Speaker 1We hit 100 million annual revenue run rate in 11 months. Gruins did it in 22 months, right? And they were acquired for 1.2 billion. AG1 took them 10 years to hit 100 million. We hit 200 million run rate in 18 months.
Speaker 2All right, Danny, welcome to the show, man.
Speaker 3Why don't we start off? Why don't you give a little intro to yourself? So who are you?
Speaker 1What do you do? Hey, Sean, thanks for having me. Quick background myself, always been an entrepreneur. Started working at a very young age at 15. I was a telemarketer. So that's how I got started working. Age 24, had my first business, was a restaurant. Did that for three, four years. Then ventured in hotel furniture business, import export from China into the US. Eventually worked on some big projects like the MGM City Center in Vegas. Did that also for the three, four years. Then in 2010. I took a leap of faith and moved to Hong Kong to launch an e-commerce company that was doing group buying. And then when Groupon went international, they acquired 51% of my company. We became the largest e-commerce company in the region. I left in 2014. We're doing about 200 million annual revenues. I had a good exit. That's where, you know, I made my first million per se, more than a million. And then after e-commerce, I was like, Hey, you know, what do I do next? I had a lot of options at my disposal and I didn't just want to go back into e-commerce, even though that was the easy route for me, I ventured then I actually, you know, got started in diagnostics and DNA testing. So founded Prenetics, which was a life sciences DNA testing company. You know, again, this was 2014, right? So very early, no one was really talking about this stuff. And then you'll see that in my entrepreneurial career, it wasn't the obvious choice, but everyone's now looking back. It's like, oh, yeah. Because obviously it's choice, right? I'm thinking about in 2010, no one was using e-commerce in Hong Kong. Everyone, in fact, told me to go back to US. They're like, Danny, let's go back to US. This model is not going to work in Hong Kong. We made it the number one e-commerce company at the time. But going back to Prenetics, you know, started off as a life sciences company. When COVID hit, you know, we were prime position to take advantage of it. We worked very fast. In two weeks, we got our COVID testing kit. We then became. Hong Kong's number one COVID PCR provider, as well as in the UK. So those three years, I would say we were like printing money. I would say, right? It exploded. At one point, we're doing 40,000 PCR tests a day. We totaled 28 million. This is laboratory PCR tests. Those three years, we did 700 million plus revenue in three years time. We listed on the NASDAQ in 2022. Where household name, everyone that arrived in Hong Kong at one point had a mandatory Prenetics PCR test. And then, of course, that goes into, you know, IM8, which is kind of, you know, what happened after COVID. You know, we had a billion dollar valuation during COVID in 2022 because COVID was still going on. 18 months later, our market cap hit, I think it was like 50 million. Went from billion plus to 50 million. We all like shit. Right? You really know who your friends are at that point, right? Because at a billion. You got a lot of friends at a billion.
Speaker 3You got a lot of friends at a billion. When you're down 95%, okay, the stock's down 95%. Were the friends also down 95% or it wasn't so bad?
Speaker 1No, I mean, the friends wasn't down 95%. But when you're growing up, everyone wants to be involved, which is natural to be fair, right? Everyone wants to be surrounded by winners. But very few want to be surrounded in a social. I mean, I think the path to recovery is significantly much harder. I mean, we had a few options, like, you know what, why don't we just close the business? Because if you think about the background, right, we, I think in 2022, yeah, we did, you know, 272 million in revenue, right? And basically 40,000 tests turned to nothing, right? So basically, you know, our revenue dropped by 95%. And to be fair, I think the market, you know, realized that and it was rightfully valued. So we started here, what do we do? You know, do we close up shop, just return capital to our shareholders? You know, do I do something else? I mean, of course, I've been successful in the market. I've been successful in the market. I've been successful in the market. 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Speaker 1Even before we got into this category, everyone told me not to do this. They're like, hey, supplement category, highly competitive, so many bad eggs. And to be fair, I can tell the story now is that my whole board disagreed with me. They're like, you don't know anything about supplements, Danny. I'm like, it's true too, right? I didn't do anything in this category before, right? It was e-commerce, selling coupons, DNA testing, running the lab, all that stuff. But also, to be fair, before any of that, I never had a background as well too, right? But of course, still, the board was like, you know what? And then we have to make, of course, a commitment with David Beckham. It was not a small commitment, correct? And so they disagreed with me. But I knew. I knew that if we made a great product, and we've nailed the positioning and the brand right, and with the support of DB, this would be a home run. So I had to really fight and educate my board. And again, it's like, hey, you know what? If I'm wrong, I'm going to resign. I'm going to quit, right? That was my position. Because it really, I needed to be convinced myself that this was the right move. But what made you think?
Speaker 3That this would be the right move? Because it is true. It's something that is crowded, right? Like, a lot of people have a celebrity. Who cares, right? Correct.
