The Founder’s Realisation: Product Is Not the Hardest Part

There comes a moment in most founder journeys when the realities of commercial execution begin to outweigh the excitement of product creation. You can have the liquid perfected, the packaging resolved, and the supply chain finally functioning without drama, yet still be confronted by a far more consequential question: where will this actually sell, and why?

I learned this lesson first with Rogue. We grew at a pace that exceeded our manufacturer’s ability to keep up, and rather than consolidating the parts of the business that were genuinely working - the SKUs with strong pull-through, the customers who were buying consistently, the processes that supported cash rotation - we expanded into a cereal brand. What we should have done was simplify. Fewer SKUs. More depth. Less cash sitting untouched in stock. Instead, we entered a category without sufficient A&P budget or structural category demand, and the result was predictable in hindsight. I made the best decisions I could with the information available, but time has a way of clarifying where discipline would have served better than momentum.

The UK hard seltzer moment followed a similar pattern. Many brands assumed the category behaviour of the US would replicate itself across the Atlantic, but it became clear very quickly that the underlying conditions were not the same.

The UK wasn’t “fishing in those waters”, and no amount of trend-following could compensate for a fundamental mismatch between product and market.

Those early lessons built the foundation for what came next.

Broken Barrier Tequila and the Reality of a 20-Foot Container

Years later, while preparing to scale Broken Barrier Tequila, we explored bringing a 20-foot container into a market that felt familiar and personally meaningful - but commercially flawed. It was the kind of decision that looked ambitious on a plan and satisfying in photographs, yet the underlying demand wasn’t there. Stock would have stagnated. Velocity would have been minimal. Cash would have been trapped in inventory rather than deployed into growth.

It would have presented well on shelves, on back bars and in conversations, but brand presentation is not brand building. The experience forced a more sober truth: brands do not grow simply because you want them to; they grow when you place them where the consumer is already predisposed to buy them.

This is as true for tequila as it is for gin, whisky, RTDs or NA. Every category has geographical patterns, cultural anchors and consumption habits that cannot be overridden by intention alone.

What the Data Actually Shows: Tequila’s Uneven American Landscape

When examining the latest U.S. tequila consumption data, certain insights become clear. The familiar high-volume states remain dominant - California, Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Illinois, Arizona, Ohio, Michigan, New York and Colorado - but the more telling shifts lie beneath the surface.

North Carolina has moved from the eighth-largest market to the fourth in just two years. New York has fallen from sixth to ninth despite its enormous population and global profile. And when you study per-capita consumption, the contrast becomes sharper still.

Nevada, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, North Carolina and Michigan all significantly over-index, indicating not just casual interest but deeply embedded cultural behaviour. To put this into context: a standard 9L case contains twelve bottles. Michigan’s figure of 140 cases per 1,000 residents equates to 1,680 bottles per 1,000 people - a level of consumption that speaks less to trend cycles and more to established preference.

These are the markets where brands compound. They are also the markets that many founders overlook, simply because they don’t carry the glamour or industry mythology of coastal cities.

This is where our concept of Motown Markets emerges.

The Motown Market Framework: Where Brands Quietly Outperform

At Lateish, we use “Motown Markets” to describe the places where brand-building is often more efficient, more sustainable and more commercially rational than in the traditional glamour markets. A Motown Market has several defining characteristics:

1. High per-capita category consumption, which amplifies early velocity.

2. Lower competitive noise, meaning more meaningful exposure for less A&P.

3. Stronger menu loyalty and repeat purchasing, which stabilises volume.

4. Broader account adoption, especially outside major city-centre clusters.

5. Cultural or demographic alignment that supports long-term category growth.

These markets may not be the most spoken about in the industry, but they frequently deliver more reliable volume, more repeatability, and more realistic pathways to scale.

Market Potential vs Market Fit: A Common Industry Error

The most common mistake I see - and one I’ve made myself - is confusing the size or glamour of a market with its suitability. California, New York and Florida have enormous consumer bases, but high visibility does not automatically translate into early traction. These states will always deliver volume in the long-term, yet that volume comes with a structural requirement: you need more bodies on the ground to compete, to maintain visibility, and to take genuine ownership of the market.

This is why our hiring strategy reflects both the opportunity and the complexity of these environments. We are building significant teams in the major battleground states - nine people in California, six in New York, six in Texas and three in Florida (with the potential to expand to six) - precisely because these states demand depth, presence and sustained field coverage. In markets where hundreds of brands are shouting simultaneously, a lightweight field team simply cannot cultivate the consistency required to break through.

That said, the Big Four are not the only drivers of meaningful growth. Tequila behaves differently in Denver than in Detroit; gin behaves differently in Charleston than in Chicago; and NA behaves differently in Portland than in Texas. Every category has its own geographic anatomy, and the brands that scale quickly recognise the need to balance highly competitive states with markets that present lower friction and higher repeatability.

