The Yin & Yang of Brand Growth: SmearCase Founders Joe Rotondo & Drew DiSpirito

In this conversation, Joe and Drew, the founders of SmearCase aka FroCo, share their journey of creating a high-protein frozen dessert alternative to ice cream. They discuss the challenges of launching a product in the retail space, the importance of networking, and the balance between speed and perfection in entrepreneurship. The founders emphasize the significance of authenticity in marketing and the need for resilience in the face of challenges. They also explore the iterative process of product development and the value of community engagement as they look to expand their brand.

Chapters

00:00
The Birth of FroCo: A Unique Ice Cream Concept

05:09
From Idea to Retail: The Journey of FroCo

07:53
Navigating the E-commerce Landscape for Frozen Products

11:06
Building Authentic Relationships in Business

14:01
Data-Driven Decisions: Tracking Success in Retail

16:41
Creating Viral Content: The Power of Authenticity

19:44
The Balance of Quality and Speed in Content Creation

24:36
Building a Brand and Community Moat

26:12
The Balance of Speed and Perfection

28:40
Defining 'Good Enough' in Entrepreneurship

32:34
The Importance of Iteration and Feedback

36:20
Finding Balance in Risk and Reward

38:20
Resilience and Personal Growth in Entrepreneurship

43:28
Continuous Learning and Diverse Perspectives

48:36
PodClose.mp4

https://smearcase.com
https://pentane.com

Creators and Guests

Host

Adam Callinan

Adam Callinan is the founder of Pentane, a financial and advertising command center that empowers brands to drive predictable revenue and intentional profit. Previously, Adam co-founded BottleKeeper, a bootstrapped consumer brand that scaled to $8M in sales within three years – without employees – and was later acquired in 2021 as an eight-figure business with a team of four, marking Adam's second successful exit.

What is Growth Mavericks?

This podcast dives deep into the tactical moves that drive business success, as well as the mental and physical resilience required to sustain it.

Hosted by Adam Callinan, a seasoned entrepreneur with multiple exits, an avid outdoorsman, and an family man with crystal-clear priorities, each episode unpacks real-world challenges, actionable insights, and the mental and physical disciplines that fuel long-term personal and professional growth.

Whether you’re scaling a startup or refining your mindset, disrupting your default is how business and life strike a balance.

Adam Callinan (00:46)
Our conversation today is with Joe and Drew from Smear Case. They did the typical scratch your own itch founder story, solving their own problem, which was marathon training and wanting an ice cream like snack that was high in protein and created their own version of that. That was a frozen cottage cheese and they have done very well in the Northeast.

by launching in a very atypical way, at least how most consumer brands get moving. And that is entirely without direct consumer going first just to retail. Now, through the conversation, we'll see this makes sense because shipping frozen things around is expensive and difficult and creates this weird user experience. But they seem to have figured that out in a way that is quite unique. Part of that you will see comes in this sort of yin and yang balance of founders that Joe and Drew have, which is great.

Matt and I experienced a bottle keeper. sort of had one aggressive, one conservative and we meet in the middle as tends to be the best, smartest place to be. So they appear to be doing that really well. There are a lot of learnings in here around the dealing with scrappy organic content and how they use things like, you know, ASMR videos for frozen cottage cheese in a way that has created some really organic. ⁓

user experiences that I've done really well and had some viral moments. So a lot of fun, a lot of tactical,

and we even got a little bit of Porsche sprinkled in there at the end for fun. So

I hope you enjoy this conversation with Joe and Drew from Smear Case.

Joe (02:22)
Thanks for having us, Adam. It's good to be here.

Adam Callinan (02:26)
How the hell did you guys come up with a frozen cottage cheese? I've been digging around, yeah, fro-co as a trademark term, I think that's epic.

Joe (02:31)
FroCo.

Thank you. Yeah, it's, geez, I never thought I would have been an ice cream man at this point in my life. ⁓ But two years ago, I training for a marathon, was craving ice cream on a hot summer New York day in a concrete jungle. And, you know, during marathon training, I was really looking for, to really nail down my diet, eat clean, refuel properly, just like perform my best.

And it's all about ingredients, right? So I was really prioritizing protein. And on a hot summer day, wanted ice cream, but wanted some sort of nutritional value. Could not believe I couldn't find a high protein ice cream since ice cream's made from dairy. Dairy's a good source of protein. so, you know, disappointed. go home, I scrapped ice cream. I went to my go-to healthy dessert, was cottage cheese, honey, and blueberries.

And that's when I realized like, wow, cottage cheese is just not as fun as eating ice cream. How the heck is nobody making cottage cheese ice cream? So I started making it myself ⁓ in my New York City apartment. It was like too good to be true. Started sharing it with people, shared it with Drew. And that's when like...

we saw opportunity of, there's white space in ice cream for having like a real high protein category. And on top of that, there's no such thing as FroCo. So we wanted to be the first to market. And yeah, a year later, we officially launched in July of 24. And here we are.

