Neon shakers. Loot boxes. Influencer shoutouts with codes like “HOLY10”.
No matter if you’re on Twitch, TikTok or just watching tv shows: this powdered drink brand is everywhere.

And yet, this isn't just another hype-fueled DTC bubble. Behind HOLY Energy is one of the most precise and gutsy marketing machines in Germany at the moment.

Built in 2020 by three bored business students, HOLY is predicted to reach €100M+ in revenue this year. No cans. No sugar. No retail distribution at launch. Just powder, a brand, and an army of creators.

In this piece, I’ll be breaking down exactly how HOLY pulled it off (and what you can copy if you’re building your own e-commerce brand).

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Lockdown, Weed, and a Wild Idea

Spring 2020. Germany is stuck at home. Uni lectures are online, schools are closed and partying is only possible in your friends hidden “Schrebergarten”.
Three BWL students (Mathias, Fredi, Philipp) are gaming, scrolling and… brainstorming. While stoned obviously…

“HOLY was literally born while we were stoned on the couch.” – Mathias Horsch

The idea? A clean energy drink for gamers. No sugar, no taurine, no crash. A direct-to-consumer Red Bull without the can (Cans are damn expensive and the German “Pfand System” is not that cool for founders).

They weren’t first. LevlUp was already live. But the HOLY team believed they could do it louder, smarter, more emotionally building not just a product, but more like a movement.

None of them had food science experience. So they partnered.
With KitchenTown Berlin, a food startup lab.

Here’s how they did it:

• R&D outsourced → with flavor specialists

• Testing in-house → friends, streamers, repeat iterations

• Simple product format → scoop, mix, drink

• Premium feel → microencapsulated caffeine, wild flavors like "Raspberry Raptor"

• High price point → €40 per tub, but 50 servings = €0.80 per drink (also good for your average cart)

  

No Ads. No Agency. Just 5,000 DMs

When the shop launched in April 2021, HOLY had:

• No paid media

• No launch event

• No existing audience

Instead, they wrote thousands of DMs to small-sized YouTubers, Twitch streamers, Discord mods. Not begging - more like offering:

“We’re launching this thing. Want to try it?”

Result:
5,000 free samples shipped.
→ €20,000 in sales on launch day.
→ €500,000 revenue in the first year.

🧠 Copy This: If you don’t have budget, build trust. Give creators free value, no strings attached. If your product is actually good, they’ll post. That’s how virality starts.

Community > Product

HOLY quickly realized they weren’t selling energy drinks. They were selling identity.

Their community, "The HOLY Squad", became part of the brand-building process:

• Voting on new flavors

• Naming the SKUs

• Sharing shaker setups

• Meme culture & Discord chat

A few guys even tattooed the logo. By this they managed to do less expensive performance marketing and focus on some sort of tribe marketing.

The Iced Tea Pivot /and How HOLY Expanded TAM

After a year, users said something not that unexpected:

“We love HOLY. But we can’t drink caffeine all day.”

So our three German protagonists pivoted.
In 2022, they launched iced tea powders (same brand, same format, zero caffeine).

This subtle shift changed everything:

• From “gamer fuel” → to “sugar-free soft drink alternative”

• From Monster competitor → to Lipton & Fuze Tea disruptor

• From niche cult → to mass-market potential

Revenue jumped to €5M. And the brand was no longer locked into the energy category.

🧠 Copy This Insight: Start with a sharp niche to build loyalty, then expand your market without losing your core. It’s how Red Bull became a media brand.

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Built Without Owning Anything

HOLY didn't build factories at all (If you read the Oatly story, you’ll know, why you shouldn’t do this…). Instead they built the ultimate distribution machine.

• Product formulation: Symrise (€5B flavor giant)

• Filling, packaging, logistics: All outsourced

• In-house: Brand, growth, community, and performance

Out of 100 team members, 60 work in marketing or sales.

🧠 Typical DTC learning: Own the story, not the supply chain. If you’re in DTC, your core competency is attention, not operations.

