He built a half-billion dollar coffee brand in his 20s. Here's what he'd do differently.

Jimmy DeCiccio co-founded Super Coffee straight out of college, scaled it to $80 million, raised nearly $200 million, and walked away without a dollar in his pocket. The lessons he shared with the FOC community are the ones that actually matter.

From our FOC monthly community call  ·  Featuring Jimmy DeCiccio, Co-Founder of Super Coffee & Head of Revenue Growth at Yerba Madre

In August 2015, three months after graduating college, Jimmy DeCiccio and his two brothers started Super Coffee because they couldn't find anything good to drink on campus. No investors, no marketing budget, no blueprint. Just protein, coffee, monk fruit, and a willingness to pour samples in grocery stores every weekend.

Four years later they were the bestselling bottled coffee in the Northeast. By 2021 they'd hit $80 million in revenue. They raised nearly $200 million in total. Jimmy's shares were worth $30 million on paper at the peak.

He made zero dollars from the business.

That story, told with complete honesty and zero self-pity, set the tone for one of the most practically useful calls we've had. Jimmy is now Head of Revenue Growth at Yerba Madre, the 30-year-old mate brand you've been seeing everywhere, and everything he shared came from hard-won scar tissue.

Physical availability first. Everything else second.

The single most important reframe from this call: brand awareness and physical availability are not the same thing, and most founders confuse them.

At Yerba Madre, 72% of sales happen on the West Coast. In California and Seattle, the brand outsells Celsius and Alani. In the Northeast, it's barely visible. Jimmy's answer isn't billboards or TV ads. It's the same thing that worked at Super Coffee in 2018: feet on the street, sales blitzes, building displays, pouring samples. Get the product everywhere first. Then spend on awareness.

He also had a sharp line on sequencing: nothing kills a bad product faster than good advertising. If the formula or packaging is off, driving people into stores to find it just accelerates the failure. Get the product right. Get it on shelves. Then turn on the marketing machine.

The leaky bucket problem

At the height of Super Coffee's growth, they were spending half a million to a million dollars a month on Meta ads. Revenue was going up. Losses were going faster. The problem was a CAC to LTV mismatch that most founders don't catch until it's too late.

The unit economics of a $36 twelve-pack shipped DTC don't work when people buy once and don't come back. A single-serve impulse beverage isn't a subscription product. They were acquiring customers who were essentially being tricked by a good ad, buying once, and disappearing. The faster they grew, the more money they lost.

His conversation with Chad from Gruns reframed how he thinks about this. Jimmy had written Gruns off as growth hacking. He was wrong. The difference: Gruns has an LTV that actually works. 80% of customers use the product every day. By month three, the advertising cost is already paid back. That's not a leaky bucket. That's a math problem with the right answer.

The hiring mistakes worth avoiding

Jimmy was candid about what worked and what didn't when building his team. A few things that stuck:

Take the secondary. Every time.

This was the hardest part of the conversation, and Jimmy told it straight. He raised nearly $200 million. His shares were worth $30 million on paper. When he left Super Coffee, he left every chip on the table. Investors get paid first. He made nothing.

His advice now: if your business is growing fast and investors want in, use that as leverage. Negotiate a secondary — even if it's just a million dollars per round. You've earned it. De-risking yourself isn't a sign of low commitment, it's good financial sense. The time to do it is when you have leverage, not when you're desperate.

On founder comp more broadly: if you're doing less than $10 million in sales, $100 to $150K a year is reasonable. Don't raise $10 million and pay yourself $400K. But also don't pretend you can run a business sustainably while unable to pay your own bills. If you can't take care of yourself, you can't take care of the company.

Go local first. Inch wide, mile deep.

When asked whether founders should go deep in one geography or wide with a focused audience, Jimmy's answer was clear: local, always. Tito's, Casamigos, Cava all built their identity in a place before they tried to be everywhere. Surfside dominated the Jersey shore before they became a $400 million brand. Had they launched nationally in Target first, they would have meant nothing to nobody.

The same logic applies to exits. Great companies aren't sold — they're bought. You don't show up to Lululemon or Vuori with a deck asking to be acquired. You build something so embedded in a community that they can no longer afford not to own you. That takes time, specificity, and genuine cultural relevance. You either have it or you don't, and no amount of ad spend manufactures it.

What we took away

• —Physical availability before brand awareness. Get on shelves before you buy billboards.
• —Unit economics have to work from day one. "We'll fix margins at scale" is not a plan.
• —CAC to LTV is the only metric that tells the real story. Make sure it has the right answer.
• —Don't hire a CMO until $100M. Build in-house creative capacity as early as possible instead.
• —Take secondary in every round when you have leverage. Don't wait for an exit that may never come.
• —Go local first. Build something that means everything to someone, not something that means nothing to everyone.
• —Shark Tank is worth it. Eight years later, the episode still reairs and still opens doors.
• —Work hard and be nice to people. You can't have one without the other and neither is optional.

Jimmy started Super Coffee at 22 with two brothers, no money, and a lot of weekends pouring samples in grocery stores. He learned every lesson the hard way. The fact that he's sharing them this openly, at this level of detail, is exactly the kind of conversation that makes this community worth being part of.

This recap is from our FOC monthly community call. Jimmy DeCiccio is the co-founder of Super Coffee and Head of Revenue Growth at Yerba Madre. You can find Yerba Madre at yerbamadre.com.