Adam Callinan (04:17)
So from apartment, you went straight to retail or did you go, did you do some D to C stuff as well?

Joe (04:24)
straight to retail.

Adam Callinan (04:25)
Okay. Why?

Joe (04:28)
because shipping frozen is darn near impossible. ⁓

Drew DiSpirito (04:33)
Yeah, D to C for Frozen is more or less a marketing exercise. It's not really a means to go to market.

Adam Callinan (04:42)
Yeah, I think of the context of shipping frozen things is probably quite tricky.

Joe (04:47)
Yeah, and nobody wants to pay $20 per pint of ice cream. You know, and that's what it would have been with the packaging, the dry ice, the overnight shipping. There's a lot that goes into it and at the scale we were at, it didn't make sense. we, you know, people are going to the grocery store.

Adam Callinan (04:50)
Ahem.

Joe (05:09)
People are still discovering new brands when they're browsing in the aisle. So we want, we just put all of our effort into the retail channel.

Adam Callinan (05:18)
How did you go from, let's talk tactical. You have an idea, you make the thing, you spend time refining the thing, suddenly you're like, holy hell, cow, this thing is great, we need to sell this thing. How did you take, how did you go from that step of being in the apartment with that thing to your first retail shelf?

Joe (05:41)
Yeah. Hot, nasty speed, Adam. Yeah. That's, that's really it. Yeah. I mean, Drew and I didn't know anything about, you know, CPG at large. Heck, we didn't know anything about ice cream. So we, we partnered with a fantastic consultant to just like cut that timeline in half. We, you know, got a co-packer who was willing to test something out.

Adam Callinan (05:44)
Yeah, perfect. Yeah, while it's melting on the way.

Joe (06:08)
And just on a small scale, made the most calculated risk of like, is the lowest MOQ possible for something like this? And, you know, we knew that we knew we had something just like based off intuition. And we, that's like, we just made the bet to, you know, make a production run and get in front of the right people.

Adam Callinan (06:32)
Did you self fund it or did you raise some money?

Drew DiSpirito (06:36)
We were strapped in the beginning and raised probably three or four months after being in market, knowing that, okay, the theory has been proven to some degree, right?

Adam Callinan (06:50)
Yeah, enough of a degree. Sure.

Drew DiSpirito (06:52)
Sure.

Adam Callinan (06:55)
Got it. What were you guys doing before this?

Joe (06:59)
Everything.

Drew DiSpirito (07:00)
Yeah.

Joe (07:02)
Yeah, we both had clothing brands. That's how June and I met. ⁓ I started a clothing brand out of college. was Sustainable Men's ⁓ Denim, made in New York. I grew up around food, worked at my dad's delis and restaurants, made bagels for him in New Jersey. Won Best Bagel in 2018. And then had to pivot to corporate America, where I worked in high growth, fast paced e-commerce startups. So we learned.

learned digital marketing, learned e-commerce, learned about the startup atmosphere, and then was just itching to get back to entrepreneurship. ⁓ yeah, now here we are.

Drew DiSpirito (07:45)
Yeah, I had in what I call an urban leisure brand. So we basically took like athleisure fabrics and

trying to apply it to more of a lifestyle cut. ⁓ And it was kind of a gallery model where we would have like a digital build out, we'd have a physical pop-up build out, and then we would have this thematic collection, which was great in theory, but it meant all new patterns every collection. There was no repeating patterns or anything that we could leverage going forward. So we had to build like a net new brand almost every time we launched.

So I knew that we were going to put that on pause. My co-founder that I was working with in that actually turned to animating and is now an animator. So he had a pivot and it was right around that time where it was like meeting Joe for coffee and he was talking about this. And at the time my day job was corporate strategy. So I was focused on acquisitions, alliances, all inorganic growth, venture building, spent a lot of time in business model canvas stuff. And I was like, Joe, this is one of the most differentiated.

things I've ever heard of. If you've cracked the code on a nutrient-dense ice cream that's actually good, then I think there's no reason it can't be successful. So he was basically like, hey, do want to help me get this to shelf? So we basically committed that right then to try and be in market by next summer.

Adam Callinan (09:10)
I would imagine you guys probably get hit up. I mean, when, and on my bottle keeper days, like I hit up constantly from people trying to start e-commerce businesses that wanted guidance on like, they want a 15 minute conversation of distilling five years worth of experience. So I'm to do that to you right now. What do you tell that, you know, that like your cousin or friend of a friend that's got this idea for this product, they now have the product. What do you tell them about finding a co-pack?

It's effectively like finding a manufacturer.

Drew DiSpirito (09:43)
Yeah.

I think there's a number of ways for us. Joe was actually on a Slack channel where he got connected with this consultant that had a test kitchen up in the Catskills where we could start producing in a small batch. And then they had a commercial creamery on site that could do larger, more professional batches, but still pretty small. And the queues, I know in the clothing days, like we would go on Alibaba and all these other sites we produced in Guangzhou.

