Eric Bandholz lost his biggest retail account, bled cash for two years, and still never borrowed a cent.

Hey everyone,

Welcome back for another bite to chew on.

Competing in a crowded category means watching your margins shrink while CAC climbs. You’re spending more to win customers who have 1,500 other options that look exactly like yours.

Most founders try to fix that by raising money and outspending competitors: burn cash on Meta, chase growth at all costs, hope profitability shows up before the runway runs out.

But that playbook is dead, and in 2025 the brands following it are getting crushed.

Eric Bandholz took a different path. He built Beardbrand, a men's grooming brand, for 13 years without raising a dollar. No VC. No debt. Not even a line of credit. 

You might’ve seen him on Shark Tank years ago asking for $400,000 for 15% of Beardbrand. The sharks passed. But Eric kept building and turned Beardbrand into one of the longest-running independent brands in DTC.

He survived losing Target, operational disasters that hemorrhaged cash for two years, and competing in one of the most commoditized categories in DTC: beard care.

Not because he outspent competitors, but because he made decisions most founders wouldn’t and built products most brands wouldn’t risk creating.

Today we're breaking down what happens when constraints force you to compete on something other than ad spend.

On the Menu:

Let’s get into it.

You can watch the whole conversation with Eric here:

Listen on Spotify 🎧 and Apple 🍎 as well.

If you’ve been following along, you’ve seen us talk about Instant and their CEO Liam. We’ve crossed paths at Grow NY, shared dinners with founders, and seen up close with Obvi how fast they’re redefining retention.

Up until now, we’ve shared about how Instant helps brands identify and remember their first-party shoppers so that you can reach your real audience, send more emails and drive incremental revenue. 

But here’s the reality: for every extra shopper you can target, every brand is still sending the same cart reminders and wondering why it’s not working.

What caught our attention with Instant is how their AI-powered flows are changing the game. With Instant, every shopper gets a unique experience:

Take July Luggage. For years, their browse abandonment flow was an afterthought. Then they switched on Instant AI. That single flow jumped 3.8x and became their #1 revenue driver, fueling $350K in incremental sales in just 60 days.

Most brands pour months and $10–30K into designing two or three polished flows, but the other 8-9 sit neglected. That’s where AI shopper intelligence drives the biggest lift.

That’s the message we’re taking onto the pod next week. Retention is the number one growth lever to lock in right now, and the brands that embrace it early are the ones who win big.

Here’s your chance to join them: book a demo by October 24 and you’ll get 50% off your first 60 days. 

That will carry you through Black Friday and turn the busiest shopping period of the year into your biggest retention lift ever.

When Eric started Beardbrand, he didn’t take a single dollar of outside money. No VC. No debt. Not even a line of credit.

And for 13 years, he’s kept it that way.

That decision forced a level of financial discipline most founders never experience.

Venture-backed brands can afford mistakes. They burn cash on Meta, chase growth, and hope LTV saves them before the next round.

Bootstrap brands don’t get that luxury. Every dollar has to work.

That’s why Beardbrand runs on one core rule: only sell products with margins that work.

If a product can’t hit profitability at the price customers are willing to pay, it’s gone.

They’ve cut SKUs customers loved because the margins weren’t there. They’ve cut slow-moving inventory even when it hurt.

But that discipline kept them alive when the business hit its lowest point.

A few years ago, Beardbrand lost its biggest retail account, Target, after a series of packaging and operational errors. Two years of bleeding cash to fix the problems.

Most companies would have folded. 

But Beardbrand survived because they had no loans, no investors, and no one pulling the plug. Their cash reserves, built through years of discipline, bought them time to rebuild.

And it wasn’t the first time they’d bet on themselves.

Before losing Target, they had self-financed a seven-figure Target purchase order out of pocket. No credit lines, no bank loans, no investor lifelines. Just cash flow.

Eric calls it freedom through constraint.

When you don’t owe anyone money, you control your own pace. You can scale up or down based on what the business can actually support. No cash calls. No bridge rounds. No scrambling for approval.

You also start to see success differently. You don’t need a fifty-million-dollar company to have the life you want.

A $1M–$5M business running at 15–20% profit can give you the same lifestyle (house, car, travel, time with your family) without the chaos of fundraising.

Bootstrap discipline isn’t about staying small. It’s about staying in control.

When you’re selling in one of the most saturated categories in DTC, better Meta ads won’t save you.

Eric learned that the hard way.

For years, Beardbrand competed against hundreds of nearly identical beard oils. Margins were tight, copycats everywhere, and the brand started blending into the crowd.

So they stopped trying to compete on beard oil altogether.

Beardbrand redefined itself around one idea: “Beardbrand is a fragrance house disguised as a beard care company.”

Their products go right under your nose. If they don’t nail fragrance and formulation, nothing else matters.

That shift changed everything about how they built products. Instead of adding SKUs for growth’s sake, they focused on solving problems competitors ignored and building features customers would naturally talk about.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

Utility Deodorant

MCT Cologne

Each new launch had built-in talking points: clear product innovations that created organic word of mouth.

That’s the real playbook here.

Most brands keep improving the same thing, chasing incremental wins. Beardbrand broke away by making things worth sharing.

Because when you’re competing with 1,500 lookalikes, you don’t need a better ad. You need something customers can’t help but talk about.

The Differentiation Checklist

If not, you’re building a commodity.

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Every founder says word of mouth is their best channel. But very few build a business around it on purpose.

Eric did.

From day one, Beardbrand treated word of mouth as a system to engineer, not a by-product of luck.

That mindset shaped how they designed products, packaging, and customer experience long before paid ads ever worked for them.

In the early days, Beardbrand’s traffic came mostly from organic channels. 

A feature in The New York Times positioned Eric as the “beard expert,” which built domain authority that shot them to the top of Google for beard-related searches. 

From there, links from Men’s Health, GQ, and Forbes followed, creating a wave of organic traffic most startups could only dream of.

That early organic foundation became the backbone of their customer acquisition flywheel.
But the real power came from how they kept customers talking long after the first purchase.

They built deliberate moments into the customer journey that turned one-time buyers into brand advocates. Here’s how they designed it:

1. Over-Deliver on the Experience

Eric’s team built tiny surprises into the order experience. Every Beardbrand package includes a free booklet called the Book of Reminders, filled with short reflections about personal growth and mindset.

It has nothing to do with beard care and everything to do with their core message: Keep on growing.

It turns a basic ecommerce delivery into something memorable, something customers show friends.

2. Create Compliment-Worthy Products

Their scents became conversation starters. Temple Smoke, one of their signature fragrances, shows up repeatedly in reviews because people get stopped and asked what they’re wearing.

That single moment, a compliment from a stranger, creates organic marketing you can’t buy.

3. Build the Community Before You Sell

Before Beardbrand launched a single product, Eric had already built an audience through blogging and YouTube.

By the time the first beard oils dropped, there was already trust, credibility, and built-in demand.

Together, these three elements turned word of mouth from a happy accident into a repeatable system.

Beardbrand built products worth talking about, experiences worth sharing, and a story that made customers feel part of something bigger.

That’s the real takeaway.

If every customer has to be bought with paid ads, your brand isn’t growing, it’s renting.

Beardbrand proved that when you design for conversation, word of mouth becomes the only channel that compounds on its own.