Cornbread Hemp is a CBD brand that embraces the 250 years of hemp growing traditions in Kentucky. Our supply chain is entirely in Kentucky, where we grow, process, and ship our products like CBD oils, CBD gummies, and CBD lotions to customers in all 50 states and from Guam to Puerto Rico.

My co-founder and cousin Eric Zipperle is our CEO and digital marketing wizard with an MBA and ecommerce background. I’m a journalist by trade and come from a creative background.

We started Cornbread Hemp in late 2018, when I was a journalist covering the 2018 Farm Bill for Politico and other news organizations. The CBD brands that existed then (and now) were shallow brands that didn’t have a real story, hid their founding teams in the shadows, and distanced themselves from the actual cannabis plant. We try to do the opposite of all of that.

We knew, starting off as a David and Goliath story, that we had to create the best, most authentic, and trustworthy products, because we couldn't compete on price. We went out of our way to become USDA certified organic, which was not easy to do. We also have a story that connects to real events and a real place, and we can talk about the terroir of our farmland that grows our product in a way that other brands cannot. Everything we do comes from wanting to hit that top mark and be the premium option.

Now, in Q2 of 2023, we’ve got 30 full-time employees. Last year, we did $6.5 million in revenue. This year, we’ll beat $15 million.

I grew up in a small town in central Kentucky, and in my middle school years, 70 men from Central Kentucky were arrested on 30 farms in 10 states with what the government said was 200 tons of cannabis and the largest domestic marijuana syndicate in American history. Of these 70 men that were arrested, none of them talked in exchange for a lesser sentence, and that led to a legendary mystique about these guys, who the federal government called the “Cornbread Mafia.”

As a young storyteller who came from a storytelling culture, it was a story that always stayed with me. It was also a story that severely impacted the economic development of my community, which was maligned as a whole by federal prosecutors before we ever had a chance to figure out what really happened.

I went to the Graduate School for Journalism at Columbia, where I learned skills like how to pull narrative out of court documents and how to interview people who didn't want to talk to you. After six years, I finished my book, Cornbread Mafia.

It became immediately successful as a nonfiction true crime book, and that led me into a journalism career where I was covering Kentucky for the Washington Post and the cannabis beat for Politico.

Through all this, I had invested in the notion that Kentucky was great for growing cannabis. Cornbread had been a derogatory term used by the federal government and media to slander my hometown community. Our brand is a way of taking that notoriety, making it positive, and turning it on its head.

2019 was our first year. We were barely scraping by, doing between $15,000 to $25,000 a month and looking for investors. Unfortunately, a lot of accredited investors had already been burned by unsuccessful CBD ventures, so that was the reality check we came up against throughout 2019.

By the end of the year, we prepared to crowdfund and onboarded with one of Wefunder’s competitors. That’s when one of my mentor advisors in the Louisville startup community said, “Why aren’t you doing it on Wefunder? Render Capital, a local VC firm here in Louisville, is matching the first $20,000 in investments on Wefunder.”

To a VC firm, $20,000 is nothing—but to a CPG brand that's just starting out, it means a whole lot. So we unplugged everything that we were doing on the competitor platform and plugged it into Wefunder.

In March of 2020, the pandemic hit, and everything was completely locked down. Everyone in our circle was asking, “You're not gonna still do that crowdfund thing, right?” But we were like, “What else is there to do?” We couldn't go out, we couldn't do anything—aside from digital marketing, our community round was the only thing we were working on that wasn't functionally blocked.

So we told our friends at Render Capital, “We're gonna take two weeks to put together this first $20,000, and then with your $20K match, we'll go live with $40K."

On the first day of the campaign, our friends and family pushed us to $20,000 in a couple hours. By lunchtime that same day, we had the $20,000 match from Render. Then we took the countdown clock off our Wefunder page and went live at $40,000-and-change.

We ended Day 1 at $55,000. In the grand scheme, $55,000 is a drop in the bucket—but to us in April 2020, it was an amazing amount of money. We ended up raising $400,000 in seven months. Then we put that money to work in 2021 and did $1.9 million in revenue.

The capital from our first Community Round allowed us to market online without being so afraid of spending every dollar. To test and scale, you have to poke around and see what works, and if you're dead broke, you can't do that. It also helped us expand our affiliate program, which is still where we're meeting a majority of our new customers.

Community rounds for CPG companies like ours are really a fantastic opportunity, because we're not a software-as-a-service, we're not real estate—we're a functional product that we offer on subscription every month to customers. So, to be able to take a customer and make them an investor, and to find an investor and turn them into a customer, creates this very loyal and passionate member of our community that we wouldn't have otherwise.

Community rounds for CPG brands are really the special sauce. I think every startup CPG brand should do a community round, even if they have VC funding, because the activation of your customers has a measurable impact on its own. For instance, we’ve seen retail growth from investors pestering their local stores to carry our product.

I've met so many of our investors, who are a remarkable cross-section of people from all over the world. They've become part of the fabric of the company and real cheerleaders of the brand.

Render Capital does such good work in the Louisville region, but its reach goes beyond Louisville. We’ve dealt with a number of VC firms that are just jerks. Render Capital is community-minded and doing things outside the box to give startup companies that first breath of air—that’s what their $20K Match is all about.

The $20K Match is smart on Render's part, because getting live on Wefunder is not just something you hit a button and do. There's a certain amount of skill and time required to get yourself live—then, to raise $20,000 on Wefunder means that you're not alone.

We at Cornbread Hemp were Render's first matching investment. Since then, I think they've done 10 more. Now, it's really fulfilling when we meet our other brands in town that have received that $20K Match.

I've not run across a lot of firms like Render. There should be more Render Capitals out there.