Scaling the next generation of food and beverage brands at The Missing Ingredient
Sacramento, CA
Joined February 2008
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CJ Bruce retweeted
Splendor Water walked into retail conversations as a brand-new player with no shelf history. What they did have: real e-comm sales data. That data closed the gap between "unproven" and "worth the risk."
CJ Bruce retweeted
A rep from a platform suggests you shift spend. Sounds helpful. But CJ Bruce puts it plainly: before you act on any recommendation from Google, Meta, or a retail media network, ask who benefits more from that change. The answer shapes everything.
CJ Bruce retweeted
Is your content speaking to your ideal consumer, or is it just content for the sake of content? Jake Ahles on why that question alone should audit your entire feed.
CJ Bruce retweeted
One-off creator posts aren't a strategy. Laurie Buckle puts it plainly: a single sponsored post is a first date. You can't build trust, or a category, on a first date.
CJ Bruce retweeted
Founders name their brand to describe what it does. Makes sense early. But Fred Hart points out that literal names quietly box you in, blocking the innovation and expansion you hadn't imagined yet.
CJ Bruce retweeted
WavenDean Fernandes on what he's seen work in CPG: nail the taste, and the product starts doing the heavy lifting. Virality becomes less of a campaign and more of a consequence. Then you fan the flames.
CJ Bruce retweeted
One pattern I find useful for working with LLMs is a nice long ramble session. Sometimes the LLM needs more bits to understand what you're trying to achieve, but you're too lazy to type them. In these cases I like to lean back, switch to /voice and just ramble for like 10 minutes, total mess, anything goes, full stream of consciousness. Sometimes I declare it up top, something like "switching to speech recognition sorry for any typos...". Sometimes I turn it into a small interview of a few turns. But I find that the LLMs are somehow very good at reconstructing long incoherent rambles and often their echo of your own tangle of thoughts comes out quite a bit cleaner than what you started with. The result is that you improve the mind meld and have to correct things less from that point on.
CJ Bruce retweeted
Dorot Gardens ran a witty, self-aware campaign and watched sell-through jump 700%. Then Jake Ahles got to submit it to Cannes Lions. Turns out funny and effective can occupy the same brief.
CJ Bruce retweeted
Sumo Citrus came in as a specialty citrus brand most shoppers had never heard of. Five years and a fully integrated marketing push later, sales had multiplied by five. That kind of growth doesn't happen from a single campaign.
I just spent about 20 minutes with Gemini 3 to build a Google Apps Script to bring some reports from a third party tool into a Google Sheet for deeper analysis/visualization.
This will save us ~$1,200/year we’re currently paying for another tool to do this.
I turn 40 tomorrow and I started writing a list of 40 things I’ve learned, want to reference or just wanted to jot down in some way. Here they are:
1. You'll never regret making an effort to see the people you love.
2. Most of success is persistence through uncertainty.
33. Write down what you want in life. Something about writing it down makes it more likely to come true.
34. There are many, many ways to make money.
35. There are many, many ways to have a positive impact on people and the planet.
36. Being kind is a competitive advantage.