Founder · August 2025 to now
fresh protein ice cream, and everything under it
I make the product, design the brand, build the storefront in Liquid, run the deliveries, and keep the books. Nobody else does any of those. This page is what that involves, because “founder” on its own does not say.
01 · The product
30g of protein and 200 calories, in one cup
A single-serve cup, made fresh rather than shipped frozen from a co-packer. The spec is the product: 30g of protein and 200 calories, in a format someone eats in one sitting without deciding how much of it to eat.
I develop the recipes and I make the batches. You can taste the protein. I’m not fighting my base. The flavors are built around it.
02 · The storefront
i build the theme, not just the store
kovakream.com is a Shopify Liquid theme I build with Claude Code, section by section and to
my own spec, in a git repo that deploys on a push to main. Subscriptions, delivery zones, discount
logic and the email capture are all mine to break.
The parts of it I got tired of doing by hand are automated, and that layer is its own body of work: safety hooks that stop a deploy reaching a live storefront by accident, routing, and 97 tests that pass.
03 · The operation
nearly 100 pop-ups, and two delivery days a week
I sell at gyms and studios across LA, in person, with a freezer and a table. I book the venues, I staff them, I run the payments, and I pack the cooler the night before. The list so far includes Nike, Barry’s, Crunch Fitness, F45, Speir Pilates, Stride Fitness, Hybrid LA and Sanctuary Fitness.
Booking them is cold outreach to owners and studio managers, and one wholesale account came out of the same habit. The pitch is ten seconds and the answer is usually no. In the CRM I built for it: 78 venues contacted, 29% said yes to a conversation, 10% booked.
Deliveries run twice a week on a route I build from the live orders, against a hard cutoff and a cooler that holds a known number of cups. Those two constraints decide everything else about the day.
04 · The numbers
what it adds up to
- 1,030units sold
- ~100pop-ups
- 30gprotein / 200 cal
Every one of those units was sold by me, either across a table or through a storefront I wrote. Lifetime ad spend behind that number: about $910.
05 · What it taught me
a stranger gives you ten seconds
A stranger gives you ten seconds and a reason to say no. I changed the product because of what people said standing at a table, not because of anything I worked out on my own.