Speaker 1And a lot of celebrity brands fail, right? They're like, my board was telling me, there's so many, there's actually more failures of celebrity brands, if you think about them, actually success cases, right? So what was your take? So my take was, number one, everything starts with the product, right? Everything starts with a better product than what's available in the market. And I can, yeah, honestly say, yeah, we have the best product in the market. But like you fairly pointed out, consumers may not recognize that, right? And so this is where, you know, from day one, we spend more time also on the taste profile. Because a lot of times people have the great product, blah, blah, blah, et cetera. But if it doesn't taste good, no one's going to drink it, right? So I spent a week at the factories every single day testing like, you know, 20, 30 different flavors until we got that taste like, ah, you know what? This tastes good, right? And that people wants to drink it again. But those two things, those two also doesn't, you know, relate to success, right? So you mentioned the color, the brand. We wanted this to stand out. We didn't want to just create another greens powder, right? No one created a reds powder, right? And so I think by default, that was interesting to people.
Speaker 3Is it red because it's like made of beets or it's red because you made it red? Like, you know what I mean? Like, did it need to be red or you chose to be red?
Speaker 1It was a natural coincidence that when we created the formulation, there was like beets inside. You know, the formulation and this was a natural red color and then like, shit, let's just, let's just go hard on this color, right? Which then made sense. And then our packaging, if you look at it, it's a very big red box, right? It's very premium, the positioning. So I didn't want it just to be another supplement brand. I wanted to have a really great unboxing experience. It's bold, the name, you know, easy to remember the fonts, the colors.
Speaker 3How did you come up with the name? Because, you know, I'm a big fan of the name. I'm a big fan of the name. I'm a big fan of the name. Whenever I brainstorm company names, you get 500 names. Each one you look at, you're like, that could be it. And then, you know, so like if I had written down on my list of supplement names, I am, and then the number eight. I might have, maybe it would be like, oh, that kind of flows. But I would have, the courage it takes to pick such a weird name. Where does that come from? Why, why, why that name?
Speaker 1I'm very good at names, right? I would say I'm like really good at names. I mean, my, my e-commerce company is called You Buy, I Buy, right? Group buying, right? With that just the number you. Then prunetics was half prevention and genetics. So you have prunetics. Right? And then, of course, I am eight. It came out, I wanted something simple and easy to remember. And then I am means I am. And then eight, if you flip it around, means infinity, infinite possibilities. Right? And I knew at one day we'll enter China and the number eight will also work in China. Right? So there's definitely meaning. That's the lucky number of China, right? Number me. And it's like, I am. It's like, I am. I am healthy. I am strong. I am powerful. Right. So there's a great meaning behind it.
Speaker 3Okay. And so you go into this category. Now you get your formulation done. What's the zero to one? So what did that, what did that look like? You just fire up Facebook ads, Shopify store. Did you do anything else? Like what, what did zero to one look like?
Speaker 1Zero to one, again, the formulation part, you know, I would say was a result of also getting an amazing scientific advisory board. Yeah. On again, when I looked into this, I was like, okay, what are all the different challenges someone can, you know, go at us? And it's like, Hey, it's just because we have David Beckham, it's not enough. And everyone knows David is not a scientist, right? I'm not a scientist. All right. So we, then the next step was recruiting a world-class scientific advisory board. The likes of Dr. Don Muzalem from Mayo Clinic. Um, you know, James Green, the former chief science of NASA. Suzanne Defco, the, you know, the director of microbiome at Cedars-Sinai. So these individuals. We brought along, they all took part in creating this formulation and that wasn't enough. And how did you do that?
Speaker 3By the way, that's, um, what your cold emailing? Is there a, I actually know there's like a, there's like an agency. There's like a brokerage service. I don't know if you know this one. There's a brokerage service between doctors and supplement brands that literally is like, get a doctor on your brand. I don't know if you've seen this. I haven't seen it. It's like a very niche agency. Some guy has, but what did you do? You, you cold call these people, you go fly out, meet them. Yeah. Talk to them.
Speaker 1I mean, um, I knew the former chief science of NASA prior. Yeah. Yeah. Basically he was at NASA for two years. So that was easy because he knew me. Right. And again, a lot of this relationships is, is built on trust. And, you know, for Dr. Dawn will Salem, you know, I contacted her on LinkedIn. We got on a call. And again, the first time we had it, she was very skeptical because so many supplement brands, you know, reach out to them. And again, especially as if you're a practicing physician, yeah. It's. Okay. It's also quite rare to work with a supplement brand, especially if you're, let's say with Mayo clinic, really, really rare, right? Because they have a lot of restrictions, et cetera, et cetera. Right. So, but I think from day one, you know, even I, I told Dawn again, we're, we're still working today very closely is that we need to prove the science and evidence. Yeah. So that's why we embarked on a clinical trial before we launched a brand, we embarked on cert third party testing by not. Just one organization, but by two, by Eurofins and NSF certification for sport. So that means if you're a professional athlete, you know, it's free from 280 banned substances.
