Founder's Story Sep 21, 2026 43m 27m saved
With Scott Frohman, Founder and CEO of Odyssey Functional Energy
Scott Frohman has put more than $30 million into Odyssey, his own money first, and until recently spent none of it on marketing.
The usual playbook for a modern beverage is to build an online audience and let the retailers follow. Frohman went the other way: brick-and-mortar distribution first, natural grocers before convenience stores, and no influencer spend until he could prove that people who tried the drink bought it again.
"I built this whole thing with no marketing, no social media, zero."
Before Odyssey he built and sold a vape business, took it public, and then built a CBD company he sold to TerrAscend in 2018. He also spent a year on a product that failed completely, with Justin Bieber as its spokesperson, and says that failure is the reason he now listens to buyers instead of arguing with them.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 43 minutes of audio, 16 minutes of reading.
Here are the 14 lessons that matter.
Key Takeaways
More than $30M is invested in Odyssey, and Frohman put in all his own money before he took anyone else's
The brand was built with no marketing, no social media and no paid influencers until he could prove the repeat rate He says 80% of people who try the product buy it again, and the average online customer takes two cases a month
The product started as a mushroom coffee, became a tea, and only then became an energy drink — the energy version's velocity was what decided it
He killed his own low-caffeine and no-caffeine versions after finding customers buying Odyssey alongside a Celsius or a Bang to get the caffeine
Retail buyers rejecting a product are data, not an obstacle — the lesson came from PhoneGuard, an anti-texting app with Justin Bieber attached that nobody would install
He dropped the mushroom-and-sacred-geometry positioning because the big retailers called it niche; the pitch is now functional energy
Beverage is won on the shelf, not online, which is why he chased distribution before an audience
He is now paying TikTok creators 50% of the sale, having spent years refusing to pay anyone
His stated ceiling is a billion dollars in sales, with Celsius as the company he thinks has the formulation problem
The product sells hardest in office micro markets, where he names Uber, Citadel and SpaceX as accounts
1. Wall Street, Then Mushrooms
Daniel Robbins opened on the part of the story Frohman keeps coming back to.
The framing the host put to him
So Scott, you were a burnt out Wall Street guy. What did that world do to you?
Daniel Robbins
Frohman's answer was that the stimulation was the problem. Years on Wall Street, a move to Florida, Cuban coffee, and then energy drinks in the afternoon as one more thing to push through on. What he concluded was not that he needed a better drink but that the life was not going where he wanted it to go.
The route out was health rather than business. He got into fitness and Pilates, developed sciatica, found Pilates helped, and started doing triathlons. Functional mushrooms came in through that door, taken for focus and clarity and for endurance, and he started adding them to his morning coffee.
What he says he noticed was not a stimulant effect but a difference in how he operated: clarity, creativity, the way he managed people, and no need for a second cup. The problem was practical. The mushrooms muddied the coffee, and he did not like drinking it.
2. Vape, CBD, Then A Break
Robbins asked whether the sequence of vaping, then CBD, then mushrooms makes him a trend-chaser or someone who sees things early. Frohman's answer was that each one was a thing he thought helped people, entered at a point where he thought the market was ready.
He was in vaping before there were vape stores, through the shift from electronic cigarettes to e-liquid bottles and then to premium bottles.
The vape business went public
I ended up owning vape stores. I went public with my deal.
Scott Frohman
He built worldwide distribution for premium e-liquid, sold the business, and came out of it with a non-compete. CBD was the next move, and the reason it scaled fast was that the distribution was the same distribution: the vape shops and head shops he was already selling into would take CBD in the early days.
He got in during 2015, when the category's legal position was unsettled.
The regulatory status was the whole risk
CBD was clearly gray, you know what I mean?
Scott Frohman
Robbins said he had tried to do something in CBD around ten years ago and got out because the regulatory changes unnerved him, and wondered aloud whether that was a mistake. Frohman's read was that the coming rule changes were exactly why he wanted capital.
He was not shopping the business
I wasn't looking to sell the company.
