Unfinished Business

👋 We're Alex and Lee, serial entrepreneurs and multi-exit founders. Our journey has made us magnets for the challenges ambitious women face in career, family, and personal fulfillment.We're launching a platform for honest discussions about conscious entrepreneurship, career growth, and holistic success. We'll explore topics like mastering self-promotion authentically, transforming imposter syndrome into career catalysts, balancing work, family, and well-being, innovative strategies for entrepreneurial success, and much more.

Unfinished Business is a business podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 44 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Unknown Host hosts Unfinished Business, a business show with 44 episodes published.

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  Unfinished Business

  How to Go Viral Repeatedly with $0 Marketing | Hot Girl Pickles’ Co-Founders

  Sep 29, 202647 min

  Leah Marcus and Yasaman Bakhtiar posted about a pickle company every day for months before they had a single jar to sell. The first videos were trends, and the trends flopped in the way that matters: views came in, followers didn't. So they changed the format to two women documenting the build, and people started tuning in like it was a TV show. That series became Good Girl Snacks, the brand behind Hot Girl Pickles. Erewhon, Whole Foods nationwide, Forbes 30 Under 30, a $3M seed, and zero dollars of paid media until a few weeks ago. Alex and Lee go past the founding story and into the machine. What posting every day actually buys you, how a comment section and a packaging breakdown built the community, why Whole Foods made them redesign the jar, how three weeks of retail data closed a funding round in a week, and how two best friends split a company between them without a real fight. In this episode: - Why trends get views and never get you followers - The hook that turned a pickle company into a daily show people watched - What $0 customer acquisition really costs, and when it stops working - The three different jobs your feed, reels, and stories should each be doing - Why Instagram outperformed TikTok for a brand built on raw video - How organic cucumbers and a single growing season forced a fundraise - Why they keep every hate comment instead of deleting it This episode is brought to you by: Structured Agency: Where strategic guidance meets strong execution. Structured is a growth agency for DTC e-commerce brands, bringing paid media, lifecycle marketing, creative strategy, and CRO together into one integrated system built for profitable growth. Learn more and request a free audit at structured.agency/unfinishedbusiness Horatio: Horatio builds dedicated, AI-enabled customer support and back-office teams for fast-growing e-commerce, fintech, and healthtech brands. Every team is trained on your brand's voice and workflows, so you can scale support without sacrificing quality. Unfinished Business listeners get $2,000 in launch credits at hirehoratio.com/unfinishedbusiness Subscribe for new episodes every week. Follow Good Girl Snacks on all platforms: @goodgirlsnacks, goodgirlsnacks.com Chapter Timestamps 00:00 Cold open 02:30 Posting before there was a product 04:17 Splitting a company between best friends 08:22 The first hire and the outside help 13:15 The marketing stack, and Instagram vs TikTok 16:11 $0 CAC and moving product off real shelves 17:29 Designing a jar for the shelf 22:54 Why posting every day sells product 25:10 The hook that broke them out 30:02 The Forbes comments 33:08 Turning cucumber disasters into content 35:06 Marketing to Gen Z 36:30 Buy into a world, not a product 37:35 Why they raised, and closing a round in a week 42:04 The weekly social plan 47:02 The scariest part is starting

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  Unfinished Business

  The Minimum Viable Company: How We Run a $50M Brand With Just 7 People

  Jul 28, 202625 min

  For most of their careers, Alex and Lee believed a bigger team meant a stronger company. Now they believe the opposite, and they've got the receipts: $50M in revenue last year with seven full-time employees and payroll running at just 4%. In this solo episode, they make the case that in the AI era, headcount has flipped from a status symbol into a warning sign. They break down what they call the "minimum viable company," where maximum revenue per employee beats a swollen org chart every time. The model runs on three layers: lean in-house leadership, a network of agencies for specialized work, and an AI layer where every team member has their own assistant handling the project management that used to go to junior hires and interns. The engine underneath it all is a company "brain" built in Notion that their agents plug into. In this episode: - Why Alex and Lee now read "I have 30 employees" as a sign a company is doing it wrong - The exact numbers behind their claim: $50M, seven people, 4% payroll - How the AI layer replaced the junior hires and interns they used to rely on - Why they built their company "brain" in Notion, and how their AI agents plug into it - The hiring rule they live by: wait until you literally can't, then demand a clear ROI - Why speed, not headcount, is the real driver of winning (and losing) - The honest downsides of a tiny team, from taking out the trash to dropped balls Subscribe to Unfinished Business for candid conversations with founders who've actually done it. Watch on YouTube, listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