Adam Callinan (09:58)
you

Drew DiSpirito (10:14)
⁓ We produced in st. Louis. You just got to get the flywheel going like I tell people that first of all you got to start with what are you motivated by like if you're just trying to do this to like have some Get rich quick moment like that is by no means going to fuel your fire You need to be passionate about what you're doing. So I almost always start there I have like a lot of these conversations with

young kids and if you're not excited about what you're building, then just stop and then look for something else. But as far as getting started, I think you just have to start telling your network that you're doing it because you won't realize until you actually vocalize it publicly that your neighbor actually knows someone that was in the ice cream business for 20 years. Next thing you know, you're at an Italian restaurant in Bergen County, like learning the ins and outs of the industry from this person.

So, like I always say, just to begin to socialize it with your network and see kind of what connections arise and then I was then I was helped. So I'm sure Joe has some good sound waves on this topic too.

Joe (11:18)
Yeah, second a lot of that. ⁓ I think once you immerse yourself in an industry and you go in by being curious, being a sponge, having those conversations, yeah, can cold DM somebody on LinkedIn or you can show it to an event and, you know.

and say hello to a founder that you follow on social media. think that like we still live in a day and age where relationships, like authentic genuine relationships go so much further than a social media or LinkedIn DM. Yeah, and that's where the magic happens. When you put yourself out there, put yourself in a position to get a little lucky, then there's always that...

you should be talking to this person. You should be talking to that person. People are so generous to open up their network once you... I think when you lead with like, not what's in it for me, like how can I add value to this person? It's so true. Cause people read through that when if somebody just wants something out of you, it's like, well, ⁓ like, yeah, you're happy to help, but there's just that feeling of, you know, organic value transaction.

Adam Callinan (12:41)
Yeah, I mean, and I'll triple down on that. The authenticity piece in this world of AI is gonna continue to just be so wildly important and the human to human interaction component. I just think we're, we are as a species going to massively knee jerk back to that human to human trade shows and dinners and handshakes and high fives.

Joe (13:03)
Yeah, have you, jeez, have you seen, I mean, you're in Montana, but in New York now, there's ads on the subway of this new like AI wearable. It's called Friend. It's like this necklace that you can literally talk to. And yeah, it made me sad to say the least.

Adam Callinan (13:25)
Yeah, mean, ⁓ man. Haven't I said yeah, I feel like there's

Drew DiSpirito (13:28)
The AI rabbit hole. We're going down it. Here we go.

Joe (13:29)
Yeah. We're in CBC

for a reason, and that's not to talk about AI.

Adam Callinan (13:35)
Yeah, my gosh, I feel like there's been some movies made about this and they didn't go well.

Joe (13:39)
Yeah.

Drew DiSpirito (13:39)
Right?

Adam Callinan (13:41)
Yeah, I think there's a lot of amazing things that come from it, but the human human is a is a huge thing. So do you have Ecom business? Like, can I go on smear case is smear case.com? Or do you call it FroCo? I FroCo is a trademark that you have in the

Joe (13:46)
Sure.

smirkcase.com, we just got that domain thanks to an incredibly generous investor of ours. We have merch for sale, but ⁓ our e-commerce website is mostly like direct people to order on GoPuff, Instacart, DoorDash, or ⁓ direct them to our store map of where they can actually find it.

Adam Callinan (14:14)
Hmm

How do you think about attribution in that context? I've had a couple of conversations with drink brands, like alcohol brands, where obviously you can't really order alcohol online. How do you guys think about that? When you're directing people to all these other places, how do you track attribution or think about it?

Joe (14:40)
Yeah

Joe Rotondo (14:45)
is such a good question. Like you're talking to a guy that comes from e-commerce that is clinically freaking trained to reduce the click to check out. Like nobody wants to click, make the store experience easy and smooth. Like our website is so bare bones. I built it in about an hour. ⁓ You know, how like, what, yeah, geez, there's so much to unpack. What's exciting is

We see, we get so much great data on our website that we're going to be using for the lifespan of our business because we see a ripple effect of when we have a viral video on TikTok, when we have something go viral on Instagram, when we put a post up on LinkedIn, people are going to our website, right? And we're collecting that data. So we're getting great information on demographic.

location, and we can use that data to then say, Hey, like Chicago, Illinois is one of our top, visited cities, for website traffic. And, know, we're, our website is constantly breaking records of, of, of traffic that we're, we're doing month over month. ⁓ while it is frustrating that, you know, it's probably difficult to navigate if you're in Idaho and you want our product, you're definitely not going to be able to get it.

but it's a great way for us to sort of tell our story, to collect that data and make informed strategic decisions down the road when we go to a retailer and say, hey, like we have huge appetite in this particular city. It gives us sort of that data metric to go against. I think, ⁓ yeah, like being data-driven in that way is important, but in terms of like the ROI, ⁓

on some of these digital marketing that we do. It's tough to track, but at the end of the day, I think we live in a digital age. It's just true. And while we're in retail, it still matters what your presence looks like on the web.

