34-year-old CEO shares his No. 1 piece of advice for entrepreneurs—it helped him build a $1 billion company

CNBC

03-06-2025

Starting a company straight out of college, with no prior business experience, isn't always easy.
To support himself and his flavored-water business Cirkul, Garrett Waggoner played professional football in Canada and worked as a car valet in the offseason, he says. His co-founder Andy Gay worked in the women's shoe section of a department store, Waggoner adds.
Together, they sought advice from anyone and everyone. Today, Waggoner's top tip for young entrepreneurs has a hint of irony to it: Don't listen to everything you're told, the 34-year-old CEO says.
"Every time you get advice from somebody who has grown a business, make sure that you're interpreting it through your own lens," says Waggoner. "What worked for [them] might not work for a different type of business."
Waggoner and Gay launched their Tampa, Florida-based business in 2015, got their products — reusable water bottles with built-in disposable flavor cartridges — onto retail shelves in 2018, and obtained a $1 billion pre-money valuation during a $70 million fundraising round in 2022.
Some of the advice they received in Cirkul's early years worked, Waggoner says: focusing on solving a real problem rather than trying to build a cool product and "obsessing" over customer experience.
Before the pair landed on the Cirkul bottle's current design, they found themselves lost in imagining all of the cool things a new product could do, says Waggoner. Refocusing on solving a problem "made us ground everything we did in the customer's actual need, which is gold," he says.
Other pieces of advice were less effective, he says, or simply weren't applicable to the type of business Waggoner and Gay wanted to run. They tried outsourcing their manufacturing, for example — a common practice for consumer product companies — but struggled to find a factory that would work with Cirkul to produce a novel product.
"Most folks in the beverage space do cans and bottles, so when approached with something unique, they all declined to lean in," Waggoner says. "We, by necessity, were required to manufacture the product ourselves."
Manufacturing their own product required a "tremendous amount of successes, failures and ultimately, learning," he adds. Cirkul's manufacturing currently takes place in warehouses in Tampa and Salt Lake City.
Other entrepreneurs agree: You need to figure out when to listen to someone's advice, and when to break from conventional wisdom and trust your gut.
"When you're just getting started in a small business, it's easy to drown an opportunity if you let yourself get pulled by different ideas," billionaire entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban told CNBC Make It in March.
Successful business owners take other people's feedback seriously while filtering out bad or irrelevant advice, Cuban added.
Kopi Kenangan co-founder and CEO Edward Tirtanata offers similar advice: Don't ever sacrifice what makes your business unique. His Indonesia-based coffee chain, which brought in more than $100 million in sales in 2023, broke into the already-saturated coffee market by creating customized menus for different countries and tailoring items to local tastes and price points, Tirtanata said in May 2024.
The strategy ran counter to the conventional wisdom of using a standardized global menu, which many other chains do, he noted.
"The next Starbucks is not going to look like a Starbucks, the next McDonald's is not going to look like a McDonald's. The next Google is not going to look like a Google – you need to be radically different in order for you to compete against the incumbent," said Tirtanata.