfinished Business, we sit down with creative director and wellness advocate Alex Sall to talk about what it really means to show up as your authentic self—in
We Built a $30M Brand Without VC, and We’re Just Getting Started
Alex and Lee are back with a brutally honest look at what it’s really like to build a profitable, non-venture-backed brand. They reflect on: • Scaling Hulken to $30M+ with a tiny team • Saying no to VC—and why they’re not looking back • Wha
Meet The Founder Who Posted About Her Period & Built a Brand Gen Z Actually Trusts — Nadya Okamoto, Co-Founder of August
Would you post about your period online to build your business? Nadya Okamoto did—and that’s just the beginning. In this episode of Unfinished Business, we sit down with Nadya Okamoto, the fearless founder of August, a Gen Z brand that’s fl
What Ballet Can Teach You About Perfection, Feedback, and Not Falling Apart, with Megan Fairchild, NYC Ballet Dancer
What do ballet and building a company have in common? Way more than you’d think. Megan Fairchild is a principal dancer at New York City Ballet, an author, an NYU MBA grad, and a mom of three (including twins). In this episode, she gets radi
