DTC Marketing Insights from Alex Cantwell of Cartograph Ventures, Juul Labs

This may shock you: 

What if I told you that there’s a product company that hit a $10 billion valuation 4x faster than Facebook? 5x faster than Snapchat. And 11x faster than Dropbox. 

🚀🚀🚀

Actually, it’s the shortest time to a $10b valuation in history. 

True story.

 And, I talked to one of the top guys at this company. 

And now, I’m here to share some insights with you. 

These days, he spends his time investing in up-and-coming consumer brands. If you want me to potentially connect you with him, I’ll tell you how at the end of this email. 

The company: Juul Labs. 

The man: Alex Cantwell.

Alex was the General Manager at Juul. And then held various VP roles at the company.

When talking to Alex, I thought of the 100s product companies that I help every day. 

I asked something like: 

“When you’re investing in companies, what do you look for?” 

Alex gave me 5 points they look for when investing. And, with his permission, I’ll share them with you here:

(1) Big enough opportunity/market size. If not enough people will buy, it’s done. 

(2) Strong team/founder. The person at the top sets the tone.

(3) Reasonable execution risk. Are there big technical or regulatory gaps to cross? How difficult will they be? 

(4) Profitable biz model from day 1. In physical product businesses, unit economics are key. 

(5) PMF (product market fit) already has to be there. The product must be resonating with customers. 

A note from me: for more on the concept of Product Market Fit, I highly recommend Marc Andreessen’s post called “The only thing that matters.”

I share these 5 tenets with you because:

(1) maybe you’re interested in Alex giving you money and advising you on growth, in which case you can email me at pat@asteroidx.com. Or (2) even if you aren’t raising funds but agree with these tenets, you can strive for them. And use them to grow your business.

And:

If you are looking for profitable growth (without the learning curve and wasted months of trial-and-error), my team and I are happy to have a phone call with you to give you a tailor-made action plan to scale on Amazon:

https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part4.html