The TikTok Strategy That’s Printing MILLIONS right now

We now have 13% awareness across the entire United States. One in seven people know about Neurogum because of Tik Tok. That's Ken Yoshimura, one of the brains behind Neurogum. He's a martial artist turned artist turned entrepreneur and known as one of the biggest missed opportunities on Shark Tank. We're a top 50 health and household product on Amazon. We're number one in our category. We sell more than 5 hour energy on Amazon and we don't spend any. When everyone realized that we were the coolest, fastest growing brand on TikTok, that snowball started rolling down that mountain

faster. Sounds like first world problem. total first world problems. We talk about Neurogum's creator marketing playbook. The same tactics that are printing them millions. Tik Tok has democratized the way people can make money by spending as little or as much as you want as long as you make good content. Like I think that's beautiful. Rogan did way more than Shark Tank. You always keep Neurogum in the studio. He's like male Oprah. People listen to him and they're like, "Oh my god, I'm going to buy that product that this guy's taking." How much is like one

of your top Tik Tok affiliates doing like per month? I mean, we have affiliates like generating millions for us. Wow. And this whole entire system that you've built, absolutely amazing. Does this work in other channels? I'm going to tell you the funnel and this like kind of our secret sauce. Yeah. So, Nurogum was 2024 Tik Tok's fastest growing brand. What's the secret to Tik Tok? Secret to Tik Tok is consistency. That's it. Like with anything else in life, right? And we had a New Year's resolution. Our head of growth and I, Jonathan H and I,

starting on January 1st of 2024, we were going to post every single day on Tik Tok, just ourselves. And as we started posting every single day, we had a better understanding of hooks. We had a better understanding of what works and what doesn't on Tik Tok and really understanding the platform. I think a lot of people are like, "Oh, you know, I'm using this TSP, which is like a Tik Tok partner like or like a tap, you know, Tik Tok affiliate partner and trying to see what they're doing and like what's a agency that will

work for you or what doesn't." And it's like, dude, we built everything in-house ourselves because if you don't know how a platform works or if you don't know how creators work in general, you're not going to be able to understand how to direct them or navigate them in the right direction, right? So for us it was like let's learn this platform like crazy and then June July hit and all of a sudden all the hooks that we were testing that we knew work that we were feeding into our creators just started popping and we also

cultivate our creators like crazy. So we have our Discord channel. We have a great community. We have a tier system. And so people have an understanding of how they can move up and work better with us and work alongside us in whatever is working on that platform. You just said a lot right there. We're going to unpack all that. I think that's so ironic too that you focused on just the inputs. That's actually exactly what we're doing for the podcast right now is we have a goal just do x amount of podcasts, iterate, optimize, and

kind of figure out what we're going to do. Same thing actually. 6 months is our goal and then we're going to kind of put our heads up to breathe and kind of see where we're at. Um, so let's just talk about natively the content that you're putting on TikTok. Were you taking winning content from elsewhere or did you just say, "Hey, I'm going to take a starter growth mindset and we're going to start from scratch and just put content out on there and start." I mean, it's a combination of both, right? Like all channels at

the end of the day, a hook is what resonates with the consumer and that's all business and that's all marketing. So for us, we have like an Excel sheet literally of hooks, like we want to test out like media appearances that have worked, you know, like Joe Rogan mentioned us yesterday again, for example. And those clips are invaluable to be able to build our credibility and push out what's working and what's not. And when these creators started tapping into like it's really just AB testing everything at the end of the day, like anything in life,

anything in business, and seeing what works. So there's no real secret formula beyond understanding your product, understanding what resonates with what consumer, and then driving full force into it. Let's just walk through that step-by-step process. So you guys have your Google sheet. You start off, you're like, "Hey, we're going to create content. Uh we probably understand and know there's X, you know, we have these 10 hooks that we think works, these 10 value props that work." And you are literally just saying, "Hey, let's test the first one, the second one, the third one." And then

you're just looking at micrometrics, whether it be views or clickthroughs, and then you're just iterating from there. So, we make every single creator sit through like a three-hour orientation every time they join. It's like a video that we record and we send them this notion and we know if they went through it or not. And so, once the creator has a really deep understanding of our product, yes, the hook is a part of it, but how are they iterating on the hook to move it forward? And when we're talking about micrometrics, yes, we know these

hooks work at whatever x percentage people are resonating, people are staying on board like for x amount of time. But from there, moving it forward into what is the creator adding on top of that? And the creator can only add on top of that if they really understand your brand and they're really dedicated to your brand, which is what we've built. and all these other agencies are sending out mass messages every single day, you know, like it's so superficial in their approach. And for us, we went so deep into it. We treat our creators well,

like we give great commissions, you know, we give them great product. That's what works. And then if someone else is working also, these creators all talk to each other. So if a creator sees a hook that's working and then all these talking points, it's almost like the system works on its own after a certain point because these creators are calculating what's working and then pushing it forward more so than us feeding them metrics than anything else. I really want to go step by step. So just starting from ground level zero. Yeah, you have your Excel

sheet, you have your content, you have your hooks, you have your value props, you test things, and then you think the next best thing is to create some sort of SOP or notion or Loom video that outlines everything. And then you're saying you're then reaching out to pre-qualified influencers and basically making them go through this tutorial. And what are you giving them like a quiz to understand and know if they read it? How do you know if they really understand and know? our brand manager basically dives in and like asks them like very specific questions,

but even beyond that, it's like I think it's I'm going to be super high level right now. You know, culture is everything, right? And I was in there as co-founder CEO literally talking to these creators. I had like a whole Zoom meeting with them and I try to do this once every quarter to basically translate our culture of the company into them and make them feel like they're a part of us. And I feel like a lot of other companies that are not succeeding on Tik Tok or are only doing like, you know, even like

maxing out at 100K in sales a month on Tik Tok are lacking that connection. Cuz a creator is only going to be so driven by money. But if you create this gaming system, this culture, this creator group where all of them are friends now and they're all talking and they're iterating and they're brainstorming on what's working and what's not, that builds on itself over and over and over again. So yes, there is a calculated process and if it's step by step, here's the hooks and everything that's working. We throw that into our orientation sheet on

notion, pass that on to the creators so that they know what to talk about. But then after that it's how do we keep building on this culture of neuro that we try to show out into the world and have the creators adopt it and these creators all live you mentioned in a discord channel which your brand manager uh interacts with them in there and potentially you can come in there and talk to them about stuff. Our head of growth is in there you know our brand manager is in there and then there's other I guess

semi-isconnected discords where they talk to each other as well. And to give us context, like how many people are in there for you guys? It's a two-tiered answer because originally we had 500 people in there and we would keep like if you don't perform, you kind of get kicked out. Like there's a GMV goal you have to reach, but we have basically two pockets now where there's like a tier one, a tier two, and a tier three. Basically, you could work your way up into certain hierarchies of the creators. What would you say is like

the most overrated advice you're hearing out there specifically about Tik Tok? Man, it's like I keep going back to like the the Tik Tok agency partners, you know, that are vetted and everything like all these guys are doing exactly the same thing. They'll charge you like whatever percentage plus a retainer every single month and they're like we're going to have all these creators just pumping out video for you and that only works so far. It's the same with like Facebook ads, you know, like everything hits like a saturation point and it stops working. How are

you as a company, as a leader, you know, whether it's me or whether it's our head of growth or whoever is managing these Discord groups, how are you as a leader motivating everyone beyond just the capital to say they're part of a cool brand? The biggest turning point for us was when everyone realized that we were the coolest, fastest growing brand on TikTok that it just that snowball started rolling down that mountain faster. And do you think it's about um hopping on let's just call that macro trends on Tik Tok or is it more about

native to your specific brand? It's a combination of both. I mean like the macro trends is what consumers are looking for and then obviously the algorithm pushes your content in a certain way so you could follow the macro trends. People come to me and like dude I sent 5,000 samples out to all these creators and I got five responses and five videos. It didn't work. I made $20,000 on TikTok and like I don't know how to scale this. It's like, dude, how are you cultivating them beyond that? Like, it's not just sending them product and

hoping like an influencer post. It's the same thing as like like the old school method, you know? How do you build a community? I'm going to jump to another story, but my buddy Dan Morris, he started Sugar Bear Hair. I love Dan. Dan's the man. Great guy. He's great, right? He's He's the Facebook OG, actually. He's the Facebook OG, but the way he built Facebook is very he would crush it on TikTok now because he got all his influencers and they he made the influencers almost jealous of each other because he would send the nicest

box to them. And if you were part of the Sugar Bear Hair group, you felt really really special, but you had to earn your way in there, right? And the same way you have to kind of earn your way to be a neuro Tik Tok creator now. And then if you're part of that group, he was sending them to Coachella to hang out with like the Kardashians. he's sending them to like whatever trip in Florida. Like it's such a beautiful way to build the culture and have them all hang out with each other. They're always

going to be loyal to you. And in the same way, like I love all of our creators, you know, and we treat them with that love, you know. We put some of them up in Time Square in December, like literally for the entire world to see, you know, and we'll give them that kind of treatment because they do so much for us. And you have to be willing to commit that much. For context, for people listening, Sugar Bear Hair and let's just say 17, 18, 19, probably even 20, 20, 20, 21 was on the internet

like a Fashion Nova. Like so many influencers, they were bombing the whole entire internet. So to take a step back just to to get some context. So you think build some sort of SOP, some sort of brand bible, make it harder than you probably think, so you can kind of vet out the weak people to really see and understand that they really know about your brand. Create some sort of group. It could be Discord. It could be Slack. Um, make sure that you drive culture and community in there and then potentially tier out the different

levels where they can drive GMV, which is gross merchandising volume for people listening. Um, and then basically just incentivize them to keep pushing volume while building a community that you would anywhere else. Yeah, exactly. And also people want to feel special. That's why you build the tears. People want to feel special. That's why you only take 10 of them to like a trip to Florida, you know, or give them a Rolex or play like we also have those kind of systems, you know, like these prize systems. That's why only three of them were able to

be on billboards all across Miami or up on Time Square. Like, how do you make these creators feel special if they're performing incredibly well because they deserve all that special treatment? Completely agree. And this whole entire system that you've built, uh, absolutely amazing. Um, does this work in other channels, other affiliate channels, or do you think this is just native to Tik Tok because of the ease of Tik Tok shop? Tik Tok is definitely the easiest. I mean, affiliate has been maybe like 5 to 10% of our business to a certain degree, like throughout the

years, you know, this last decade, but it's so hard to build a relationship with your affiliates in the same way that you could build a relationship with an affiliate or a creator on TikTok. And so, you have to leverage that. I mean, if you're going on impact.com or CJ, these like publishing partners or even like old school like email affiliates and things like that, like these publishers are so driven by money and you could give them like the prizes and everything, but it's these creators show their face on TikTok. They're the face of the brand

that's representing you, selling your product, and so they want to know that they're a part of something cool. these other like Commission Junction or Impact affiliates or like the email affiliates or any of these other guys whe they're building landing pages trying to drive Facebook traffic and like getting the delta on the CAC. Zero personal relationship with that. We've done relationship and we were on like random different blogs. We never interfaced with actual people that were pushing our product and they were just getting even if you want to they don't want like they don't care.