This is the logic behind the Motown markets. Their economics are different: acquisition costs are lower, velocity compounds more quickly, and a handful of well-placed BDMs can deliver disproportionately strong results. A BDM in Michigan or North Carolina is not expected to earn the same competitive premiums as one in Manhattan or South Florida - but they also do not require the same level of A&P, nor do they face the same intensity of competition. The two models serve different strategic purposes.

In essence, the Big Four give you scale and signal; Motown markets give you stability and compounding velocity. The skill lies in orchestrating both: deploying enough people to own the most competitive markets while ensuring that expansion into high-preference, lower-clutter markets continues to drive profitable, category-aligned growth.

Both play a role. Both matter. And when balanced correctly, they create a portfolio of markets that support each other rather than cannibalise resources.

How Lateish Operationalises This Reality

The Lateish model is designed to help brands avoid precisely these pitfalls. At its core, it is a retainer-based fractional sales system backed by a commercial intelligence platform. We are not trying to chase one-off wins; we want brands to scale with us, market by market, so that early success in one territory funds the next phase of expansion. The faster we can help you achieve credible, repeatable wins, the sooner you can reinvest your sales back into A&P and push that velocity further.

Our approach rests on four interconnected principles.

Fractional Teams in Market

Our BDMs operate inside the markets most aligned with your category, working a focused list of 20–25 targeted accounts each week so that we build real presence rather than sporadic visibility. The retainer model exists for a reason: it gives you a consistent, embedded resource rather than sporadic brokerage, and it gives our teams the mandate to behave as if they are your in-house market lead rather than a visiting salesperson.

The intention is simple: deliver meaningful, early commercial wins, prove the model in that territory, and then scale with you into the next state or region. We want to earn the right to be the team you call when you are ready to move from one market to three, and from three to nine.

Category Exclusivity

Category exclusivity is not a cosmetic promise; it is fundamental to how we work. A BDM representing your tequila should not be juggling another agave brand that competes for the same back bar, the same menu slot, or the same distributor’s attention. We structure portfolios so that our people can genuinely act as an extension of your brand – carrying your story, your pricing logic, your margin objectives and your priorities into every conversation, rather than diluting their energy across near-identical competitors.

This also changes the incentive structure. The BDM is not chasing a bigger commission on a rival SKU; their success is tied to the performance of a complementary portfolio, in which your brand occupies a clear, protected role.

Commercial Intelligence That Empowers, Not Restricts

Our Commercial Intelligence platform exists to empower founders and commercial leaders, not to police where stock can or cannot go. You would never refuse a sale on the basis of a postcode, and neither would we. What we want to give you is the context: where velocity is emerging, how different channels behave, what sits behind account performance, and why certain markets respond more quickly than others.

The SaaS has been built out of lived experience – being a solo founder, consulting for brands, feeling the gaps in visibility when you are raising investment or reporting to stakeholders without a clear, real-time picture of what is actually happening in market. We want global transparency around our efforts and energy: which markets are working, which need support, where the next Motown might be developing. And crucially, we do not intend this to be a private advantage for Lateish alone. Our ambition is for the platform to be available to all start-up drinks brands and agencies, including those who might be considered “competitors”. If the industry as a whole becomes more data-literate, founders make fewer catastrophic mistakes.

Market Sequencing

Sequencing is not about restricting where a brand can go; it is about structuring market entry so each new state strengthens the next. Some markets demand a heavier operational footprint - New York, California, Texas and Florida all require depth, field coverage and sustained resourcing. Others, such as Michigan, Ohio or the Carolinas, offer dependable velocity with less competitive friction.

Our aim is not to limit how many markets a brand enters; our aim is to maximise the likelihood that a brand ultimately enters all the markets it wants. Early wins in the right territories create the commercial momentum a brand needs to reinvest in its A&P, expand its team and move into additional states with confidence.

This is why we encourage founders to speak openly with us about their long-term battlegrounds. We take a broad view - balancing glamour markets with Motown markets, sequencing ambition with feasibility, and building a pathway that allows a brand to move from one territory to three, and from three to nine, without burning the cash that should be fuelling its growth.

Market sequencing, in other words, is not about slowing expansion.
It is about ensuring expansion compounds.

The Markets Poised to Become the Next Motown

Based on emerging data and category behaviour, the next wave of markets likely to show Motown characteristics over the next two to three years include Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, Wisconsin and South Carolina. These states are not necessarily part of the industry’s typical wish list, yet they display the early environmental factors that often precede strong, sustained category adoption.

Being Everywhere Is Vanity; Being in the Right Places Is Strategy

The United States is not a uniform landscape. Consumer behaviour varies dramatically by region, and the brands that grow quickly are those that place themselves where they can become inevitable rather than merely visible. Rogue taught me the cost of expanding before understanding where the demand actually lay. Broken Barrier taught me the importance of discipline in market selection. Lateish exists to help founders avoid the versions of those lessons that come with a much higher price tag.

Brands do not scale because they are everywhere. They scale because they enter the markets that already contain the conditions for them to succeed.

And more often than not, those markets are not the ones on the coast.

They’re Motown.