What really kills most early-stage consumer brands isn't a bad idea. It's underestimating how much cash, traction, and market proof it actually takes to survive.

In this episode of Seed Money, Jayla sits down with beverage industry veteran Sam Anderson, co-founder of BevAssets and Frontline Beverages, to unpack the hard truths most first-time founders do not hear early enough.

If you are building a beverage, CPG, or physical product brand, this episode can help you avoid the expensive mistakes that wipe out most founders in the first one to three years (95% don't make it past year 3!). Sam shares what actually works instead—starting in your backyard, building proof of concept one account at a time, creating velocity before expanding, and understanding the real economics behind shelf price, margins, and reorders.

Why should you care now? Because in today's market, cash is tighter, distributors are more selective, retailers expect movement fast, and founders can no longer afford to confuse visibility with traction. This episode is a must-listen for entrepreneurs who want to grow smarter, raise capital more credibly, and build a brand that has a real shot at lasting.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why most first-time founders underestimate the true cost of launching a beverage brand

• How to build proof of concept before expanding into new markets

• The danger of expanding too fast with limited capital

• Why founders need industry-specific advisors before raising serious money

• What sustainable success can look like even without a massive exit

Guest Bio:

Sam Anderson

Sam is a beverage industry professional focused on building brands and driving growth. After working with brands like E&J Gallo, Diageo, Coca-Cola, Brown-Forman, Kellogg's, and Breakthru Beverage Group, Sam brings a passion for strategy, sales, and market expansion to help emerging brands navigate go-to-market planning, distribution partnerships, and customer engagement. His goal is to turn great beverage concepts into scalable, successful businesses through practical execution and strong industry relationships.

Connect with Sam here on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samuel-anderson-74a582/

About Your Host

Jayla Siciliano is an entrepreneur with 25+ years in consumer brands, product, and marketing. After raising her first angel round against all odds and later appearing on Shark Tank, where she closed a deal with Mark Cuban, she now helps founders become fundable, confident, and ready to attract the right investors. Entrepreneurship changed her life, and she's on a mission to help first-time founders raise their first round of angel funding and change theirs too.

Disclaimer

The information in this podcast is educational and general in nature and does not take into consideration the listener's personal circumstances. Therefore, it is not intended to be a substitute for specific, individualized financial, legal, or tax advice.

If you're getting ready to raise—or already in the middle of it and not getting the responses you hoped for—this episode will change how you think about pitching. Jayla sits down with Diana Wilson, a seasoned executive who has raised over $100M and taken Deckers, the now-billion-dollar lifestyle brand, public. Diana unpacks one of the biggest reasons first-time founders fail to get funded: they're busy selling the beauty of their business, but never answering the one question every investor is silently asking—what's in it for me?

Diana shares her founder pet peeves and the framework every founder needs to create real investor alignment—a compelling story, solid financial projections, and the emotional intelligence to build trust in the room. She also breaks down the most common mistakes early-stage entrepreneurs make, from vague growth plans and weak financials to poor follow-up and lack of rehearsal, and why so many founders overlook the relationship-building side of fundraising altogether.

This matters now because capital is harder to win when you are a first-time founder. Investors are moving fast, filtering faster, and making decisions on whether they trust you long before they say yes. If you want funding, you cannot rely on passion alone. You need to show that you understand the numbers, can communicate clearly, and know how to turn investor interest into long-term belief.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• The financial mistakes that instantly weaken a pitch

• Why "hockey stick" projections can destroy credibility

• How to use milestones and funding tranches to tell a more believable story

• The soft skills that make investors trust you

• How to follow up in a way that builds long-term relationships

If you are building your first company and trying to raise money, this conversation will help you pitch smarter, avoid the mistakes that turn investors off, and understand what actually gets people to lean in.

Listen to the end when Jayla brings on a special guest who practicies live in front of Diana.

Don't have time to take notes? You can download Diana's Three Pillar Framework HERE for free.

