Shopify Happy Hour

Hear from Shopify founders, operators and experts on growth marketing strategies, lessons learned from the trenches, and other nuggets of wisdom shared over a different drink each episode.

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Shopify Happy Hour

Launching a Non-Alcoholic Beer Brand on Shopify: Lessons from Go Brewing

August 16, 2025 • Season 1 • Episode 20

Launching a consumer brand is never easy — but launching a brewery without alcohol? That’s a whole new challenge.

In this episode of Shopify Happy Hour, I sit down with Joe Chura, founder of Go Brewing, the non-alcoholic beer brand redefining how we think about social drinking. Joe shares his journey from idea to launch, the countless recipe iterations, and the marketing moves that helped Go Brewing quickly find its place in a competitive industry.

You’ll hear how Joe:

Turned a personal vision into one of the fastest-growing non-alcoholic breweries in the U.S.
Perfected the brewing process through relentless testing and innovation.
Built an online-first business with Shopify at the core of its growth strategy.
Leveraged subscriptions to create community and recurring revenue.
Collected and used customer feedback to guide new products and campaigns.
Balanced storytelling, social media, and PR to build credibility and excitement.

We also dig into the bigger picture:

Why health-conscious consumers are fueling the non-alcoholic movement.
How “hybrid drinking” is changing beverage culture.
Where Joe sees opportunities in THC-infused beverages and beyond.

If you’ve ever wondered what it takes to build a modern CPG brand — from brewing to branding to building community — this conversation will inspire and challenge you.

🍺 Whether you’re sober curious, an entrepreneur, or just fascinated by where consumer trends are heading, Joe’s story is proof that you don’t need alcohol to build a buzz-worthy brand.

Brands mentioned:

Chapters

00:00
Introduction to Go Brewing and Non-Alcoholic Beers

07:33
The Journey to Starting Go Brewing

15:33
Brewing Process and Challenges

19:59
Launching and Marketing Go Brewing

28:24
Subscription Model and Customer Engagement

37:52
Future Trends in Non-Alcoholic Beverages

Dan Cassidy (00:01)
Welcome to the Shopify happy hour. On this show, you'll hear from Shopify founders, operators, and experts on growth marketing strategies, lessons learned from the trenches, and other nuggets of e-commerce wisdom shared over a different drink each episode. Today's guest is Joe Chura, founder of Go Brewing, a non-alcoholic beer brand on a mission to help people unwind without the hangover. Joe, welcome.

Joe (00:23)
Thanks for having me.

Dan Cassidy (00:25)
Thanks for being here. I'm excited to get this stuff going. So first thing we need to do is have a proper cheers, but let's talk about what we're drinking. So I've got the Prophets Hazy IPA by Go Brewing. What are you doing? You said you've got the Kolsch is that right?

Joe (00:38)
I have our Bad Tiger Cole.

So the interesting thing is you have one of our first beers and I have one of our newest beers. Actually our newest beer right here. So, pretty cool.

Dan Cassidy (00:46)
Nice good stuff. are you

have you typically been a Kolsch guy?

Joe (00:50)
No, it's our first time making a Kolsch. I have not been a Kolsch guy. We have a beer club and we always look for creative styles that are either we haven't made yet or something in the category that seems interesting to us. And I also look at the seasons and I definitely didn't want to make a stout in the middle of the summer in this warm spell that we're in. So a Kolsch seemed appropriate and I wanted to make it fun, so called a bad tiger.

and that's what I'm drinking. And you have our Prophets which is the first beer we made in our garage. Actually, not the first, but the second beer we made in my garage in 2022 before we opened.

Dan Cassidy (01:30)
Awesome, fantastic, well, cheers to you, thanks for being here. Cheers, cheers, cheers and beers.

Joe (01:32)
Yeah, cheers.

Dan Cassidy (01:35)
So I gotta say that, you I often try to reserve tasting the product for the podcast but I've been cracking several of these over the past few weeks and I love it. All the beers that I've tried have been super solid. So I've tried multiple IPAs because you've got the profits hazy IPA. There's another IPA and then there's a double IPA and then also the Pilsner. Yeah, all those have been really nice. And what I love about

Joe (01:54)
We have lot of IPAs.

Dan Cassidy (02:02)
any beers that taste really good is that, you know, if I'm going out with friends on the weekend and I'm, you know, visiting different breweries, it's really nice to be able to swap in like a non-alcoholic every now and again, because it just makes the next day so much better. Or during the week, if I come home and I want to taste a beer but don't want to feel bad the next day, cracking one of these guys is just so lovely. So, I...

Joe (02:20)
Mm-hmm.

They have a word

for that now. It's called zebra striping. I learned that this year. I didn't know there was such a thing, but it's when you mix an A with alcohol. And actually, we see it real time in our tap room because we've always had alcohol. We served alcohol, but we never made really alcoholic beer. But certainly, we have it there. And we often see that. So it really goes in line with 80 % of our audience that

wants to still drink and they just want to cut back.