Yeah. Because what you're saying is that notion that video they have to watch. It's only as good as the secondary conversation after it to understand and know that they actually understand the brand that are passionate about the brand. So, how are you getting uh these influencers? Do you guys are you guys spending money and driving traffic to a page? Are you cold outreaching to people? How are you getting this influx of people that want to be in your community? I mean, we used to call outreach um and then if there were like really good creators

like we would just put them on a retainer and so other creators we attracted to that cuz there are creator superstars in this Tik Tok ecosystem you know for us honestly like we pull from other taps like we we pull from other tap like a Tik Tok affiliate partner. Yeah. So we pull from other taps like we pull from uh other groups. It's we do our own recruiting now because that makes way more sense for us than cold outreaching a bunch of people cuz like dude I don't know how many it is but there's millions

of people that are on Tik Tok shop with 5,000 followers you know getting 100 ping requests every single day. I'm one of them you know like I can show you my Tik Tok like creator requests and I have like 10 companies reaching out to me every single hour. Like you could be the best company in the world and no one's going to respond to you, you know? Makes sense. Uh to to give everybody context, how much is like one of your top Tik Tok affiliates doing like per month? How much are we paying them or

how much are they generating in GMV for us? Either or. I mean, we have affiliates like generating millions for us on a monthly basis. Not Not millions. Like like close to a million, I would say, on a monthly basis. Wow. So, you're saying there's people over the whole entire year are making multi-million dollars with you guys? Yeah. Yeah. Our top creators. Yeah, but they're like pump and then those guys pump out like five videos a day. It's crazy. And then one pops and it's just like in one day they're generating $250,000. Like I remember in

December, yeah, like mid December there was one guy that just during our TikTok new arrivals like he leveraged all the Steve Aoki what like the Times Square all that hype we were building and generated $250,000 in one day. It was crazy. Unbelievable. Looking back, um, what one Tik Tok campaign or one Tik Tok post did the best? Can we break that down? What's one that you remember that crushed it? So, there's three that always work and always pop up. Um, one is Shark Tank, you know, and and it's not just a Shark Tank clip. It's

they frame it in a way where it's Kevin Oly calling our deal stinky poo poo is the biggest mistake he's ever made in his life. And listen to this. This is why this gum is now doing this much in revenue this year. You know, they spin it into this incredible story and they use like Ryan's background as a paraplegic, my background is like an athlete. So stuff like that works really well, right? Yeah. And it's a combination of you guys getting [ __ ] on and then kind of, you know, an underdog story. Exactly. Wow.

And then we have our Joe Rogan clips, right? So people will clip Joe Rogan when he was pitching to Bobby Lee about how much he loves Neurogum. And so people will clip that and be like this is the gum that Joe Rogan is talking about and like you know that's more bottom of funnel but it's like taking the biggest podcaster in the world talking about your product and then like pushing that out. So to put a bow in that for somebody that wanted to get on Tik Tok shop you would say the first piece of

advice would be personally as the leader and driver of the company or the CMO to just go in and just focus on inputs. Post as much as you possibly can. Keep learning. Keep iterating. Yeah. Input. Input. just like don't hesitate. You know, fear is a mind killer. Just [ __ ] go. Uh, taking a step back from a marketing mix perspective, why don't you give me like a very highlevel look at where you guys are spending your dollars from a marketing perspective? So, when we hung out what, like 4 months ago or something, we were

spending a lot on Tik Tok ads and driving more volume into Tik Tok ads because it was able to scale and then we were kind of like sacrificing our Amazon a little bit. Um, so our rorowass, like we were talking about this before we were recording, but our rorowass was like literally infinite. It was like it was in like the 70s as at one point. It was crazy. Wait, say that again for everybody. You're saying your rorowass on Amazon was in the 70s. Rorowass on Tik Tok at that point was like insanely high. It was

like 68 or something, 68x. And that was spending ballpark how much money a day? It's hard to say because like you know sometimes we would just spend $20,000 and then the video itself would go viral so people would be buying on that video and then we started running into supply like issues and things like that cuz we were growing like a little too fast on Tik Tok. But in December when Tik Tok new arrivals happened, we were basically just like, what if we max out our rorowass on Tik Tok and cut out all spend on

Amazon and what happened was people still attribute into Amazon. And so we're at like 52x rowass right now on Amazon, right? But we have way higher profitability. But Tik Tok being an awareness and impressions driver that we're pushing as hard as possible literally elevates velocity in retail stores. our DTOC channel goes up. You know, Tik Tok's obviously pumping, Amazon's pumping, and now we have like this really comprehensive like marketing approach that translates to every single one of our channels. So, you're basically saying you're pouring more money into Tik Tok for top of the funnel and

cutting off the faucet spending elsewhere just because if you don't spend there, it's just going to be profitable as is. And Tik Tok is going to drive awareness to that because it's a top of funnel and bottom of funnel play. Before it was we were just doing bottom of funnel on Tik Tok. But if you're pushing top of funnel on Tik Tok anyways and although the rorowass gets reduced like that's not the metric you should be looking at. It's like the comprehensive business approach across all channels and seeing your overall revenue is actually rising your

awareness rising. And we just did like a Neielson test Neielson epsilon meltwater like consumer insights test. We now have 13% awareness across the entire United States because of Tik Tok. One in seven people know about Neurogum because of Tik Tok. Wow. which is absolutely insane because of approaches like this. just pushing pushing pushing at the top of funnel level and you're saying now it's just all roads lead to Tik Tok all the top of the funnel is there and then just let everything kind of hit kind of in a way and then like any top

of funnel awareness play so we have a partnership with chess.com we have a partnership with hundred thieves you know these big game so we look at our consumer insights and try to identify who these big players are we only do those plays so that it funnels into Tik Tok we do chess.com so when you know like I don't know when this podcast is airing but when one of the best chess players players in the world. Literally top three chess players in the world, goes up against Steve Aoki, which is a match for setting up sponsored

by Neuro. Our creators can look at that and turn that into content and we know it's going to work. You know, we know that there is a funnel and a system where if you do something that's top of funnel elsewhere, Tik Tok will elevate it to this whole other level so more people will see it. So looking at like your content flywheel, any outside partnership that you're doing for general awareness, 100 thesis, everything just all roads lead to repurposing it and throwing it to Tik Tok and then that feeds the whole entire business. Like I

would say that's like 70% of the strategy with partnerships. Wow. So from a marketing delivery perspective with 100 Thieves and with Chess, you probably want them natively to be posting on TikTok as well to just keep which they do. Yeah. But it's crazy because like I think back in the day and you know this as a business owner, you would do all these top of funnel plays and you have no idea where the attribution would be. You have no idea what the real true rowass is or any of that stuff. And you could try to

use AI models and this and that and like see what's working and what's not. But for us, we know that if we do something and it fits our consumer demographic, we can funnel into Tik Tok no matter what. Wow. So let's just say you're spending $10. Of that $10, how much is Tik Tok? How much is Meta? How much is elsewhere? I want to understand and know kind of your marketing rubric. So, and you could tell me as much or as little as you want to tell me. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm going to tell you

the funnel and this is like kind of our secret sauce. Yeah. You know, so if Tik Tok is a top ofunnel brand awareness play and we do a little bit of bottom of funnel obviously as well, but it's like, you know, let's say 8020 top of funnel, bottom of funnel 20%. And then just pushing as much creator content out, but bumping up the ones that we know are working. Then we use Google Performance Max, Google PMAX to basically capture any strays that are going on Google and looking up our product. So our Google is pumping

like crazy. And you could target them across native ads, you could target across search, you could target them across YouTube and we're going to be spending like many, many, many millions of dollars on Google because of that because we want to catch basically all the attribution that's coming in from Tik Tok onto the search channels. Facebook I, you know, probably makes up still like three two three% I would say of our spend um or sorry two or of that $10. I was going to say sorry 20 30% of our of our uh uh let's say

$10 for just digital marketing and it is working but to us that's almost like a hygiene play more than like a true let's try to build and increase uh you know like consumer play. So outside of let's just call them outside partnerships stuff like IO which we'll get into. You're saying 20 30% Facebook another x amount on Google and then the rest is on Tik Tok. The rest on Tik Tok and we basically cut down almost all ad spend on Amazon when we're in stock. We're a top 50 health and household product on Amazon. We're

number one in our category. We sell more than 5 hour energy on Amazon, you know, and we don't spend any ads. So, if you're a new brand and you have $20,000 to spend on marketing, where would you spend it as a new brand? Man, that's a tough one because in my opinion, if I were to do Neuro all over again, that initial spark is going to determine everything, you know, and how are you building momentum from that spark to elevate your business constantly? And for us, I mean, yes, we blew up on TikTok, you know,

last year, but the spark was Shark Tank, which we shot 6 years ago. You know, it was Joe Rogan who mentioned us four years ago. It was all the PR we got 8 years ago. It's like, what are these things that are going to get your brand to the right place so there's a level of awareness? So, if people feel there's a level of credibility to be able to commit to buying it. So you would just say all roads lead to how do you find that first lever of credibility and then it's just all about

leveraging that option and then leveraging that. Yeah. And then and then it's just a flywheel from there. Credibility, creators, sale, you know, it's so crazy because every single brand can just look back and see that inflection moment. Like for us um in 17 we blew up on Meta and then in early 18 when Scooter Ron and Gary Vayner Truck invested in the company like we definitely drove that to then go on Gary's podcast, bring Scooter on our podcast and then leverage that into just tons of social proofing. I completely agree, man. I think so many

people, you know, they're working hard, they're not working smart, and it's just all about buying your way into just finding that first thing and then just keep leveraging it. Yeah. because that one thing is going to do so much more for you than like thousands of hours that you're putting in just optimizing a meta ad. Where do you think the future of Tik Tok and performance is going to go? What would you say in the next 12 months? Do you think it's going to stay kind of how it is? I hope so. We'll see. You

know, I was just at Congress last week talking with a bunch of congressmen to tell them that like Tik Tok has democratized the way people can make money and how entrepreneurs can reach new audiences. Now, it's not being gated by some massive company like Meta where you have to spend to get money back to be able to reach for consumers. With Tik Tok, you could reach as many consumers as you want by spending as little or as much as you want as long as you make good content. Like, I think that's beautiful. But you know

obviously these bigger players who are a payto-play model who have a monopoly on all of your data because of the data compliance laws that like came into place like they have a stronghold on how businesses can scale. Tik Tok I think is breaking that mold which is beautiful. Yeah. I mean it's so crazy to see. I mean you have 16 and 17y old kids making 20 $30,000 a month. It's absolutely nuts. between Tik Tok and Twitch. Those are the two ones that I'm seeing that I don't know much about Twitch. I'm just learning about Tik