Speaker 3So I have a lot of friends who are in the supplement game and in, in general, when you're in e-commerce, it's easy to become very skeptical and very jaded. Of course. Um, not because anybody means poorly, but just because it's very easy to get something up and running and put the make, put all your effort into the packaging, maybe even some into the taste. But ultimately, you know, you're not in the factory and, and, you know, and also it's very easy to have something that might help, but it's, it's not scientifically proven. Right. Scientifically proven is a very high bar. And so I would say there's almost two, two, two parts of the ledger. There's the first part, which is like, are these clean ingredients? And is it made in a clean factory? That's kind of like trust test. Number one. Yeah. Trust us. Number two is the hell's a postbiotic. What's prebiotic? Does any of this stuff actually matter? If I drink this, does anything really change in my body? And I know obviously I'm asking, you know, the priest, if religion is real, but I guess like if I'm a highly logical, rational person, what would be your most convincing thing you could tell me that would make me actually believe in supplements?
Speaker 1A lot of supplements out there don't work and that's the reality, right? And I think the best validation of our product is that it doesn't matter who we have back on, blah, blah, blah, et cetera. Our business won't be in 20 months. Can't be a 20 million. Can't be a 200 million plus business without recurring subscriptions. And that means the product works as advertised. All right. And how does someone know that the product works? How does the customer feel about the product? I mean, you'll feel it. And the best way to energy, what are you feeling? Better energy recovery. Yeah. You sleep better. Your gut. Yeah. Everything is working better. Yeah. And of course, a lot of these individuals, these are CEOs, athletes. I think the best case I can show you, I mean, I was surprised by this email, right? Around last April or May of 2025, right? I got an email from Irina Sabalenka's team, right? A cold email into me, right? They're like, hey, you know, Irina's been on your product for about three months now via a recommendation from her nutrition coach. When you're the world number one tennis player, every single thing they're measuring, your recovery, how you're feeling, three to four. Four times on a daily basis. And they don't need to bullshit, right? I mean, she has so many options and resources. And she's like, hey, she's been feeling amazing from a recovery perspective. And she hasn't gotten sick while on the product. And given that they're traveling, yeah, different time zones every single week. Can we partner together? Right? And so that was a great validation of the product working at the highest level of sports. And the reality is also every single ambassador that came after that, was inbound to me.
Speaker 3you a question is the market in china or india for that matter like two big population places is this is the supplement market the same is it just the same but 10 years ago um is it different
Speaker 1or what's going on over there um india to be honest with you i don't know um i do know it's a much lower price point yeah category um in china they do have ag1 but it's not like yeah from what
Speaker 3i understand it's not doing well why do you think that is is it is it all just price point or is
Speaker 1there another factor i mean again it goes back you know to price point education branding positioning you know there's like so much right i think to be fair 99 of american companies going to china and then they can just succeed with the same business model and for china to operate it successfully you need a completely different business model completely different team like for example my team can't do china 100 there's like no hell they have no way they can do china right so for me to enter china i would need to get a completely new team of every single
Speaker 3individual hey let's take a quick break you know that feeling when strategy is done the brief is written everyone's aligned and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content that someone is usually you and it's due tomorrow well the breeze assistant from hubspot can help it works right inside hubspot you can draft a campaign copy blog posts emails all in your brand voice all using your actual customer data so you don't create just content you create content that converts check out hubspot.com the agentic customer platform for growing businesses tell me about some of the operational excellence so i want to know what are some things that you're doing that i could look at that um i could be inspired by oh that that you know the way they do that that's really good so now i'll give you a couple examples so we had chad from grunes on the podcast and he was showing us their funnels their facebook ads we're looking at his ad library together and they were showing like he's got like you know there's eight different sort of reasons to buy right maybe you're on ozempic and you want ozempic support maybe you're looking for mood and here's a mood thing maybe you're a woman and your hair and your hair is falling out postpartum whatever i don't know what they're i don't remember the exact angles he's like i've got like the ad that goes to the landing page for that persona for that problem for that sales pitch and i'm running all eight simultaneously whereas most entrepreneurs are you know usually just get fixated on one and they don't get they don't get as much of the market he would tell us that or um eric ryan from method soap and ollie gummies came on and he was he's a master of packaging and positioning and he said i was looking in the vitamin aisle and you know first thing i knew was that every container was round and so we would be a rectangle and he's like it's as simple as that i look for a sea of sameness and everywhere in the aisle that i see a sea of sameness i know there's an opportunity to come and do something different that's what they did in band-aids and soap and vitamins yeah i would say