Dan Cassidy (02:54)
That's great. Yeah, there's definitely been a trend towards low ABV beers. I typically just don't love them. I'd rather drink a stronger beer and then have my next beer be an NA, like just 0 % or 0.5%. So I can enjoy the taste, flavor profile of a stronger beer, but then mix it with something that's super light, still tastes really good, and then still feel good the next day. So that's really nice. One thing I do want to talk about is the can art. So I'm a can art and packaging nerd.

And you've got some really cool stuff on here. So outside of describing what hops you're using in the beer, which I definitely appreciate, I'll read this out of the can. So we've got some motivation here for everybody listening. Get up and try again. The only way out is through this hazy IPA is a nod to the brightness that follows a storm. It's not about waiting for the clouds to clear. It's about pushing through despite not having clarity.

And that's when the finish line will emerge. I love it.

Joe (03:51)
And that

was written without chat GPT. You believe that?

Dan Cassidy (03:55)
I didn't even know that was a possibility these days to have some content that wasn't church equity.

Joe (03:59)
Yeah, well

that was created and really hasn't changed much in the very end of 2022. And all our beers have stories, all our beers in retail. We certainly have beers that don't have stories and don't have the depth, but all the beers that we had early on in that, and you'll see in the stores, you'll see a QR code and you could read the story about.

who inspired that beer, why it was created. And that one happened to be Rich Roll, who's a very well-known podcaster, author, and an ultra-endurance person. And he was actually out here in the Naperville area when I had the idea of Go Brewing back in the day. So when we created our first beer, I wanted to kind of create an ode to him and his story about how he really...

did some incredible things when he was overweight, out of shape, down in the dumps, and in his 40s transformed his life. And coincidentally, that's our target audience. So anything I can write to relate and inspire someone, I definitely try to do that.

Dan Cassidy (05:07)
Fantastic. Well, I love the positive vibes that you're bringing, not just through the NAB-er, but also the messaging on the can. So, okay, so let's flash back to those days, early stage of Go Brewing and even before. Where did the idea come from and why did you start it?

Joe (05:22)
My background's in software and tech, so I built a marketing company and then a software company and grew them to 450 employees, ended up selling them. I hate using employees as the barometer for success, because it certainly is not, but it just is the scale of which, in 2013 we had three, and then by 2018 when I sold them I had 450, and we were growing really quickly.

And when I sold both businesses, thought, you know, I was at the top of the mountain and I felt great, but I looked at myself and I was very unhealthy. I didn't take care of myself. I put my health last. I was drinking way too much. I just kind of had more time and money than I ever had in my life. Looked around and my father was really suffering from alcoholism, ended up dying in 2006 from alcoholism.

alcohol and drugs and my brother was also suffering at that time. So in kind of looking around me and knowing my family history, I knew I didn't have really good genes like many of us have people in our family that have alcohol issues. I certainly wasn't a unique person, but knew I needed to do something and kind of let it ride for a couple of years. And then in 2020, the height of COVID where we had the most excuses to

just get crazy, my wife and I were like, let's do this challenge called 75 hard, just 75 days of a bunch of rules, but the hardest one for me was to abstain from alcohol, and I had never done that in my life for more than a few days. And after 15 days, 20 days of abstaining from alcohol, it was extremely tough. I don't want to make this sound like it was easy, but I was, for the first time in my life,

I was outside from this cloud that had been hovering over me that I didn't know was there. And I started to feel really good. And I was just like, this is incredible. I almost felt like I had superpowers. I say that tongue in cheek a bit, but I really did. But I still had these crazy cravings for alcohol that had developed over decades. And the first time I had a non-alcoholic beer, was like, wow, this really helped me kind of get through that evening.

And the next day I woke up and I was like, I'm not hungover. Like this feels pretty good. And I did that again a few times. And I was like, wow, there's something here. So that kind of how the idea started of like, there's something here and I don't think I'm alone. And then a year or so later, I created this event called Go. And that's the one I was just talking about where Rich Roll came out for it and we did a 5K and we did all this stuff. And at the end of the event, I didn't want to hand out alcohol.

So I handed out non-alcoholic beer. then that was another kind of proof point of like, okay, well, something is leading me toward this idea. Then the third thing that happened was, um, I sub-leased our marketing and software office. had 30,000 square feet post COVID. Most of my team worked remote anyway. Definitely didn't need that space. Well, long story short, a cidery ended up, uh, taking over that space. They sub-leased it from us.

At the time I sold my companies to cars.com. I wasn't really even involved in the sublease part of it. just found out about it later and they vacated their spot. We're on that today. And I asked them what they were doing with it and they said nothing. So it was my idea of like, Oh, I'm going to follow this sign again of the universe telling me that there's something else here. this here's the cidery where I could just take over and create a non-alcoholic brewery. So I had a conversation with, with those guys there and probably, uh,

The thing that really kind of put it over the edge for me of like, okay, I'm going to definitely start this business or go for it, was the fact that you could sell online, which is coincidentally what we're going to talk about today. And the ability to sell a beverage like a beer online was historically not possible. Yet it was starting to happen because with any beer, because it's under 0.5%, it's not regulated in most states. So I was like, I don't know anything about beer except how to drink it. I don't know anything about...

