The 12,000 Leaky Bottles That Built a $600M Brand
Kat Cole’s Customer Obsession Playbook
“This is the way.” - Din Djarin, The Mandalorian (2019)
Footprints vanishing in wet sand. A thick marine layer hanging over the Santa Barbara coastline. My day at the Rosewood began with a group walk, one of those well-intentioned networking moments you half-expect to be forgettable. But as I walked alongside Eric Ryan1, now a partner at Greycroft, I noticed how fully engaged he was with a young founder beside him. They were deep in discussion about a children’s medical product and the mechanics of gamifying its experience. Product-market fit, consumer insight, usability. It was a founder conversation, not a finance one.
A few hours later, that same theme returned in sharper focus.
Kat Cole2, CEO of AG1, took the stage at the Greycroft Consumer Event. Her reputation precedes her, former Hooters waitress turned president of Cinnabon, then CEO of a $600M health supplement brand. But what stood out wasn’t her résumé. It was her clarity, her operating philosophy, and her insistence on one thing most founders underestimate: proximity to the customer as a source of truth and power.
As an early investor in Grüns, a rising challenger in the supplement space, I came into the room with curiosity and a competitive lens. What could be learned from a company that had built a category-defining business on a single product and a single channel?
“The people closest to the action know what the right thing to do is long before the leader makes a call.”
Cole said this early in her talk, and it hung in the air like a challenge.
Most founders nod at the idea of customer-centricity. Few build systems around it. Fewer still operationalize it at scale. Cole has, and it’s why AG1, still essentially a one-product company, has scaled to over $600M in revenue with 90% of its sales on subscription.
The details matter. When she joined AG1 (then Athletic Greens), Cole began by reviewing every consumer friction point, no matter how small. One example: the shaker bottles. Customers were complaining they leaked. Internally, the response was procedural, just send them replacements. But Cole dug deeper. How many replacements were being sent? The answer: 12,000 a week. That’s not noise, that’s a signal. A quality issue at that scale reflects a failure of product, UX, and responsiveness. And she fixed it.
It’s the same story with the multivitamin confusion. Despite AG1 functioning as a complete daily supplement, 30% of customers were still taking a separate multivitamin. A founder might interpret that as a marketing gap. Cole saw an existential threat: if customers don’t understand the value, there is no value. Again, she fixed it.
This is the real playbook: identify friction, eliminate it. And do it again, and again, and again.
Cole doesn’t outsource this work. She speaks with 30 to 50 customers a month herself. She reads the reviews. She tracks complaints. She listens harder than most founders pitch.
“I had a clipboard in every store called the MMDD Log, ‘made my day difficult,’” she said, recalling her time opening restaurants during her early years at Hooters. “Everyone wrote down the worst part of their shift. We fixed the most common item by the next day.”
That’s not customer service. That’s operational discipline. It’s also a leadership choice.
Because inverting the org chart, treating front-line employees and customers as primary sources of truth, requires humility. It runs counter to the myth of the visionary founder who leads from instinct. But the founders who actually scale enduring consumer businesses? They’re not just visionaries. They’re pattern matchers. And the best patterns come from the field, not the boardroom.
This insight matters more now than ever.
We’ve entered a phase in consumer where distribution is democratized, capital is constrained, and products are often indistinguishable. Technology, branding, and performance marketing no longer offer durable moats. The companies that win will be the ones that understand their customers more deeply, and respond to them more precisely, than anyone else.
That requires a shift in posture. Less prediction. More observation. Less storytelling. More listening. And above all, more urgency around fixing what customers hate.
After the session, one thing was clear: the brands that stick aren’t just well-designed, they’re built by founders who listen harder and fix faster than everyone else.
Kat Cole reminded me of a simple truth: startups exist to solve real problems for real people. If you’re not close to those people, you’re operating in the dark. You might get lucky. You won’t build something lasting.
At Sugar, we talk a lot about momentum, how to help founders build it, sustain it, scale it. We bring capital, distribution, insight. But none of that works if the founder isn’t close to their customer. Not just metaphorically close. Actually close. In the DMs. In the reviews. In the support queue.
The directive for our portfolio is now clearer than ever: talk to 20 customers this month. Don’t send surveys. Don’t run focus groups. Just talk. Ask what’s broken. Ask what they misunderstood. Ask what they almost didn’t buy. And then fix it. Fast.
In consumer, your brand is not what you say, it’s what the customer feels. And they only feel one thing: whether you understood them enough to make their life easier, better, or less frustrating.
Everything else is noise.
Yes, that’s me casually name-dropping Eric Ryan. I wrote a whole essay about this exact behavior. Guilty as charged: Let Me Pick Up Those Names You Dropped.
And yes, now I’m name-dropping Kat Cole too. At this point it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. If you’re keeping score, this essay explains everything.
Are people with an operations background, like Kat Cole, more likely to embody a customer-centric and continuous improvement mentality? Are they more successful at implementing this type of "kaizen" culture in their organizations?