If You Cannot Outspend Your Competition, Out-Weird Them

Inc. Executive Editor Diana Ransom speaks with happy co-founder and CEO Craig Dubitsky and GOODLES co-founder and CEO Jen Zeszut. Photo: Nathan Bajar

BY ALI DONALDSON, STAFF REPORTER @ALICDONALDSON

Does the world really need another coffee or pasta brand? Probably not. But that hasn’t stopped serial entrepreneurs Craig Dubitsky and Jen Zeszut. That’s because the co-founders behind the coffee brand Happy and the better-for-you boxed macaroni and cheese brand Goodles know the secret ingredient needed to compete in a crowed market against legacy brands with much larger staffs and advertising budgets.

“We can’t outspend them, so we have to out weird them,” says Zeszut, who spoke at the Inc. 5000 Conference in Palm Desert, California, on Friday.  “A little bit of joy and a little bit of weird goes a long, long way.”

The Goodles CEO, who raised a $13 million Series A fundraising round last year after growing the Santa Cruz, California-based business by 33x in 2022, told the crowd of entrepreneurs in attendance that any company can stand out from the competition, if the founders understand—and lean into—what makes their product different.

“What is your weird?” Zeszut asked the audience; “How do you stand out? Be you—whatever that is—and just go all in. You can be scrappier. You can be weirder. You can be more authentic.”

For Goodles, that meant throwing out the typical health food playbook. (No brown or green packaging, for one.) Instead, Zeszut envisioned each box as “a disco party in the aisles.” The macaroni and cheese, which is packed with protein, nutrients, and fiber, comes in brightly colored boxes with fonts that wouldn’t feel unusual in a comic book. And every April Fools’ Day, the company switches up its usual flavor varieties for sassier names like “kiss my asiago.” Plenty of investors did not understand their marketing strategy, Zeszut admits. But she says that playful attention to detail has helped the company supercharge sales by about 20 percent on the first of April. 

Dubitsky, the co-founder behind EOS and Hello Products, took a similar approach when he got into the coffee business with actor Robert Downey Jr. When shoppers see Happy in one of the brand’s more than 60,000 distribution points, including Target, Walmart, CVS, Sprouts, and Amazon, they will not notice any reference to coffee. That omission was purposeful. 

Happy embraced simplistic, recyclable packaging that could enjoy a second life on customers’ countertops as a storage container long after the beans were gone. The label also includes information about the National Alliance on Mental Illness, the largest grassroots mental health organization in the country, which owns a stake in the company.

Still, Dubitsky cautioned the crowd of fellow founders that their brand difference needed to be authentic and true to them, especially if it was mission-driven. “People have a bullshit meter. They can tell if you’re phoning it in or if it’s real,” he says. “Doesn’t matter what your business is. Everyone is a human being. They can tell.”

But at the end of the day, marketing strategies mean nothing without a strong product and a strong set of business fundamentals behind it. “If you don’t have the poetry and the plumbing, forget it,” Dubitsky says.