The Story
A chalky powder, a checklist, and a stubborn idea
Dan McCormick keeps a creatine habit older than most startups. He started taking it in early high school and never stopped, which is a strange biographical detail until you realize it is also the entire business plan. For more than a decade he watched one of the most-studied compounds in sports science get sold in jugs the size of paint cans, wrapped in flames and shouting fonts, aimed squarely at teenage boys. Meanwhile the science kept widening: strength, recovery, and increasingly, cognition. The mismatch bothered him.
Before he did anything about it, he learned the trade. McCormick spent the better part of a decade inside other people's high-growth consumer brands - time at the luggage company Away, a stint as Head of Finance at the underwear brand Parade, and a run as Chief of Staff at Not Boring, the business newsletter that became one of Substack's biggest. The thread through all of it was operating: finance, supply chains, the unglamorous machinery that turns a clever product into a company that ships on time.
Somewhere in there he built a checklist. Not a vision board - a literal set of characteristics for the perfect direct-to-consumer business. Recurring use. Real, provable benefit. A category that had been culturally mispriced. When he ran creatine through the filter, it lit up every box and added one more nobody else seemed to notice: only about 2% of Americans were taking it. He did not see a saturated market. He saw the other 98%.
Saying no to things is sometimes more beneficial than taking every opportunity ahead of you.
- Dan McCormick
The 25 phone calls
In December 2022 he co-founded Create with Sienna McCormick - his wife, and a six-year Goldman Sachs veteran who brought the finance and operations spine while he chased the product. The product was the problem. McCormick wanted creatine in a gummy, because a gummy travels, tastes good, and asks nothing of you except to be eaten. He called roughly 25 gummy manufacturers. All 25 said it could not be done - creatine is finicky, it degrades, it does not want to be a candy.
He brought in an outsourced operations lead who knew a West Coast manufacturer fluent in the chemistry of CBD gummies. Dozens of R&D batches later, they had a commercial version. It was not good yet. The first gummies melted and the taste was, by the founders' own admission, rough. But a melting gummy is a fixable problem, and a category nobody believes in is a moat. They iterated in public, listened to customers, and reformulated until the thing actually worked.
Creatine isn't a steroid. It's a safe, scientifically-backed compound that facilitates ATP production - essentially, the energy currency of our cells.
- Dan McCormick, on the 25-year branding problem
Branding as the actual product
McCormick treated creatine's biggest obstacle as a marketing problem, not a chemistry one. Create's packaging is calm, clean, and deliberately un-macho - designed to sit on a kitchen counter next to the coffee, not in a gym bag. The pitch reframed creatine from a hardcore gym supplement into a daily nutrient for women, older adults, and people who would never be caught measuring scoops of powder. The brand sold direct first, on purpose, so the team could gather customer insight and iterate at speed before chasing shelves.
It worked at a pace that is hard to fake. Create scaled from $0 to $4.5M in revenue in roughly its first year - and did it profitably, which in DTC is closer to a magic trick than a milestone. The gummy became the best-selling creatine gummy online and then the first creatine gummy to land on GNC shelves, a beachhead into the exact retail world the brand had been quietly outflanking.
Relative scale. Series A (2024) led by Unilever Ventures; Series B (2026) led by Alliance Consumer Growth.
Capital, but on his terms
For a founder building this fast, McCormick is unusually allergic to fuel he cannot control. He talks about disciplined capital allocation and the danger of money that forces growth a business cannot sustain. He has favored operators and founder-investors over traditional venture capital - people who have run a consumer brand rather than just funded one.
That preference shows in the cap table. The 2024 Series A, $5M, was led by Unilever Ventures. In March 2026 Create announced a $20M Series B led by Alliance Consumer Growth, with participation from Unilever Ventures and Impact Capital - the family office of Mike Repole, the man behind vitaminwater and BODYARMOR, which is about as on-the-nose an endorsement as the beverage-and-supplement world can offer. Between late 2025 and the raise, the team grew from five people to twenty-five, pulling executives out of AG1, Vital Proteins, SmartSweets, and The Farmer's Dog.
Our consumers have built creatine into their daily routines. The new products, packaging and formats make it easier than ever to take Create anywhere.
- Dan McCormick, on the Series B
What he is working on now
The next move is distribution and format. In April 2026 Create launched Creatine + Electrolytes - 5g of creatine monohydrate, a sodium-potassium-magnesium electrolyte blend, and a gram of taurine - exclusively at Target. The strategy is consistent with everything that came before: meet people where they already shop, in a format that fits a life rather than a workout. The stated aspiration is plain and large - make creatine as normal as a multivitamin, and convert the 98% one approachable product at a time.
McCormick comes by the founder instinct honestly. He grew up in an entrepreneurial family - both parents and two siblings started small businesses - which may explain why building a company alongside his spouse reads, in his telling, less like a risk and more like a default setting. He is careful to draw a line between the business and the marriage, but the line clearly holds: the company that came out of a personal frustration with chalky powder is now the category leader it set out to redefine.
