Dom Finetti × Chomps · A working pitch for social & community

MEAT DOM.

I'm Dom Finetti. For ten years I've built the rooms where fans actually live - Discord servers, forums, ambassador programs, comment sections - for Adobe, Mattel, AMD, Cisco and Logitech. This is what I'd bring to the first 90 days at Chomps: a point of view, five formats I'd ship, and the receipts behind them.

Dom Finetti enjoying a Chomps meat stickActual Chomps enjoyer
PLATFORM-NATIVE COMMUNITY-FIRST 0G FLUFF 10+ YEARS EDITORIAL JUDGMENT NIMBLE RESOURCEFUL PERSISTENT
PLATFORM-NATIVE COMMUNITY-FIRST 0G FLUFF 10+ YEARS EDITORIAL JUDGMENT NIMBLE RESOURCEFUL PERSISTENT

All stick, without the ick

10+

YEARS IN COMMUNITY

0G

AGENCY FLUFF

35K

MEMBERS GROWN AT ADOBE

20+

MODS & CREATORS LED

1.5M

FOLLOWERS OWNED

2.7M

IMPRESSIONS ON ONE DROP

Why Chomps

I'VE ALREADY BUILT ROOMS FOR PRODUCTS PEOPLE LIKE.

I WANT THE NEXT ONE I BUILD TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE.

For ten years I've been the person who builds the room where fans actually live, and I've mostly done it for products people like. Chomps is a product people are loyal to - that's a different job and a much better one.

The specifics matter too: minority-owned, family-operated, B Corp, and now non-UPF certified. That's a brand that made hard choices before they were marketable. My whole approach to community is that you can't fake the thing underneath - you can only give people a good reason to talk about it. Chomps already has the reason. I want to build the rooms.

And selfishly: this is a team small enough that a good idea can be live the same week. After years inside enterprise approval chains, that's the part I'm hungry for.

I keep a box of Jalapeno Beef and another of Nashville Hot Chicken within arm's reach. The Jalapeno has a slow, green heat that builds; the Nashville Hot lands with that cayenne punch up front. Both taste like actual meat, not a compressed protein bar. I travel almost every month to Dallas, New Orleans, Nashville, and the Bay Area, and these are what I reach for when airport terminals run out of anything decent. Two sticks is enough to keep me full through a three-hour flight without the sugar crash or the greasy regret. That's the product difference to me: it satisfies like real food because it is real food.

Where I'd start

Three things I believe about Chomps on social.

Certification is a claim. Culture is a habit.

Non-UPF, grass-fed, B Corp - the most defensible ingredient story in the aisle, currently living mostly in captions. I'd move it into formats people repeat, not claims people scroll past.

The comment section is under-farmed.

Gym, carnivore, keto, hunting, teacher tote bag, toddler snack. Six distinct communities sharing one product. Right now they mostly talk to the brand. I'd get them talking to each other.

Speed beats polish four days out of five.

The gap between brands that participate in culture and brands that comment on it is almost always an approvals problem. I've fixed that at Mattel and AMD by building the lane before the moment.

Written from the outside looking in. Half of this probably changes in week one once I see the data - that's the point.

Five formats

NOT CAMPAIGN IDEAS.

REPEATABLE FORMATS, REASONING ATTACHED.

The format

A recurring 15-second format where we read one ingredient label out loud - ours or somebody else's - and just let it sit.

Why it works

Non-UPF certification is a fact, and facts don't travel. Formats do. This one turns the hardest-won thing on the package into a series with a built-in comment-section argument, which is the cheapest reach in social.

How we'd measure it

Saves and shares first. Comment sentiment as the tiebreaker.

What Chomps isn't doing yet

THE FUTURE PLAYBOOK.

Chomps Crew

A named ambassador tier layered on top of Refer a Friend.

Right now loyalty ends at a discount code. There's a whole level above it: early flavor access, a private space, a creator lane for the loudest regulars. I built a version of this at Cisco with goCSAP. The structure is the part I keep to myself.

A room, not just a feed

A real community home - Discord or similar - built around how people actually eat Chomps.

Keto threads, gym bags, road trips, lunchbox parents. Six communities already exist; they're just homeless. I grew Adobe's community to 35K members doing exactly this.

What's In Your Bag?

A named, recurring UGC format fans already want to post.

Every Chomps eater has a bag: gym, carry-on, glovebox. Give it a name and a cadence and it becomes a free content engine and an ambassador pipeline at once.

The Terminal Test

Travel content built from the road, not the studio.

I fly monthly - Dallas, New Orleans, Nashville, the Bay Area. Airport terminals are where protein bars and jerky fight for their lives. There's a series and eventually an activation here. I have the receipts on me.

A tiered creator bench

Celebrities for moments, mid-tier for momentum, ambassadors for always-on.

I've run the top end - Stevie Nicks, LeBron James, Billie Eilish, Venus Williams - and the working creator layer at Logitech and AMD. The interesting part is how the tiers feed each other.

The 10% becomes a welcome

The footer signup is a transaction. It could be an invitation.

Right now the email capture offers a discount and stops. Onboarding into a community costs about the same and compounds instead of expiring.

Deliberately vague. These are the hooks - the actual programs are the conversation I'd rather have in person.

First 90 days

START BY LISTENING.

END WITH A BUSINESS CASE.

DAYS 1-30

Listen louder than I talk

  • Audit six months of posts and tag what worked by format, not by topic.
  • Sit in on CX tickets for a week. The complaints are the content calendar.
  • One-on-ones with the community manager and every freelancer. Find what's slow and why.
  • Set the baseline: engagement by format, response time, share of voice, sentiment.
DAYS 31-60

Ship the system

  • Publish a voice + escalation doc a new hire could run on day one.
  • Launch two formats, kill anything on the calendar running on habit.
  • Stand up the response workflow with Creative and CX, with tiered approvals.
  • Start a weekly test log: one hypothesis, one result, one decision.
DAYS 61-90

Prove it moves business

  • Tie organic winners into paid with a clear boost threshold.
  • Bring the first community-sourced product insight to Brand, with receipts.
  • Report what we learned and what we're stopping, not just what we posted.
  • Draft the case for an owned Chomps community space and what it takes to run it.

The receipts

Ten years building the rooms, not just posting in them.

35,000+

Adobe global student community members, grown from ~2,000 across Discord, WhatsApp and GroupMe

5 minutes

Sell-out on the Hot Wheels x MSCHF "Not Wheels" drop

2.7M+

Impressions generated by that same drop

1.1M+

1.1M+ community replies moderated across Mattel Creations

17,000+

Members built from zero on ScholarshipOwl's Discord

$50k+

Earned media value from Cisco's goCSAP ambassador program

On leading people

20+ moderators at Mattel. A volunteer mod team at AMD. Campus ambassadors across 15 universities. Freelance creators at Adobe. Coaching a community manager and a creator bench is the part of this job I've done the longest.

On names people know

I've worked alongside celebrity talent and creators at AMD, Mattel, and Logitech, including Stevie Nicks, LeBron James, Miley Cyrus, Billie Eilish, Venus Williams, and Trisha Hershberger. The throughline: protect the talent's time, give them a clear creative lane, and make sure the community gets something out of it too.

On AI, honestly

I use it as an operator, not a novelty: sentiment models on community feedback at AMD, automation and calendar tooling at Adobe, and prototypes like this page. It handles the work nobody should do by hand so the team spends its hours on judgment.

CHOMPS FANS
ALREADY TALK.
LET'S GIVE THEM A ROOM WORTH STAYING IN.

This isn't a pitch for more posts. It's a pitch for a community that sells the product while we're asleep.