Jan 13, 2020 · 1h 4m · how-i-built-this
Spindrift: Bill Creelman
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Spindrift founder Bill Creelman explains how he navigated personal financial risk, complex supply chain hurdles, and industry skepticism to disrupt the beverage market with a hundred-million-dollar sparkling water made exclusively from real squeezed fruit.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Guy holds 33.1% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Guy as informed peer 3.2 Guest teaching 2.5 Guest disagreement 0.6 Guy pushing back 1.5
speaking balance: gold is Guy, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 42:11 Defending reinvestment and calculated startup risk
Bill rejects Guy's premise that mortgaging his house after a major exit was reckless, arguing that his prior experience enabled him to calculate risk by staging investments across discrete commercial milestones.
Hardest push from Guy ▶ 42:11 Guy calls out remortgaging the home as crazyGuy refuses to accept Bill's casual framing of startup financing, directly challenging him on taking extreme personal financial risks in his thirties after already securing wealth from his previous exit.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 45:12 Explaining the mechanical disruption of citrus pulpBill schools Guy on industrial carbonation engineering, explaining how fresh citrus pulp clogs high-speed bottling lines and why US co-packers viewed Spindrift's raw juice tankers as an operational threat.
Guy holds their own ▶ 29:07 Guy contextualizes the soda tax and regulatory backlashGuy brings crisp industry context into the discussion, citing early 2010s municipal beverage taxes and soda volume bans to demonstrate why Bill's pivot away from high-sugar drinks aligned with regulatory tailwinds.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Guy as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Guy pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Childhood on a Western Massachusetts Farm | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Guy Raz sets a nostalgic, narrative scene about western Massachusetts farm life in the 1980s. Bill Creelman details his family's farm-to-table upbringing in an entirely collaborative exchange. | |
| Georgetown Years and the Nantucket Smokehouse Pitch | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Guy prompts Bill about his college years at Georgetown and early business ideas. Bill explains his initial pitch for a Nantucket smokehouse mail-order business. | |
| Industry Advice and Pivoting to Nantucket Harvest | 4 | 2 | 1 | 3 | Guy probes the economics of a seasonal mail-order catalog business, highlighting that a six-week holiday sales cycle cannot sustain a company. Bill candidly agrees and explains the necessity of pivoting to wholesale. | |
| Discovering Cocktail Rimmers and the Genesis of Stirrings | 3 | 2 | 0 | 1 | Guy asks about the transition from regional gourmet foods to cocktail mixers. Bill describes stumbling across cocktail rimmers and margarita salts right as cocktail culture was taking off. | |
| Scaling Stirrings Amid Cash Flow and Payroll Pressures | 4 | 3 | 1 | 2 | Guy highlights the hidden cash-flow crunch behind high-growth consumer brands. Bill illustrates the reality of scrambling for payroll hours before the deadline despite outward success. | |
| The Diageo Acquisition and International Departure | 4 | 2 | 1 | 2 | Guy challenges the perception of a multimillion-dollar Diageo exit, asking if Bill felt triumphant. Bill explains the emotional exhaustion and team disbandment that made the deal bittersweet. | |
| Mid-Episode Break and Teaser | 5 | 2 | 0 | 1 | Guy contextualizes the soda industry around 2009 to 2010, citing soda tax debates and municipal size restrictions. Bill connects this macro shift to his personal diet soda habit. | |
| Basement Formulations and the Fresh Juice Supply Chain | 3 | 4 | 0 | 1 | Bill explains the technical hurdles of creating a shelf-stable beverage made from raw, volatile fresh citrus juice. Guy listens closely as Bill describes his early cold supply chain experiments. | |
| Early Production Runs and Fast-Casual Storytelling | 3 | 2 | 0 | 1 | Guy questions how Bill managed minimum bottling runs and early distribution economics. Bill explains partnering with emerging fast-casual salad and sandwich chains to co-storytell. | |
| Double Down: Reinvesting Capital and Managing Financial Risk | 3 | 3 | 3 | 5 | Guy pushes back forcefully, calling Bill crazy for mortgaging his home again after already cashing out of a successful business. Bill counters that he took calculated milestone-based risks. | |
| Overcoming Pulp: Achieving Ambient Shelf Stability | 2 | 6 | 1 | 2 | Guy asks why co-packers resisted bottling Spindrift. Bill educates Guy on how citrus pulp gums up high-speed carbonation lines and why bottling plants actively tried to avoid them. | |
