David Vanderveen and Peter Griscom sit down with Shahab Elmi, Co-Founder & CEO of Cymbiotika, to discuss how the wellness brand scaled while protecting the product standards that shaped the company from the beginning.

Shahab has spent decades building companies across retail, technology and consumer products. At Cymbiotika, that experience has shaped a disciplined approach to growth: protect the product, surround yourself with people you trust and keep moving through the periods when the business gets hit hardest.

The conversation traces Cymbiotika's path from a bootstrapped DTC business launched around COVID to a major omnichannel brand expanding across Target, Whole Foods, Sprouts, Walmart, Sam's Club and TikTok Shop. Shahab shares how limited capital forced financial discipline, why the company refused to water down formulas as it scaled and how new funding will support inventory and brand storytelling at a much larger scale.

The Competitive Intelligence Report from Social Commerce News gives brands a practical framework for understanding what their marketing actually caused and where the next dollar should go.

In this episode of Verified: The Social Commerce Podcast, David Vanderveen and Peter Griscom break down the difference between attribution and incrementality and explain why platform-reported ROAS can create an incomplete picture of performance.

They walk through how demand moves across TikTok, Instagram, Amazon, DTC and other channels and how operators can account for halo effects and cannibalization along the way. The conversation also covers geo tests, holdouts, a 90-day measurement roadmap, AI agents for continuous testing and the data foundation brands need before pursuing CAC financing.

The report is designed as a working operator resource: build the baseline, run the tests, calibrate the results and use the findings to make better allocation decisions.

Chapters

0:00 The Competitive Intelligence Report from Social Commerce News

1:48 Attribution vs. incrementality

4:05 Where did the sale actually come from?

6:36 Why platform dashboards can mislead operators

7:54 How Meta and TikTok take credit for conversions

9:50 Measuring demand across multiple channels

11:16 Choosing where to spend the next dollar

14:46 The false confidence of closed-loop social commerce

15:36 Measuring halo effects and cannibalization

16:20 Demand creation vs. demand capture

18:08 How to design an incrementality test

21:07 Why one test is only one data point

22:09 The 90-day measurement roadmap

24:08 Common incrementality testing mistakes

27:51 How much should brands spend on testing?

28:51 Short-term ROAS vs. long-term brand building

31:01 Finding repeatable signals in the noise

33:55 Using AI agents for continuous testing

36:55 Why measurement matters for CAC financing

41:09 Growth requires constant experimentation

43:48 Why your business can never be treated as static

46:26 Awareness, engagement and conversion across channels

48:49 How to use the Competitive Intelligence Report from Social Commerce News

Download the Competitive Intelligence Report from Social Commerce News and find every episode at SocialCommerceNews.com/verified

Ben Witte is the Founder & Co-CEO of Recess, the brand that pioneered the relaxation beverage category and has since expanded into Mood, Mocktails, and Supplements.

In this episode of Verified: The Social Commerce Podcast, Ben joins Peter Griscom and David Vanderveen to explain why he believed consumers needed an alternative to both energy drinks and alcohol—and how that conviction became an entirely new category.

He discusses why Recess focused on marketing a feeling instead of an ingredient, how launching direct-to-consumer validated the category before retail, the lessons learned from the CBD regulatory collapse and COVID, why Recess evolved into a platform brand, and what founders should know about creating a category instead of simply competing for market share.

Chapters:

0:00 Intro

0:21 From Silicon Valley to founding Recess

3:17 The insight that created the relaxation category

5:17 Why being an industry outsider became an advantage

7:04 Marketing a feeling, not an ingredient

10:16 What Ben got right—and wrong—about the original thesis

12:10 Creating a category versus capturing market share

16:36 Why Recess became a platform brand

20:37 Building for the long term with investors

24:10 Turning the CBD crisis into an opportunity

28:25 Growing through organic content and community

33:15 Lessons from fundraising and navigating difficult markets

41:23 Bringing in an operating partner to scale

45:32 Why Mocktails became the next category

50:19 Advice for founders building brands today

53:08 Where to find Recess

Subscribe and find every episode at SocialCommerceNews.com/verified