Speaker 1even right now you know to be fair wise you know the ads and landing pages personas that's quite standard operating procedure right now right if you're a dcc brand doing 100 to 200 million dollars i mean you have to be doing that correct um i think for us wise any one thing that we've done really well with scaling on meta ads you know right now we have anywhere from you know two to three thousand ads live at any given time we're testing out you know 500 to 800 creators on a day um that is really really important right and you have and right now the reality is even with ad buying i mean you know ad buying is like a commodity right now yeah before a few years ago you have to be really really good at ad buying but now meta does all of that for you already right you don't need to do the targeting you don't need to do all this stuff right all you need to really figure out is how do you get really good creatives and really good creative diversity on the different personas because now you need the creative to do the targeting
Speaker 3so tell me about that creative machine so you said two things you said you have a couple thousand ads running at a time so are those like statics or those videos and videos i would say as well you
Speaker 1know 55 60 statics and then the rest of videos and you're doing that with what a studio you're doing
Speaker 3that with ai what is the machine that's building all that a combination of everything so we have
Speaker 1our own ambassadors yeah again we have of course we have like a top 10 very famous ambassadors then we have another thousand more ambassadors and then we have like one hundred thousand more ambassadors or more so ambassadors affiliates that are creating lots of content for us on a daily basis right and that feeds the engine depending on whichever personas that we're going to and a lot of times you have your proven winners and then it's like how do we recreate all these proven winners because you know there's also creative fatigue that happens right so we have our own creative fatigue score that we identify so we know okay when a ad is potentially going to get in fatigue which then ultimately will drop that row us right again 300 000 above on a daily basis on meta you know which is quite high given that we're only 20 months in right and we've been able to yeah scale that and any one key then again public information given we're public companies that if you look at what happened in q2 versus q1 q1 our cac was 305 right our average order value is about 230 right so we doubled our marketing spending q2 right we doubled it from about 17 to 33 million dollars in a quarter right our cac actually went down by four dollars all right from 305 301 because you would imagine if you're doubling spend your cats are always going to go up yeah right and then so i think we reached a point where again we got the engine running the brand is also doing very well from a brand position and we've ran now 200 plus offline events i think this is something that i haven't seen any other supplement brand do
Speaker 3why are you doing that because that creates content or because that creates loyalty or both what's the what's the main reason to do 200 offline events i mean it's very important from
Speaker 1us from day one and it's by a business this is about a authentic product science and you know when we have these events we have our scientific advisory board members there they're talking about the product right and again this is not just a marketing aspect as you know a real science behind it they get to meet our formulators and our scientists and doctors last week in new york we did like you know seven events in seven days right um as part of us open i always say these the events are very difficult to scale right right but i think that's very very important especially in the age of ai you don't know what's weird we don't know what's what's fake or whatever right and that's why i think having the offline presence is really important for us
Speaker 3yeah and i think that's pretty counter to where most brands are right now i think it's so easy to sit at your laptop fire up ads let's you know tweak your landing page and it's clearly you get the scale you get to measure it you get everything you get the feedback loop right away you don't have to like go get face rejection out in the real world and it almost means that like offline has this disproportionate premium because it's simply like less contested and once you've had an in-person touch point and then you go see an ad right it's going to be a completely different experience
Speaker 1than if you've never it's just a hundred percent and i attribute you know that cac lowering when we double our spend we're not talking we're talking about like a lot of double a lot of spend doubling right and even in july our cash fell to 239 dollars right yeah you know which is you know we're spending more than 10 million dollars a month on marketing right and then so it was continue to lower it but i do believe again i don't have quantifiable data to say these are all offline but i'm going to continue to double down on offline events um because that's a really important to the brand side of things
Speaker 3tell me about some of the kind of early days of entrepreneurship where maybe your entrepreneurial philosophy got got formed or the core skills that are helping you today but where were they first kind of originated where would you cut your teeth doing it i mean so i dropped out of high school
Speaker 1right so i was you know basically a bad kid got kicked out of high school for fighting so i had to really learn everything you know on the streets i would say right as as an entrepreneur and you're always faced with making decisions with very limited information and i think you know for everyone that knows me i'm do you know me i'm like very street smart right i can figure things out by
Speaker 3myself with very little information where were you going to high school in san francisco oh you're in san francisco so you get kicked out so what why telemarketing how did you stumble into telemarketing
Speaker 1um i i mean i think i didn't stumble i think it was like what do i do you know i'm not going to school right so and then as a telemarketer you know i was 15 and i was good at it i was good and you know kind of like cold calling people what were you selling i was telling timeshares timeshares yeah yeah i remember timeshares is like again this is about 30 years ago right so those few years where i was i was a very bad kid actually formed a lot of my thinking as an entrepreneur because i always had to reinvent myself always had to go to a new school make new friends um and get very comfortable and yeah i i i believe i can survive anywhere you put me into nigeria africa whatever it is i will figure it out yeah the yeah the sort of more