Adam Callinan (16:54)
Any thoughts on that, Drew?

Drew DiSpirito (16:55)
Yeah, I'm trying to get to your point about attribution because it is something specifically when we think about driving trial and converting these folks, it's being in frozen and being predominantly retail, it makes it a lot more difficult. There's no affiliate marketing link. We can't just have a bunch of influencers say, click below, shop here. And sadly, the DoorDash's GoPuffs of the world, while they're great channels, they don't provide a lot of data back to us on the demographic of buyers. So I think there's a lot of market

Adam Callinan (17:03)
Ahem.

Drew DiSpirito (17:25)
opportunities for both existing platforms to work with their brands. I also think there could be mechanisms to enable influencers to facilitate retail buying. I don't think there's a lot to support that today. ⁓

But like Joe said, I think building critical mass and just having a captive audience helps to drive that traffic, whether or not we can say, okay, Joe actually ordered because Joe saw that video. We don't know, but we can see larger volumes of data showing velocity changes tied to something. yeah, it's definitely a little bit of a gray box when it comes to frozen in retail.

Adam Callinan (18:12)
Yeah, mean, let's be honest. Attribution has been a gray box for a very long time, even in EECOM up until the point where you're, you're spending enough dollars that multi-touch and all these fancy things actually matter. So it doesn't sound like you're really operating in that much of a different plane. You're looking at top line revenues by geography based on things that are, are, or are not happening digitally.

Drew DiSpirito (18:38)
Yeah, I think that's a fair assessment.

Adam Callinan (18:40)
Yeah. What are you using today? This is a selfish question for analytics, tracking analytics. You're not doing all that with GA4, you? Or are you?

Joe Rotondo (18:52)
We

do a little bit of Google, ⁓ but we dissect everything. Shopify is ⁓ where our website lives, but every month we're doing deep dives on just like the backend of our social channels, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Instacart, GoPuff, and Amazon. So we're pulling all that data individually.

and then dissecting it to see if we could see ⁓ stories or ⁓ similarities. So it's a little rudimentary, but it's important to do even though like we are in retail and we do do digital marketing, knowing the data story is so important, especially as a young brand. It's like, where are we actually, where do we have traction and why do we have traction?

there in that specific channel and then it just allows us to tailor our approach to you know each thing.

Drew DiSpirito (19:52)
Yeah, the only thing I would add to that is, you know, on the sales data side of the house, we get distributor reporting from both of our distribution partners. So we'll be able to see case level sales by flavor, by store, week over week. And it allows us to kind of know like where we have high performing stores. Was it tied to an activation or promotion?

⁓ Ideally, the more activations and promotions you do, you start to see that lift and that raise that floor. ⁓ This is a ⁓ great example. We were featured on another podcast indirectly by Stavi. ⁓ He was just shouting out our brand. We saw a huge uptick in GoBuff and then we have a sustaining increase ever since. So it's just...

It's nice to be able to like, it's, all in disparate places, but John and I have our pulse over those places so we can start to kind of assign that attribution if you will.

Adam Callinan (20:58)
Have you picked up talking about, you know, virality and the social things that you're doing? Have you picked up a theme for your brand on what has a tendency to make something like, what is that viral component?

Joe Rotondo (21:13)
Yeah, it's funny, like the most produced or thought about sort of piece of content typically performs the worst. And I think people just, I don't know, there's no rhyme or reason. For us, we've had a lot of success with like ASMR manufacturing videos of our ice cream being made. It's something that people don't really get to see a lot of. And I think people are interested in, since we are cottage cheese based.

frozen dessert, like people wonder like is it creamy? Is it smooth? So this sort of answers that question of texture and and I think people just love I think people go on social media for different use cases. They want to be entertained. They want to be educated or they want to be numbed. These manufacturing videos sort of do all three and and those have landed and it's it's typically the most low-lift low fidelity

⁓ piece of content that performed the best.

Drew DiSpirito (22:15)
Yeah, we often get from my close friends and family, like, you know, is there a 2.0 where you're going to have a much more polished website or a much more polished social media? And we've kind of gone back and forth of this because that low fidelity, low production value allows us to increase the velocity at which we create content. And it's seemingly pretty high engagement. think you have to remember like

Ice cream brand doesn't need to show up online like Louis Vuitton or something else, right? Like we don't need to over engineer our website ⁓ You you look at like Joe's comment you comment before like if you look at our website, it's it's very bare-bones but that's intentional because it immediately takes you to the ability to order and to this point earlier reducing clicks, so ⁓ There's a little bit of like intentional intentionally look

production value to what we're doing. But I'll be honest, coming from that kind of fashion world, it's sort of like at odds with my approach. Like I often want to see like everything super polished, everything kind of tie into the prior post and create this like, burriler campaign. But I think at the end of the day, like the attention span of people today is so small and very few people are paying attention.

to the extent that you are as the owner. So like you just need to prioritize getting content out, I think.

