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Clif Bar hit its first million dollars by selling to bike shops instead of chasing broad retail. The strategy: find the right room of people who actually need your product, prove it works, then expand outward.
Clif Bar hit its first million dollars by selling to bike shops instead of chasing broad retail. The strategy: find the right room of people who actually need your product, prove it works, then expand outward.
That's how Clif Bar got to their first million dollars. A lot of people think, well, if I could just get on the retail shelves of big box grocery and retail stores, then I will have made it. That's not always the case, but let me show you an example of somebody who did it really well. Clif Bar, you see them everywhere. You've probably eaten one or many. Well, Cliff did not get to their first million by being in retail. At least not retail as we know it. Clif Bar started by being in bike shops. Why bike shops? Because this is the for endurance athletes 25 years ago, when Instagram wasn't a thing and there were no podcasts back then, and they could only get into retail in order to get in front of customers, they got in front of the right customers, they got into the right room that only endurance athletes went into, and that was bike shops. Then they piggybacked off of that success and got into more stores. They didn't jump right to getting worldwide distribution. They can do it now because they prove that if they're in the right room, people want to buy their stuff. That's how we need to think about it. Not how do we get everybody to see our stuff. Not how do we go viral, not how do we get on every shelf. We think instead about how we get a small group of people that we know would benefit from trying our stuff.