Speaker 3adversity you face the more confidence you get um when you survive you know there's another guy um craig craig clemens who came on the podcast good friend great guy he's also an e-commerce monster so he's company golden here he's one of the best e-commerce sponsors in the world so he's company golden hippo does hundreds of millions a year in sales bootstrapped him and his brothers he also was in telemarketing he was selling dating products when he was younger and um you know he he was sharing for him one of the ways he got better at sales was he was going to these seminars and he was reading books and he was just looking for like anything he could pull out one line one one copywriting thing one psychological um sort of hook that he could pull on to did you do any of that or were you just brute force numbers game
Speaker 1well i mean you have to like communicate you know properly right i think you always have to be direct and i think i've always kept that right so very transparent in terms of hey especially would be let's say trying to meet someone for the first time always telling teams yes don't don't don't talk about boas bs right i think you just have to be direct and transparent what's in it for them what's in it for us and again for me i've always for each of my businesses i'm always trying to deliver greater value first i think that's very important i never try to look at what's in it for me i was like what can i help this person with how can i help my partner how can i help their business and that's been my philosophy from day one i think if you have that type of philosophy going in it doesn't matter if the other partner other partner doesn't reciprocate you move and you learn to move on
Speaker 3so you're telemarketing you learn about the numbers game you learn that you got to sort of figure it out so you get street smart to figure out things to survive and you you learn it doesn't
Speaker 1matter who you talk to right you can i can go up to anyone it's just basically you know the worst thing that happens is they reject me right how many people would you call in a day it was like night shift at the time when i was working so i was like you know 6 30 then i would say 100 200 people and of that what's the rejection rate still gonna be like how much is not 90 90 95 right
Speaker 3and and so was that something did you have to sort of what did you tell yourself to be able to like kind of quickly bounce back from that no he's just i mean again it's a it's a numbers game
Speaker 1he just fell you know but basically you just tell yourself hey you know the next one is going to be more likely to be positive right so you have to just get through it and i think you know to refer telemarketing taught me a lot i think telemarketing taught me a lot i think telemarketing taught me a lot yeah you have to have a skin even when you talk to investors same thing right when you're early on days getting investment i mean you talk to 100 investors you know only five maybe may invest in you so there's nothing different about that it's just you're not getting rejected like hanging up on you but you're still faced with that right i'm giving an example um of how that came to use right so i was doing my hotel furniture business i was cold calling basically mgm then i got a meeting and then was able to get a meeting that was able to you know deliver the value i was able to get but without my cold calling days i probably wouldn't have done that right even when i did my e-commerce business you buy i buy which was group buying i remember i went to hong kong and i had to go call all the merchants myself right because again you know it's not like it starts off with nobody it starts with nobody right so i remember one time i was calling a big restaurant group and then director of marketing he hung up on me and i was like he hung up on me really like you know it was like it hurt me i was like wow this guy like he said some like very bad words and blah blah blah to me right and then normally he was like oh you're probably like you know that was thinking wow who's this guy's boss i was thinking right and then then i like found who's this guy's boss says he was director of marketing and i co-called the office and it was sandy and he owned like 30 plus restaurants this indian entrepreneur and i asked for sandy called the front desk he picked up the phone and i'm like hey this is danny i just moved to hong kong i moved here from the u.s yeah i can have five minutes of your time because i have this interesting e-commerce idea and would love to see if i can partner with you right and then he met with me the next day for 20 minutes and he told me danny hey um danny i don't think your business is going to work in hong kong because why would i give 50 off to customers and i only get 25 of the check all right but you know what because you know you call me after my director of marketing hung up on you and we're still here i'm going to work with you and give you all of my dirty restaurants and sign you up and he did that because he knew you know i didn't give up and just was persistent resilience and that changed the directory of the business because he gave me 30 restaurants and i needed one deal a day right so he gave me basically my whole next 30 days was filled by one guy saying yes and of course then i can continue but it was a big restaurant group right it was very and then i would then go to other restaurant groups because got him because he was so famous hey yeah sandeep donnie concepts was working with us yeah can you partner too then yeah and once you once you get yeah some traction etc then more and more people will work with you right but that's just reality someone has to give you a chance and you just
Speaker 3always have to be on the hunt my my uncle vinnie was uh door-to-door when he came to the country he came to this country door-to-door salesman of like the bible or i don't know what he was selling and i asked him the same thing like man you were walking around in the heat in georgia in the summers you're walking house to house knocking on door like getting rejected even more than on the phone like to your face door slam and um same thing 90 to 95 percent of people door slam us he was the top sales guy and he had a thick indian accent i was like how did you do that and he goes oh i took rejection better than anyone else i said well how did you take rejection better he goes i put a price on the word no so he said if if a yes is worth a hundred dollars to me and it's going to take me you know for every 20 no's i get one yes then he's like then every no is worth five dollars to me right he's like i just so when they would say no i would hear in my head all right that's five bucks in the bank let's keep going and so he's like i was adding up the no's i was putting a price on it because i knew really like it's a numbers game i have to keep knocking and so i have to like sort of see each knock as a success even though what my ears hear is a rejection i have to change what i'm hearing and that led him to be the number one sales guy in the country he ended up training all the other sales guys and i think there's a i think there's something everybody should take from from that whether you're fundraising or whatever whatever you're doing that like you know e-commerce i think a good like if i looked at our conversion rate right now i think it's like two point something percent two percent two percent two and a half percent maybe and you know 97.5 percent of people come to our site and say hell no now you don't feel it as much when it's e-commerce right but you but but you feel it when it's over there you know so so it's all a numbers game yes what else you mentioned mgm what's the story there i didn't