Tok now to be completely frank with you. And I think we're sorely missing out and this might be uh Dude, you guys were crushed on Tik Tok as like l you have the licensing, you have the product, you have these cool like just having a creator be like, "Dude, this could get me." Imagine it's a fat boy. I'm just thinking of like a hook right now. It's like a frat boy being like, "This painting behind me got me all the chicks, you know, in college." Boom. Like, "My frat house became the coolest frat house because

of this thing." And then points to your channel. Like talking about misconceptions there. Like for me, I've always heard and we have tried, but quite frankly, we probably didn't try hard enough. We probably should take your advice and post. We've posted months in a row, but I would say not a year. Do you think that it has to be a low price point product to win on Tik Tok or can you have a higher price point? I mean, I think it's like anything. You know, if your rorowass pays off in a certain way, it doesn't

matter. You just if if you have a $700 product and you're spending $400 to get it, but it makes sense from a capital and COGS perspective. Then just scale that. Might have to give another try. Um, okay. So, we talked about paid. Let's look outside of paid for a second. Um, we'll get into Shark Tank, we'll get into Rogan. I know you have an official partnership with Iayoki. So, let's just talk about anything and everything outside of pay that you guys are doing in marketing. Would love to hear. Yeah. So, I'm going to take a

step back and like this is how we approach all partnerships and like top of funnel and any activation play that we do in general. Uh, we get consumer insights. we get an understanding of where we overindex on a consumer group and then we dive deep into that and then we basically try to saturate through like TV uh player partnerships whatever into that. Let's talk about that. Where do you get those insights from? So uh so we use things like Meltwater which is like consumer insights dem like a platform um that we pay a lot for.

Uh, epsilon is like another one. And these platforms they they do what they look into they basically have a database like Cambridge Analytica style database of basically behaviors across the United States consumer like basket size data like you know things like that. Are they combining uh outside consumer data with your customer base? Exactly. So they basically take your consumer data, plug it into their system, get an understanding of like whatever the statistics are on where you overindex and certain behavior types or not, and then they send you that sheet back. Man, the last episode, um,

we've never used like outside credit card data to understand the personas. This is another crazy one. Um, what is like a minimum investment that you need to make into something like this meltwater for it to make sense? You you said that it's expensive, but this seems like it's everything that you need. Yeah. Uh it I mean there's a reason why data is so expensive, you know, and because like if you could leverage data correctly, you can make all your money back. I don't know what the exact cost are. I know it's five figures six figures.

Um so like $50 $75,000 someone could probably get this. Yeah. Yeah, I would say so. But you need to have a big enough sample size, you know, to feed into the system. Interesting. So let's have you uh keep diving into that. So you they come to you, they look at consumer trends from the outside, your customer base, what you're overindexing on, what you're under indexing on, and then what? And then we look at those partners. So let's say it's like running. So we're looking at a partnership with Strava right now because that just makes sense

because we've overindex like crazy on runners and people that do running for like their hobby, chess.com, people who play chess. Like we don't necessarily overindex on it, but it's such a adjacency in our brand. So like what is our brand messaging and positioning? Where's our consumer sitting? And then does it make sense from an activation standpoint where we could amplify it on TikTok or any other marketing channel that we push it into? Um Steve Aoki like you know he invested in us but then as we started doing better he like started leaning in a lot

more and he's also like the coolest guy in the world, hardest worker, doesn't sleep you know cuz he works his ass off every day. Most traveled musician in the world. that is a representation of our like brand messaging and positioning that fits perfectly with him as if you guys have not listened to that documentary watch that documentary with it's amazing he's a hustler it's crazy so you know he was a perfect partner for us and like he comes on board all the time to all these like fun things that we do um I think all

roads lead back to what I've noticed with you and we're you know you're an athlete you're an entrepreneur you're an artist I think the core thing that I think with you is just is is discipline And it seems as though you're very disciplined in nature where all roads are leading to this meltwater and then every single decision is just funneled through this. It's focus. Yeah. Right. It's it's you can't focus if you don't understand what consumer to target. So with the consumer insights that you start off and every big company does this start with the

consumer insights. Identify the three markets. Let's say for us like we identify the three markets that we want to target that we want to invest X amount of dollars into. These are people that resonate with our brand. Let's go all in on that. and they'll overindex and how much they spend on that. We focus on these consumer groups that make sense and we target them and we raise the bar. That's some great great advice. Um, so these partnerships, 100 Thieves and Chess.com, I want to dive a little bit deeper into those specific partnerships. Uh, from

a marketing deliverables perspective, you mentioned some sort of redirect traffic backed into Tik Tok, which is your your best funnel. What else are you asking these guys to do that you've seen value? A lot of it is content um content based. You know, we'll be considered like an official partner if they have like games or something going on. Uh a lot of the time like you know it's there's a really really big YouTube partnership that we're about to do with like you know I can't say it yet depending on when this airs but like the

biggest YouTuber in the world. Wow. basically we'll make a custom tin for him and packaging and you know we'll do like donations to like a charity of his choice things like that. Um, it's pretty robust like in any whatever it is, it has to just fit our brand mantras, our core values, and our brand messaging and positioning. Content is a big one like interaction with the players, sampling at the events, all those things. But co-branded product and co-branded product. What you're wearing right now, is that a is that co-brand or is that just there? It's

not co-branded, but they sent it to me and I love the jacket. I love it. Um, you mentioned content. Let's dive into content. um in-house, external creators, or a hybrid? Where do you guys create your content? It's a big discussion that we have every single day at the company. I used to own a creative agency, you know, back in the day. We used to build toy, like that's still around. Like I used to build toy stores, you know, we built uh the six collection for fear of God. Like so we did some really big experiential

activations. working and wrangling creators is incredibly hard. Talking about myself also, you know, it's incredibly hard and the bandwidth and resources that a marketing person needs to be able to manage creative in-house is going to take up so much of their time that sometimes it's worth just depending on an agency that knows how to do this incredibly well to do that for you. With that being said, if I could hire four full-time highle managers to be able to do something like that for the same price as I'm paying an agency, does that make as much

sense? You know, and it's really hard to say like this is just a business question in general. Like sometimes it's worth just getting someone from the outside so that you could get their inputs. And have you guys seen more success with UGC created content or more of that like rich content? It's a combination of both, you know, like people need the credibility, people need highle content to know that a brand is real, especially if it's a consumable brand like ours. Um, so it could come from it. It it just needs to translate in the right

way to the right demographic. Also, production is expensive. It is. Production is crazy expensive. And then especially if you start hiring a team and they're running around and they're doing all this stuff, it's like speed is more important. Speed and quantity is way more important than quality in this day and age. Like people are flipping through their phones like through cont like millions of pieces of content on a daily basis, you know, like you just invested half a million dollars into really nice content that's not performing. Just wasted you just waste a shitload of time,

you know, like to to us like that. That's where it doesn't really make sense to like we're we're thinking about it and we're thinking through it because like streaming TV, you know, connected TV, like all those things are still pretty big, but like there is an inflection point where you do switch over, I think, but right now quantity, speed, hooks, all the things that are working and resonating and then optimizing on that and making that maybe a little bit prettier. What do you think has been the hardest part about scaling your marketing department? Content. Speaking

of content, it's content. Yeah, always makes sense. Um, how are you guys looking at AI in relation to content? I'm curious. Yeah, I mean, we use it here and there in the business. Um, but it's really obvious. AI still can't capture that really human interaction. And if you watch any of our creator videos, it feels so personal. A lot of it feels really raw in a way. And in this day and age of AI, people almost look for that knowing that AI content is everywhere. Even if you look at the comment section, you know, cuz

I know a few friends that um all like dead internet theory, they have basically comment bots that help them boost up their rankings and their comments and like try to build sentiments around certain uh ads that they push out. like that's people are catching on to that you know and that level of dishonesty that maybe AI is presenting I think it's going to change really really rapidly don't get me wrong but as of now it still feels like there that rawness the mistakes that humans make like all those things AI doesn't have and people catch

on to that in like a subconscious way I completely agree I think that I think it's coming soon I think we're like 6 to 18 months away from content really being able to harness AI. But all these tools that I've used so far, they're so they'll sell us on six different things they can do and like one or two of them work and it's a little too manicured, you know. Yeah. And at best case it'll get you I think 80% down the field and you have to spend resources to to optimize What's crazy is like

10 years ago when we started, this is obviously it wasn't even like a talking point then, but when we launched, we blew up on Indiegogo and raised like blew we raised like $15,000 in 3 days on Indiegogo when we launched, you know, as a Kickstarter. Um, the post I made when I was reaching out to all these PR companies and publications, I purposefully put in a typo so that they would recognize the typo and they would respond back to me knowing that I wasn't like just a mass email. Like people see that stuff. You know

what I mean? Like people want to feel like there's this real human interaction and that you put in the effort to do something. That's a nice hack. I like that. It was intentional. Yeah. But if you're hiring someone for a marketing role, I think uh generalists in nature are are so much uh there's so much demand for that. What would you say is the most important kind of key attribute to be a good marketer in this now day and age? That's such a tough question. And it's funny because my understanding of marketing has evolved so

much in these last three years cuz there's the marketer that comes from the traditional background of big CPG. They know how to organize things very well. They have their road maps. They have their campaign planning and everything, but you could plan as much as you want and strategize as much as you want, but if your core messaging and positioning isn't resonating with the consumer, then all that is for not. But then there's the growth side of things where this guy has zero organization maybe, but they're so good at testing hooks. They're so good at being

rapid at like seeing what works and what doesn't that you need those two brains to come together. So I don't think marketing is any longer a oneperson job. It is an amalgamation of like different qualities of approaches coming together and then building the strategy on it being able to move quickly campaign campaign planning road mapping doing all those things like synergistically. So it's an organization more than a person. For the person out there listening, I'd love to know, let's just say 0 to hund00 million in annual revenue. Till what point do you only need that

guy that can just go fast? When do you need to bring in that organized CPG high level? 0 to 20. I think you need the fast guy. 0 to 20, you need the guy that's just constantly testing and is like addicted to that dopamine hit of growing your business. So, you're basically telling everybody out there, if you're just a young scrapper, generalist marketer, you can edit videos on Capcom, you understand and know how to use Tik Tok, you can probably do $20 million in this thing. Yeah, absolutely. Like, don't think, just do like just go

do it. And then once you got it figured out, now you have an understanding of your brand, that big CPG person comes in, which like, you know, we had that big CPG from talking rain person, our VP of brand that's now coming in. And also Jim Murray, who's like executive adviser, who came, he was the CEO of Fastables. he him coming in and then laying out the structure, the framework, everything together with this person so that now we're literally going viral every single day. We have these big activations happening on a quarterly basis. Now we

have things to feed and everyone knows how to run tightly. I love it. Um we're going to hop out of business and then jump back into business the whole entire second half of the podcast. Uh, as I mentioned before, athlete, entrepreneur, artist, I think there's a lot to be said about discipline and kind of uh, mental makeup there. Uh, I saw you did this masogi, this um, 4x4x 48 mogi that David Gogggins has uh, popularized. I'd love to know why you did that and what did it teach you about like mental toughness. Yeah, honestly the

