From Failed Protein Bars to a Free Parenting App: Pearson Kilgore on Entrepreneurship, Ego & Mantle

Pearson Kilgore is one of Logan Lewis's oldest friends, which meant this episode skipped the usual first-meeting small talk and went straight into the roller coaster of the last decade: restaurants, a protein bar company, a 43-year-old family solar business, and now a free app built almost entirely inside Claude Code. Pearson is president of Suncatcher of Atlanta, the founder of Prepped & Ready and Envision, and the guy behind Life With Tripp, an Instagram account documenting his toddler son that's racked up tens of millions of views, including several while getting torched in the comments.

He never wanted to be an entrepreneur

Pearson grew up watching his dad run Suncatcher of Atlanta through the 2008 crash and the recession years after, and it scared him off business entirely. "I actually looked forward to a cubicle life," he said. He enrolled as a general studies major, drifted into psychology to dodge math, and only backed into entrepreneurship after a health-coaching job offer got yanked out from under him days before he was supposed to start. "That's when I was like, all right, well, I don't want to ever work for someone ever again in my life." He'd already been prepping meals for his personal-training clients out of a borrowed restaurant kitchen in Kennesaw — that side hustle became Prepped & Ready, and one opportunity kept leading to the next: a pizza shop, then The Local, then more.

Why he calls Envision a failure — on purpose

Envision, his protein bar brand, looked like a hit: real branding, a product Pearson says was the only bar he could eat despite his food allergies, and a manufacturing deal that started smoothly. Then the first shipment arrived with roughly 45% of the boxes falling apart from bad glue, the original manufacturer wouldn't take responsibility, and a second manufacturer eventually told him he needed to inject $100,000 into the operation just to keep the machines running. He said no — and had to pause Prepped & Ready, which he calls his biggest regret, to give Envision a real shot in the first place. "I genuinely think that my ego got in the way with Envision," he said. "I was like, I'm shitting gold, I think I can do this." He's deliberate about calling it a failure rather than softening it: "If I can put a clear label on something, then it's like, all right, this is what it is, and then I can move on from it."

"The barrier to entry is not very hard"

Pearson pushed back on the idea that starting a business is complicated. He registered his own LLC and EIN in fifteen minutes, paid under $1,000 for a trademark, and said Envision's entire startup cost — inventory included — was around $30,000. "People try to overcomplicate business for sure," he said. "The hard part is showing up every day... when they're having to eat shit one day and they still show up the next day." That, in his view, is the real cost of entry: consistency, not paperwork.

The bucket video that made him internet-famous for the wrong reasons

Life With Tripp started in April 2025 as a commitment to post once a day for a year, partly to document his son's life the way his own childhood was never really filmed, and partly with an eye toward brand deals funding a future college account. It's worked — but the video that actually went viral (24 million views) was a tongue-in-cheek clip of Tripp with a bucket on his head while Pearson looked on, which drew thousands of comments calling him an unfit parent. "I got so numb to comments," he said. "Every time someone commented, it just boosted engagement, so the video just kept pumping." He and his wife Caitlin made peace with it early: face-blurring a kid doesn't stop anyone determined to find them, so they'd rather post openly and let the account speak for itself.

Building Mantle almost entirely in Claude Code

The idea behind Pearson's newest project, Mantle, came from a simple worry: what happens to all those Instagram videos if Instagram disappears the way MySpace did? Mantle is a free app — inspired partly by the message Tony Stark leaves his daughter — that lets parents record notes, video, photos, and audio against guided prompts across 11 chapters, then export everything into a permanent offline file that never depends on an app staying alive. Pearson built the concept and web app himself in Claude Code before a software-engineer friend confirmed he didn't even need to hire a developer. "The framework and the bones of everything — it was all via Claude," he said. It's live now on iOS and Android, free, with no monetization angle: "This is a lot of it is for me too... I wanted to be able to provide something for myself, but then I'm like, all right, well, I should provide this with everybody."

Listen to the Full Conversation

This recap only scratches the surface. Pearson also gets into what it's like running Georgia's oldest solar company as data centers reshape the industry, why he'll probably never take out a business loan, and the very real possibility of a Prepped & Ready comeback. Catch the full episode below.