Speaker 1understand that one when i started first working the hotel furniture business i was doing hotels that were like 50 rooms 100 rooms small hotels right how small hotels change just doing all of
Speaker 3their custom furniture sorry can you go back why why why does danny start selling hotel furniture
Speaker 1how does that happen no because i was doing my restaurant business at the time i had a good friend that was an interior designer and she was just telling me hey you know she's a designer for these hotels and she was having difficulty sourcing furniture and i was like why don't you look in china and she's like she doesn't know how to and i'm like why don't i help you and it's just like okay why don't you help me right and i just did it for her and then but after a few of the hotels i figured out you know it's the same process if i make 50 chairs or 50 as if i make two to three thousand chairs right so it's like who is making two thousand hotel rooms right now and at that time was like vegas right then i started co-calling the vegas hotels and eventually i called mgm and she gave me a meeting and then i went into the meeting and you know one year later i got a you know four million dollar contract with mgm how did that feel that first kind of big contract i mean it felt you know amazing but of course ultimately you know i wanted to deliver and that's so that's why a lot of times even when we do an achievement or milestone you know i always tell the team hey you know this is good yeah but it's not the end right we're just getting started right and it's like you know even last month we had 20 million in monthly revenue right but hey this is good progress great progress i would say but we have so much greater opportunity so but you know i was of course happy that we're able to get such a big customer when you were doing the covid testing you
Speaker 3were kind of in the right place when covid hit where you could provide testing you said a couple interesting things one the ramp was crazy you said you did like 700 million revenue in a couple of years which is just a bonkers number i'm sure there was a lot of free cash flow in that too not just revenue yeah we made over 100 million dollars net net yeah exactly and you the second thing was you said like in hong kong like everybody who entered the country had that sounds like maybe you had like a kind of a really valuable key contract that you won or some sort of like a you know pretty defensible position so can you tell the the story of that and also during that did you did you think did you know well this the music's gonna stop on this at some point and what happens after that or did you say i don't know let's just run and we'll figure it out when
Speaker 1when that happens yeah so i can tell you the back story on this right so um i think this is in april yeah april of 2020 so covid was getting very bad i had a meeting with the chief executive of hong kong i was like hey you know we have a lab you know covid seems to be getting you know worse and worse you know by the day yeah can we somehow provide support and make use of our laboratory yeah to basically to provide the covid testing to the community right um and then you know the chief executive said the same at the time said you know what um you know we have our own public health laboratory we can do it all of ourselves so that was that right and i'm like okay no no worries and because at the time wise it was very difficult to get a cover test in hong kong you would have to go to the hospital and they were charging like three to four hundred $100 USD for COVID tests. And then I knew the cost of a COVID test is a fraction of that, right? And they were making so much money. And at the time, you don't want to go to a hospital to do a COVID test because it means that you may get infected too, right? I was like, you know what? We'll just create our own at-home PCR tests. And so we launched that within about a little bit more than two weeks. And every day, we're just trying to help out the community. We're selling it for $100 USD when everyone wants selling it for $400. And even the hospitals would call me like, why are you guys selling it for so cheap? I was like, I just want to help the community, right? That was the core reason for getting into it. So every single day, we'll be selling out. And then July, yeah, the government actually then, again, called me. It's like, can we meet again? Because it was getting out of control, right? You know, three months later, and they're like... Daniel, we need your help. Yeah, can you help us service COVID testing to the community? I'm like, yeah, we'd love to help. Like, yeah, what do you want us to do? They're like, we want you to test 300,000 restaurant workers across 18,000 restaurants in Hong Kong. And I'm like, how long of a time do you want this testing? They're like, yeah, we want you to do this in three weeks. So that was like crazy. Operations, right? I don't know why I even said yes to it. Again, we went from 100,000, 100, 200 tests on a daily basis to now testing, you know, 300,000 people in about a month time, which basically meant that we had to scale out from 200 tests to 10,000 tests on a daily basis. And myself, my executive team, where we're all in the whole... And there were so many people without jobs at that time, right? And then basically, we started... Mass hiring. Yeah, at one point, we had like 2,000 to 3,000 people.
Speaker 3What was the bottleneck? Was it the actual tests, the supply chain for the test? Or was it the people in the lab to read the test? Because you get the result at home, right?