4x4 by 48 was actually not that hard. It was just uh like funny enough like I did with a group of friends because you're just running four miles every four hours for 48 hours and like yeah it sounds hard and it's like a lot of miles but I did that on a Yose run with 7,000 ft elevation last year you know in one go. And then this year I'm going to do the Grand Canyon run 11,000 ft elevation 48 miles like down up down up in October. I'm doing it in May 6th. You're doing the

rim to ri May 6th. Yeah. No. Are you running it? I swear to God I'm It's I have two different options right now. I can run it with a group of psychos the week before or on May 6th with payment and Matt Happy and those guys and they're doing two days. You've been training. I've been training. I started training. I'm deciding in four weeks which route I want to go. Okay. I need to understand and know I need to make an educated decision beforehand on which one is a safe route because I did hear it's

fairly dangerous. Yeah. I mean doing because you're going to be exhausted the entire way back, you know. So, but Anyone can run an endurance race in my opinion, but it's all mental fortitude. Like David Gogggins, like whatever you think about him, I think he's a little too intense um and doesn't put a lot of thought into the things he does, but he's still incredibly inspiring because he did like a 100 mile race with zero training because he was like, I'm just going to do that thing. And you could do it and you could blow out

your knees and your cartilagages and everything, but you could still do it if you have the will to do it. And so for us with the misogi, we're not telling our employees to hurt themselves obviously, but we're paying for whatever it is that they feel is going to impact other 364 days of their year because I think it's incredibly important for someone to push themselves at least once in a year. Like my buddy Ken Ride Out, do you know who that is? Yeah. He he's the man. He breaks a PR every single year since he

was 35 and he's like 50some now, you know, and that's his mindset where he's like going in and he's like, I'm going to get better every single year and I'm going to do that one thing that's going to make me better every single year. Same mentality with Misogi. Is there something that someone on our team can do that is going to make them better so that it comes back and it makes our team even stronger than before? So, I didn't even know that. Is this something that you encourage every single one of your team members

to do every January 1st? I mentioned it to the entire teams like what's everyone's missogi go do it and some people are like I'm going to read 50 books this year like our social media manager read 48 books last year I was like holy crap that's crazy that's so much knowledge he just took in like one of them made uh like an album you know like a music album and like we fully supported it you know I went and ran like you know like there there's so many things that like people are doing that are

elevating themselves and translates back into the culture of the company. Yeah, I think you as a leader uh doing these ultramarathons and these misogies is obviously a huge way to kind of motivate and inspire the team. Um I'd love to understand and know more about the ultramarathons. I've ran tons of half marathons, 20 miles a couple times. I'm jumping right into this rim to rim to rim. Um but I would love to know uh why did you choose to do these ultramarathons and what's specifically on ultramarathons? What's the biggest thing you get out of them?

So, I used to hate running because I grew up as a martial artist, you know. So, I was training with the judo Olympic team out in Japan. I was fighting in Thailand like growing up, you know, since I was like 16. Like I would be flying out to Thailand and Japan to train. And it was interesting because I hated running during that time because I felt like it was punishment. But as I get older, I'm realizing that these long runs where I don't listen to music and I'm just running for hours on end just consolidating

all my thoughts together gives you a much deeper understanding of who you are and what you need to do that you could take back to everything else in your life. There was one day that I just remember I got up and I was like my I think my car got broken into like multiple times. I had like my insurance dropped me. My art studio burned down completely. Um and then it was like co so I think during that time I was like damn I just went on a run to just consolidate my thoughts together. I

think I ran like 8 miles. I felt great and then since then like I use it as active meditation for myself and just keep extending it longer and longer and longer for some reason. What's the longest run you've done? Uh well hopefully this 48 mileer is going to be the longest but um 36 milesi. Early on, I was uh trying to gun for speed more than distance because I felt like it was like for my ego. You know, when you go fast, it's like a ego thing. It's like look how fast I can run. Look

how fast I could do this thing. And when I stepped away from thinking like that and thinking about just running as this again this active meditation process, it just resonated a lot better with who I am as an individual and as a as a leader as a person who could speak more clearly as a person that has more confidence and you know especially with like the endurance component and entrepreneurship is definitely not a race. You know, I've been at this for 10 years. I've had multiple other failed ventures like prior to this, but through everything,

I still maintain the enthusiasm to keep going forward until I reach that level of success that maybe I'm gunning for, which I don't think I ever will, like frankly, cuz I just love building and doing stuff. But, you know, there's something enjoyable every single mile like as you run. And then, you know, my goal is uh in two, three years to do Bentonville, the 100 mile. And ironically, through that, I would imagine you probably got faster just when you stopped thinking about Oh, yeah. And just do it. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I So, do the 100

mileer and then see what's next. So, love it. Um, let's get into some culture and hiring. Uh, I had never heard about this book that you spoke about a couple times on the internet. It's called Who. Oh, yeah. The a method for hiring. Um, so who the a method of hiring? Uh, how did that change your team building approach? So that book was recommended to me by the co-founder of RXBar who built an incredible incredible team, Jared Smith. He's also an investor in our business. But in the past, I think I was looking at hiring

in a non-structured way. I was like, "Oh, does this guy or girl like fit the vibe check?" You know, do they have the qualifications? And someone could have a good resume, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're a culture fit. Someone could be a culture fit, but that doesn't mean that they have the skill sets to be able to excel in your business. And what who lays out is a score a scorecard method across the board to build a hiring process so you have a deep understanding, not just from yourself, but other teammates that are going

to work adjacent with that person to hire the best person possible to fit into your organization. And is this an operating system or is it just like a checklist of different things that you do? Um, it's an operating system. We have an incredible recruiter named Kyle Kelly that like I can't recommend it enough. If you're a business owner, like Kyle Kelly is like the biggest hack that we have as a recruiter. So, he'll go through the first stage process of finding someone that fits our criteria, our job description, our culture, everything that we feed to

him. It's usually like three or four people that he identifies. And then from there we have an understanding of like the gates that this person has to pass through before interviewing with me for the hire. Let's unpack that a bit more. What does that actually look like from a tangible perspective? So we usually give them a homework assignment. So for example, we just hired a a retail trade marketing person. That person had this homework assignment for the we're entering into 2400 KC stores in the Midwest. How are you going to activate it? Tell us a

little bit about yourself and your personality. how you're going to inject that personality into marketing and retail and then give us a little bit of your background to give us an understanding of that approach as well. So, it's a comprehensive view and then they, you know, the person we're hiring gave us the best slide deck because it started off with this is who I am as an individual like you know I love dancing like I love traveling um I'm going to Paris like whatever at this time and I like and this is what I learned

at Red Bull. She works at Red Bull right now and then she's joining us next week. And then from there, these are my learnings from Red Bull that I will translate into sea stores and this is what you guys have right now that I could merge to make it work. Wow. And this is like a second interview that this person's coming to like to us with because we fed them the homework exactly what we wanted to look from them and then they just exceeded everything that we asked from them. So this is isolated. Who is

the individual? what are their traits? On the other side, it's this is the exact job description and then finding that hedge in the middle that says, "Hey, this is what I learned from my past job and how I'm going to bring it into this job specifically with the homework assignment that you gave them." That's exactly it. Wow. Um, and you're saying first they have the homework assignment and the job description. He is then going to market and finding all these people that he thinks fits. Yep. Then they do the homework assignment and then if you

like what they say, they get to you. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, some people come with without doing the homework assignment and we're like, "All right, well, we're not going to hire you." You know, it's like you you we want people that want to work with us. We want people that that pass the vibe check across like whoever their adjacent people they're going to be working with is before they reach me. And then finally, when they reach me, it's all about core values. What are your core values? How do you identify with each of these core

values in your own life? And then like how are you going to embody it when you join our company? That's amazing. And you're talking about who that person is going to work adjacent to them in the company. Are you saying other people outside of you and the recruiter are involved in this process? Yeah. Yeah. So, it's uh like for this retail trade marketing person that we just hired, I he interviewed originally with our senior financial analyst who we got from Celsius, one of the best people in our company, and then Jeff, our VP of retail

sales. So, they're coming at it from a sales perspective. So they understand that whether or not she understands retail data, how to talk the talk, the vocabulary of retail and so on and so forth. Then she talks to our brand team, VP of brand because she needs to work with the marketing teams. So the adjacencies, that's when she presents her homework assignment. And then finally, she comes to me where I just talk about core values. Wow. So if you're hiring anybody, anybody that they would be reporting to, you want to get their POV on the

specific homework assignment to understand and see if they know from all different angles. And honestly, like our hiring process, I think could be faster, but it's so much better to take your time. It's like dating or getting married, right? Like it's better to like take your time finding the right person than like jumping in and finding someone that just fits the role. Yeah. We've also seen on here, hire slow is definitely the advice that we've heard from most people. Dude, it's it's so worth it. Like at the end of the day, one of our uh

strategies on a page, which is like a big thing we do at the very beginning of the year are uh annual soaps, 98% retention of employees every year is our goal, you know, so we want to make sure people don't leave, you know, we want to keep our employees as much as possible because we go through such a rigorous hiring process that we know they're a right fit when they come in, not find out find that out later. This is an amazing book and an amazing advice for any entrepreneur out there. What you're saying right

now, I I've never heard of this book. I definitely don't do the things that you're talking about right now. And I would have guessed that it had to be above 90% your retention rate cuz they're they're going through the ringer. Dude, no one's no one's left our company in the last 3 years. It's crazy. Like every single person works so well together and our culture is so good. And like we even do stuff where like our integrated brand manager, Monica, is getting married in May, right? We did a surprise bachelorette party for her at Expo

West and we all went to Disneyland together as a team. Like stuff like that too, right? Like that our VP of brand just planned on her own to like surprise her with. It's like the fact that it's not in your programming and she or he did that on their own, that means you have someone good. It's incredible. So the number one complaint I hear from most entrepreneurs is just like I hate our CMO or I hate that. Like you hear that all the time, right? It's just like, man, like this person's just not working. Like,

