The question arrived without warning, phrased like a dare and delivered straight to camera: “Do you want to build the next billion-dollar brand with us?” Allison Ellsworth posted it late last month, almost offhandedly, to the six-figure audience she has spent years cultivating across TikTok and Instagram. Within days, the woman who turned a kitchen experiment with apple cider vinegar into a prebiotic-soda empire had more than 2,000 resumes in her inbox for five open roles, and the quiet realization that she had stumbled onto something. “I just posted on social media not fully realizing how viral it would go,” she told Marketing Brew. “I just think it was a fun, modern way to recruit.”
What she is recruiting for remains, for now, deliberately obscured. The new consumer brand is still largely under wraps, its team currently a lean ten people, its launch penciled in for November. The open positions skew toward the world Ellsworth knows best, digital communications, influencer management, the creative machinery of a modern CPG launch, and applicants have flooded in from exactly that world. Multiple candidates are already deep in interviews. The one caveat she has made explicit is that this is not a Poppi rerun. The new venture, she has told her followers, is “not competitive to Poppi,” so the fans hoping to work on Poppi 2.0 need not apply.
The context here matters, because Ellsworth is not a first-time founder testing whether anyone will notice. In May 2025, PepsiCo closed its acquisition of Poppi for a staggering $1.95 billion, a figure that included an estimated $300 million in cash tax benefits and marked the largest exit ever recorded for a female founder in the beverage industry. She built the brand with her husband, Stephen, going from friends-and-family taste tests to the Dallas Farmers Market to the number-one best-selling soda on Amazon and a Super Bowl spot. She has since become a fixture of the entrepreneurial firmament, landing on the TIME100 Next list and returning to Shark Tank as a guest investor. When Allison Ellsworth asks if you want to build something with her, the ask carries weight.
That weight is precisely the point she is making. The instant traction, she argues, is proof of what it means to be a socially native founder, something she describes as table stakes for any brand hoping to build affinity with a younger generation. “I’ve always seen my platforms as a way to not only build community, but to be transparent,” she said. “I don’t see why we wouldn’t continue to do all of that. Why not use this beautiful tool that we have that everyone’s already looking to and is already inspired by?” She began posting founder content back in 2020 and has, in the years since, effectively authored a playbook that a wave of younger brand-builders now follow.
There are limits to the method, and she is candid about them. The applications have skewed heavily toward marketing, creative, and social, while supply chain, finance, and operations roles have drawn far less interest, in part, she suspects, because those functions simply do not live in the social feed the way creative work does. Some applicants have been younger or underqualified, an unsurprising byproduct of the medium. More traditional recruiting will follow. For now, the posts are working.
This time, though, she is building differently. Where Poppi’s early strategy amounted to “figure it out as we go,” she is approaching the new brand with intention, org charts drawn early, culture built from the start. She does not plan to be the perpetual face of its social strategy, a conscious response to a landscape she sees as increasingly saturated, and she is chasing new formats to break through, including long-form content and a film crew currently documenting the build. Her advice to founders still frozen by the camera is characteristically grounded. “I always tell people, ‘Close your eyes and picture a room of 200 people,'” she said. “If you only get 200 views, that’s a lot of people. And you should be proud of that.”
