EE520: Thomas Carty - From 300 Boxes to Nationwide Retail | How He Built Thirst

there's nowhere in ireland now that we don't have thirst and if it's not there it's because we don't want it there i always say they're like get going and get good later so that started a period of time and thirst where i drove all over dublin to sell one single box to somebody the secret sauce is graph there's no secret like massively overrated it needs to be perfect and massively underrated is the power of social media thomas yes welcome to the pod Thank you. How

are we? I feel like I need to do like a Bruce Buffer.

It's time. Yeah, it's been a long time coming. The champ is here. Yeah, absolutely. How are we? Good, fantastic.

Yeah, pleasure to have you on the pod. Thank you. For people not familiar with you, what do you do?

So, firstly, I'm a professional athlete and professional boxer. I've been a boxer for about 16 years. Always been an athlete, but for about 16 years I've been taking it really seriously. And then I turned pro in 2020 during COVID. And outside of that then, you could call me an entrepreneur. I never really actually classed myself as an entrepreneur. Why? I just never really even realized what I was doing. I kind of fell into what I'm doing with Hearst. I didn't come up with the idea all of a sudden just to say like i really want to be an entrepreneur i kind of just had an idea went with it and by proxy fell into the category that's how all good things happen right yeah

so you now have thirst one of the fastest growing brands in ireland um give me the origin story of where the idea came from because i think this is going to be a really incredible episode for people who have an idea and i'm going to get you to step through idea concept launch i think it's gonna be really interesting and then post launch what did you learn and what's changed so we'll go through all that over the episode but give me bring me back to the original genesis the idea where to come from

So when I turned pro in 2020, it all stems from boxing. So the whole thing has stemmed from my professional boxing career. When I turned pro, I was always looking for sponsorship in the beginning. I turned pro with no financial backing. I had no major promoter. I had nothing really. I just had an idea. I was trying to qualify for Tokyo 2020 Olympics. and they cancelled them because of covid so the 2020 tokyo olympics actually happened in 2021 but in 2020 when i was trying to qualify and i was pursuing with the irish team and you know chasing qualification it was all put on hold because of covid and when that was put on hold it was touch and go whether the olympics were going to happen at all that they might just skip the cycle i remember like like yesterday so you've been building to that for how long for Since, like, I tried to qualify for 2016 and that didn't work out. And then I changed weight category, moved to heavyweight. in 2016 when I didn't qualify. And so since 2016 to 2020, that was the dream. That's all I did. Anything I ever did up until that point was outside of boxing, was to make money to sustain training. Wow. That's all I ever did. So four, longer than four years. Longer than four years. Eight years leading to that moment, which was then gone. Four