I don't get. It's like you either cultivate and let that person grow because you hired them for a reason or you hired wrong. There's only two options there. It's either you or it's usually not them. Unless you hired incorrectly, then it is them. Do you believe more in uh clearly defined structure and roles or more of like fluidity in in the organization? So, one of our soaps going back to that is organizational fluidity. So, how are we all additive to each other? And this is like I was actually going to do a talk at YPO

next week about this, but the event got cancelceled. So, um I could do the talk now. Um so, I'm a firm believer in organizational fluidity. So, how are we additive to each other than being rigid in our roles so that all of us can be cross departmental in a certain way. If you are a digital marketing person and don't know anything about retail, but retail makes up 20% of our business, then you only understand 80% of our business. That's a big gap. So how are digital marketing efforts translating now more effectively into retail marketing efforts

and how is retail brand awareness translating into digital rorowass efficiencies that's being additive to each other and I think a lot of organizations become so rigid in this their four-pillar system of operations marketing people and finance that it starts breaking apart at a certain point you know and for us it's scalability like every employee in our company generates over a million dollars in revenue a year, right? It's like you do that through being additive to each other. What type of programming do you do to make sure people understand and know what's going on in different

departments? Is it just a cadence of hey, make sure you're talking to the whole entire team? Is it a weekly standup? How does that look? Yeah, there's a combination of weekly standups. Um, so we have key prior the way we do our leadership meetings like it's usually really short, 15 minutes stand up every Monday. We have key priorities. So our four key priorities are this, this, this, and this. What is every single department doing to funnel up to those key priorities? So it's not updates from each department, you know, oh like what what are you

guys doing? What's working? What's not? Every single department lead has to funnel up to those four key priorities that the entire company's focused on. And as far as those four key priorities, I mean, three of them could be in one department. And that's what you're saying right now is you're going to want all departments leading into just the priorities that are important. Yeah, exactly. It doesn't matter. That's I mean Tik Tok success is one of them but Tik Tok success is also Tik Tok success depending on region like driving people to retail like it could

be something like that or sees store success could be driving brand awareness in a region where the Tik Tok demographics are more concentrated like it starts overlapping right in different ways. What do you think is the secret to retaining the top talent? I mean, it's it's a it's a pretty general answer, but like culture, you know, people, culture, um, not being afraid of conflict. If something's not working, someone brings it up. And I think one of the biggest issues, and you see this in a lot of organizations, someone will see that something's wrong, but because

they're afraid of getting reprimanded, they don't say anything. Every person listens to each other, and even if it's incorrect, it's a a learning or growing experience. It's funny you say that because my core values and then D with ghost core values. His was radical cander. Ours is radical transparency. It's the same exact thing. That's exactly it. Yeah. I mean, yeah, we call it servant mindset. Yeah. You should be taking advice from anybody and just have no ego attached to it. Um, what is one question you ask in an interview that reveals the most about a

candidate? If you had to pick one question. Dang, that's good. Um, I I you know, one question I always ask is just I I don't think this reveals a lot, but like what do you do for fun? You know, I I ask that every single time and the answer they give if it's boring, I'll be like, "No, no, no." Like give me a good answer, you know? I'll try to like push them to give me a better answer than them being like, "Oh, you know, I like playing video games." Or whatever it is, right? And

then usually they'll start diving into like something a lot more interesting about themselves and then you unpack it. It's it's pretty simple, but getting an understanding of their personal life, what they truly enjoy is something that's usually not the case with work, right? Like you're not doing your enjoyable thing that you're passionate about like for most people. So getting an understanding of that allows us to I think translate into a little bit of the company, like another additive piece into the company. Love it. All right, so we're going to do this podcast a little differently

now. I just have tons and tons of business questions that I'm just gonna fire away at you. We usually start in the beginning with this, but we're gonna do it now. Um, so I guess let's just start with a question that usually I ask first, but we're going to ask it now and get into it. So, uh, what was the original inspiration behind Neurogum? And was there a specific moment that sparked the idea? So, when I was training incredibly hard during college, you know, I was training like 6 to 8 hours a day, like it

was training then school. I was studying neuroscience and I was looking for an option that would give me the mental energy to do both and I got really deep into the world of neutropics. So I started buying paracetam from websites like hard rhino which I don't think even exists now um on the black market you know I remember I had oh my gosh I remember buying things on Silk Road uh through my friend who knew how to use Bitcoin for like half a bitcoin back then like or whatever it was. I I don't even remember,

but I just remember talking to my friend David and being like, "Dude, that was like the most expensive like Oxy Rasitam that I've ever bought in my life." That was like probably worth a million dollars. Now, I was mixing those things in my room, taking them, realizing that they were working incredibly well because I didn't want to take Monster or Red Bull, and you could talk to any athlete. No one's drinking energy drinks if you're training at a professional level to go out and train or like exercise. And it was either that or no explode,

you know? That was out. Oh my god. No explode. Yeah, guys, for people listening, that was that is steroids. I remember in college people were taking these guys were huge. Yeah. Every single person, it was no explode. It was no explode. I'm like, dude, you're not taking that those who need to last for 6 to 8 hours of training. Like, you're doing that for a 1-hour gym pump session, but for a professional athlete, first of all, like half those ingredients are banned now. Like, so neutropics were something that legitimately I felt changed my life. I

was like, "Wow, now I have the mental capacity to be able to do and the mental fortitude to be able to push through training and to push through school." And then when my co-founder Ryan, who you know was one of my closest friends in college, I met him his freshman year. He was a cross country and track athlete. Catherine is cross country and track team at Arcadia who went to nationals. He was running like a 420 mile or something in insane. his sophomore year, he got in a really bad snowboarding accident that left him paralyzed

from the waist down. So, he's in a wheelchair now. I was giving him these neutropics to get him back into the groove of school, get him back into the groove of, you know, like just life in general from this catastrophic injury that he just experienced. And he was like, you know what? I want to go scuba diving. I want to like cuz I don't need my legs for that. On a scuba diving trip, we were taking these pills and looking around. I realized that the accessibility of scuba diving and creating the accessibility for these things

that really impact our life in a positive way can be done better and so what's more accessible and sharable than gum and mints and no one else is doing that. So we decided to put these ingredients into the gum and mints and like the rest is history. Context when was this when you guys started? 10 years ago. So 2015. Yes. So this was when neutropics people didn't even know what neutropics were. Um yeah, I feel like it would be like in a like a subreddit where like random people would be talking about it and building

like an underground. So the post we made when we launched our gum, the reason we raised so much money so quickly on Indiegogo is I was one of the biggest contributors on our neutropics like 12 years ago 10 to 12 years ago. And that's where I was testing and asking all the questions and it was a small group of us. And I remember I made a post that said, "Hey guys, we just launched the first neutropic gum ever." It became the number one post on our neutropics. It's probably like in the top 10 now, but

it's like it's the number one post on our neutropics at that time. And just that traffic flooded into our Indiegogo. People were willing to buy a bunch of like these $20 packs and that was our first amount of capital to build our business. For initial context too, I know but I don't know. What exactly is a neutropic? It's anything that gives you cognitive benefit without side effects. Ideally without side effects, you know, so people talk about like like mud water. Yeah, like mud water or like ratio, which is a combination of different cortiseps and mushrooms,

right? But and Shane's a great guy, but a lot of people will look at like, oh, it's aderall, you know, for example, uh a neutropic. and it gives you those focused benefits, but the side effects are so detrimental to your health that it's something that you can't take every single day. Versus something like a coffee is naturally a neutropic, but you get the crash afterwards. When you add caffeine to elenine, which promotes alpha waves and reduces anxieties, it eliminates a lot of the jitters and the side effects of caffeine, which is why it's a staple

neutropic that a lot of people use, which is the main ingredient in our energy and focus product. Yeah, you guys time this perfectly. I feel like the kager on like neutropics in general, it's so early. Like you think this is this is so early. Correct. It's crazy. Like you you could even see on the like the Google trends like where neutropics start picking up. What has been the biggest challenge when developing a functional gum or a mint compared to a typical supplement? So the greatest thing about our company, we have a patented way we make

our product. Most gum is made in a heat extruded way. They basically get the gum base, they put the ingredients in, and they run it through heat so that it melts together, and then they cut these little chicklets up. That's like almost all gum in like the world. We have a patented way we make it because we have a mom and pop manufacturer that produces our product for us that we found because most gum manufacturers in the US is owned by one the biggest gum conglomerate in the world. Um, and we didn't want to deal

with them. So, as a benefit, we use cold compression. So we use a lot of pressure to pump ingredients into the products so that there's no degradation via heat. With that being said, while we have that moat, we have a capacity constraint issue that we sometimes run into because this is the only person in the world that can make our products. And this manufacturer that's vertically integrated with us now is the only manufacturing system that can make our product as effectively as we do. We can only build capacity as much as our business scales. Is

that the biggest problem you're dealing with right now? Is that Absolutely. It's a good problem to have, you know, but it's, you know, it's sounds like a good problem. When creating a new product, what do you think matters more, flavor, function, or branding? We we always say flavor is king. Flavor is king. And then from there, fine-tune your ingredients, you know, like obviously we we're sold in Whole Foods, arowan, so all of our ingredients are incredibly clean, but that was an iterative process. Our first product tasted like absolute garbage. And I remember I mean the

function people loved and people will chew through it but there's a great book called crossing the chasm and you could get this first initial group of biohackers but if you really want to cross the chasm into mainstream there needs to be a much more approachable way that you attract these customers and for a consumable product that's flavor. You have to have a good tasting product that people are willing to chew all the time because that's their first impression. Yeah, that's uh Peter Rahal, the other guy from RX. That's uh flavor 101. Um I found very

very interesting. You once had a product that was making money but decided to shut it down, a move that most entrepreneurs would not make. Uh what led to that decision and what did you learn from it? So it's a combination of a few things. So there's something called skew rationalization in the CPG world. If you have a CPG business, there's only so much capacity that you have on your line. And with COGS and holding inventory, that's just assets on hand. And if you're not selling through as quickly as you think you can, or if it's

not selling through as quickly as other products, then you're just sitting on cash as a liability, you know, that you can't pump into any other part of your business. So, that's one component. having this product that's health and vitality that was actually doing pretty well. We had a pretty good subscriber base with it um because it was a daily multivitamin product, but it just wasn't selling through as fast as our energy and focus. So, it was taking up line. making that decision where we free up cash, increase capacity on this so we could pump more

marketing and going back to that theme of focus, focusing on what works, I think did wonders to our business, you know, and we continue to do like this idea of skew rationalization is something our ops team does constantly. It's so funny you say that because even if you're doing a thing where you're going to drop ship, which we're doing, I admire you so much for that because it's so hard to just shut something off versus just leave it there. don't put resources in and you almost think it's just free money. It's just free LTV, but

ultimately it is owning mind share in the potential consumer's brain no matter what% you think it's it's still a distraction unless you're using it psychologically where it's just like oh for $10 more dollars I could get this product and maybe you know there's like a pricing psychology there. If it's not that then it's a distraction to what you're actually trying to sell. Yeah. Deep and narrow, not wide and shallow. I'm with you on that one. Um, what would you say is the secret to standing out in a crowded supplement and wellness market? Unique form factor