The CAC Equation Most Startups Would Avoid

HOLY spends more than it earns on first-time customers.

Let’s break it down:

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Investing still felt like something your uncle with a three-piece suit and a Commerzbank login did on weekends. Mobile apps? Ugly. Fees? Brutal. User experience? Early Excel (≠ absolutely brilliant).

Then came our three protagonists Thomas, Christian, and Marco — a physicist, an ex-banker, and an engineer — and they had a different idea.

What if buying a stock was as simple as ordering a pizza?

They called it Trade Republic.

Ten years later, they’re a full bank with over four million users, a €5 billion valuation, and a product portfolio that makes most traditional banks look like fax museums.

But now, the EU has passed a law that could take out the core of their business.

Here’s how Trade Republic reinvented investing — and why that €1 trade might soon cost more.

Three guys, one idea, no suits

It started in a startup incubator in Munich. Thomas Pischke, fresh out of his physics degree, gets a spot in LMU’s elite founder program. Previous alumni: Flixbus, Foodora, Freeletics.

He wants to build a stock trading app. But he’s more backend than boardroom.

So he calls Christian Hecker, an old friend and former Merrill Lynch banker. They bring in Marco Cancellieri, a software guy with startup blood. The team is set.

They get a room, drink too much coffee, and start building.

Meanwhile, in the US, Robinhood is making waves — commission-free trading, mobile-first, exploding user base.

The German trio is hooked. Inspired, but not copying.

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In 2015, they launch their own vision of a neo-broker. Same idea. Different continent.

One euro per trade. That’s it.

Too good to be true?

At the time, most banks in Germany charged €10–15 per trade. Trade Republic’s €1 model was either brilliant or insane.

The question was: how do they make money?

The answer: Payment for Order Flow.

Here’s the short version:

When a user buys Apple stock, Trade Republic doesn’t execute the trade itself. It routes it to a partner like Lang & Schwarz — a so-called market maker. These guys match buy and sell orders and earn on the spread (the tiny gap between buying and selling prices).

Lang & Schwarz then shares part of that profit with Trade Republic.

That kickback? It’s how they kept user fees at €1.

Add in some ETF provider fees and a steady stream of new users, and the model worked.

At least for a while.

The mission? Close the pension gap

From day one, Trade Republic wasn’t just selling stocks. They were selling purpose.

Specifically: the Rentenlücke.

In plain English: Europe’s growing pension gap. A structural financial black hole waiting for Gen Z and Millennials at the end of their careers.

CEO Christian Hecker dropped the word in every interview. It became the company’s unofficial tagline.

The logic was simple: if the government can’t save your retirement, you better do it yourself. And Trade Republic would be your tool of choice.

Savings plans. ETFs. Automatic investing. Easy UI. Low fees.

By the end of 2019, they had over 150,000 users. Most of them first-time investors.

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COVID, Reddit, and the first real stress test

Then came 2020. COVID hits. Lockdowns start. People are bored, stuck at home, and not spending money.

And suddenly, retail investing takes off.

By the end of the year, Trade Republic has 600,000 users.

Then January 2021 hits. GameStop goes nuclear. Reddit loses its mind. Hedge funds panic.

Trade Republic users pile in. The servers sweat. The system freezes. Lang & Schwarz halts trading.

Suddenly, the hype turns into backlash.

The app gets flooded with 1-star reviews. BaFin receives 4,000 complaints. Trade Republic sends out apology emails.

It’s the first real crisis. But they make it through.

Burning money = Raising more?!

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The Internet is an empty space. Google? Still a wet dream. And a guy called Gary Kremen buys a few domains that will soon be worth millions: Jobs.com. Sex.com. Match.com.

His idea? Take lonely hearts ads from the newspaper and put them online.

In 1995, he launched Match.com — and accidentally invented online dating.

Back then, dating online wasn’t cool.
It had a sketchy vibe. People didn’t brag about it at dinner parties. And it wasn’t cheap, either.