Guest Bio:

Diana Wilson is a committed and success-driven leader who is passionate about helping companies and individuals turn uncertainty and change into opportunity and growth. With more than 30 years of experience across strategy, finance, and operations, she has raised over $100 million, led companies through high-stakes growth, including taking Deckers public, and built high-achieving teams that perform under pressure. Today, she advises leaders and early-stage founders through pivotal moments of growth and change. Connect with Diana on Linkedin and follow her substack Wit & Wisdom here. https://substack.com/@dianamwilson

About Your Host

Jayla Siciliano is an entrepreneur with 25+ years in consumer brands, product, and marketing. After raising her first angel round against all odds and later appearing on Shark Tank, where she closed a deal with Mark Cuban, she now helps founders become fundable, confident, and ready to attract the right investors. Entrepreneurship changed her life, and she's on a mission to help first-time founders raise their first round of angel funding and change theirs too.

Join the fund raising conversation with Jayla on LinkedIn.

Disclaimer

The information in this podcast is educational and general in nature and does not take into consideration the listener's personal circumstances. Therefore, it is not intended to be a substitute for specific, individualized financial, legal, or tax advice.

It's 11pm and you're tweaking your deck for the gazillionth time.

You know your background. You know your level of commitment. You know exactly how much you've sacrificed to get here.

But how are investors supposed to know that?

If investors don't think you're credible, they won't take you seriously. And here's what no one's telling you—it's probably not your idea, your market size, or your projections that's holding you back.

Investors are looking at your deck and quietly asking one question: "Is this founder for real?"

And your deck isn't answering it.

In this episode, Jayla reveals the exact credibility marker that was missing from all three pitch decks she reviewed last week—from founders who had personally invested anywhere from $300K to nearly a million dollars of their own money. These were serious, committed, deeply invested founders.

And none of them had it in their deck.

Investors at this stage aren't funding ideas. They're funding you—your conviction, your sacrifice, the proof that you've already got skin in the game.

This episode could be the difference between another polite pass and someone saying "yeah, let's meet."

Listen to the full episode now—and if it hits home, please leave a review. It helps more first-time founders find this show when they need it most. And if you know someone who keeps tweaking their deck and still isn't getting responses, send this their way. They need to hear this.

Raising capital for a CPG brand can feel like a black box. The Investor Ready Checklist shows you exactly what investors are looking for, the signals they use to judge founders, and whether your brand is truly ready to raise. Use this simple checklist to remove the guesswork and approach investors with confidence.

👉 See If You're Investor Ready

About Your Host

Jayla Siciliano is an entrepreneur with 25+ years in consumer brands, product, and marketing. After raising her first angel round against all odds and later appearing on Shark Tank, where she closed a deal with Mark Cuban, she now helps founders become fundable, confident, and ready to attract the right investors. Entrepreneurship changed her life, and she's on a mission to help first-time founders raise their first round of angel funding and change theirs too.

Disclaimer

The information in this podcast is educational and general in nature and does not take into consideration the listener's personal circumstances. Therefore, it is not intended to be a substitute for specific, individualized financial, legal, or tax advice.

Most founders think fundraising is persuasion. It's not—it's alignment. In this episode, Ali Dastjerdi (Co-Founder of Raylu) shares the mental models he learned from speaking with 5,000+ founders, raising seed and Series A, and surviving multiple near-death pivots.

You'll learn how to diagnose investor fit in minutes, engineer momentum with strategic angels, and recognize product-market fit when customers try to rip the product out of your hands. Click below to listen and apply these frameworks to your next raise.

Guest Bio:

Ali Dastjerdi is the Co-Founder and CEO of Raylu, an AI platform built for private market investors. Raylu helps funds separate signal from noise, evaluate opportunities faster, and make higher-confidence investment decisions with complete transparency. Before founding Raylu, Ali worked on the investment team at Insight Partners, where he focused on developer infrastructure, data, and enterprise software. His experience investing in companies such as Weights & Biases, Landing AI, and DNSFilter inspired him to bridge the gap between technology and investing. Based in New York, Ali leads Raylu with the belief that the future of private markets belongs to investors who combine judgment with intelligence and who move not just fast but smart.

Connect with Ali Dastjerdi:

LinkedIn

Relu Careers

Relu - AI Platform for Investor-Startup Matching

About Your Host

Jayla Siciliano is an entrepreneur with 25+ years in consumer brands, product, and marketing. After raising her first angel round against all odds and later appearing on Shark Tank, where she closed a deal with Mark Cuban, she now helps founders become fundable, confident, and ready to attract the right investors. Entrepreneurship changed her life, and she's on a mission to help first-time founders raise their first round of angel funding and change theirs too.