is one thing that, you know, we were able to crack. Price point is another thing. There's a going back to consumer insights like one thing that you know with our packaging on the top of this if you let's see the packaging on the desk it goes from energy and focus which is our old packaging to this new one that says caffeine gum for sustained energy and elevated focus. Being bold about exactly what the consumer wants on your packaging is so important. And so many companies will go in and they have this beautiful branding but you

have no idea what it does. A retail buyer is going to walk around. They're going to see a million products and your product will look good, but if it's not resonating with the thing that they want, they're going to walk past it immediately. For us, they're going to see this. They're going to see caffeine gumbed. Boom. They need energy. They're going to buy it as an impulse purchase. I like this. It's uh it's direct response. I mean, it's saying it's direct respon. Yeah. Take from digital. It's same thing. I love that. Um, what would you

say is one branding decision that significantly changed Nuro's trajectory? Bold colors. So working with Herman Shear, do you know Chapen and those boys? I don't. Great guys. So they did our branding for us. We actually ended up winning a Adobe award for the packaging and we went from this like really shiny white like it looked really clean packaging to these bold colors so that those colors can stand out on retail and that changed everything normally. What color were you guys? It was just white. Oh wow. Yeah, it was white and it had our text and

everything but like it just got lost. You know, there's a reason McDonald's is yellow and red. There's a reason these big company like Coca-Cola's red, Pepsi's blue and red. There's a reason there's color psychology that people study in retail branding. And that changed translated to, you know, better sales in retail, better exposure, better visibility, better brand awareness, all the above. For those guys listening, not watching, it's a uh it's a red and a green, no more a white. Um, what would you say is one underrated thing about brand building that entrepreneurs need to prioritize more?

Messaging and positioning. I think a lot of people are like, "We're going to try to sell to everyone because this is a product that translates to everyone." That's how we were the first 3 years of our business. We're like, "Energy gum, man. Everyone could take this." But once we fine-tuned it to, hey, our name is Neuro, so it has to be about the mind. Let's go back to our roots in neutropics and talk about us as like a cognitively beneficial product more than just like a pure energy product which is why we have energy and

focus on there. We realize that our consumers are resonating more with the focus component which is why on our new packaging also sustained energy and elevated focus diving in and focusing staying narrow and deep you know is so important than trying to capture the masses. find your cohort and expand from there versus the other way around. I think that's so interesting. Uh I don't know if you know who Zack Pogreb is. He's a good good friend of mine, Long Island guy. He's uh owning the word obsession. He's very big on Twitter. He's building out an

app that's like a a bolt-on to like a Straa. Um but it's so interesting you say that because the word focus, I actually think energy is a very saturated market. Focus, I can't think of one, right? I think about we have a couple iconic pieces that have the word focus in it and they then they do well. It's ironic, but I think that that's brilliant because you just don't see that. I've never seen the word focus on a package in a store before. Yeah. Yeah. But you you killed it with that one, bro. You killed

it. That's a good one. How late in the game did you figure that one out? That's a good one. Yeah. Like three years in. That was three years. Three years in. But, you know, you're talking about like things that changed the brand. That was an inflection point for sure. That's huge. Um, all right. Let's go a little bit into uh to retail strategy and sales. Um, I think it would be incredibly valuable for the listeners to hear a full arc of how Nurugum has approached retail. Can you walk us through like a highle journey of

year-over-year growth, number of doors, key retail accounts, and I know we're going on year 10 with iconic 10. It's a lot has happened. So, it might be a little a little uh little all over the place, but I would love to know. Okay, year one, you're in zero stores. You can take it from there. What's your what's year? Year one purely DTOC. I think we did like 700 somethingk that first year, you know, year two double growth, double grow. Like we were constantly like on this double growth trajectory until this like these last two years

it was like 3x three, you know, like we just elevated 3x like I think we were last year like three and a halfx or something. So just crazy growth over the last three years. And to give people context real quick, from year 1 through year six, your two inflection points would probably be the Shark Tank, which is that piece of leverage, and then Rogan just Rogan did way more than Shark Tank. It was crazy. Like way more than Shark Tank. His first time he mentioned us, like he's like male Oprah, you know? People listen to

him and they're like, "Oh my god, I'm going to buy that product that this guy's taking." And so, and it's crazy because like again, I mentioned earlier, Rogan mentioned this yesterday on like episode like 2290 now, you know, and this is like his 20th time mentioning us, if not more, but we don't even see the blips anymore, right? Like, and sounds like first world problems here. Total first world problems. Don't even see. It is crazy that like every time like he's so impactful and people listen to him still as the biggest podcaster in the world.

But not until we learned how to capitalize on these blips with PR, creators, marketing, everything did our business start seeing this more exponential growth. Cuz before we almost like depended on this PR to come in. We almost depended on like us to get Shark Tank. That's like betting on luck versus making your own luck, right? And so I know I'm not answering your question at all. No, we're going to get to that. Don't worry. At all. But like and after that second Joe Rogan mention, we were just like, why are we not trying to build

more PR opportunities? So, do you know Jack Taylor, John Beer and those? John Beer, shout him out. Legend, dude. I love that guy. I've known John Beer for probably 15 years now. Most interesting man in the world. The most uh for people listening, I think it's a point we're bringing him on the podcast, bro. You have to. He's been a finalist for for guys listening. He uh he owned and sold a ghost town. He's fully tatted. He's got gold teeth. Um beautiful wife and kid. Interest can't explain. You had to bring him on the podcast.

Uh he's a mixed martial artist in some sense. I think he does jiu-jitsu or something. Uh he has been so early on health and wellness and fitness. Uh and he's a a great pure human. We're now talking about it on the podcast. It's official, guys. He's coming on. Bring him on. He represents us. He represents Athletic Greens. He represents Plunge. Like every single big health and wellness brand you could think of, he represents. He's doing something new with Ken Ride Out. So something I think it's called Ride Out. Yeah. Benel, Ken Ride Out, uh, and

then him and a few others, but sportsoriented. So, so let's just say year 1 through year 6, 700,000, then it's 1.43. It keeps going and going and going. What is the inflection point that you're now going apeshit? The inflection point now, so you know, again, building your own opportunities. what are these things that are going to be pops and focusing on like those things that you feel are going to be pops. So you could for us obviously it's feeding into the Tik Tok creator ecosystem but for any other brand you have a consumer base if

you've been selling product you have a consumer base that's going to love your product and talk about it. How do you utilize that group of people your community to amplify whatever it is that you're doing. So find those moments, right? And for us now entering even deeper into retail when we first started off, you know, I think we were in the first market we got into like outside like the smaller regional stores and stuff, you know, was Whole Foods and then Sprouts, Fresh Time, so we saturated naturals. So we're 90 98% of all natural stores

in the United States. Um, and in the downtown LA store, we sell like 200 units per week at Whole Foods, you know, like so, uh, Jeff, who is our VP of retail sales, does an incredible job. And then our other, uh, VP of sales, Rob, who does mass and drug, got us into CVS. So, we have a full end cap at CVS C CVS now, um, starting in May, I think. Uh gosh then CVS um Giants Meyers like little Walgreens maybe uh not Walgreens but we did get into so Walgreens is terrible actually as a

partner so we like decided not to go with them although they wanted us and Ryaid too and I think Ry is like bankrupt now right so I actually think Ryaid and Walgreens are about the same for me when I see those logos yeah exactly they're just like that level right but we got into Walmart and we got into like 4,800 Walmarts so right off the bat we went n like national. I think it was like a $5 million PO, something like pretty sizable. What we realized though at that moment cuz we ended up pulling back

completely from Walmart because of their chargebacks and everything. We realized that it's not a matter of store count cuz we were going so fast just trying to get as many stores as possible, sales, sales, sales. But our velocity, our placement at Walmart, all that stuff sucked. And our brand awareness could be good, but it doesn't even matter. we decide to pull back, rethink how we look at packaging, rethink how we look at the consumer placement, and unless we're placed in the right areas that align with what the consumer is looking for, we don't go into

the store, even if it's a massive opportunity like a Target, cuz we want to be ready for it. And now this year looking at our ACV which is uh average commodity value. So where you are relative to store size across whatever the store type is. We have a $95 million opportunity in this next year in our top 15 regional markets in convenience store. So we're going to go in super hard. That's why I was just in Virginia to talk about some deals with a partner of ours. And we're going to start off with Casey's 2400

stores, small footprint, but right on the cash register, doing all their promos, trying to see if we can hit velocity, and then we're going to expand from there. How do you understand and know that exact opportunity? It feels like that you guys are very, very good on the back end from an analytics perspective. How do you know that? Is that uh are you getting outside reports? Is your saleserson tapping into the buyers? Like what does that look like? So Joe was part of a threeperson team at Celsius until their acquisition, you know, and he's a

killer. Yeah, he he's he's like an absolute killer and knows so much about retail and velocity and all that stuff. Um he looks at IRI data, spins data. I'm not allowed to do uh I was told by my editors that I'm not allowed to We need to say what that is. What is IR? Oh, sorry. So um we leverage basically all these big retailers do not share their data with you. You have to pay for their data. It's not like going on to like your Shopify platform and seeing who's buying from what areas and whatnot.