Scott Frohman
He was making money, the company was private, and what he wanted was a war chest to get through the regulatory shift. Instead TerrAscend, a large multi-state cannabis operator with its biggest operations in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, wanted to buy it, and he sold in 2018. He then spent a year on the integration and left in January 2020, a few days after his second child was born, and took a break.
3. What The Exits Taught Him
Asked what carried over from the first two companies, Frohman gave one answer: sensitivity to what is actually working.
His analogy was exercise. People ask him what the best workout is, and his answer is the one you are willing to do. The same test applies to a product: the best one is the one a customer will engage with repeatedly, not the one the founder likes most.
The difference with Odyssey, he said, is ownership of the idea. The vape business was a friend's that he was asked to run, and he justified it as a better alternative to cigarettes. He liked CBD. This one he built from nothing: the name, the formulation, and how he wanted it to exist, because he was using the mushrooms himself and the coffee was not working.
This one is not built for an exit
I think that this is the future of what, you know, what people are looking for longer term.
Scott Frohman
4. 30 Years, No Innovation
Frohman's read of the category is that nothing has changed in it since it started.
Three decades of the same drink
there's been no innovation in energy beverages since the inception of the last 30 years
Scott Frohman
The names he ran through were Red Bull, Monster, Rockstar and now Celsius, and his claim is that they are the same combination of caffeine, other stimulants and sweetener, repackaged. What has changed, in his account, is the consumer rather than the formula: people talk about alignment, being centered and being present in a way they did not twenty years ago, and his argument is that energy should mean how someone is operating rather than how stimulated they are.
5. Not Having To Educate
Robbins raised the obvious commercial problem with a functional-mushroom drink, which is that it needs explaining.
Frohman's answer was that he did not have to do the explaining, and that this is the only reason the project was viable.
Word of mouth did the education
This has happened organically because one person tried this.
Scott Frohman
The mushrooms were already in the public eye when he arrived, so his job was narrower: make something that tastes good, works, and is more approachable than what already existed.
The alternative would have killed it
if I had to go, I have to go educate everybody on this. I don't think I would have done the project.
Scott Frohman
6. Build First, Price Later
The formulation decision was made without a cost model.
He built the product before he priced it
Let me build the greatest product, and then I'll back it out and say, what do I have to sell it for?
Scott Frohman
He asked for the highest potency of each ingredient he wanted and then worked backwards to a shelf price, on the theory that a product people come back to solves its own economics. What made it work commercially was that the mushroom manufacturer and several ingredient suppliers came in with him, which got the pricing to a level he could compete at once volumes were real.
His own summary of how naive that was is unusually blunt.
He would not have started if he had known
if I would have known more of what it took to do this, I don't know if I even would have started in the first place.
Scott Frohman
Beverage was harder than anything he had done
I didn't realize what it took to compete in beverage
Scott Frohman
In vaping he was early; in CBD he had the distribution. In beverage he had neither.
7. The Original Can
Robbins made the point that most founders wait for a perfect launch, spend too much, and never ship. Frohman produced the original can on camera.
It was 2021, and it was a coffee. The label said Odyssey mushroom elixir, the positioning was functional mushroom brew, and the artwork was sacred geometry and a Metatron cube. It was a French roast oat latte.
Then production was delayed by the pandemic, and the delay is what produced the company. While he waited, he made a white tea with elderberry and five different mushrooms, turkey tail and chaga among them, and positioned it on immunity, because immunity was what 2020 was about.
That gave him two products instead of one, and one surprise: he had assumed the mushroom flavor would have to be masked, and the tea came out clean.
He took the coffee to California and pitched a natural grocer, who told him politely that everyone in the world wants their product in that store. They tried it, liked it, and told him how he might get in. The tea is what changed his mind about what the company was.
8. Coffee, Tea, Then Energy
The next product was the Odyssey Elixir, positioned for cognition and energy, in dragon fruit lemonade.
The energy version outsold everything else
the velocity on this product was through the roof.
Scott Frohman
He was running three categories at once, coffee and tea and an energy drink, and killed two of them. The elixir went into thousands of stores, the repeat business arrived, and early customers told him they loved the design and the sacred geometry.
His verdict on that phase is that it launched him and then stopped being enough.
9. Winning On The Shelf
Robbins asked how he thinks about physical retail against selling online.