Speaker 1No, no, no, no. You get the result in the lab. Okay, so you would send it in. You have to send it in. This was before antigen tests were rolled out, right? Because early on, you had to do a laboratory test, which is a PCR test. And then the antigen... Antigen test, which is the quick ones, which are less accurate, only came into play maybe one year after. I see. I see. Okay, so you said supply chain and hiring people. People, logistics, data, right? And then we're the first company contracted by the Hong Kong government to do mass community testing. And of course, six months later, there was like 14, 15 different laboratories that were also doing COVID testing. However, the thing that's... stood out from us is I think a lot of it has to do with my technology and e-commerce background and data and all that stuff, yeah? Was we're the only testing provider that never had a f**k up when it came to false positives and false negatives. And then so when all these other laboratories, they messed up, and then the government got a lot of crap for it, right? Obviously, because if you get a positive during that time, you have to go to detention for like seven, 14 years. Right. 15 days, right? And then so this is why at one point, every single individual that landed Hong Kong airport was mandated a prenatics test because they wanted it to be the most secure and most accurate test.
Speaker 3Did you have to do anything crazy to unlock the supply chain there?
Speaker 1On a daily basis, you have to be fighting, you know, with so many different other laboratories around the world, right? You have to get all the supply chain. So it was like every single day we're fighting. And again, a lot of times you have to just to outbid them. And we have all, right? So again, but it was a constant battle. Those were some crazy two, three years of craziness.
Speaker 3Yeah. When you, so I want my last question, you know, I have a few friends who were doing this. I had one friend who was doing mobile testing. He had like vans that were testing. I had another friend that was doing PPE when, when you couldn't get masks and other PPE to hospitals and whatnot. And people were making money hand over fist and doing this because there's so much, I mean, there's the strongest demand I've ever seen for anything ever, right? Yes. Life or death at global scale. But you know, some of those people, they kind of stashed away enough cash that it was still a success. And some people had overbuilt and then suddenly the music stopped. And now it's like a lot
Speaker 1of work for nothing. So, so give me an example, right? On, on that exact thing is that it was, it was right when we knew COVID was over, I let go of 2000 people very, very fast. And that turned out to be a really good decision. And because again, during that time wise, and you had QHealth you had, you know, Lucera and these were at the time there were listed companies at one point QHealth was $3 billion market cap. They had a billion dollars in revenue in the U S right. Lucera, they had another, like, I think there were $2 billion market cap. Yeah. They went bankrupt, you know, 18 months after COVID because they overbuilt, they built their own manufacturing places. They bought into the at-home testing, which never panned out post COVID. But I knew that for both sides, for a company to survive after this, we needed to make a drastic cut. And also for the individuals, right? Because what, what are we going to do? Why am I have 2000 people? There's no testing. I'm just kind of like, you know, I'll stand around, which is not good for them. Everyone has to move on, you know, with their life and livelihood. And yeah, that was a very difficult decision, of course, but ultimately it was the right decision for both sides.
Speaker 3Mercury for all my businesses. I think I have like maybe seven or eight businesses. We use Mercury as our business banking across all of them. And now they actually just launched a personal banking account. So I have my personal account there. I moved off of Wells Fargo and chase. I'm just all in on Mercury. Why? Uh, I like products that are easy to use. I like products that get me and the problems that I have. So like very easy to make a joint account with my wife, very easy to spin up virtual cards, uh, one click and I get savings yield. It's just has all the stuff that I need in one place. So if you're looking for the best banking product on the market, it's definitely Mercury. I will fist fight anybody who disagrees with me on that. Go to mercury.com slash personal and learn more. Mercury is a FinTech, not an FDIC insured bank. Banking services are provided through choice financial group and column and a members FDIC. If you were, I don't know if you know, you meet a lot of entrepreneurs or, you know, there's a lot of people that will come up to you that are excited about what you've done and they're trying to do something and they're pitching you an idea. What do you think most entrepreneurs just don't get? What's the one thing if you feel like you could just shake them and, and say, look, Ben, you just really don't get it. It's the gap between where you are and where you want to be is this. What do you think that gap looks like for most people?
Speaker 1I think, I mean, again, about going back to the number one, right. You know, I always believe that if you build the best product in the market, it just makes everything so much easier. Right. And I think if you look at, again, even, you know, when, when the COVID has, I, I, we had the best product in the market. So if you had the best product in the market, it's much easier to foundation, branding, positioning, premium pricing over any of your competitors. Right. And I also believe, you know, as entrepreneurs and et cetera, you have to get into the weed of everything. I think some entrepreneurs, they don't like to, yeah, get involved in every part of the business. But at least from my perspective, you know, what's worked very well for me is I'm involved in every part of the business. It doesn't matter if we're a hundred million company, 200 million will be a billion dollars, whatever. I guarantee I'll be involved in a lot of the key, all of the key decisions because I think that's what separates a founder from a higher CEO. Right. I think the founder, and that's why a lot of times these founders, blah, blah, blah, et cetera, they grow their business to 400, the higher CEO. Oftentimes the founder always comes back, right? Because the CEO perspective, they're always much more conservative. And they're looking at this from a paycheck where the founders that were able to take risks. And they're looking at this from a paycheck where the founders that were able to take risks that a CEO wouldn't be able to take. So for example, even when I started IM8, if it was a CEO, there was no way he would have been able to take that risk, right? But because I'm the founder, you know, I have so much at stake here. There's no one in the organization that to take a risk as much as me. Right. To be able to make that move, let's get into the supplement
Speaker 3category, right? Yeah. I don't know if you've read, have you read Founder Mode? The sort of
Speaker 1Paul Graham blog post? Yeah. I mean, I've read that. Yeah. I think Founder Mode is very different. Am I correct? It's like, yeah, we see things very, very uniquely different. And entrepreneurs, you know, really have to dive into that. Yeah. And, you know, the first thing you said about
Speaker 3product, you know, the best product market. I mean, on one hand, that sounds obvious of like, oh, well, okay. Yeah. And I would say most people, everyone thinks they have a good product.