In the early 2000s, a Match.com subscription cost $25 a month. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $44.

Because of this, for a long time, online dating stayed niche.
Then, in 2012, everything changed. With a swipe.

The app that turned dating into a game

The company behind Match.com, now called Match Group, wanted to try something new. Something fresh.
So they launched a new app. Clean UI. Super simple setup.
Log in with Facebook. Upload…

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Lilium.

Even the name sounds light, sleek, and futuristic. The pitch was equally ambitious: a fully electric jet with vertical takeoff and space for five passengers, flying between cities at 300 kilometers an hour. Zero emissions. Barely any noise. All bookable via a smartphone app. Like The Jetsons, but real.

Or at least, that’s how the story went.

In September 2021, Lilium went public on the Nasdaq — not through a traditional IPO, but via a SPAC merger with Qell Acquisition Corp. It was a glossy moment: a €2.5 billion valuation, soaring headlines, and a founder, Daniel Wiegand, who didn’t just sell a product, but an entire future.

There was just one problem.

Lilium had no finished product. No paying customers. No actual revenue. And not a single full-scale jet that had ever carried a human being.

Not even one.

Just think about that for a moment.

This wasn’t merely a pre-product company but a pre-function company. A beautifully rendered vision, full of ambition, but with little real-world engineering behind it. A concept with no proven grasp of physics.

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And yet, the funding kept coming. Round after round. From Tencent, Atomico, Baillie Gifford, Frank Thelen. By 2024, Lilium had secured more than €1.5 billion in investment. They built a state-of-the-art factory outside Munich. They struck a headline-grabbing deal with Azul Airlines in Brazil to supply 220 jets.

They had everything (except a jet that could actually carry a person).

What they did have was something else entirely: a powerful story.

So where did this story start?

A story of a boy obsessed with flight. Wiegand’s childhood, as he tells it, was filled with slow-motion footage of birds and backyard experiments in gliding. He earned his glider pilot’s license at 14, studied aerospace engineering in Munich, and had his life-changing moment in 2013 — watching a video of the Boeing Osprey tiltrotor during an exchange semester in Glasgow.

Why not build something like that — but electric, quiet, and made for cities?

That was the idea. And in 2015, Daniel Wiegand co-founded Lilium with three fellow students. They named the company after Otto Lilienthal, Germany’s aviation pioneer, who, fittingly or ominously, died in a crash like the rest of aviation pioneers. A poetic tribute, perhaps. Or an unintentional warning.

But Wiegand had a clear vision: a jet that could take off vertically, fly swiftly and silently across urban areas, then land softly on a rooftop. Fully electric. No runway required. No emissions. All managed through an app.

In 2017, the first prototype made its debut. A sleek, futuristic-looking two-seater that hovered a few feet off the ground for a few seconds. The video looked impressive. The reality was less so — it was a lightweight, remote-controlled scale model, nowhere near the demands of a real aircraft.

Still, it was enough to spark belief. The PR machine did its job. Early investor Frank Thelen came on board. And Lilium quickly became a media darling. Talk shows, tech blogs, glossy investor presentations — all painting the same picture: a revolution in urban mobility, with Germany at the helm.

In 2019, Lilium revealed its five-seater jet design. The prototype managed to hover briefly — no passengers, no full-scale flight test. Still, the media was quick to announce that the age of flying taxis had officially begun.

The truth? It hadn’t.

Soon, the questions started. First from engineers. Then from journalists. Eventually, even investors began to take a closer look.

In 2020, the trade journal Aerokurier published a detailed technical analysis. According to experts, the Lilium jet’s battery could sustain vertical hover for only 70 seconds, and its realistic range was closer to 18 kilometers — far from the 300 the company had been promising. In other words, the aircraft couldn’t do what it was supposed to. Not even close.

Lilium rejected the criticism, calling the analysis inaccurate. Some investors defended the company, claiming access to deeper insights. But no one ever presented a public counter-calculation — and certainly not a working, full-scale flight.