retail, like how to get into stores. But I do know how to sell online and I'm pretty innovative when it comes to that. I, and I love the whole, I was an SEO nerd. I just love that whole world. And as soon as I started dabbling around, man, I was just like, I'm in love with this idea. And, and I still had the problem of like not knowing how to make beer at all. I never brewed in my life. And at the time, this sounds so

dumb to say, but I didn't even know like co-packing was an option. Like I didn't even, it wasn't even on my consideration set of let's evaluate this. I was more of like what I, what I call our brand go. I was more of like that guy like, Oh, all right, let's just get to the first step. First step. Obviously we got to create our own product and we got to do it in our garage. Well, I got to hire someone that knows how to do it better than me. So I hired a brewer just put out a job before I even had, had the company. Cause I'm like, I'm not going to create a company without.

someone that knows how to make beer, otherwise they'd be sitting around reading books for five years. And I ended up finding a guy, brought him to the garage, and my wife's Tesla went out, and the electrical panel for this makeshift brewery we created went in, and we spent the better part of 2022, the early part of that, creating recipe after recipe, making it a beer. And that's kind of how the whole thing started.

Dan Cassidy (10:56)
Amazing story. So a couple things with that. Brewing beer is not necessarily a quick endeavor. So what did the testing process look like? Because it's different if you're gonna make a new chocolate bar, right? And you wanna taste a whole bunch of different flavor profiles, you can get that stuff going pretty quickly. And every day you can kick off a new batch.

Beer takes a while. what did that process look like from getting your first batch brewing and then tasting and then saying, okay, cool, we wanna make these changes. Like how long did that process take and what did that tasting process look like?

Joe (11:16)
Mm-hmm.

better part of the year it took but that we started with one style and that was the Pilsner and I didn't know any of this at the time but that's one of the hardest beers to make because you have to have clarity in it and you you kind of teeter on this like sulfuric taste you kind of want it but don't if you ever had Heineken you know what that tastes like but then it needs to have these characteristics that are really really difficult to achieve

as opposed to a Hazy IPA, which is one of the most popular beers and one of the most easy to make because you could be super cloudy and you don't have to worry about that. So our brewer, to his credit, he was like, let's start with this because everything after this will be easier. Not easy, but easier. And the goal is when we launch, we want to have five SKUs on the website because I knew just selling one, it wasn't going to do much with my average order value and shipping and all that. So like we need to launch with five, but let's start with the Pilsner. So really it became

iterating one recipe after another on that alone. And then a few months into it, he's like, you know, we really need a lab person when we start like a lab technician. And here's me like marketing mine thinking like, no, we need a podcast studio and we need like this and that. Right. And, and we ended up not ever getting any of those and really just focusing on creating a lab and getting a lab technician early on. And we had a lab tech.

come in from a bigger brewery, actually a bigger national brewery came in. He's reporting in my garage, so I'm building this team. And then we brought in a consultant that wrote the book on beer quality and management and knew how to do sensory testing. So sensory testing is when you taste a beer at different stages. Typically, it's at the end of making it. And you kind of blind taste test it and rate it. And there's all kinds of sensory tests you could do. So she.

basically gave us all these different smells and tastes and walked us through how to do that and did it with us and we had this great team and we were building everything off like quantitative data and all the specs and just kept going and going and going and then finally we were to the point where like this is pretty good now. as, well unlike alcohol, any beer, the fermentation process is a lot quicker because you're

you're not making a lot of alcohol. We never de-alked either though. And you can imagine why de-alking would, or that's taking out the alcohol of the beer. That requires a lot of equipment, utilities. Like, I mean, you have this by-product of alcohol, like, and you obviously couldn't do that in my garage. So we never developed that methodology of like de-alking. It was always like, how do we create a good beer?

adjusting the time, temperature and ratio of that beer to make it taste like the real thing. And, and that was like so lucky, like in hindsight, all these things were super lucky. Just being naive sometimes is the best thing because I didn't know anything. If I would have just like contracted it out, like who knows where I'd be today. So we're really, as we started getting closer and closer and getting more confidence, decided to build the brewery. And, and that's when I really leaned on the brewer and his expertise and all these tanks and everything.

You know, I was kind of the money guy in the business and marketing and did all that. And he focused on the product and I focused on the branding, the stories, like all that stuff, finding the white space in the non-alcoholic space to be able to tap into. So that's kind of how it was. then we got to a place where we felt comfortable to go to charity event and just to give away the beer to see, people's reactions and see how people would.

would just approach it. this was pretty early. Now it wouldn't be as uncommon, but this was really at the tail end of 20, well, probably early 2023 at this point, we were doing that and getting feedback and just going back and iterating. And that's kind of how we started to develop the product and make it better with every batch.

Dan Cassidy (15:33)
So you mentioned de-elking, so I'm certainly no expert in brewing beer, especially NA beer. But, so how's it different? So from what I've heard...

some brands that are making any beer will either burn off the alcohol at the end or they filter it out, right? If you can use like some filtration process to get rid of that, but it sounds like what you've done never even got to that step. So how, how do you make beer without the alcohol content getting high enough? Are you just pulling it off way before all the yeast eats the sugar and farts out all the alcohols? Is that what's happening?