Speaker 1Yeah. But you have the realistic, right? It's like, yeah, it's like a big difference. I mean, I tell people, how do you know this? I say, don't trust me. Just put it into cloud, put it into HatchMT. What's better, IM8 or, you know, AG1? Let's see what it says on the similar product, right?
Speaker 3What does it say? Let's try it. It says, if I had to choose one today, I'd buy IM8 over AG1. So there you go. It says, it's not just 90 ingredients versus 75, because that's ingredient count is mostly marketing. I think that it's currently doing a better job putting useful ingredients at disclosed non-trivial doses in the same daily drink. And then it goes through the formula and it gives a little bit of an answer. So at least according to Chad GPT right now, that is, that is correct.
Speaker 1Okay. I'm going to cut that segment out and use it as an ad. Okay. That's perfect. Yeah, give me my kickback. And then you can do whatever you want. Yeah, give me 10% back. I'll be one of your TikTok affiliates.
Speaker 3Exactly, affiliates, yeah. You know, I sold my company to this guy, Mike Whitmire. And he had built the number one ranked result for buying or selling gold online. So anybody who wants to buy gold, his company was the premier leader. And I was excited when we sold because I was like, oh, you know so much about SEO. What are all the SEO hacks that we're not doing? I'm terrible at SEO. I never even tried that as a growth strategy. So I was like, tell me, tell me, like, you know, what should we start doing? And after a few meetings, I was like, dude, when are you going to tell me like the hacks? And he's like, well, there's some practices. He's like, there's not really hacks. He's like, so I was like, what'd you do with the gold company? And he goes, I printed out like the page, the webpage for all of us. And I asked myself, honestly, is there a reason that you should use us? Why should Google put us number one? Are we better? Are we actually better? Is it easier to use? Is it easier to understand? Is it more friendly? Is it faster? Like, do we have, are we better in any way? And he's like, we had a cold, honest conversation with ourselves that no, we were not better. And then we decided, well, we actually have to be better if Google is going to rank us higher. And slowly but surely we did, you know, one brick by brick, we just made the actual experience better until we felt we actually deserved to be number one. And guess what? Like at that point, we didn't need any of the hacks. We actually were number one. And I just remember thinking like, oh, I feel like you just taught me like a very valuable, like, you know, a very valuable, obvious lesson that I needed to hear from someone like you. I needed to hear from the guy who could shatter this myth in my head that the guys who rank number one are always just doing these clever tricks. And it's like, there's no trick. The trick was be the best. And if you're not willing to be the best, like if, you know, there's no way around, you just got to go through this. And I needed to hear that at the time.
Speaker 1Again, that's,
Speaker 3it starts with the product. And any entrepreneur just has to be realistic, right? Well, isn't it right that as a founder, you basically have to alternate between delusion and realism in a way that doesn't make any sense. In one moment, you're going to have to be delusional. You're going to have no evidence, but you're going to have to have the faith. Yes. And you're going to have to believe, even though you have no experience in this, the market tells you one thing, smart people tell you one thing, but you believe another. That's delusion. And you got to be a little delusional. But then, exactly. Then you have to switch gears and be hyper realistic. And the guy, you know, somebody who's never delusional, they end up being an employee. And somebody who's only delusional ends up being a failed founder. It's the person who's able to shift gears between the two and know when you need to be in each mode. That's sort of the art of the whole thing.
Speaker 1Yeah. And then, like, again, I had to be very, like you said, I had to be very delusional because I knew in my head, if we put all these pieces together, we will have a big success. Right? But again, going back, I didn't have any experience in this. So you had to build this with the limited information. I knew at the time.
Speaker 3Yeah. Well, Danny, I appreciate you coming on, man. This is a, you have a fun story from telemarketing to now running one of the fastest growing supplement brands in the world. And thanks for coming on. Thank you. All right. Let's take a quick break. I want to tell you about Marketing School. It is a podcast that is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network. And it is run by Neil Patel and Eric Hsu. And these guys are both marketers who are running businesses. And so if you want real world tactics from practitioners who are actually out there in the field doing it, this is the podcast for you. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts.
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