So you basically pay for this data that gets aggregated from all these big retailers. Look at how it's performing in the energy supplement space which is the category that we play into. And then we set a goal to be like, "All right, we're going to make up 20% of all energy supplement sales across these markets." And that's the size of the prize for if we take up 20%. So that's in short, you need to buy it. You need to buy you need to buy this data and or hire someone that probably knows from last year's

12-month run rate of what it looked like and what it looked like vice versa. And then we overlay that onto our DTOC, Amazon, Shopify, uh, Tik Tok data, see where people are buying, where we're shipping, and then mashing up the regional data alongside the sales data. We, uh, combine those two and go into the right markets. Contextually, I love giving context on where you're at with a company and when you started investing in these things. As you mentioned before, 0 to 20, you want the scrappy generalist marketer. At what point in the journey or is

it never too early is it to start really buying this data? Well, you could get a lot of data. I mean, not so much anymore on like Facebook ads and stuff like that, but you could get a lot of data from Shopify. You get a lot of data from surveying. Like, you don't need to be spending, you know, 50, 60, $70,000 every quarter to get data if you're smart enough with how you leverage your consumer base and you and ask them the right questions. So from 0 to 20, that's what we did. We had like

a checkout survey. We would do quarterly surveys where we give people $500 gift cards for like our top, you know, customers to basically understand and know. Yeah. Understand and know. And there's scrappy ways to do it, you know, and people are willing, if they love your product, they're willing to give you feedback. So leverage that first. But then after a certain point when you're going into big box, when you're going into convenience store, when you're expanding and trying to become a nationally recognized brand where you do have to invest, get an understanding of how to

be tight. Because the big thing with retail is if we fail at Casey's, knock on wood, if we fail at Casey's, Casey's is never going to take us back. In the same way with Walmart, we're trying to get back into Walmart now, but you know, we didn't do well at Walmart the first time. our velocities were crap and they put us in like the worst position also. So, we're doomed to fail. Now, it's an uphill battle to get back into Walmart, right? So, you have to be tight with how you're approaching it so you can

take advantage of that opportunity. It's about to sell through, not to sell in. I've said that on multiple podcast. Um, for brands looking to break into retail outside of just waiting for retailers to reach out, uh, what are the best strategies to proactively get in front of buyers and secure a chance? That's a loaded question because it depends, you know, uh we use personal relationships for some, we use connections through um like friends for some like and and partners for some um or there's opportunities like UNFI shows uh or Kah shows which are big distributors

that you could go to and you place your product, you have all your spec sheets and everything and you could pitch to buyers. Um there's also platforms like RangeMe that people could use. I don't know how effective range me is personally, but I know people use it. So, there's opportunities to get in front of buyers, but you need to be at the places where the buyers are because you're not going to just cold email them. And like same thing with creators on TikTok, you know, they're getting emails all day. You're not going to be able

to cold email them and get them. I also am more of a direct like engagement with a buyer, which is what our sales team does more than using a broker. Although brokers could build opportunities, but they're brokering like 15 20 different brands alongside you. They're not going to be able to talk in the same way that you can. I always recommend and I mean potentially to get your initial foot in the door, use a third party agency, but yeah, they're they're juggling multiple brands and whatever they're making the best margin on. Also, you get to

learn if you're doing it yourself, you get to learn how to pitch and then refine the pitch. A broker is not going to ever give you that feedback. What about something like uh like the Expo West, like all all those trade shows? Do those still work? I think XOS used to be really good. Um, for us, we don't do it because we're already in 98% natural store, so it doesn't make sense to it. It's like $100,000 to build a booth, you know, or like $60,000 minimum to build a booth. Like, that's a lot of money.

Like, think about just pumping that into ads, you know, or fan creators. True. Uh, to give context to the listener, how many doors are you guys in? over. It's hard to say because we're in a bunch of like bodeas and like random sea stores, but uh over 20,000. Yeah. 20 and 30,000 like something. Yeah. Uh last question on retail. If you were launching Neuro in retail today, knowing everything you know now, what would you do differently? I would not launch immediately. I would probably wait like 3 years. build a digital footprint, understand the consumer, and

then find three retailers that you know you could be incredible partners with, and then start from there. Makes sense. That's very similar advice from Manny from Slate Milk. Okay, let's get into uh some entrepreneurial insights. We're going to last page here. Uh looking back, what is the best entrepreneurial decision you have ever made related to neuro? Man, that's a loaded question because I could think of a million different things. Give me one big one. I think starting a business with a co-founder was one of the best decisions I've ever made. There's the quote, "Go far

alone, go farther together." Even in the hardest times, knowing that I have someone that has my back is so helpful. And there's no one that understands the hardships you're going through in a business more so than the person that's building the business alongside you. I could not imagine ever starting a business and making it to an advanced stage just by yourself. No way. I just I I don't I don't understand it at all. Um, and from a a backend kind of accountability chart perspective, uh, you and your business partner, what do you handle and what

does he handle? What does that look like? So, I I primarily handle investor relations management. So, like managing the teams, building organization, uh, and he focuses more on partnerships. So he's going out like if you ever meet Ryan, he's one of the most likable guys you'll ever meet, you know, and he'll go out and he could basically talk to anyone. So, you know, he's getting dinner with like the VP of food sales at Insomniac on Tuesday that he met through another connection of ours and he's able to connect the dots so well and build these

like relationships with people that like we're just leveraging that superpower as much as possible. I love it. Uh, one piece of advice about entrepreneurship you strongly disagree with. I hustle culture just in general. I bet other entrepreneurs that you brought on the podcast have said that as well. It's like dude, if your mind is so caught up in the minutia of work, then you are not thinking big picture. And there's that what we were talking about earlier. Find that one thing that's going to make so much more impact than doing a million things and like

spending all your time hustling and waking up whatever the hell it is that you're doing that these hustle culture guys talk about cuz that's going to impact you so much more. And then from there you can start depending on people that have better expertise than you instead of you trying to hustle and do everything yourself to amplify your business and to grow your business. I think the issue with hustle culture is it's so ego-driven. You know, it's like it's all about you. Look how much I hustle. Look how much like I'm the guy waking up

at 5:30 and making my coffee and working out. This is like, dude, like going back to this conversation about like my co-founder being the best decision I've ever made in the business. It's bringing the right people together and building a group of people all aligned on a vision to push something forward is going to go so much further than by yourself. I love it. That's great advice. Very uh mature advice. I mean, I've I've been on both sides of the coin there. Same here. Yeah. And like I'm curious for you, like when did you have

that epiphany, man? Probably like I would say like four or five years ago, like which is still pretty mature. Like I've already been in business for 5 years at that point, you know, and I I think it's just like a natural journey for a lot of people, but um you could work maybe three times harder at most and build your business 3x. You can't work 20x harder, though. You need 20x more people to be able to do that. You can't work 100x harder to 100x your business. You need those people. There's only so much you

can do by yourself. And there's only so much that fits in here, you know? So, you got to just like let that go. That for me is the biggest thing is what you just said right there is just the mind share is just like it's so funny, man, cuz my girlfriend drove me to this podcast and I help her on her business. She helps on what I'm doing. and she was talking about like in the minutia of like a deal that she's doing on Monday and I was like babe I can't nothing can go in

my head until after this podcast. Yeah. And that's I think that's something that the switching costs of doing different things in different businesses. That's a real thing. That is something that I have focused on so hard the last three, four, five months and really clearing things off my plate and just guarding my time. I think that's the most underrated thing. Like for me it's hysterical how somebody could bash Elon Musk. It's like the fact that that guy's doing what he's doing. Yeah. I mean you want to talk about resource allocation, that guy's definitely an expert

in hiring people and putting smart smart people in place. Um what's one underrated skill every founder should have? I'm going to give a technical answer and then I'm going to give like a kind of like a vapid, you know, philosophical answer. But um I think humility is incredibly important. I think a lot of people go in with so much confidence, but at our age, and you can't do this when you're in your like late 30s, early 40s, 50s, I don't think as much, but if you're a young entrepreneur in your 20s and 30s, everyone is

going to be willing to help you. You should take advantage of that. Not in a way where it's malicious in any way, but if people if I see like a young 20some year old entrepreneur that's driven that wants to like build this idea, I'm going to give him that time a day, you know, and a lot of people on our end too, like Brian Lee who founded Legal Zoom, you know, who was our very first investor, gave me the time of day when I was in an elevator with him and he had no idea who

I was, you know. Um Jared Smith, the other co-founder to Peter Raal for RXAR who invested in us also gave us the time a day to give me the advice on how to hire properly. Like these people have gone through this journey and they're willing to help you. So one philosophically humility go to the right people find these people that have done it before. Soak that all in and try to apply it to whatever you're doing. And don't be afraid to keep asking people for help, you know, within like don't annoy them. Yeah, I literally

just posted about this and it got the biggest reaction I've gotten on an Instagram story ever. Really? Ever? Um, yeah, man. I've been paying for consultants and asking people for help. Um, I've been in this give give give and I feel like I'm just depositing so much to other people and I've never even asked and now I'm just reaching out to people and asking them for favors, advice, introductions and I've been blown away. Dude, most people want to help other people. It's just human nature. And what you said, I I I really do resonate with

that. Um, age is just a number, but like when I see like a younger entrepreneur that like I feel like was like I see myself in them. Yes. I shouldn't be saying this cuz I I posted this too about 15-inute thing. Like I'm going to give you 15 minutes. Like you could put 15 minutes on my calendar cuz I'm always going to have like a special place in my heart for that because I know for me I'll always remember the people that gave me their time on the come up, you know? Always. Yeah. My more

technical answer, yeah, let's give a more technical answer is uh get really good at searching. I remember when we first started, I it's not Google anymore. You know, there's so many different platforms and chat GPT and stuff, but like we were really good at being scrappy and searching for answers effectively and googling the right way, Redditing the right way, chat GPTing the right way and that is a like prompting proper properly especially now with uh all these AI systems is so freaking powerful and you have no idea how much you could leverage that. Speaking on

the last thing, uh we are paying a team of consultants um to help us with a lot of things with what we're doing now. And one of them is building like a back-end infrastructure and like a brain for the company that's 50 60 70 pages that we keep building on. That's the first input into chat GBT. And I completely agree. I think the propped uh engineer is a future job that is going to be a very very valuable job. We we build that into notion. Our notion is like hundreds and hundreds of pages in the

same way as our brain. You could ask it. So like we have people in the company like oh what is I'm going to think of a random question but it's like what's the cogs on our cinnamon gum? They don't need to go ask someone else anymore. They just ask the AI system in notion and it'll pull it up for you. You know this might be the biggest cheat code that we put on all day right here. It's a massive cheat code man. Just put everything down and then have search everything. And you have to keep

building on it and building on it and building on it. You have no idea how much time it saves you and like the brain space and cuz every time someone asks someone else and they have to get distracted from this and that it's like dude that is time and energy. It's the cognitive swishing right guys you guys just put on some crazy game there. Um what's one thing you wish you understood about raising money before you started Nuro? So I remember our second year in our business we went to this investment group. I don't even

know what they're called anymore. And I thought I had I thought I had an understanding of the numbers in my head, you know, and like I studied it. I went in. But one thing I was missing was the vision of the company. And a lot of these investors at an early stage, if you're raising your first round, they don't really care about like the cogs and the margins and it has to be reasonable. Obviously, you know, people are looking for that vision. So get that vision so crystal clear in your head when you go to

raise that first amount of capital because that's going to say so much more than any of the numbers and the mumbo jumbo that you're dealing with like that matters at in a series A series B obviously but for that first round of capital the jockey the jockey and the vision I completely agree on that. All right two more little mini sections before we get into the lightning round. Um let's talk a little bit about failures and lessons. What is a recent investment you made at Nurero that massively exceeded or was underwhelming as far as your

expectations went in ROI? So underwhelming I'm going to go back to the Walmart thing. You know Walmart huge investment big PO getting into, you know, 4,300 or 4,800. I forgot what it was, but like over 4,000 stores nationwide huge launch. failed miserably. No matter how much money we put into Ibata, which is like a couponing like you know different marketing like retail marketing things, no matter how much we were pushing, we couldn't just like we just couldn't sell through effectively. We couldn't get our velocities up and ended up failing miserably. So again, I would say

underwhelming but a major learning experience for us that allows us to translate into all of our like uh convenience store and sales opportunities in the future. Walmart customer doesn't want to focus, guys. whatever. So consumers, man, like at the end of the day, it's like understanding where your consumer is. We're a middle upper class income brand when you look at our consumer. No offense to Walmart consumers, but like that's not really the consumer base at Walmart, you know? Yeah. I feel like um like the cohort I'm in is like my low-end affordable stuff is Costco.

