The functional gum and hydration brand young athletes actually want. Made in a US factory we own, under a name we own.

Half right, for a different reason. An SBA 7(a) acquisition loan doesn't care how old Electro is if you buy through a new company: the lender underwrites Troy's last one or two years of cash flow (1.25x coverage, no projections), with at least 10% down, up to $5M, around 9.25 to 10% today. Nowhere near 80 to 90%.

The real blocker is new: since March 1, 2026, every direct and indirect owner of an SBA borrower must be a US citizen or US national. A green card no longer counts. If any of the three of us isn't a citizen, SBA is off the table unless a lawyer finds a structure that works. Then the money comes from a bigger seller note, family and angels, equipment financing on the machines, or a conventional loan.

Do this week: confirm each partner's status. It decides how the whole Path B deal gets financed.

Sources: SBA SOP 50 10 8.1 (effective Oct 1, 2026) and the Feb 2026 citizenship notices, summarized by Starfield & Smith and Coleman Report.

Two fixes. Free: UM School of Law's Startup Clinic is on the USPTO's list of certified law school trademark clinics (Florida), and it also does entity formation and financing documents, which we'll need for the Troy deal. Apply through their intake now: Startup@law.miami.edu. Clinics run on semester schedules, so they can be slow.

Fast: at about $40K MRR, a flat-fee clearance search and filing in three classes costs a few thousand dollars, less than two weeks of profit. Get two quotes in parallel with the clinic. Every week of athlete content builds a name we can't own.

Sources: USPTO Law School Clinic list (updated Oct 14, 2026), UM Startup Clinic.

Five days can't tell us churn. MRR roughly tripled in five weeks, so most subscribers haven't reached their first renewal, and that's usually the biggest drop for a supplement subscription. The real test is the first renewal of the September and October cohorts.

Track retention by first-order month (month 1 to 2, 2 to 3, and so on). If month-2 churn comes in at 30%+, the $100K date moves and Troy's cap stops being our real limit. That changes which path wins.

Too harsh, and it costs us leverage. Subscribers, the email and SMS list, 10,000+ onboarded athletes, the content engine and real profit are all assets, and they carry over to a new name. The missing trademark caps what someone would pay. It doesn't zero it out.

Going into a Troy negotiation or a family raise believing we're worth zero makes us accept bad terms. Fix the name, then talk about ourselves like the business we are.

Right that big subscription brands get big multiples, and the examples are real: P&G agreed in August 2026 to buy Thorne for $3.8B, about 5.8x Thorne's revenue. Unilever bought Grüns in April 2026 for a reported ~$1.2B, about 4x revenue.

Those are $300M to $650M brands. Brands with $2 to 5M in revenue usually get priced on profit, about 2.5 to 6x SDE or EBITDA. Small food manufacturers trade around 3 to 4x. So "$3M ARR + factory" is more like $4 to 10M to a buyer, depending on margins and retention. $20M would be a higher revenue multiple than P&G paid for Thorne.

Use the conservative number with family and angels. Pricing a round too high leaves us a valuation we can't grow into.

Sources: Thorne, Grüns, IBBA Market Pulse Q2 2026.

Troy caps units, and units go to renewals, new first orders, athlete samples and replacements. Once renewals alone fill the cap, new customer growth stops. Plan in units: subscribers × units per box + new orders + samples.

Same for the "sell 90 days upfront for $200" idea: great for cash, but shipping three months at once burns three months of capped capacity in one go. Charge 90 days upfront, ship monthly. Same cash, no spike.

Small business acquisitions usually take three to six months from a signed LOI to close. What adds the year is moving the machines and recertifying. If Troy keeps the building, leases it to us, and stays on as a paid consultant, we could own production by mid-2027 and decide on Miami later, with real data.

Center-filled gum is a 50-year-old industrial process (Freshen Up in 1975, Center Fresh, Trident Splash), with standard co-extrusion equipment from companies like Syntegon and Teknogum. Troy's real edge is that he'll do small runs with functional ingredients in the US. That's valuable, but it's a service. It isn't secret technology.

Two consequences: his business is worth what its cash flow says, not "the only one in the world." And a backup exists if we pay minimums or build our own line.

Sources: Trident Splash history, center-fill rope extrusion.

The USPTO treats a misspelling or sound-alike of a descriptive word as that same word (TMEP 1209.03(j): SHARPIN, URBANHOUZING and TOGGS were all refused this way). "Electroo" would be read as "electro." Spend lawyer time on coined names.

Source: TMEP 1209.03(j).

Gum is bigger than we said: about $30B globally (about $4.1B in the US). Electrolyte drinks are about $33 to 40B and growing around 8% a year. So gum is about the same size.

The catch: US gum units fell about 32% from 2018 to 2023, and Mondelez sold Trident and Dentyne to Perfetti in 2023. Gen Z moved to sour candy. The category isn't growing. Our bet only works if we take share by making gum matter to young people again, which is exactly our angle. Say that out loud when pitching.

Sources: Mondelez, Fortune on gum decline.

We do; we just haven't said it. The data says young athletes, college first (baseball and field sports especially), plus the people who follow them. That's sharper than Bloom's "women in fitness." Next time Mark asks: functional gum for athletes, sold through athletes.

Not verifiable. Neuro is private; known revenue was $3.5M in 2019, and the big cumulative numbers online have no primary source. What is verifiable: 20,000+ stores (CVS, Walmart, Whole Foods) and KIND's founder joining as a partner in 2026. Use those facts in a pitch, not the revenue claim.

Source: Neuro (gum).

