The Shopify dashboard was running in a co-working space in Brooklyn when the number crossed seven figures. Greg LaVecchia, co-founder and CEO of Bloom, was sitting next to his wife Mari, just the two of them and maybe one other person on staff, watching what happened after they restocked their greens powder and sent every email, text, and Facebook ad they had at once. Within 12 hours, Bloom had done $1.36 million in sales that day. What Lav did the following morning is the part most people do not expect: he called the manufacturer and placed a purchase order for $1.36 million in more greens. Every dollar, straight back into the machine.
Lav is 31 years old, co-founder of Bloom alongside his wife, and by his account the business now does over a million dollars a day in sales and is approaching 70,000 retail doors worldwide. He built it without owning a single warehouse, truck, or manufacturing facility. The journey took ten years, a receding hairline, gray hairs he is frank about, and what he calls ‘a million mistakes.’ The business principles he extracted from those mistakes are what he lays out here, in his own words, without a formula anyone can copy.
Why scaling first beats optimizing early
The first lesson Lav hammers is the one he says trips up new founders most consistently. They spend their early energy renegotiating supplier costs, studying profit-and-loss statements, and setting up tax-advantaged structures before the business has any real size. At Bloom, he did not touch supplier or manufacturer renegotiations for the first three years. The only thing that mattered was whether the customer received a product they loved, on time, in packaging that looked and tasted exactly right. ‘I don’t care about making 30% profit on $50,000,’ he said. ‘I care about making 30% profit on $100 million or on today $500 million.’ The goal in the early stage, by his logic, is not a highly profitable business. It is a big one.
This connects directly to his read on cultural momentum versus spreadsheet validation. When Bloom launched its purple-canned energy drink in July 2024, every consultant in the room told the team that any female-targeted energy drink had to come in a white can. Celsius had dominated with white. Hard seltzers were white. The data was unambiguous. Lav launched purple anyway, because he wanted someone to be able to identify a Bloom can from across an airport. Today, Bloom’s energy drink line is tracking toward $500 million in annual revenue. The crisp apple flavor alone, he says, will do over $100 million this year. Not one dollar of consumer research was spent developing it. The women in the office tried it and said it was incredible, and that was enough to move.
The protein soda he walked away from at the last minute
Not every bet survived. Two years before this account, Lav put serious money into research and development for a protein soda, sold it into strategic partners, and had tens of millions of dollars in potential revenue lined up. Then he watched several well-funded protein sodas enter the market with professional retail execution and saw them all fail within a week. He called the partners, called the retailers, and killed the project in its final month. It disappointed people. It erased tens of millions in near-term revenue. He walked away because he decided one badly-timed product at scale was more expensive than the short-term loss of pulling out early.
His first pre-workout product stained fingers, clothes, and shaker bottles a deep red from natural beet powder and tasted, no matter how much flavoring he added, like a beet pina colada. His earliest nutrition packaging had no Bloom logo, only a letter B, meaning customers who wanted to reorder had no idea what company they had bought from. One million cans of Bloom Pop shipped with the romance copy on the back panel cut off mid-sentence. One out of one million customers commented on it.
The McLaren that waited for $100 million
Lav and Mari shared a single car until Bloom was running at $100 million a year in annual revenue. The McLaren 720S in papaya orange came after the run rate cleared that threshold, not before. He was around 26 years old at the time.
The principle underneath that story is the one he calls the most important for early-stage founders: the business eats first. Every dollar pulled out too early carries an opportunity cost that compounds against the future of the company. The founders who build something great, in his framing, are the ones who stay in monk mode for three, four, five, sometimes six years, and only then do both simultaneously, taking from the business while continuing to feed it.
What ties all ten lessons together, Lav argues, is a single disposition: comfort with uncertainty. Lav put it plainly: ‘Every big decision that I made that ended up becoming something fruitful started with a lot of fear, a lot of conviction, but a lot of fear and very little data to back it up, but a willingness to move anyway.’ The certainty, he says, came after the action, not before it.
The six-month-old who changed the frame
Somewhere in the middle of laying out these lessons, Lav mentions a six-month-old son named Kai at home.
Bloom began as $9.99 instant-download workout PDFs sold on Instagram under a business called Mari Fitness, built by two people whose only real skill was that they were obsessed with fitness and wanted to share it. That was the starting point for everything that followed.