I feel like you're talking about high-end and Costco and then Walmart is a different customer. Exactly. Yeah. Right. So that was a big learning lesson. Uh underwhelming um exceed obviously Tik Tok. Looking back at Neurogum's journey, when was the closest the company came to shutting down? Oh man. Tell us everything here. I could go crazy on this so many times. I've come so close so many times. Just tell me what it is, man. The biggest one is this lawsuit after Shark Tank where this lady that's worth mucho Dairo came after us and it was going

to be a war of attrition that she was just going to freaking take us down over a trademark thing and we're in a totally different category but she just like I don't know she just kind of took it the certain way you know and thankfully one of the guest judges on Shark Tank and this again Ryan's superpower I'm we were trying to reach out to this guy. Ryan just DMs this guy on Instagram and this guy responds. Daniel Lubetsky, the founder of Kindar, worth $3 billion. He seems like a nice guy. He's the nicest dude.

He literally saved our business cuz he came in and you know, we're like trying to figure out how to pay for these lawyers. We're like we're break even during that time. So, it's not like we have a bunch of cash. I think we're doing like four or five million a year. Like not that big of a business. This lady's worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Daniel Lubetski comes in, gets in a call with her, and is like, "Hey, look, I'm uh I'm worth 10 times more than you, and I'm going to back this entire lawsuit

unless you you back off." And the lawsuit ended there. Wow. It was crazy. He just stepped in and he was like, "These guys are my friends and if you mess with my friends, I'm going to mess with you." Damn, that's some g I like that. That's a gangster, dude. He's a G. Shout out to Ryan, too, for uh for shooting a shot in the DM right away. Absolutely. Oh my gosh, it was that was a crazy moment. I like that. That's a good intro onto the last segment uh before lightning round is uh Shark Tank.

So, what's something about the Shark Tank experience that most people at home would never realize? So, they love drama. So, we were in there for an hour and a half, but they cut it down to 7 minutes. So, and another thing for anyone going on Shark Tank, this is advice I give to everyone going on Shark Tank. All the Sharks love talking over each other and they because they all have egos. They love hearing their own voice. If there's a question you don't want to answer, just wait for five seconds. They can't handle the silence,

so someone else will ask a different question and then just answer that question. That is very very good practical uh advice. I like that one a lot. Um beyond the cameras and the deal making, what was the biggest lasting effect Shark Tank has had on Nurero, good or bad? So the lawsuit right that came out of Shark Tank cuz that person saw uh us pitching on Shark Tank and then saw that our names were similar although we're in a totally different category. So from a lasting negative effect, there was that, but obviously it solved itself

thankfully. Um positive effect obviously with Tik Tok and everything, the credibility, seeing where we were 6 years ago versus seeing where we are now. There's this beautiful underdog story like we talked about that gets translated into Tik Tok creator hooks. Yeah. I feel like I know too many people that didn't get a deal and they kind of push it under the rug and they're not realizing that they can use that logo and that social credibility whether good or bad or good. Every failure could be turned into a success. Yeah. All right, we going to the

lightning round here. Uh, hardest stage of a company. We're talking in millions here. 0 to 1, 1 to 5, 5 to 10, 10 to 50, 50 to 100. I think 10 to 50 absolutely is the hardest aging company. 50 to 100 kind of starts, if you're getting from 10 to 50, 50 to 100 starts rolling like the momentum starts rolling on its own. Um, but you could bulk your way up to 10 with Facebook ads and whatever and just spending your way. But to go from 10 to 50, you need to become a legitimate brand.

What other big keys are there from 10 to 50 from a organizational structure, maybe experience systems, what are the other big key uh initiatives? Brand awareness, better retention strategies, and not retention just from retargeting, but retention from tapping into your community and making them love your brand. um brand expansion if that's the route you want to go like so product product innovation and then think through marketing again in like a campaign planning road mapping that kind of way like it becomes a much bigger organizational uh lift to get from 10 to 50 and you're going

to have to start thinking about a company not as individuals but as a unit yeah I think not including kind of the AI hedge that people are using I feel like you can get zero to 20 like good companies with just like consumer products with like six people, eight people. Uh that company Jolie I think has sub 10 and they're doing they're doing okay. They're all really smart former affiliate guys to my understanding. So they they understand that ecosystem. Good LTV though. Um great LTV. Yeah. Number one reason why entrepreneurs fail? Uh they give up

too early. A personal habit or ritual you most credit for your success as a founder? Exercise every day. like find time to exercise every single day. Simple and profound. Customer service overseas, domestic or hybrid? Hybrid. Customer success is domestic. Customer service is overseas. Last two answers. I would give the same answers. Uh this is an interesting one because this was on my bucket list and kind of finalist, but it didn't happen for me. Best part about starting a business in Vegas. Tax breaks, tax abatements, everything is cheaper. uh in terms of uh property like you

could get a warehouse for a third of the price that you can in LA and uh growing entrepreneur community. If listeners can take away just one thing about becoming them best selves, what would it be? Do not go all in on just your business. Look at yourself to become a comprehensive and complete human being through how you treat your body, how you treat your mind, and how you treat your financial stability. That's an amazing answer, man. All right, you're offline for a month. Let's just say you're uh running a thousand miles in the jungles of

the Amazon. Uh what are the two core KPIs that you need to see to evaluate the health of your business? You can only pick two. Organizational fluidity. It's it's like the big one. Um so making sure that retention for employees stays in place. Um so everyone's working incredibly well together without the need for my leadership is one. And then the second one is probably maintaining opex. I know that's a kind of a boring answer, but you know if opex is being maintained at the levels that we set it as a KPI, that means everything else

is functioning properly from a financial and like a cogs and margins and whatever perspective. That is mind-blowing that you did not say IBIDA um or a growth company. Yeah, that's uh IBIDA or ROAS. I thought that you would say one of those two. I think that's so interesting that you said the retention because that just that basically tells me that you picked a good team and if the team is still there and happy then you'll bet on that all day almost blindly. Yeah, 100%. I also think rorowass is a high like once you get to

50 to 100 million rorowass and beyond rorowass is hygiene more than anything else. Um I know you've trained uh Muay Thai and judo at the highest level we spoke about earlier. If you could take one principle from martial arts and apply it to entrepreneurship, what would it be? Martial arts is a journey of getting better yourself. So it's it's interesting because I remember my sensei was telling me that if you cheat on martial arts, martial arts will cheat on you. It was a quote that he would always say to me. So if you are going

and training for a competition, if you don't cheat on your training, then you will always bring the best version of yourself to that competition and you'll most likely win. It's deep. Uh last couple questions, my man. Uh favorite book or podcast and why favorite and you can't say the who with the hiring. Yeah, even though that was I I like that. That that would have been one of my favorite parts of this p. I love that. Yeah. No, it's it's and it's it's a very simple book. It's like the way they lay it out that

crucial conversations and uh I think it's called like how high output management by the former CEO of IBM are three books that I recommend to almost everyone but they're not my favorites. you know, like I'm a big uh I love reading uh I love spear fishing. Like that's like one of my big big hobbies whenever I come back to LA. Uh Breath and Deep by James Nester are two books I read recently that just I feel like it profoundly changed the way I look at myself, look at like the history of humans and how we

approach nature. So what is it? It's like a sapiens for nature. for for Deep for example, he went to a free diving competition like 10 or 15 years ago and got really deep into the understanding of like you know a 100 years ago people or more like maybe like 150 years ago now people thought that if you dove deeper than 100 ft like a human would literally explode. Now people are diving 300 plus feet on a single breath and there's something called the mamalian reflex where us as human beings coming from the ocean. There's a

weird capacity that our spleen has that provides us with more oxygen the deeper we dive to be able to stay underwater for longer. It's incredible. And it's him just diving into this journey like the history of uh submersion and like the the history of free diving and just human history as a whole and innovation. It's a great book. Yeah. Um entrepreneur or brand that you want to give flowers to and why? Ooh, there's so many. Oh man. Uh I think Will Nits at IQ Bar is an absolute killer. uh we started our business around the

same time and he's been able to just find his niche in the saturated bar market and do an incredible incredible job. Um obviously Jared Smith has been a great mentor of ours from RXBar. Uh Brian Lee, you know, it's like one of the greatest entrepreneurs from the greater Los Angeles area. Um oh my god, I feel like I'm it's like a disservice just like not naming everyone. Kevin Lynn, the co-founder of Twitch, who's been a longtime supporter of ours. He's absolutely incredible, like as a human being, as an as an operator, uh, and helps us

out a lot. Actually, a lot of the Twitch team, the chief strategy officer, Colin, is also an incredible friend of ours. The Colin Carrier, uh, he's helped us out a lot. Um, man, I could go on and on. I'm going to give a random one. I have not given one on any of the episodes yet, but he actually introduced us, which is Ben Sharf from We were literally just talking about Ben. That guy is the biggest hustler. He's dude, he's such a G. Forget that. He's one of the greatest humans. Um guys, check it out.

It's platter.com. He just recently raised around and it helps just kind of organize and optimize your whole entire app stack on Shopify for commerce. And um Ben is a great guy. Love talking about focus. He took that mantra of focus and applied it to an e-commerce store, an e-commerce platform. There's so many apps that are promising you this upsell, this whatever. They took the most efficient things, put it onto a store, so you have a high functioning store immediately. I think you guys are the best use case, too. When I went on your website, it

was beautiful and simple. Do you see that row? It was like 48x rorowass or some crazy number. All right, man. So, the crazy big last question, how big can Nurogum be? I think we could be the next Red Bull. I really think that it went from like coffee to energy drinks that Red Bull was able to do and then from energy drinks that Red Bull was able to do into this little more functional shot product that 5Hour Energy did and then now we're taking an even step like even a further step forward where we're a

pack of gum that you could share and keep in your pocket. I think we could be as big as the other energy supplement players in the world. Love it, man. Um, where can they find you on social at Nurogum on social? Uh, pretty straightforward. Neurogum nur og gu on all social media platforms. If you want to find our company and if you want to find me, it's Kentaro. K N T A R O. Nice. Love it, man. Appreciate you coming. Thank you, man. If you guys got this far, I assume you guys enjoyed this interview.

Uh, if that's the case, I think you guys would enjoy the other episodes. Make sure you guys go check them out. I want to keep growing this thing bigger and better. All I ask from you guys, give it a like, give it a subscribe, and share with a friend. Appreciate it. See you guys soon.