| The Trader Joe's Breakthrough and National Ambitions | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Guy asks about landing national retail at Trader Joe's and the decision to discontinue the profitable soda line. Bill explains the discipline of simplifying to amplify the core sparkling water product. | |
| Eradicating Natural Flavors for Radical Ingredient Transparency | 4 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Guy shares the typical consumer assumption about natural flavors. Bill reveals how flavor houses refuse to disclose their formulas, prompting Spindrift to eliminate all added flavorings. | |
| Surpassing $100 Million: Growth, Sacrifice, and Legacy | 3 | 2 | 0 | 1 | Guy asks about Spindrift crossing the $100 million mark and probes the balance of personal sacrifice, luck, and work ethic. Bill reflects modestly on cultural timing and relentless commitment. | |
| Epilogue: The Close Call with the Spindrift Trademark | 3 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Guy shares a brief epilogue about Spindrift's near trademark loss before segueing into the 'How You Built That' guest segment featuring Gaurav Chawla and the Chime chai brewing machine. |
Statements from this episode (15)
Creelman funded Stirrings with millions in personal debt instead of equity
“We never took outside capital at Stirrings. We borrowed like crazy. I mean, we were leveraged personally. You know, I had, you know, millions of dollars of notes that I was responsible for.”
Creelman: Stirrings structured Diageo deal as staged equity buyout
“The plumbing was that we ultimately ended up selling them, you know, a percentage of the business with the idea that we would then exit the business to them entirely pending kind of growth and trajectory of the business.”
Creelman: Stirrings accelerated Diageo buyout in 2008 amid economic downturn
“What ended up happening is in 2008, the business and the partnership really kind of hadn't fulfilled the potential that we had all imagined, and there were a variety of factors for that. One was the economy changing, the other was sort of the fit between their…”
Creelman: Early Spindrift Required Continuous Cold Storage Due to Volatile Ingredients
“Yeah, there was no other way to maintain that incredible fresh flavor that we were talking about at the time without keeping it cold. I mean, it just was too volatile a product.”
Early Spindrift formulations contained added sugar, natural flavors, and colors
“Maybe I'll just add to that that it was also more of a soda profile at the time, so it had a little bit of sugar in it natural flavors and color, you know, just sort of whatever. There were things added early on as we were just trying to dial in the flavor and…”
Spindrift launched with a 2,000-case initial production run across four flavors
“We made, I think, 500 cases of each flavor. We had four flavors, so 2000 cases.”
Spindrift focused exclusively on food service accounts for its first five years
“That food service focus with me and now my small team was really all we did for the first four or five years in our business.”
Creelman funded early Spindrift by taking out mortgages on his house
“So, what we ended up doing is basically putting mortgages on our house, and but again, now you're talking about buying inventory, and starting to hire a team.”
Creelman: Would not have started Spindrift had he known manufacturing complexity
“I don't think I would have gotten into this business had I known how complicated it was.”
No US carbonated beverage plant had handled real fruit pulp before Spindrift
“So there wasn't a single carbonated beverage plant in the US that had ever handled a product like this.”
Creelman: Trader Joe's initially launched Spindrift unsweetened water in the East
“At the time, we really didn't have any customers for the sparkling water. The soda was doing well in those food service accounts, but the sparkling water, the unsweetened version was really not anywhere, and they Yeah, they just were incredibly brave and took …”
Spindrift discontinued a profitable five million dollar soda line for sparkling water
“So we made the hard decision to shut down. It was about a five million dollar business super profitable, and just focus our resources on, on the sparkling water.”
Creelman asserts there is no real standard for natural flavor additives
“There really is no standard for a natural flavor. There may very well be all of the things you described, but there's no assurance of that.”
Spindrift decided to eliminate natural flavors entirely from its drinks
“We made the hard decision to get out of natural flavors entirely. That's really the, you know, kind of our position in the market.”
Spindrift nearly rebranded to Presscraft in 2015 over trademark dispute
“By the way, back around 2015, Bill almost had to give up the name Spindrift. There was a legal problem with the trademarks that had to be resolved, and Bill was just days away from changing the name. And if Spindrift hadn't worked out, the company's more than …”