Know If You're Investor Ready

Raising capital for a CPG brand can feel like a black box. The Investor Ready Checklist shows you exactly what investors are looking for, the signals they use to judge founders, and whether your brand is truly ready to raise. Use this simple checklist to remove the guesswork and approach investors with confidence. Click below to get your copy now.

See If You're Investor Ready https://seedmoney.mysamcart.com/free-checklist

Disclaimer

The information in this podcast is educational and general in nature and does not take into consideration the listener's personal circumstances. Therefore, it is not intended to be a substitute for specific, individualized financial, legal, or tax advice.

If you're a first-time founder, you're probably feeling it:
Cold outreach gets ignored. Paid ads are expensive and unpredictable. And in an increasingly "fake" online world, trust is harder (and slower) to earn. The result? You burn weeks in meetings, chase intros that never materialize, and pour energy into "partnerships" that look good on paper… then ghost at the finish line.

In this episode, Jayla sits down with Kyle Kane (former Universal Music VP of A&R, TEDx speaker, executive producer, award-winning entrepreneur), now founder of Onspark.com, to break down why partnerships are the #1 growth driver for modern businesses—and how early-stage founders can stop guessing and start building partnerships that actually produce revenue.

Kyle shares lessons from building over $2B in partnership value working with major brands and artists, then explains how he's turning that playbook into OnSpark, an AI-powered partnership engine designed to help founders, creators, and investors find vetted, aligned, high-intent partners.

• The real reason most partnerships fail: misalignment + unclear value exchange

• How Kyle reverse-engineered partnership success into a simple lifecycle:

  • Discover → Verify → Launch → Amplify

• The two hidden deal-killers that often show up right before the finish line:

  • Low self-worth ("What do I even have to offer?")

  • Lack of trust (ghosting, last-minute fear, sabotage)

• How to define a "successful partnership" based on your stage (audience, distribution, clients, investors, etc.)

• The founder investor strategy most people get wrong:

  • Stop treating investor meetings like interviews—you're interviewing them

  • Ask the questions that reveal if they can actually cut a check

  • The value of being (not just looking) buttoned up when talking to investors

• The growth principle trends Kyle sees successful entrepreneurs have:

  • Distribution before product

  • Leverage over effort

  • "Build environments where luck becomes inevitable"

  • Being focused is the #1 force of nature for any entrepreneur

• Kyle's take on AI: essential, but dangerous if it replaces your thinking

Visit OnSpark Today– AI-powered partnership engine

Connect with Kyle on LinkedIn

Dan Martell + Book Buy Back Your Time

About your Host:

About Your Host

Jayla Siciliano is an entrepreneur with 25+ years in consumer brands, product, and marketing. After raising her first angel round against all odds and later appearing on Shark Tank, where she closed a deal with Mark Cuban, she now helps founders become fundable, confident, and ready to attract the right investors. Entrepreneurship changed her life, and she's on a mission to help first-time founders raise their first round of angel funding and change theirs too.

Disclaimer

The information in this podcast is educational and general in nature and does not take into consideration the listener's personal circumstances. Therefore, it is not intended to be a substitute for specific, individualized financial, legal, or tax advice.

If you're tired of getting silence after your investor pitch, this episode is your wake-up call. We're breaking down the real reason you're getting ghosted—and it's not your idea. It's how you handle the investor Q&A. Learn how to show up composed, confident, and ready to answer any investor question. Find out how to stop rambling under pressure, and get the exact system Jayla used to raise her first round as a pre-revenue cpg startup and later land a Shark Tank deal.

Need help with Q&A? I created a tool for you (what I wish I had) to help you get fully prepared and crush that next investor meeting by having the answers investors are looking for.

https://seedmoney.mysamcart.com/deck-of-investor-ready-flashcards97

Topics Covered in this episode:

• Why investor silence usually has nothing to do with your idea

• The four make-or-break questions every founder must be ready to answer

• How to talk about your numbers—even if you're early stage

• Crafting a compelling "Why Now" narrative

• What to say when asked: "What stops someone from copying this?"

