Black Rifle's Veteran-Led Success

A story about how Black Rifle Coffee Company was started and grew into a billion-dollar company through social media and understanding their audience.

"One of the owners had a bunch of Facebook pages, I think he had like 30 Facebook pages ranging from 'stuff for moms' to 'veterans.' He started selling a ton of stuff, and they were looking at all the stuff they were selling. They thought 'we should make our own thing' and that's how the coffee business started.

I did a call with Richard, one of the guys. He wanted to be an actor, went to Hollywood but it wasn't working out. He taught himself to code, started making iPhone apps really early in the App Store, did pretty good with that. Ended up getting hired by Verizon to do something on the marketing side.

Along the way, he started doing YouTube fairly early on, making videos for the brand and personally, building a pretty big YouTube following. Him and his buddies started trying out different products, and coffee was one of them. The coffee one took off.

To this day, they do tens of millions in merch sales - not the coffee, just people love the brand so much they'll buy the t-shirts. There's fashion companies that do tens of millions and that's their whole business - this is just their spin-off business. That's how strong the brand is."

The company is now worth over a billion dollars in market cap and has gone public.