Joe (16:06)
Yeah, it starts early on with the formulations. You create a recipe where you don't create a lot of opportunity for the alcohol to be formed. So you create a lower malt bill, which then creates lower sugars for the yeast than when you put the yeast into yeast to create the alcohol. So that's essentially how it is. But you've got to do a lot of things that are creative to make up for that. Otherwise, you'd have very watered down products. You have to use specialized grain. And we don't really even use specialized yeast strains. There's that.

produce lower alcohol. We might have tested that once, but that is not the core of our product. If you look at our ingredients, they're truly what's in the same alcoholic counterpart of that beer. We just really developed a formula over time to make it taste good without it. And the other side to that, the majority of bigger companies like Heineken, Light, and all those, they'll de-alkalize it. So basically make a full strength beer.

to SPAC and then they'll take the alcohol out. But now you have this byproduct of alcohol. You got to do something with it. If you're a big company, you can make a seltzer, you can do whatever. And it could be a really smart way to create an alternate product for us. We don't want to deal with that. You you'd have a bad yield, my opinion, for the product that we wanted to sell. then the ability to sell it online then goes away completely because now you have this alcohol thing you got to get rid of.

So that's why we landed on what we did and it was the best thing ever because now my gross margins can be and have the potential to be a lot stronger than someone who's taking out the alcohol from their product.

Dan Cassidy (17:42)
So that's how you can get the low calorie count is because there's just less bolt in the product.

Joe (17:48)
Calories are really a product of alcohol. Something I learned is, you seem fit and I'm sure your audience understands macros and so you got carbs, you have fat and you have protein. Well, there's something that people don't talk about. There's alcohol too. Alcohol is not a macronutrient because it's not a nutrient, but it is a thing. It lives on its own. And every gram of alcohol represents seven calories.

So the funny thing is when people are like, how many carbs in your beer and they're comparing it to like Michelob Ultra, I'm like, that's kind of the wrong question. It's like how many calories from alcohol and Michelob Ultra that are way worse for you than carbohydrates from the malt and beer because they're actually a good like recovery part of it. It's the alcohol that is the completely wasted calories that are a direct correlation to the ABV in a beer. So like if you have a beer that's 8 % or 9%,

you're gonna have a lot more calorie content. It's highly caloric versus something that's .5 % or something that's 2%. So that was like a really good byproduct of creating this product is that the calorie count is about a third of what a normal beer would be.

Dan Cassidy (18:59)
Yeah, it's a very nice side benefit of if I'm reaching for an NA beer and want to not feel bad the next day but also not feel bad because I drank empty calories or ate too much like it's a super nice benefit. So fantastic. Thanks for walking through that process where you

Joe (19:02)
Mm-hmm.

Dan Cassidy (19:17)
Move into the old cidery, take it over, start brewing your own NA beer. You've got your brewer, you've got your lab tech, you are going through this testing process. You decide to, basically because you weren't sure exactly the right way to go, which sounds like the perfect way to go about it, is you brew beer that was not alcoholic from the start so you didn't have to worry about adding processes and dealing with some other byproduct down the road.

So you've got your set of beers. People are liking the taste. You're happy with everything. You've got the facility where you can start brewing. How do you then start selling product? What was your, what did you then do to go to market? What did that plan look like?

Joe (19:59)
It was 100 % online. So the day we opened is the day we launched our Shopify store, all your subscription, then the Shopify store, and our Taproom. So those were like the three channels that we launched with literally the same day. that was, I say 23, but it was really October 15th of 22. Because I would like.

It was like testing for a couple months, you know, to figure things out. So we created our own fulfillment center here, got in a few orders. We would pack them ourselves and would start shipping them out. And I did a lot of things before opening that Shopify store to try to get leads or emails to collect to be able to talk to someone by the time we opened. And I did that through Facebook lead ads.

at the time just so I could tap into an audience and start nurturing an audience, get them excited about this thing that was opening. We also did some PR. I think it was important to do PR early for two reasons. One, to get our name out there locally. And then secondly, to use for social proof through online advertising and our website as seen on immediately.

So it was cool because we were one of one. It's funny because when we started, was like, we're the only one in Illinois that's a non-alcoholic brewery. And then I was like, we're the only one in the region that's a non-alcoholic brewery. then when I really looked at into it a year later, I was like, is there anyone in the nation that is actually has a non-alcoholic brewery? I know like athletic brewers their own beer, but most people at Copac and they certainly don't have their own brewery that they have a tap room.

We were on like this island, so it was kind of cool from a PR standpoint, because we were able to like tap into that and be blessed with being on the news all the time and talking about things and people looking at us like we were crazy. And that was kind of how we started.

Dan Cassidy (21:56)
So you're collecting emails from Facebook, lead gen ads, you've got the local brewery, you're doing some PR, you start selling, what do you then do? What's your next step to start growing? Let's talk online sales specifically. How did you then ramp up from that early period where you were generating emails and getting those early customers? What did you then do to start scaling up?

Joe (22:19)
I have

a great story regarding this because it was like very fortuitous timing.