Frohman's position is that most companies do it backwards. They build a community online first; he built distribution.
Where a beverage is decided
you have to win, on the shelf.
Scott Frohman
He said he studied how Celsius, Bang and Bloom won, and that winning online does not translate. What he built first was thousands of small natural stores across the United States, which he credits with getting the product going, and tens of thousands of customers who told him they were glad the product existed.
Then he started talking to the larger retail groups, and they told him something he did not want to hear: he was classified as functional, and functional read as niche. He had a no-caffeine version, a low-caffeine version, and too many options.
10. The Caffeine Pivot
What the data showed was that customers were buying Odyssey and a second drink at the same time.
As the brand got into more convenience stores, Frohman found people picking up his low-caffeine can alongside a Celsius or a Bang, because they still wanted the caffeine. So he cut the no-caffeine and low-caffeine versions and added a high-caffeine one.
The high-caffeine line is 222 milligrams
With Odyssey and even the Odyssey 2-222, which is 222 milligrams of caffeine
Scott Frohman
His claim for the formulation is the same one the whole brand rests on.
What he says the category does to you
Basically spike you up, crash you down, hard to come back.
Scott Frohman
And what he says his does instead
So you get a longer sustainable energy without the crash from the jitters, but you're getting this focus and clarity.
Scott Frohman
He was explicit that this was the consumer overruling him: he had wanted to give people less caffeine and more function, and they wanted both.
The higher-caffeine line now sells faster
And now the velocity on this is considerably higher than we have on the lower caffeine.
Scott Frohman
11. What It Cost
Robbins asked what building Odyssey cost him.
The first thing Frohman said is what it did not cost. He still has his wife and two children, still runs and cycles, built the same gym in the office that he has at home, and meditates, on the reasoning that if his health is not right nothing else is.
The financial answer is a number.
The capital in the business
We have over $30 million invested in the deal between my money and other people's money.
Scott Frohman
And the order he put it in
And when I came and got started, I put all my own money in, by the way.
Scott Frohman
He said he did not want to bring other people's money in until he knew it worked, and that if it had not worked he would have taken the loss himself. The money went into a long series of reversals: coffee and tea to energy, 85 milligrams of caffeine to a higher dose, sacred geometry to functional energy, functional to energy outright, and a long run of reformulating flavors to compete on taste with the category leaders.
Distribution moved in both directions
I lost stores along the way. I gained stores along the way.
Scott Frohman
Where that leaves the business now is a specific number of outlets and a specific position in the trade.
The current footprint
while we're in 10,000, 12,000 doors, 50,000 points of distribution and doing very well
Scott Frohman
The company is strongest in natural and is expanding into grocery, and his stated route from here is the one the newer soda brands took: start in natural stores, build into grocery, then go to convenience.
12. A Billion In Sales
Robbins put the obvious question.
The host's framing
You can't beat a billion dollar exit, right?
Daniel Robbins
Frohman answered about revenue rather than an exit.
What he thinks the business is worth building to
Look, I think the opportunity is a billion plus dollars in sales.
Scott Frohman
The company he named as the one to take share from is Celsius, on the argument that its formulation descends from the original energy drinks and carries their problems with it.
Where the product is selling hardest is not retail at all. Frohman said Odyssey is one of the biggest sellers in micro markets, the unattended shops inside office buildings.
The accounts he named
Some of the biggest companies, whether it's Uber and, Citadel now and, SpaceX and, like so many.
Scott Frohman
His explanation is that people who come to work wanting an edge are the natural customer for a drink sold on function. He also described the drink being used as an evening alternative to alcohol, and was careful to say he is not knocking anything.
13. The Bieber Failure
Asked whether anything had ever broken him, Frohman went to a company called PhoneGuard.
It was software that detected when a phone was moving faster than ten miles an hour and blocked incoming text messages, auto-replying that the user was driving. This was the BlackBerry and early-iPhone era, texting-and-driving prosecutions were in the news, and the campaign against it had real momentum.
He got Justin Bieber as the spokesperson, and the coverage followed — Good Morning America, the Today show, viral reach.
The endorsement did not move anyone
Justin Bieber became my spokesperson. Guess what? I lost it.