I'm starting convincing myself of this as I say.

Adam Callinan (23:58)
Yeah, I can see the internal sales pitch going on here is fantastic.

Yeah. I mean, I think you hear that relatively consistently. And we saw that at Bottlekeeper, the stuff we would shoot. And it was the same, like it was fun. We weren't selling cancer therapies. We were selling, you know, fancy, expensive beer bottle koozies. And it was a goofy, you know, tongue in cheek, super sarcastic. And everything we shot that did really well was done on an iPhone in 10 minutes.

And that's the stuff that went crazy. And we did some fancy production stuff and it was always at the end of the day, like why the F did we do that? We just spent a bunch of money creating a thing. We could have shot 15 of those things for a 10th the cost and tested it all faster.

Drew DiSpirito (24:29)
Yeah.

Joe Rotondo (24:36)
Yeah, what's interesting is in CBG especially, like your brand is your moat and your community is your moat, right? That's your biggest defense. ⁓ For a startup, it's really hard to justify the ROI on these produced photo shoots where you sink in a couple thousand bucks. I think in the early days, can scrap by pretty far.

⁓ with your dollar and like the roi will come from somewhere else ⁓ yeah it's it's it's a it's a fine balance of of threading the needle on you want to put out good content and you want to put energy and resources into it ⁓

but you want to make sure that your dollar is going to where it, your dollar and your energy is going to where it needs to in order to get to that next level of, of business success.

Drew DiSpirito (25:37)
Yeah, I think that's well said. think there are a lot of new brands that probably over invest in website design and maybe that's ⁓ stemming from perfectionism, which isn't a horrible thing, but in the name of like rapid iteration and getting out there, you need to be able to kind of temper those feelings of perfectionism and just get 1.0 out and you'll learn more about who your customer is, what part of your value prop truly resonates

with them and you can kind of tailor from there.

Adam Callinan (26:12)
How do you, let's go down that rabbit hole. There's, there are gems in there. How do you define good enough? If we're in a speed versus perfection.

Context here. What is good enough mean to you if and again you can use that in the case of smear case or use it in the case of that You know your cousin that has the idea and he's like halfway through a prototype How do you how do you explain to them? What good enough means?

Drew DiSpirito (27:18)
I'll let Joe go first. I have a little bit of a mental model, but.

Joe Rotondo (27:24)
Good enough is like, shit man, you got that idea? I will never be the one to say, I wish I could have done that. Fuck that, for real. Like you go to a museum with somebody and they see the red dot on the canvas, like, like, why didn't I do that? So why the fuck didn't you? You know what I mean? Like it's in the execution. And if the execution means writing a LinkedIn post that isn't that thought out and you put it out anyways, that's good enough.

If it's a shitty iPhone shot of you holding the pint in front of a store, which we do a ton of, like that is good enough. know, it's the like holding yourself back to wait for perfect or wait for V2 is where people get lost in that paralysis of action. I think good, if you're out there doing your thing, that is good enough, man. That's way better than what other people are doing, which is sitting on the couch with the idea stuck in their head.

and getting mad that they didn't do that thing. So I'm just passionate about that. You know, quick send and share your artwork. You know, at the end of the day, like, what we're doing is a form of our artwork and ⁓ artwork, think, is meant to be shared.

Adam Callinan (28:40)
let perfection get in the way of progress.

So Drew, how do you look at that?

Drew DiSpirito (28:44)
Yeah, I'm

like I said, I'm wired way differently. Like, I'll give you a, for example, quick side plot here. I went to Leon Bridges and Charlie Crockett Forest Tales last week and I felt moved by the concert. So I wrote a 500 word.

critique, if you will, more of a journal entry than a critique. And I was telling someone about it and I was like, should really post that on Substack. And just the thought of posting this long form content out into the world forever. Now I'm, you know, well, I need to get to B2, B3. I need to, you know, get my brother-in-law's opinion. He likes these artists. need to, you know, so I'm like, not only do I want it to be better, but I want people to speak into it. And Joe is wired the complete opposite. He's like, oh, wait.

shipping 1.0 and just getting it out there. I think we have a lot of our talk about attribution. I think a lot of our success as a brand is attributed to Joe's working style in that regard. And I've tried to be a lot more like that as I approach my own work. And it's not to say don't be collaborative ⁓ or don't be perfectionist, but it's being able to know that

for every day you wait to do that thing, it loses its efficacy. That article, if I posted that on Substack the night I wrote it, it probably could have gotten circulated or reviews, not that that was the intent, but ⁓ now if I post it this week, it's sort of stale. They're already in Oklahoma touring somewhere else. It's irrelevant. ⁓

But I think a decent mental model is probably the lifespan of the artifact itself and the cost. A post is free and it lives forever, but in the sphere of the news cycle, it's going to be gone in a few days. So post V1 and get it out there. If it's designing our custom cooler for a trade show that we know is a few hundred bucks,

and it's going to be at every trade show for the next three years. I think, you know, I'm glad we went to version two, three on that because every iterations, Jonah, I went back on that. The final cooler was way, way cooler than cooler number one. So I think just looking at that, the shelf life of the asset itself and like the spend, I think as those increase, the time and attention should increase.

