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S5 E27 Building a Better Beverage: Kun Yang on Cactus Water, Shark Tank, and Scaling Pricklee
This week on Crunching Your Growth, Phil sits down with Kun Yang, PharmD, Co-Founder and CEO of Pricklee, a fast-growing natural hydration beverage brand built around the power of the prickly pear cactus fruit.
Kun’s journey is anything but ordinary. He went from a career as a biotech pharmacist to building a consumer beverage brand with a mission to challenge the artificial hydration industry. Inspired by a childhood prickly pear recipe from co-founder Mo Hassoun’s Lebanese grandmother, Kun and his team saw an opportunity to create a cleaner, better-for-you alternative to traditional sports drinks, coconut waters, and legacy hydration brands.
Pricklee gained national attention after appearing on ABC’s Shark Tank, where the team secured a deal with Barbara Corcoran and accelerated their growth. Since then, the brand has evolved from Pricklee Cactus Water into a broader natural hydration platform, with new branding, updated cans, expanded flavors, and growing industry recognition.
In this episode, Kun and Phil talk about the leap from pharmacist to founder, how to break into the competitive beverage category, what Shark Tank really does for a brand, the challenges of rebranding while scaling, and why the future of hydration may come from one of nature’s most resilient plants.
Scaling isn’t magic, it’s systems. Crunching Your Growth brings you inside the playbooks of founders, operators, and marketers who turned good products into durable businesses. Hosted by Phil Masiello. 4x exit founder, agency CEO, and author. the show unpacks real numbers, real bottlenecks, and the decisions that move needles: sharpening positioning, building demand beyond one channel, turning ops into an advantage, and evolving from founder-doing to team-owning. Expect crisp segments (What Worked, The Stall, The Fix, The System), on-screen frameworks, and case-specific metrics (CAC/LTV, retention, contribution margin) you can copy. If you’re building a consumer brand on DTC, Amazon, or omnichannel retail, Crunching Your Growth is your weekly working session.
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