How I built Sunday Scaries from $0 to $8.4M — and what I'd do differently

In 2017, I co-founded a CBD brand out of a Costco receipt and a panic attack.

Eight and a half million dollars in peak annual revenue, 4,000 retail doors, a feature in a Netflix movie, and the Chainsmokers as customers later — I'm still operating that brand. And I'm finally ready to write down what actually happened. Not the LinkedIn version. The real one.

This is the story of how Sunday Scaries went from an idea to a national brand, what I got right by accident, what I got wrong on purpose, and what I'd do completely differently if I were starting again today in 2026.

If you're a DTC founder considering this path, read all of it. There's no fluff.

The origin: a bar, a panic attack, and a shared Google Doc

In 2016, my college classmate and I were running a bar and grill. If you've ever owned a hospitality business, you know the math: long hours, thin margins, a permanent low-grade stress that bleeds into every part of your life. By the end of most nights, I had the kind of anxiety where you can feel your heartbeat in your jaw.

We tried everything to handle it. Therapists. Apps. Cold plunges before cold plunges were cool. Eventually a friend handed us a CBD gummy. We tried it. It worked. Not in a "now I feel high" way — in a "now I feel like a normal person again" way.

The product existed. The category was emerging. But almost nothing in the early CBD market was packaged for people like us — anxious, modern, design-aware adults who didn't want to walk into a head shop or order something with a green leaf on the bottle. Everything looked like medicine or weed. Nothing felt like a brand.

That was the gap. We didn't invent CBD gummies. We just figured out we could package them better than anyone else was.

Lesson #1: You don't need to invent a new product category. You need to find a category that exists, look at how badly the incumbents are branded, and out-brand them. That's the entire game.

The first year: brand before product, every time

Most founders launch a product, then try to bolt a brand onto it later. We did the opposite. We obsessed about the brand for months before we ever shipped a unit.

We hired a friend to design the logo. We mocked up packaging on Sketch. We bought the domain, we built a Shopify store on a free theme, and we wrote every piece of copy in our actual voice — sarcastic, self-aware, anti-medical. We refused to use the word "wellness." We refused to put a leaf on the box.

When the first batch finally arrived from our manufacturer, we already had an Instagram account with 800 followers, a launch list of 200 emails, and a half-finished podcast we'd recorded with friends. The product was almost an afterthought. The brand was the product.

We launched with $0 in ads. First-day revenue was $1,800. We thought we'd made it.

Lesson #2: Brand is the only sustainable DTC moat. Anyone can find a manufacturer. Anyone can run Meta ads. The thing nobody can copy is taste — how your brand sounds, what it refuses to say, the references it makes, the audience it knows is watching. Build that first or you're going to bleed cash forever trying to outspend competitors who already have it.

Years two through four: the content engine that built the company

The thing I'm most proud of about Sunday Scaries isn't the revenue. It's that we built almost all of it through organic content — not paid acquisition.

TikTok before TikTok was obvious. I started posting in 2019 when most DTC brands still thought TikTok was a teen platform. I posted as the founder — face on camera, talking about the actual product, the actual brand, the actual life of running it. Not ads. Just videos. We hit our first viral moment with a 28-second video where I deadpan-described a panic attack and then casually pulled a Sunday Scaries gummy out of my pocket. 1.2M views. We sold out of three SKUs that week.

Instagram as the brand bible. Our Instagram was the canon. Every post had to feel like a single coherent voice. Cream background, witty caption, a meme that would only land if you understood our audience. No "use code SAVE20" energy. We treated it like a magazine, not a storefront.

Press, not paid. Forbes, Men's Health, Cosmo, Bloomberg, eventually a feature in the Netflix movie Our Little Secret. We never hired a PR firm. We pitched journalists ourselves with one-line emails: "We're the CBD brand the Chainsmokers actually take. Want a sample?" Subject lines like that get opened.

Through all of it, paid spend stayed below 12% of revenue. Most DTC brands at our scale were spending 40%+. The difference compounded.

Lesson #3: Organic content isn't free. It's the most expensive thing you'll ever do — it just doesn't show up on the Meta dashboard. The cost is your time, your willingness to be on camera, your taste, and seven years of consistent posting before it pays off. Most founders quit at month nine. Don't.

What I'd do completely differently if I were starting in 2026

If you put me back at year zero today, here's what changes.

1. I'd build the TikTok Shop infrastructure first. In 2017, we couldn't have. The platform didn't exist. In 2026, TikTok Shop is the single largest underbuilt distribution channel in DTC. I would treat it the way I treated Instagram in 2018 — go all in before everyone else figures it out.

2. I'd ship slower and price higher. We launched at a price point that was too friendly. Lower price = higher COGS pressure = thinner margins = less cash for the things that build the brand. Premium pricing isn't a vanity exercise. It funds the brand-building you need to justify the premium price.

3. I'd hire a fractional CEO at $1M. I tried to do everything myself until $4M. By the time I was ready to hire executive help, I'd built a culture and a set of habits that an outside operator couldn't unwind. If I were doing it again, I'd hire someone at $1M revenue who'd already built a $10M brand and let them install the operating system from day one. Yes, that's the exact service I now offer. No, the irony is not lost on me.

4. I'd build with AI infrastructure from week one. Every part of the operation that's now humans-doing-repetitive-work would be automated from launch. Customer service, content repurposing, weekly reports, inventory forecasting — all of it. The brands that build with AI in their DNA will out-execute the brands that bolt it on later.

5. I'd diversify earlier. A second brand at $2M, not $7M. Optionality is the most valuable asset you can build, and it gets harder to build the bigger your first brand gets.

If you're a DTC founder at the start of this — $0 to $1M, struggling to find product-market fit — I want to help. If you're already at $1M to $10M and stuck, I want to help with that too.

I take 3 Fractional CEO clients at a time. If that's you, let's talk.

— Mike