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  Unfinished Business

  How This CPG Founder Went From a Kitchen Experiment to 7,000 Stores

  Jul 14, 202631 min

  Katie Lefkowitz was a lifelong Snickers fanatic when a colon cancer scare and a doctor's orders to cut sugar should have ended that relationship. Instead, she went home and started experimenting with date-based caramel in her own kitchen. Katie is the founder of Harken, the better-for-you candy brand now in nearly 7,000 stores including Walmart, Costco, Sprouts, and Kroger, with Whole Foods launching this fall. Before Harken, she was COO at CAULIPOWER, the original cauliflower-crust pizza brand, and that food-world network is how a printed-out prototype with stickers on it turned into Harken's first national retail deal. In this episode of Unfinished Business, she walks through how that deal happened (including a calendar invite with no explanation attached), why she skipped the usual direct-to-consumer playbook entirely, and what she's learned running a five-person team through a Costco launch. Our biggest takeaways: - How a colon cancer scare turned into a national candy brand - The unmarked calendar invite that got Harken into Walmart - Why she walked into her first retail pitch with fake, printed-out packaging - The case for skipping DTC and going straight to retail - Running investor relationships through a monthly two-hour office hours block - Why Harken is overhauling its packaging in Q3, and what drove the change - The fiber stat she says is moving more product than any ad Subscribe to Unfinished Business for more unfiltered founder stories. New episodes weekly on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

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  Unfinished Business

  How TUSHY Turned a Taboo Category Into One of DTC's Strongest Brands with Justin Allen

  Jun 16, 202634 min

  Justin Allen co-founded TUSHY a decade ago to solve a problem most Americans didn't know they had. No roadmap, no comparable brand, no playbook… just a bet that if you made toileting joyful enough, people would come around. They did. Now, ten years in, Justin is asking harder questions: What does brand even mean when the media landscape has completely fractured? How do you build creative at scale without losing what makes you you? And when do you trust the data, and when do you just flip the table and build? In this episode: - How TUSHY created a category from scratch and what the "toothpaste out of the tube moment" actually means for retention - Why Justin went "kicking and screaming" into founder content and what made him change his mind - The performance creative orchestra: what it is, why volume isn't enough, and what strategic diversity in creative actually looks like - What brand meant in 2015 vs. what it means today and why Justin has stopped pretending he knows - Learning velocity vs. just "moving fast" - When failure is an option, and when (with plumbing under pressure 24/7) it absolutely isn't - His take on retail, TikTok Shop, and how to innovate for a channel instead of force-feeding itSubscribe to Unfinished Business on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. New episodes every week.

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  Unfinished Business

  Going From $50M to $100M: How We Use Partnerships As Our Biggest Growth Levers at Hulken

  Jun 2, 202619 min

  Two things have been true at Hulken since year one: no dropshipping, and only say yes to collabs that actually earn it. On the eve of launching their most complex product development yet (a full pattern collab with Posh Peanut), Alex and Lee sit down to work out, on camera, what they actually think now. This is a solo episode. No guest filter, no rehearsed takes. At $50M, the playbook isn't finished. The most honest thing you can say is that we’re still breaking rules we set when we were smaller. If you're building a product brand somewhere between "we're figuring this out" and "we've figured this out," this is the real version of that conversation. What's in this episode: - The reason Alex and Lee said no to dropshipping for years (and the exact conditions that finally changed their minds) - Alex's 3 non-negotiables for every brand collab - Why Lee won't say yes to any retailer that won't buy inventory upfront - How the Beautyblender collab landed Hulken backstage at the Grammys and the Oscars (the bag, not them) - The "position of power" test that tells you when your brand is actually ready to dropship Subscribe to Unfinished Business on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

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