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Spotify.

The app we all use. The brand that turned music into a monthly subscription. The platform that made it feel normal to stream Taylor Swift at 7AM in the shower and Bad Bunny at 2AM in the club.

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It’s one of the most culturally powerful tech companies of our time. And until 2024, it had never turned an annual profit.

Let that sink in.

Despite over 220 million paying users. Despite over €11.5 billion in annual revenue. Despite basically rebuilding the entire music economy from scratch...

Spotify had lost nearly €3 billion since it was founded.

How is that even possible?

Let’s dig into the numbers, the structure, the industry, and the power plays behind the Spotify paradox.

Because what looks like a slick subscription business is actually a giant economic tug-of-war — and Spotify had been losing for almost 20 years.

Back to 2006

Back in 2006, the music industry was flatlining. CD sales were crashing. Pi…

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The global financial crisis had left millions unemployed. Markets were crashing. Consumer confidence? Basically nonexistent.

But while Wall Street panicked, one man was simply getting bored.

His name? Ethan Brown. Late 30s. Secure job in the energy sector. Excellent salary and a comfortable life — but no spark.

So he quit.

Brown didn’t just want a new job — he wanted purpose. A mission. Something that made sense not just on a spreadsheet, but on a deeper level.

And strangely enough, he found that purpose in a greasy memory: the Double R Bar Burger from Roy Rogers. A symphony of beef, bacon, and cheese. 600 calories of pure Americana.

There was just one problem: Brown was now vegan.

So he set out to do the impossible — recreate the burger he loved, without harming a single animal.

That mission became a startup. And that startup became one of the most talked-about food tech companies of the next decade:

Beyond Meat.

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A vegan burger… for meat lovers?

From the very beginning, Beyond Meat wasn’t made for vegans. It was designed for meat eaters who simply wanted to eat less meat. A crucial distinction.

Brown teamed up with scientists from the University of Missouri, who were experimenting with soy and plant proteins. After years of trial, error, and taste-testing failure (seriously, Seitan-only patties? No thanks), they struck gold:

Pea protein, spices, and beet juice.

Beet juice wasn’t added for flavor — it mimicked the “bleed” of beef. Suddenly, a plant-based patty didn’t just taste better. It looked and felt like real meat.

The Beyond Burger was born.

And in 2016, Whole Foods took it nationwide. Not in the vegan aisle — in the actual meat section. Right next to ground beef.

Game on.

Sizzle, then boom

From 2016 to 2019, Beyond Meat was everywhere.

Sales doubled. Then tripled. Then tripled again. Celebs like Leonardo DiCaprio, Snoop Dogg, and Kim Kardashian invested or endorsed. Even German finance bro Christian Lindner (yes, the “better not govern than govern wrongly” guy who then governed wrongly and quit afterwards) posted about it.

By 2019, Beyond Meat IPO’d at $25. By market close? $65.75. One of the most successful U.S. public debuts in a decade.

Brown became a near-billionaire overnight. Investors were hyped. Consumers were curious. Supermarkets stocked up.

And then came the next move: fast food.

Beyond Meat struck deals with KFC and McDonald’s to put plant-based patties in drive-thrus. The vision? Not just a supermarket brand — but a full-on meatless McEmpire.

But scaling comes with cost. And cracks were about to show.

Too fast. Too furious. Too… sausage-y?

To grow fast, Beyond Meat expanded its product line: sausages, meatballs, chicken strips. Some were fine. Others?

Let’s just say one version of their plant-based sausage collapsed on shelves if stored vertically. Seriously.

Internal emails revealed they skipped key product testing just to hit deadlines.

Meanwhile, R&D spending ballooned. So did production costs. And salaries. And operations. In 2022 alone, they spent over $600M — with revenues going the other way.

Losses piled up, margins evaporated, and in March 2021, they took out $1B in debt to stay afloat.