Joe Rotondo (31:13)
you

Yeah, yeah, I appreciate that, Drew. think, like, as you are shipping those, that V1, like every single time you do it, you're gonna learn. So with that, like that first time is gonna be way worse than your 10th, 20th, 30th, 40th, 50th, right? So I think it's important to share fast so you can iterate fast and you can get feedback fast, right? You can see what's working, what's not working.

⁓ in, like a safe, there was a post that we ended up didn't putting out, like, like by us not sharing something it's we, we miss that opportunity to learn and get data and get feedback, see how our, ⁓ how our audience reacts to it. Right. I think in the early days we were like, we had a thesis of who our target customer was. And we, we acted on that and we re we really niche down and spoke to them.

But by sharing that, we eventually found a secondary customer that now like, wow, like we wouldn't have known if we had not shared the V1 of what we're working on, right? So yeah, there's, you're always going to sharpen the knife the more you stab it, which is counterintuitive, but it, it's just the truth.

Adam Callinan (32:34)
Do you think there is value in the balance or the in-between where you both sit? Like Joe, do you find yourself coming more towards center on that like super aggressive, get it out now immediately, fuck it or else thing or are you pretty hard and fast on the aggressive line?

Joe Rotondo (32:56)
I think that's what makes us successful is that there is that balance. ⁓ I'm always looking for ways to grow and better myself, but I think, you know, there's, yeah, I don't, I don't know. think for where we are now, I think ⁓ the mentality, like we're only a year old. You know what I mean? Our hype is way bigger than our actual footprint and stage. So I think.

we have maturing and catching up to do and like we can grow into X. Yeah, am I getting more to center that? I don't know.

Drew DiSpirito (33:39)
I think the collective.

As a collective, are, you know, like we in this very room, we had a Founders Day a couple of weeks ago where we just took a look at ourselves and how we're carrying ourselves and the value that we're contributing and our working styles just to get more aligned. you know, Joe said, you know, I think I'm a move fast and break shit guy. And I think you're a think through it guy. And we both we both and on my page, we each had our own little pages. I more or less said the same thing.

And we're like, well, does anything need to change about that? And we both kind of said, no, the equilibrium is us being together. So we don't need to evolve individually so much as making sure that ⁓ both voices are contributing to the strategy. think, yeah, like I said before, I don't think we would be as far along in our journey had we not had Joe's persona in the room, but maybe there are.

Like you can't, there's no, I used to do enterprise risk management for six years. It's really hard to measure return on risk. You know, it's hard to measure not effing up, but I think having that other perspective in the room helps you avoid pitfalls that could create problems down the road. like I.

Adam Callinan (34:46)
You

Drew DiSpirito (35:01)
I think if you're a founder and you're looking for more support, everyone says fill the skills gaps, but I think filling the risk tolerance gap is something that's not really discussed. ⁓ It's worth talking to that trepidatious person and then having that same conversation with the jump in head first person and kind of see where they say, and have, in the rant here, we had this conversation about retailer expansion.

the opportunity to be in probably more than 2,000 doors by March, which would 20x our store count nearly. And we're talking to one advisor and they're like, what's the bigger risk? If you do it or if you don't want and they're more so leaning towards small, calculated, don't get ahead of your skis. And then we talked to another advisor and they're like, do you believe in your brand or not? Is your sourcing in order? Is your capital in order?

Is this the right retail channel? If it's yes, yes, and yes, then what are you waiting for? Like this is the opportunity to do it. ⁓ So it's just like good to get both of those perspectives and then kind of use our professional judgment to say, okay, this is, this is what we want to do. Like it is a yes, yes, and yes. So therefore we will, you know, go forward.

Adam Callinan (36:20)
Yeah, I if it doesn't make you a little bit uncomfortable, it's probably not worth spending.

Joe Rotondo (36:20)
Good job.

Adam Callinan (36:24)
That's cool though. My in bottle keeper, my partner was my cousin and I was super aggressive and he was super conservative. And it was a beautiful balance of meeting in the middle where I can, I mean, could name a hundred times where we were arguing about some shit and we ended up in the middle of it, which was the right place to be. It was hard. I mean, it wasn't always pretty, but I think having two founders that think the same way is worthless. You might as well just have one, but just do it.

Joe Rotondo (36:25)
Absolutely.

Drew DiSpirito (36:48)
Yeah.

Joe Rotondo (36:49)
Yeah.

