AG1 grew from $10M to $600M in revenue over seven years, entirely customer funded with zero VC money until 2021. Jon Corne was Global CMO for most of that journey, building the podcast advertising and creator economy strategy that the entire DTC industry has spent the last five years trying to reverse engineer.
In this episode Ryan sits down with Jon, now 12 months out of the business, to unpack the full playbook for the first time. From landing Joe Rogan before anyone knew what podcast advertising was worth, to signing Huberman before his first episode aired, to cutting Amazon when it was 25% of the business, this is the most detailed breakdown of AG1's growth strategy ever recorded.
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00:00 Introduction
02:08 How Jon joined AG1 with no marketing experience
03:12 What AG1 looked like in 2017: 10 people, one product, $11M run rate
06:02 Why podcasts beat every other channel for supplements
06:08 The single product strategy and why it created a brand moat
21:04 The almond croissant analogy: focus as competitive advantage
24:09 Building the creator economy playbook before the term existed
24:19 \"We will be the number one audio brand in the world\"
27:02 The runners thesis: using creators as live market research
33:49 The Google Sheet that managed 8 figures and delivered 9
36:34 Why AG1 cut Amazon when it was 25% of the business
37:47 Why Meta was only 15% of AG1's ad spend
41:27 Day trading is Meta. Value investing is creators.
43:38 How AG1 structured creator deals and why they paid fairly
49:25 The COVID moment that halved their customer acquisition cost
53:00 The Joe Rogan story: almost cancelled after episode three
54:06 The Elon Musk episode and what it taught Jon about context
58:03 Why Jon paid above market rate for Joe Rogan impressions
1:00:48 Signing Huberman before his first episode aired
1:13:09 How AG1 thought about retention and why it starts with acquisition
1:17:44 The data infrastructure problem that held them back
1:22:56 Gummies, competitors and the future of the category
1:28:22 What Jon would tell his younger self
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