But I will say before I even started that, I'm a big believer in you have to have your foundation solid first. And what I mean by that is all your email flows need to be dialed in. So I spent a long time doing that before we even launched. That's your welcome flows, your post purchase flows, your abandoned cart, all of that stuff should be ready. If it's not, I would highly recommend not spending money on advertising. Why? Because you're going to send people to your website. They're going to opt in.

for maybe an offer or a lead magnet and you're gonna have no way to contact them again. So you're just wasting money. So everything was super solid including our subscription business and that was another big thing that I'm so happy we did day one because that just grows very slowly over time but today we have thousands of members now. So I would say that like don't do anything until you have a good UX it's very clean you have your analytics set up properly the way you want it.

and you have your templates, your flows, your lead magnet, and you've tested this with multiple people that aren't gonna just say, hey Joe, it looks great. You know, you want negative, constructive feedback to get better. So that's one. So once we had that, then I started doing some lead generation ads through Facebook, continued that, found that those ads, those leads weren't very good, so pivoted to sales campaigns from there, found some

non-alcoholic Facebook groups that had just happened to start to find our product and started to nurture relationships there. Like meeting, I would just like respond personally to posts. I would talk about us. I would lean into the fact that we, you know, we're the small company. We're making our own product kind of like us against the big guys, which is still true to this day. And, and then I, uh, I knew the Superbowl was coming up and Heineken Zero

was doing their first Super Bowl ad ever. So was like, interesting. I came from automotive and spent 25 years there. And I built everything from working on the semi line to working at Ford Motor Company when the internet was just starting to take off to building a marketing company and then a software company. It was insanely competitive and these dealers would just go at each other like crazy. So any competitive advantage that you can show them,

They were all in for, and a lot of that included bidding on their, each other's names, you know, doing all this stuff that I think since like the OEM compliance, like said, all right guys, that's enough of that. Stop wasting your money going after one another. But I was like, who knows even SEO in this space that we're in. So I optimized the website and I started to create landing pages that still exist today. And they're incredibly bad in the sense that like, I look at them now and they're kind of silly because.

They had, I didn't have really anything to say I'm better than any other competitor. So I leaned into the things I did have, like, you know, we're self-funded. We made this ourselves. We are a small team. We use like classic ingredients and just all of the little things that you could possibly say. And I created a landing page like us first Heineken. You know, we have five varieties. Heineken has one. So I created this landing page like.

months before the Super Bowl ads, it got it indexed, started showing up organically, not many, no one really even Googled like Go Brewing versus Heineken. However, started creating some performance marketing ads and then in Google search started optimizing for Heineken's name. Cause as you know, before the Super Bowl happens, the ads get leaked and people talk about it and people start Googling Heineken Zero. And this is still pretty early. So that was really interesting acquisition.

point for us because it got her name on the map in terms of paid performance marketing. And then of course I had like a crazy offer that I ended up leaving for like over a year because it was so good, but I gave like so much away that I'm like, I got to cut this offer off because the ROAS would be pretty high on it. But you know, I'm giving away like 30 % for someone to try her product in the hopes that they like it and they become a subscriber. So.

That's really kind of how we started and then it started to pick up from there. We got more subscribers and then over time we just added more and more to the marketing mix. I'll pause there and because that was like the first like few months, but it was a lot of fun.

Dan Cassidy (26:54)
Super cool, love that you're latching on to kind of the national broader conversation and trying to leverage some of that, some of those talking points. So what was the offer that you said that was crushing it from a ROA standpoint, even though you were losing some money on the product, do you remember what the offer was?

Joe (27:09)
It was like 30 % off if you use like, for some reason I put the date, I put a month, like use February, use the code MetaFebruary something, Facebook February and then get that. Well that Facebook February lasted like for 12 months after that. So that's a lesson, like don't use a specific date because it may not make sense. It probably did work in the sense that someone might have thought it was an error and they're like, I'm gonna take advantage of this. But it was more of that like, that play of.

like, okay, I can't do this forever because I'm giving away the farm to get someone to be a customer. But I justified it as like, you know, our cogs were not dialed in yet. We didn't even know what beer was going to hit product market fit. So it was really good way to test and build up a customer base.

Dan Cassidy (27:54)
nice. Yeah, we've ran offers, know, Mother's Day, Black Friday stuff and they can go for eight weeks, 12 weeks, even longer. Sometimes it's like, you know what, just let them ride if they're working. Let them ride. Because I do think sometimes consumers think they get a steal where it's like, oh yeah, the brand must have forgot about this. We're going to take advantage of it. So but if it's working, it's always good to keep that stuff going. So talk to me about the subscription that you're doing because that's that's super interesting, especially for a beer brand, alcoholic or not. Talk about the subscription program.

Joe (28:04)
Mm-hmm.

Dan Cassidy (28:24)
that you have.

Joe (28:25)
wanted to think about something different versus like a subscribe and save. So I was thinking of like, how do we create a club and a community that people get perks, but they also have this ability to get unique products that the general public can't get. So really build value into this thing. Because a subscribe and save is cool, but it's not very special. Like you're like, yeah, I'm getting a good deal.