Yeah. I think to sum it up in one sentence is when we made a decision to go for it is like, we want it to be first, but we wanted it. We wanted to do it the right way. Right. That is literally the yin and yang of our relationship is like, we have to go as fast as possible, but it needs to be, ⁓ it needs to be done in a way that makes sense. ⁓ and that, that got us to where we are.

Adam Callinan (37:19)
Yeah, that's really cool. There is a big perception as reality thing going on here as well, given the fact that you're claiming the footprint, the digital footprint feels bigger than the physical footprint and there's so much beauty to that. I mean, it's so much more difficult to create that than the opposite. So well done, that's really cool.

Joe Rotondo (37:37)
Yeah, thank you.

Yeah, we're pretty darn fortunate. Honestly, it is a huge massive blessing that people have recognized it and have seen the value in it and have taken what we built and added to their conversation, you know? And there's an element of virality to what the heck is frozen cottage cheese?

You know what I mean? there's an element of luck at play for sure. Like it'd be ignorant to not recognize that. ⁓ But it's on us to execute and capitalize on the moment for sure.

Adam Callinan (38:20)
Yeah. Switching gears. ⁓ one of the things that is one of the two topics that is very important in this podcast that I really enjoy spending time around is the, or the difficult things or the components and pieces that you have built into your life that allow you to remain resilient. And Joe, you said something at the beginning of this, our discussion here was that you need to put yourself in a position to get a little lucky. And I

deeply agree with that construct and that if we can build things into our personal lives, look, cause let's be clear, like there is no, when you're an entrepreneur, there is no like business and personal, it doesn't really work like that. If we can build things into our personal lives that allow us to be more durable through these like wild up and down swings to get to that point, to get to that lucky point, that first inflection point, more companies will be more successful. Sure as hell it'll be a lot more fun.

how do you do to kind of stay in the game? I know we talked to marathons, I imagine that's probably part of it.

Joe Rotondo (39:28)
I retired from running after the New York City Marathon, honestly. ⁓ I did a handful and it was great. But in high school and college, I swam and the toughest part was jumping in the water. That was the toughest part. That's the toughest part about entrepreneurship. That's the toughest part about launching a business. That's the toughest part about learning something new is literally jumping in the water. But once you're in the water,

Adam Callinan (39:31)
Okay. Was that one and done or did you do a couple?

Drew DiSpirito (39:32)
Thanks.

Joe Rotondo (39:56)
damn does it feel good because you did the hardest part, right? The hardest part is starting for a lot of people. ⁓ So I think that may have trained me to just like attack the hard, do the uncomfortable. I'm still trying to, you know, there's still a lot of things in my life that are difficult that I avoid, that I'm trying to get better at. But I think what keeps me personally grounded is waking up every morning,

and getting a workout in and just like attacking the day that way. think it's like you exert a lot of energy, you get that anxiety off your chest and it just sets you up for like, wow, I did the hard thing today physically. Like now I can get after the rest.

Adam Callinan (40:43)
How about you, Drew?

Drew DiSpirito (40:45)
Yeah, it's interesting. Growing up, I was very competitive. had a twin brother and was an athlete all throughout high school and part of college. I definitely consider myself much less competitive now. I more so focus on

like longevity as far as physical health goes. Like so yoga, like I try and make a weekly habit. I do slow flow like hot yoga because I've had back pain for 12 years and I know that when that kicks in like then that's all my brain can concentrate on. So for me like taking care of the physical self has become a much higher priority as I've gotten into like a much more serious entrepreneurial endeavor. And I think if you're in your 20s and you think it's

going to happen to you. It will happen to you. Create a stretching routine now if you can. You don't have to be a yogi, but just figure those things out. Work on mobility. think that's kind of an underrated skill set is mobility. ⁓ And then like

You know, for me, at least, like I used to hang a sign above my door that was said, manufacturer opportunities. And what that meant was like, put yourself put yourself in that room. That's the effect that you can. I was also kind of.

the way I always, like I only missed two days of high school and four years and it was because my grandfather passed away because I never wanted to be playing from a back foot academically or from sports. Like I missed the drill in wrestling practice to learn how to do that move. Now I'm, you know, on the back foot going into the meet that weekend not knowing a critical skill that could have benefited me in that match. So I think, yeah, like, and I love going to lectures on

all topics. Like, I used to go to this group called Green Drinks Brooklyn, and it was just sustainability topics from sustainable architecture to upcycling and renewable energy. Like, I definitely think this notion of continuous learning in subjects that seem unrelated will benefit you in the long run because of a more holistic perspective. So I guess if I was going to distill it,

physical self, mobility, mental self, diversity, diversity of thought, and making sure you're kind of learning about seemingly disparate things because you'll be able to plug them together in a beneficial way that you won't be able to foresee going in.

Adam Callinan (43:28)
Yeah, I think I always think of that in the context of a big bowl of soup. It's literally like my analogy is you go and learn all these like random ass things and then at some point you realize you've made them into this epic soup and you don't know it when it's happening and it all just comes together and you're like, ⁓ shit, that's what that was.

