Marketing Pros: Nick Miller of CBD Beverage Brand, Good Day

First up, congrats – your launch product has now been on market for a month! How’s it going?

“Yeah, that’s right! We’re coming up on a month now since our first product launch – a cold brew coffee. A nice clean, high-end blend of fair trade, organic coffee, filtered water and our broad spectrum CBD. And it’s going really well. Of course we’re a small company so there are always lots of little hiccups here and there. But I’d say the response to the brand has been really great.

We’ve been really pleasantly surprised by the interest of retailers as well. That’s something that we didn’t plan on focusing on quite so early, but the positive response has been really encouraging. So we’ve been able to make a nice push into starting to sell in retail as well.”

Who’s behind Good Day?

“There’s three co-founders. I’m the COO – I run all of our operations and product. Basically everything that has to do with either making the beverages, the whole supply chain, or our online digital experience. So, the website and the eCommerce experience.

“My co-founder Warner Siebert has a sales and marketing background and was an executive at Sysco Foods –  he’s our CEO.  And, our third co-founder, Andy Gabriel is our CFO. In addition to having a finance background he also has run a home-pressed juice company, as well as a large beverage contract manufacturer. So he really rounds off the team with the food and beverage experience.”

Look at that holy trinity! How long have you guys been working away at this?

“The business really came out of a little bit of luck and coincidence. I had been thinking about cannabis, and CBD more specifically, for a few years now since I started using it while I was running ultra marathons. I was trying everything and anything that might work for recovery from long mileage weeks – cryotherapy, dry needle and cupping, infrared, the whole thing, as well as CBD. And CBD was one of the things that I felt was actually effective in helping recovery.

“The trend of cannabis consumption has been growing really rapidly, but it’s primarily been consumed in what are largely unhealthy ways. Smoking, even vaping, or when you’re thinking about edibles – brownies, cookies, really sugar-rich unhealthy things. That just didn’t mesh with my lifestyle. I wanted to just have CBD in a healthy way – the way the rest of the food and beverage market has been moving.

“And, it just so happened that literally within three days of one another, both myself and my co-founder Warner, had reached out to a mutual investor in both of our past companies and brought up the idea of a very similar business. We reconnected back in October 2018 and started kicking around the idea for this company. We didn’t start in earnest on building it until January 2019. We left our jobs in March and April respectively, to go full time.”

Was that a scary leap?

“We call it either fortunate or unfortunate, or maybe crazy, that we’ve both done this before. So Warner, my co-founder and I actually know each other because we were both the CEOs of previous companies that we started in the same incubator space, in New York back in 2011. I started a company called Parking Panda which did deal management and pricing optimization for the parking business. He started a company called BuzzTable, which did a mobile waitlist management and CRM for the restaurant industry.

“He ultimately raised money from Microsoft Ventures and sold that business to Sysco Foods. I raised about $10 million for my company and ultimately sold it to Spot Euro, our largest competitor. There’s always risks in giving up your cushy, comfortable corporate lifestyle. But we were both, to some extent, prepared for what that meant.

“There’s always some stress  – you don’t know that it’ll still be around in three months, six months, or a year. But you learn a lot and you’re pushed a lot more when you’re building something brand new, than when you’re at a company like Facebook or Sysco, where if you don’t show up for work for a day, a week, or even a month, the company is going to keep right on rolling!”