And there's that in ours, but I wanted it to be more than that. So from day one, it was like this club and you had access to these beers. They're at a slight discount, nothing crazy. And over time that changed and morphed and it turned into this year. What I did is I said, we're going to make a unique beer every month that we'll probably never make again. And we're going to make it just for this beer club. And the reason why I did that

Dan is because I was looking at our zero party data. So anyone that's listening to this, a huge opportunity you have in Shopify versus Amazon or other websites is to collect data, not just shopping data or your customer's information, but survey data. So I used an app called Faring. There's a ton of them out there. Nothing crazy special about that one. But after someone purchased, I would have a question that would pop up and I would change it after I got sometimes a couple thousand responses.

And I was also very lucky because the people that were trying our product, were really like, they really like think most were really thankful. They wanted to be a part of something. It's an emerging category. So it's just a really good time. So I'd have like a 50, 60 % response rate on these surveys. So would, I would ask questions like, you know, initially started off with like, how'd you hear about us? But I'm like, you know, if you're good at digital marketing, you can look at analytics data. It's kind of a wasted question, even though it's still important. Once you get.

300 results on something it's significant enough to know okay, I get it What I started asking is about our packaging and I started asking about you know, what drives you to choose this product and By a landslide everyone said variety, you know, they want variety. They want different flavors. They want interesting stuff so in thinking about the beer club, was like, okay, why don't we lean into that and create it a beer that

is unique every month. And I also looked at our competitors, and the reality is they can't do that, most of them, because they don't make their own product. When you co-manufacture, you have MOQs, minimum order quantities, you have a lot of things you have to plan for. Like literally, you and I could come up with an idea today, I could have the beer in 30 days from now, like live on our website, right? That's not possible with co-packing.

So I was like, okay, I'm going lean into that and exploit the fact that we make our own beer in a positive way. And then also try a bunch of styles, see what really hits to try and get product market fit with another style. And that's exactly what happened this year. So we grew it from less than a thousand to several thousand subscribers this year now that are part of this beer club. And we're committing to, you know, making a very special beer every month that we

think about and we have plans and then we also include perks like surprise and delight gifts like mugs and koozies and just things like you can't buy. So I knew like to be part of something like we had to make it special. People don't have to drink any beer. It's a nice tab, it's a luxury, it really helps people, it's a tool but they don't have to have it, you're not gonna die without it.

So it's like, I know I need to do a good job of retaining those customers, and that's how we do it.

Dan Cassidy (32:02)
love the idea of a subscription or some type of VIP club. So the town we're in, Wilmington, North Carolina, there's a lot of breweries, a lot of really good breweries, and I always say there's a big opportunity for them to create a VIP club where every month they're doing kind of like what you're talking about, where even if it's last Friday of the month, come in and get a tour of the brewing process and try this new beer that's just come off the line, that's a select kind of VIP beer, whether it's for an alcoholic brand, non-alcoholic brand,

apparel brand, food brand, I think doing anything where you can reward your best customers, motivate them to lock in for some type of subscription or VIP program where they can, you give them the opportunity to spend more money with you, stay with you for longer, and most importantly, give them a reason to talk to their friends about your brand. I think that's huge. And so what's great about the subscription program you have is it's not just,

know, buy every month and save 10%, which is nice and people like that, but having a unique product that only they can try and talk about, I think, drums up a different level of demand, which is really cool. Besides meta ads, what else are you are you seeing success with to acquire new customers?

Joe (33:23)
Meta's the biggest one. We do a little in Google, and I like to think about it as Google's intent engine. Meta's a discovery engine. So many people didn't know about us. I think we're getting more and more popular across the US, but did not know about us early on. So definitely that. We're also doing a lot of organic stuff now, like more organic content, like higher production.

Contents that we're putting out there that hopefully I don't I can reduce my reliance on paid ads to acquire customers and then we also have a big business when it comes to distribution and we use the data that we've collected from these customers and all the questions we have to then go to retailers and distributors to say here's why you should carry our product and Wilmington, North Carolina Which we just launched in North Carolina recently, but if we didn't start with this direct consumer audience

and we didn't have that data early. One, I don't think we would have found these gems we did in the sense of the products that we were able to create from that data. And secondly, have a customer base that we can now talk to when we do open a new market and say, hey, you know what? I love the fact that you bought online, but go to Whole Foods today or go to Kroger or go to Total Wine and please buy from there. It's actually a better deal.

But the online opportunities still exist because you have this beer club that just will never be in retail at that velocity. know, like retailers aren't going to take 12 different new products a year. It's very scheduled. So that's the way we approach it. And acquiring customers a lot are from word of mouth now.