• How to address red flags before investors bring them up

• The mental trap of desperation and how to avoid it

• Practicing under pressure: the exact method Jayla used to land $450K and a Shark Tank deal

• Why the Q&A is more important than your pitch deck

• How physical flashcards can train your brain to stay calm and confident

About Your Host

Jayla Siciliano is an entrepreneur with 25+ years in consumer brands, product, and marketing. After raising her first angel round against all odds and later appearing on Shark Tank, where she closed a deal with Mark Cuban, she now helps founders become fundable, confident, and ready to attract the right investors. Entrepreneurship changed her life, and she's on a mission to help first-time founders raise their first round of angel funding and change theirs too.

Disclaimer

The information in this podcast is educational and general in nature and does not take into consideration the listener's personal circumstances. Therefore, it is not intended to be a substitute for specific, individualized financial, legal, or tax advice.

If you're sending investor emails, landing the occasional meeting, but waking up at 2 a.m. gripped with quiet panic—this episode is for you. Jayla Siciliano gets real about the emotional rollercoaster of fundraising and how desperation, even when justified, can tank your chances. Sharing personal stories from her own journey (including her Shark Tank experience), Jayla breaks down five actionable strategies to help founders show confidence and composure when everything is riding on the raise.

You'll Learn:

Why focusing on your vision instead of your needs changes everything

How to create momentum and avoid clinging to one investor

The art of asking like a partner—not a pitcher

When not to push for a close

How to shift your energy before every meeting

👇Get The Free Investor Ready Checklist ✅

https://seedmoney.mysamcart.com/free-checklist/

Raising capital but not really sure what investors want? The Free Investor Ready Checklist gives you the exact step-by-step path to get investor-ready and avoid the rookie mistakes that kill deals before they start. Grab it above and start fundraising and stop making mistakes.

About Your Host

Jayla Siciliano is an entrepreneur with 25+ years in consumer brands, product, and marketing. After raising her first angel round against all odds and later appearing on Shark Tank, where she closed a deal with Mark Cuban, she now helps founders become fundable, confident, and ready to attract the right investors. Entrepreneurship changed her life, and she's on a mission to help first-time founders raise their first round of angel funding and change theirs too.

Disclaimer

The information in this podcast is educational and general in nature and does not take into consideration the listener's personal circumstances. Therefore, it is not intended to be a substitute for specific, individualized financial, legal, or tax advice.

👇Get The Free Investor Ready Checklist ✅

https://seedmoney.mysamcart.com/free-checklist/

Raising capital but not really sure what investors want? The Free Investor Ready Checklist gives you the exact step-by-step path to get investor-ready and avoid the rookie mistakes that kill deals before they start. Grab it above and start fundraising and stop making mistakes.

In this episode:

If you're an early-stage CPG founder struggling to raise money, it's probably not your product—it's your pitch list. In this episode we're talking about Why Your First Investor is Also Your Customer. We break down why the right investors are often already fans of your brand and your product, and how to identify those early believers. Make this mindset shift now and stop wasting time in the wrong rooms. Click below and start targeting smarter.

Topics Covered;

• Your first investors are likely to be your customers.

• Many founders pitch to the wrong people, like VCs.

• Angel investors are often passionate about the problem you're solving.

• Lead with pain points, not product features.

• Finding believers in your product is crucial for early funding.

• Networking is key; start with personal connections.

• Ask your network for introductions to potential investors.

• The investor community is more cautious in uncertain times.

• Building momentum requires talking to many people.

• Shift your mindset from seeking investors to finding believers.

About Your Host

Jayla Siciliano is an entrepreneur with 25+ years in consumer brands, product, and marketing. After raising her first angel round against all odds and later appearing on Shark Tank, where she closed a deal with Mark Cuban, she now helps founders become fundable, confident, and ready to attract the right investors. Entrepreneurship changed her life, and she's on a mission to help first-time founders raise their first round of angel funding and change theirs too.

Get More of Jayla's Fundraising Resources: https://seedmoney.mysamcart.com/seed-money/

Disclaimer

The information in this podcast is educational and general in nature and does not take into consideration the listener's personal circumstances. Therefore, it is not intended to be a substitute for specific, individualized financial, legal, or tax advice.