Leah Marcus and Yasaman Bakhtiar were scrolling TikTok at their first jobs out of college when they noticed something: 9.5 billion views on the hashtag “pickle.” The wave of Gen Z women snacking on camera, coupled with a grocery aisle that hadn’t changed in years, inspired them to take a huge leap of faith. They quit their jobs, bought a domain, and started posting daily on TikTok and Instagram two months before Good Girl Snacks had a single product to sell.
That pre-launch content became the foundation of a community-driven brand now stocked in Whole Foods and Erewhon, all without spending a dollar on customer acquisition. Ahead, Leah and Yasaman share the specific tactics behind their social-first growth.
On creating a “TV show” people tune into before having anything to sell:
Leah: We started posting on social media before we even had a product. We quit our jobs in summer 2023 and launched our TikTok and Instagram about two months later. It also solved a content problem; we didn’t have anything to show or try, so we were just documenting what we were doing without knowing what we were doing.
Probably week three, we had this epiphany: We need to create a TV show that people are tuning into every single day, because that’s how you build a community. We don’t care about views—we care about followers. So we started the series: “Day one of quitting our corporate job to start a pickle company as best friends in our early 20s.” It went viral immediately. We templated it and posted it every single day.
People had a seat at the table. They were intrigued: “Why are you quitting a stable job to start a pickle company? And why are you doing that with your best friend? You’re crazy.” But that’s what made them follow.
Yasaman: And through that we unlocked this secret bucket of shoppers who follow us online and don’t even like pickles. Maybe you’ve never bought pickles ever, but because you like our page or you want to support the business or you’re just curious, you end up buying the product, trying it, and loving it. We get DMs all the time from people telling us, “I’m a pickle hater, but I love your product.”
On the crunch that accidentally became their best sales tool:
Leah: We noticed that on top of people wanting to support the brand, there’s this psychological thing where if they see a video of us eating pickles on the internet, it makes them crave them. The crunch just makes you hungry—it makes you want to crunch into one too. We found that out totally by accident.
It’s the TikTok effect in general. You see food trends, fashion trends, these weird gadgets, and you see other people using them or eating them. For some reason, we want to be a part of that story, a part of that community. That’s why people go out and buy.
Yasaman: It’s totally unintentional. You learn about marketing and they teach you how to sell through the senses—sound, smells, taste—how to make people want to buy something. For us, that small part of eating a pickle on camera has worked really well. And it’s leading to sales.
On keeping their customer acquisition cost at $0:
Yasaman: It was mostly out of necessity; we were bootstrapping. But we’re Gen Z and we understand that Gen Z doesn’t like to be advertised to. We were really careful about how we speak about our product—how we make people want to buy without being too pushy or too salesy. That’s how we personally react to ads too. Gen Z spends so much time scrolling through content, and we’re so flooded with images and videos. How do you stand out? How do you make that person want to keep watching organically? That’s what we really tried to hone in on.
Leah: We didn’t think we’d be able to keep it this long, honestly. It just happened by accident. We took a step back and realized we were getting better results than we would from a Meta ad. So we just kept doing it because it worked. But we fully had ads and paid strategy baked in from the start.
The thing is, if you don’t post every day, the algorithm does not reward you. It’s the rule of sevens in marketing: The more touchpoints you have with someone, the more they’re going to buy your product. If they see a TikTok at 7 a.m., then an Instagram post at 5 p.m., then they go to Whole Foods and see you on the shelf, that converts to a sale. That only happens because you’re posting every day. We want to be in your brain at all times.
On treating followers like influencers—and letting them shape the product:
Leah: Instead of inviting influencers to events, we actually invite our followers. Tapping into those small networks is a lot more successful than paying an influencer to show up for 10 minutes.
We also kind of hacked our product development by accident. We were launching our bread and butter flavor sweetened with dates, and showing the process of coming up with it on camera. We didn’t have a label, so we said, “Guess the flavor in the comments,” and told people if they guessed right, we’d send them a PR box. We got thousands of comments, and we got so much inspiration. People were commenting things like, “a garlic one” or “we want a sweet pickle.” We still have access to all of that. The garlic cumin flavor came directly out of that comment section.
Yasaman: We were taking notes. People were like, “I want a tamarind flavor.” OK, noted. We always say our followers are our influencers. We’ve sent them PR, and whenever we have a question about the business, we open it up to our community. We try to democratize the whole process, especially for product development and new flavors, because at the end of the day, they’re the ones we’re catering to.
On why building in public is a two-way street:
Leah: We always make a moment out of disaster situations, because those are the videos that go viral. We made a video about our 200 PR boxes that broke—all of them, broken glass, pickle juice everywhere, and FedEx still delivered them—and it exploded. People were like, “Thank you for being honest. I’ve never seen a brand talk about that before.” And then they follow us, or they have respect for us.
It’s also connected us to so many other founders reaching out like, “The same thing happened to me,” or “I know somebody who can help you.” The community aspect is a two-way street. We need them as much as they enjoy watching our content.
Yasaman: Posting about it is kind of like tension release. It’s so stressful, and then you post about it and you’re laughing about it. People in the comments make you feel better, or they tell you, “This happened to me too.” I was talking to a friend who works in PR for a massive luxury company, and she told me about everything that went wrong on one of their campaigns. Looking at their Instagram, you’d never tell anything went wrong. But behind the scenes, it was so much worse than what we went through. Whether you’re a startup or a huge corporation, these mistakes happen.
Catch the full interview with Leah and Yasaman on Shopify Masters, where they share how they pitch retailers by promising to bring Gen Z through their doors. Plus, discover why they ignored expert advice, and what it takes to make your first hire when culture fit is everything.
This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