But 50 % of our direct-to-consumer business is now a subscription, which to me was huge because I don't have those acquisition costs building up over time. But I was also a believer in like, I didn't want to go shallow in a bunch of things. I wanted to go really deep. So that's why Metta was the place for us. Probably do some dabbling, some TikTok shop stuff because we can sell it now. And then we're also on Amazon. So Amazon has pros and cons to it. Amazon launched probably mid-year,

in 2023 for us. And we started growing really quickly on Amazon. We became arguably the number one NA player, even beating out the top player in the space. But then Amazon just changed the rules overnight and they said, you know, your product isn't allowed anymore and you've got to get it out of our warehouse and we're going to destroy it. And we're like, what? And I knew people at Amazon, I called them and, and it was just.

impossible to get any answers and it was some policy they created. So I'm like, all right, well, I'm not going to put things in FBA anymore. You know, it would be like ridiculous to do that. So we went away from that for a while. They still allowed FBM. So FBM is fulfilled by merchant essentially like we fulfill it just like we do our website. Advantage is Amazon is a building audience. Obviously it's the biggest marketplace in the world. To me, it was just as much about

getting that product in their fridges branding, getting the awareness out there. then long story short, about six months ago, we see this ad for a competitor, this huge like Amazon takeover for an NA beer out there, a celebrity backed one. we're like, what is this? Like, how are they allowed to do this? Well, somewhere in between the policy got shifted or reversed. So, FBA got opened back up. So now we're big in FBA again.

and that's one of our channels. But the downside to FBA is you don't get customer data, you don't get information, you do build your brand, you do get subscribers, but you don't really have a relationship with these folks. So you try to create one, but you kind of don't know who they are. You're not really allowed to talk to them. It's kind of weird. if your business is FBA, there's positives to it, but there's negatives to it as well.

Dan Cassidy (37:16)
Well, it's nice that you started with Shopify where you can gather all that data firsthand and leverage that. So you've got a fair amount of a good level of control over your own destiny. And then you're leveraging, you can leverage other platforms to extend distribution, use it as a branding vehicle, like you mentioned, but you still have your core home of Shopify.

and in-person sales through the brewery as well. Where do you see the NA and alcohol industry headed? Because there's been tons of change in the last year or two with lots more options coming out. Where do you see things headed and where do you see demand going?

Joe (37:52)
I see a place where the velocity of non-alcoholic beer is flattening a little bit. And THC beverages are starting to emerge, I think, in a big way. And that category is going to 10x. I do think NA beer and NA in general has a lot of room to grow. I'm not as bullish as some of my counterparts thinking it's going to be 20%, 30 % of the market. I just don't think it's going to be there. People want to still have an

an occasion where they can have an alcoholic beverage or in this case a THC beverage, they want something that's going to give them an effect after a long week. I do see a world where there's a lot more moderation. Like you were talking about, there's a lot of people that are now being educated by folks like Andrew Huberman and these health and wellness folks that didn't exist like 10 years ago that are straight up just talking about alcohol and the truth of it.

I think the consensus is, like, you can have alcohol, but you got to chill out now. Like you can't be drinking like we used to when you were kids, especially now with the kind of products that are out there. And you know, you're looking at 8%, 10 % beers and hazy IPAs are still the rage and you know, all these things that you just, you just can't do it anymore. So the world will still grow. ICT, THC beverages is emerging very, very quickly.

because they provide two things, I think, arguably a healthier alternative to many alcoholic beverages and still like this effect that you can get like a real effect. there's just, and it's new, it's like anything, it's new, so there's a lot of experimentation, there's a lot of folks doing that, so that's why we created another brand under Go Brewing Inc. which is like gonna be

really a go beverage company because we have this hydration water, we have go brewing, now we have Easy Man, which is kind of the first of its kind THC microdosed beverage that drinks like a beer. So that's a really fun brand. I'm doing a lot of cross marketing with the go audience into that. And the nice thing about that brand is it's all gluten free. So that was another interesting niche that we figured out early is because we've

just listen to customers, we're not geniuses, and a lot of them would ask about a gluten-free beer, so created a gluten-free beer, and it took off, and that represents the highest lifetime value of any of our products, because people really can't get them elsewhere. And it turns out that through iterating on that product, we were able to derive a hemp-derived beer as well, and called it Easy Man. It's its own thing, and it's really fun. So I see that emerging.

I see your point, low alcohol becoming more popular, but to what you said, it needs to get, I think, better. And at that point, you're like, OK, do I want five low-alcohol beers, or do I just want two NAs and two alcoholic beers? But I think the reality is it's like, and I don't know if I coined this term, but I wrote an article in Rolling Stone called hybrid drinking. It's like a hybrid athlete. Ron, could.

You can lift weights, you can do all these things, and that's what I like. I like to know I can have an alcoholic beverage, and I like to know I can have an NA, I like to know I can have a THC beer, and each one of those represents a different moment for me and how I want to feel.

Dan Cassidy (41:15)
love that term, I've not heard that before. I will embrace the hybrid drinking life. Yeah, it makes sense because sometimes you wanna go out and have a couple beers with buddies. Sometimes you wanna go out, have a couple NA beers and feel good the next day and not worry about any after effects. Sometimes you might wanna relax with THC or CBD. I really like that there are tons more options for people and we've had a fair amount of folks on the podcast that are offering alternatives to alcoholic beverages and I think the more options we have, just the

You know, tons of people are, you know, I've got the whoop band, tons of people are tracking their biometrics and it's good to see the impact of what we're doing to our bodies and yeah, it's pretty clear when people drink alcohol, like what happens the next day. So from an HRV standpoint, recovery standpoint, so the more options, the better. So yeah, love that you're creating all these options for consumers. Okay, so let's move on to the speed round.

Joe (41:57)
Mm-hmm.

Dan Cassidy (42:09)
each answer about 30 seconds or less, whatever comes first to your mind. So what is one of your most recommended books?