Scott Frohman
The failure point was installation. Mothers wanted it on their teenagers' phones and teenagers would not put it there.
Nobody would take it
Nobody wanted it from nobody. Nobody.
Scott Frohman
What he takes from it is not about the product. It is that he had no mechanism for stopping: he went too far, put in too much money, and had never in his life had to quit anything. He calls it the most valuable lesson he has had, and it is why he now reads a slow-moving product as information.
Buyers saying no are giving you data
They're not all wrong. These people are smart.
Scott Frohman
That is what drove the repositioning. The pitch to the major retailers is no longer a mushroom or a Metatron cube; it is sustained energy, no crash, focus and clarity, a drink that tastes good, and a product that brings a customer into the store who would not otherwise have been there.
14. Paying Creators 50%
Having built the brand without spending anything, Frohman is now spending.
The reason for the delay is that he did not want awareness until the product could hold it, and the evidence he waited for was repeat purchase.
The repeat rate is what unlocked the marketing
we know that 80% of people try our product come back and buy it again
Scott Frohman
And the online customer buys on a schedule
we know the average consumer online's buying two cases every single month religiously
Scott Frohman
The mechanism is affiliate rather than advertising. He is paying creators a share of the sale rather than a fee, on the reasoning that the whole job is trial.
The TikTok payout
legitimately 50% payouts to content creators on TikTok
Scott Frohman
The Instagram rate is 35%, creators get 20% discount codes to hand out, and the company accepts a loss on a first order because it expects the customer to come back. Several hundred sample boxes have gone out, and Frohman hosts virtual meetings with creators, sometimes 25 at a time, to explain what the product is and why.
The pitch he is making to creators is discovery: they want something their audience has not seen, and he wants the product found rather than advertised.
The reason he stopped hiding
we're not being like this great restaurant that nobody knows about
Scott Frohman
Robbins' closing read was that the thing separating Frohman from most founders is the absence of ego in a pivot.
The host's verdict
I think you had no ego when you needed to pivot.
Daniel Robbins
Frohman's own sign-off was shorter.
Why he says he does it
I love seeing people be well.
Scott Frohman
Bonus Insights
The best workout is the one you will do
Frohman's test for a product is borrowed from fitness: people ask what the best workout is, and the answer is whichever one you are willing to do repeatedly. He applies the same question to a product rather than asking which one he likes.
His answer on the wellness industry's biggest lie
Asked what the biggest misconception in wellness is, Frohman said it is the phrase "better for you" itself. Some things are and some are not, he said, and the useful question is what a particular body needs rather than a blanket claim that applies to everyone.
Nobody arrives at a category by accident
He credits the functional mushrooms he takes daily with the creativity that produced the company at all, and with the sensitivity to notice when something was not working and needed changing.
He is buying podcast advertising next
Frohman said on the show that he is interested in podcast advertising, and that the audience he wants is the achiever — someone trying to get ahead, whether that is at work or at Coachella.
Frohman's bottom line is that a beverage company is won by proving repeat purchase before spending a dollar on awareness, and that every one of Odyssey's turning points came from a retailer or a customer telling him he was wrong: the format, the caffeine level, the branding and the category it is sold in.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Odyssey Functional Energy (Frohman's company: started as a mushroom coffee in 2021, now a functional energy drink with more than $30M invested)
Celsius (Named as the incumbent he thinks has a formulation problem, and as the drink customers were buying alongside his low-caffeine can)
Red Bull, Monster and Rockstar (The three brands he says defined a category that has not changed in 30 years)
Bang Energy (One of the brands he studied on how to win shelf space, and the second drink customers were pairing with his)
Bloom Nutrition (Named alongside Celsius and Bang as a brand whose route to market he followed closely)
TerrAscend (The multi-state cannabis operator that bought his CBD company in 2018)
TikTok and Instagram (Where the creator program runs: 50% payouts on TikTok, 35% on Instagram, with 20% discount codes)
Uber, Citadel and SpaceX (The office accounts he names when describing how well the drink sells in micro markets)
Shopify (Raised by the host as the direct-to-consumer route Frohman deliberately did not lead with)
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