The taste problem. The price problem. The vibe problem.

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Plant-based milk was still that sad soy drink at the back of your friend’s vegan fridge. Oat milk? Not even on the radar. And then came a tiny Swedish company with an unhinged marketing department, a war declaration against cows, and a mission to turn breakfast into activism.

They called it Oatly.

Within a few years, they turned bland beige liquid into a billion-dollar brand — and got sued, praised, canceled, and copied along the way. They raised millions, went public, ran ads during the Super Bowl… and somehow, still lost money on almost every carton.

This is the story of how Oatly broke the rules, broke into your fridge and almost broke itself doing it.

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Small Spoiler: It wasn’t the cows that took them down. It was the spreadsheets.

What this chart tells you: More money coming in, but even more going out. Oatly scaled up quickly, but burned through cash even faster.

It all started with a vending machine in Japan

The Oatly story begins in 1985, not in San Francisco but at a food science conference in Japan. A Swedish chemist named Rickard Öste tries to buy a drink from a vending machine and has a eureka moment.

Back home, he gets to work on a plant-based milk. Soy? Too many allergies. Rye? Tastes like liquid bread. Barley? Great for beer, terrible for lattes.

Then he lands on oats.

The first versions? Kind of disgusting. Think oatmeal water with an identity crisis.

But Öste is a nerd in the best way — he keeps tinkering. Eventually, he finds the magic: oats + water + enzymes = creamy, slightly sweet, highly marketable oat milk.

In 1994, he launches a company: Oatly.

There’s just one problem. He’s a brilliant scientist — but not exactly a branding guru. The early packaging looked like something you’d find in a health food store run by monks.

Then came Tony…

Fast forward to 2012. Oatly is selling okay, but nowhere near changing the world. So they bring in a new CEO: Toni Petersson.

Imagine a guy who used to run nightclubs and sell Costa Rican real estate. Charismatic. Weird. Not your average corporate suit.

His first big move? Go to war. Against milk.

In 2014, Oatly prints this line on its packaging: It’s like milk, but made for humans. The Swedish dairy industry loses its mind. Oatly gets sued. Loses. Can’t even use the word “milk” anymore.

So what do they do?

They publish the lawsuit.

Suddenly, the whole country is talking about oat milk. Sales skyrocket. Oatly realizes: they’re not just selling a drink. They’re selling a fight. Milk = bad. Oats = future. And if you’re not on board, you’re part of the problem.

Flush the milk, save the planet

From there, things get wild.

Oatly launches viral campaigns. Billboards. Mockumentaries. A stunt encouraging people to flush dairy milk down the toilet — a not-so-subtle nod to an old anti-alcohol PSA in Sweden.

People love it. Or hate it. Either way, they’re talking.

By 2020, Oatly is on fire. Revenue doubles year over year. It becomes the oat milk. Not a drink — a movement. You’re not just buying Oatly, you’re buying into a vibe.

Then Oprah and Jay-Z invest. Of course they do.

But so does Blackstone — one of the world’s most infamous private equity firms, accused of everything from rainforest destruction to general soullessness. Oatly fans are furious.

Oatly’s response? If we make sustainability profitable, the big dogs will follow.

Bold. Or naive. Maybe both.

Super Bowl, super hype, super problems

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And yet: welcome to OnlyFans. A subscription platform that quietly rewired how adult content is monetized – and made billions doing it. No VC funding, no product-led growth fairytale, just a brutally effective business model and the right timing.

Today, I want to walk you through how OnlyFans pulled this off. Spoiler: it's not just about porn. It's about control, monetization, disintermediation – and timing so good it looks strategic (but probably wasn’t).

The problem: Free porn killed the money

In the early 2000s, the porn industry was booming. Literally. VHS turned to DVDs, then to online streaming. Paywalls worked. Then the “Tube sites” came along.

YouPorn, Pornhub, XHamster (I’m sure you’ve never heard those names before) – platforms where anyone could uploa…

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