Joe (42:15)
I would say...

It's, from a business standpoint, it's the brand story books by Donald Miller. That is a very good book if you want to get started for your audience to grab in terms of understanding how you should lay things out, email flows, how to talk to customers, make things very simple with your USP. So that's my...

One, I recommend probably more than anything because I get a lot of folks that reach out to me for advice.

Dan Cassidy (42:47)
Fantastic book packed with tons of advice. That's very approachable. So love that book. What is an under the radar product or brand you've used and like, but most people don't know about.

Joe (42:57)
Hmm, that is a good question. Honestly, I'm gonna embarrass myself by saying this. I started to get a ton of gray hair on my, what is like a, not even really a beard, but as it grows out a little bit, I like the look of something on my face. That I found this product on Amazon that will darken the grays a bit.

And I forgot the name of it actually. It's not like naked, but something like that. And it's so good. Like I was shocked. I thought, you I have like kind of reddish hair and then like everything I've read was like, it'll turn orange and this, it just works. And it just like, literally I put in Jet GPT, this is going to be even nerdier. And I said, how old am I here? And I had like gray and I was just like, and it was like, you look like you're 49. I'm like, damn it. I'm like.

47, you know? And then I did that and I literally did, okay, now how old do I look in this picture? And I dropped it by like six years. So it was like, and this stemmed from like I was out with a bunch of younger guys once and these girls around us, were guessing everyone's age and they just like age me out so bad. And I was like, what is it? And my wife's laughing at me and I'm just analyzing myself in the mirror and I'm like, it's freaking gray hairs I have everywhere now. So.

Dan Cassidy (44:13)
That's funny, I've got some

buddies who are doing the just for men with the, know, turn their actual hair into black. So yeah, that's the age we're at.

Joe (44:20)
It's kind of like

that, it's like what's nice about it is you don't mix anything. It's just like this thing you put on this brush, you comb it on 15 minutes, you wipe it off and that's it. Like it's super easy. And again, even if you have like stubble, it works. Super embarrassing, but it's the reality of it. Getting old.

Dan Cassidy (44:36)
love it, transparency,

being honest is perfect, fantastic. What is one thing in life you do better than most people just naturally and how do you do it?

Joe (44:44)
think I have street smarts and this pragmatic sense. I didn't have anything handed to me. I grew up and found I was going be a dad and started working in the Chicago assembly line, building cars, reading books in between, and just happened to find enough space to be able to finish college and take the next step. So I'm good at figuring problems out and how to make the best use of time.

when someone might not think they have time. So 15 seconds to me is time. If I'm commuting home, I'm learning, I'm reading, I'm listening to your podcast, I'm listening to something. If I'm running, doing the same thing. So I think that, and I will outwork anyone because I love what I do, and I don't consider it work. So finding that space that can otherwise be a little bit unhealthy to the normal person of like, if you work too much, but like I truly would.

rather do what I do in the corner than sit there and watch TV or sports on a Sunday.

Dan Cassidy (45:46)
Fantastic. Tell me about one of your favorite shopping experiences online or offline.

Joe (45:51)
Hmm. That is a good question. Online. Trying to think of some, a time recently when I was like surprised and delighted by shopping online. Nothing jumps out at me of like a moment, I have to say. I think when you are in person, I like to have a relationship. So I go to a running store in town here at the nape of a running company.

And they kind of know you. They know that there's a personal connection of the races you're doing or how to go. They send you a card every time you buy something from them, just a little postcard, a follow-up. When they have an event, they'll invite us to it to participate. And I just think it's a really smart way to build a community. So I would say that's been special.

Dan Cassidy (46:40)
Yeah, that's such a good way for retail stores to compete with all the online stores is to build community, build relationships. Sounds like that one is doing a great job with it. Who is a brand founder we should have on a future episode?

Joe (46:53)
Hmm. gentleman from Jolie is really smart. I don't know if you've talked to him yet. He's one of these guys that created something that you would think wouldn't be a recurrent subscription business and turned it into a massive one. They basically created this filtered shower head. His name's Ryan.

He monetized in the sense of like he's selling this filter for the showerhead on a recurring basis. I don't know if it's monthly or quarterly, but you get this filter, ships your house and he has 15,000 plus subscribers, maybe even more than that now for this thing where you otherwise wouldn't think that's a recurring revenue model business. So, and that's really important for founders to, think to look at is like.

Just because you have a product, think about how you can get that recurring revenue in the door and it's not just one time thing and you're having to work on these acquisition costs constantly. If you don't have the repeat customer coming in, it's tough to just be an e-comm business. Unless you're a service business and that's a whole nother thing. But if you're e-comm, you gotta think through that. I think they did a remarkable job at thinking that and they're super lean. I think he has eight employees and...

you know, $60 million of revenue plus, if not more than that, and might be shortchanging them. So really good business.

Dan Cassidy (48:09)
Fantastic, recommendation. Joe, thank you so much for bringing GoBurring to market as a way to help people grab a drink with friends without waking up and feeling like crap the next day, for sharing your expertise and insights with our audience, and for joining us on the Shopify happy hour.

Joe (48:22)
Thank you, Dan.