Drew DiSpirito (43:39)
Okay.

Yeah,

I love that. Yeah.

I mean, it kind of just snowballs, right? Like Joe had a denim brand. Joe had a podcast series himself, you know, all these entrepreneurial things that he had done. I cut hair for high school and college days. I had a clothing brand and now this like Joe always says, like, you got to get your reps in. And I think that aligns to the, you the knife actually gets sharper the more you use it in entrepreneurship, which is a novel comment. I've never heard Joe's, so I feel like

Adam Callinan (43:46)
Yeah.

Drew DiSpirito (44:15)
I like talking a lot. I wrote that down. I'm going to keep thinking about that. think that's how you have to approach these things.

Adam Callinan (44:25)
⁓ side note, I'll edit this part out, but when we're done, don't hang up cause we have to wait for your episodes to load all the way in Riverside. ⁓ Drew, have to ask because you have a wall behind you covered in old Porsches and I am a massive Porsche file. I can see a couple of G bodies up there. Yeah, there's one. What's the story?

Drew DiSpirito (44:32)
Sounds good.

Yeah.

my God. Well, my grandfather worked for GM. My dad is a total car nut. He knows way, way too much. He's like encyclopedic knowledge. I've always approached it more from like a sensory perspective, like the design and the smells and the sounds. Like I grew up going to car shows every summer with my dad and my brother.

and I have a model of a Lamborghini Super Veloce right in front of me. ⁓ And these are just a couple of portraits and mostly artists that I appreciate. ⁓

One guy who renders a lot of futuristic renditions, another guy who uses a PVC pipe to create life-scale models. And then everyone knows Daniel Arsham. did his Future Relics campaign where he built all these kind of eroded artifacts of today. then the Rolls Royce was this bit of photo I shot in Midtown East a couple years ago I decided to frame. So that's kind of an outlier, but yeah.

⁓ Anything vintage. I have a keen interest in a shoot film. ride a vintage motorcycle and I love all things old cars.

Adam Callinan (46:04)
Yeah, we were very much in line there. I've owned a number of old naturally aspirated Porsches. I just sold an 88, a 930 that I absolutely loved and bought a 94 Defender 110 that I'm fixing up in my garage. Yeah.

Drew DiSpirito (46:13)
No, I won't.

good for you. That's amazing.

What color was the 930?

Adam Callinan (46:22)
I was black. It was a cabriolet. It was black on tan. I bought that car from the original owner with 20,000 miles on it. It was epic. Yeah. But I went out in the garage one day and my four year old son was standing in the middle of the hood. I was like, got to get that out of here. ⁓

Drew DiSpirito (46:27)
Wow.

Joe Rotondo (46:29)
Yeah.

Drew DiSpirito (46:30)
That's pretty special.

no. Yeah.

my gosh. Yeah, it's gonna be hard to reach the top of the defenderhood. Have you seen the Jerry Seinfeld quote? Like the man who dies with the lowest mileage proportion loses? Yeah. Yeah, you do see a lot.

Adam Callinan (46:45)
yeah, he can barely get inside it, it's perfect.

Joe Rotondo (46:47)
you

Adam Callinan (46:54)
That's totally true. Yeah, you see that a lot. You see that a lot. These amazing

cars that just don't get driven like they're moving art.

Drew DiSpirito (47:01)
Yeah.

Adam Callinan (47:03)
Yeah. Awesome guys. Where do you want people to find you? Personally, professionally, we'll put all the links in the show notes and everything.

Joe Rotondo (47:12)
Yeah, right now you can get Smear Case in Whole Foods in the Tri-State area, in Sprouts down in Florida. If you're in New York City, it's the most accessible. You get on GoPuff, Instacart, DoorDash. You could even order it on Amazon if you're near a Whole Foods at StocksOS. I think, yeah, what's exciting is we have, we've really grown a community of case heads on social media and ⁓

Drew and I are excited that, you know, come March of next year, we're going to be, our footprint will be way larger. So our fro-co will be way more accessible. ⁓ So thank you for being patient. Thank you for following along. Thank you for being excited. It, it'll definitely be worth the wait. We're confident. ⁓ Yeah, we're confident that you're going to love it as soon as you try it. So you can follow us ⁓ on Instagram at Eat Smear Case. That's for Instagram and TikTok.

You could follow myself on LinkedIn, Joe Rotundo, and that's where I share what the journey's like.

Adam Callinan (48:18)
Drew, any special links? Okay.

Drew DiSpirito (48:19)
Nothing to add. Just go to

at Eatsmearcase. Yeah. You gotta build that community.

Adam Callinan (48:25)
Epic.

Well, thanks a ton guys. This is super fun. Appreciate your time. Best luck with the continued growth and launch super cool what you guys are doing.

Joe Rotondo (48:34)
Thanks, Adam.

Drew DiSpirito (48:35)
Thank you.