Electrolit is Mexican (Grupo Pisa, Guadalajara), with US registrations in classes 5 and 32. It enforces hard: a trade dress case against PepsiCo's Gatorlyte, import cases, and about 40 lawsuit notices filed on one registration in 2026. That matters for the shots (next group).

Source: USPTO TSDR, ELECTROLIT.

Gum sits in class 30. Electrolyte shots sit in classes 5 and 32, Electrolit's exact lane, and they're the same kind of product. A company that sued PepsiCo over Gatorlyte packaging is a real risk for a brand called "Electro" selling electrolyte drinks.

Rename before shots launch. Launching shots under the new name also saves a second rebrand.

Troy told us investors were visiting and another brand asked him to build them a factory. His company's site also mentions a planned plant in Portugal. Ask about that: it could mean outside investors, new debt, or a business that's splitting.

If someone else buys Troy, our gum supply can be repriced or cut overnight. A supply agreement with a right of first refusal (we get to match any offer) and change-of-control protection fixes this for the cost of a lawyer's review.

Creatine breaks down into creatinine in liquid, faster when acidic and warm. In published data, a solution at pH 3.5 lost 21% in three days at room temperature; another study lost 90% in 45 days. Acidic ready-to-drink shots are the hardest format.

Creatine gummies that tested under label became a scandal in 2024, and a class action was filed against Create in April 2026. Joyburst's soda uses only 2 g.

Launch the electrolyte shot first. Add creatine only after Agrifood shows real-time stability data (creatine measured at 0, 3 and 6 months by an outside lab) at our pH.

Sources: Jäger et al. 2011 review, Create class action, Joyburst.

If Troy owns the electrolyte liquid-core formula, we don't own our product either, just the name on the bag. Ask him directly and get the answer into the supply agreement. It also changes what we'd be paying for in an acquisition.

Sugar-free gum sweeteners like sorbitol start absorbing moisture above about 30% humidity. Gum softens, deforms and pulls moisture from the liquid center. Denver is dry; Miami isn't. A Miami line needs dehumidified production and packing rooms, plus recertification.

The bigger risk is people: the process lives in Troy's head and his staff's hands. Machines without them aren't the product.

Source: gum conditioning patent.

Good idea, with a legal catch. The FTC's Mail Order Rule applies to pre-orders: you need a reasonable basis for the ship date (30 days if none stated), a delay notice offering a refund if you'll miss it, and refunds within 7 working days. Shots have slipped before.

Safer: a waitlist where the card is saved and charged at shipment, with a clear ship window.

Source: FTC business guide.

Shots weigh far more than gum. Before scaling, model the landed cost per box: unit cost, import and freight from Colombia, packaging, fulfillment and postage. A $58 gum order and a $58 shots order can have very different margins.

Two cap tables with different investors get messy fast. Before raising, set up one holding company that owns the brand and trademark (and later the factory), so investors buy into one thing. UM's Startup Clinic handles entity formation and financing documents too.

Get most of the moat before spending millions: a written supply agreement with a monthly allocation, locked price, formula ownership, right of first refusal and change-of-control protection. Pair it with paying for the bottleneck. If packing is manual, a packing machine or extra packers credited against orders could raise the cap within weeks. The acquisition then becomes a choice, not a rescue.

Close the gap with structure, not by raising the price. In recent small deals, cash at close is about 83 to 92% of the price, seller notes 6 to 13%, and earnouts show up in about a fifth of deals. Let Troy "hear his number" through an earnout tied to growth plus a paid consulting role, and keep the real estate out: he leases us the building and gets monthly rent for retirement.

If SBA is in play: a seller note only counts toward the down payment if it's on full standby (no payments) for the life of the loan, and then only for half of it.

Source: IBBA Q2 2026.

Start with Ford Gum (Akron, NY). It does private label and co-manufacturing, is SQF Level 2 certified, has made functional gum (vitamin, oral care, military ration gum), and is the only maker of Big League Chew. No sign it does liquid centers, so ask. It's the obvious source for a solid electrolyte gum, the cheaper retail gum, or team buckets.

Other private-label gum makers to email for samples: Continental Confectionery (Turkey), Totaler Chic-kles (Spain), Indaco (Italy), Canel's (Mexico), Candico (India).

Source: Ford Gum co-manufacturing.

Two speed tricks: run the free USPTO search yourselves before any lawyer meeting so you only pay to check survivors, and file intent-to-use the day the name is cleared. That locks our priority date before we announce anything.

Strong idea, with numbers. There are about 1,600 college baseball programs. NCAA rules let schools buy electrolyte products for athletes, but not creatine or amino acids (BCAAs), and caffeine is on the banned list above a threshold. So team buckets should be electrolyte gum only.

Price anchor: Big League Chew's 80-piece bucket lists at about $15, and the 240-piece team bucket retails for about $45 to 53, roughly 20 cents a piece. We need a cheaper team format (Path B or Ford Gum). The value is dugout visibility with our exact customer, more than the revenue. College season starts mid-February, so pitch in December and January.

Sources: NCAA permissible supplements, NCAA caffeine, Big League Chew bucket.

The cheapest shots customers we'll ever get are our gum subscribers. Open the waitlist to them first, with a founding-member price, before any paid or athlete push. It also tells us demand before we place the first production order.

Turn it into a data room now: a clean monthly P&L and balance sheet, cohort retention, acquisition cost by channel, inventory. Every lender, investor and Troy himself will ask for it, and having it ready is what makes "we're serious" believable.

Good insurance. A food product development lab can document our gum as a spec any co-manufacturer can run. Check the agreement with Troy first, and better yet, get formula ownership settled in the supply agreement so we're documenting something that's ours.