Ah, the classic startup mantra. Come up with a great idea, make lots of money, sell out to some conglomerate, and pat yourself on the back. Job well done for selling your very soul. You did it. You gave up 10 years of your life just to what… please your shareholders? 👏👏👏
I feel like our company — as well as 99% of other startups have fallen into the capital-raising hype train before they have built a real business. These days all to many view raising capital as the default way to build a successful company; even as validation that their company is doing well.
Our company has taken some time to reflect over these last few weeks, and as a result, we are going to be hitting the reset button. Less of a change in direction, and more of a change in our approach.
As we truly believe in being transparent—not just saying it to be cool like most—we are going to walk through our plans in this post.
Why the change?
For the last few months our company has focused 90% of its attention on two things: growing and raising capital. Though we have been successful in both (to a degree), we have continued to struggle with demands. Over said months it’s been a massive challenge for us to fulfil orders on time, which has lead to letting a lot of people down. Way too many people 😔
Second to that, our team never collectively defined the type of company that we want to become, which has meant a lack of true identity and vision.
We have come to realise that the underlying cause of all our issues is that we have focused too much on growing and raising capital, and neglected what really matters: the fundamentals.
The change that is now underway all started with a simple questionnaire that everyone in our team filled out, including two very important questions that will shape the direction of our company forever.
- Do we want to be a lifestyle business or a fortune 500?
As it turns out, none of us want to build a fortune 500 company. We’re not interested in a pissing contest that rates our success based on how much our shares are worth on the stock exchange.
2. How do we define our company’s success?
In addition, it turns out that everyone in our company defines success as helping and providing value to as many people as possible, as opposed to how much all of our shares are worth.
Our team believes in providing people with REAL value, such as legitimately improving cognitive performance—instead of illusory value—like making shareholders and investors a ton of cash from an IPO.
We’re making the decision to put customers before shareholders. Making someone’s brain better is so much more exciting to us than increasing a bank balance.
All and all, this process has opened our eyes to the real things that we need to address, and I firmly believe that this will be the change needed to really turn our company into something special.
High level changes
- Funding: As our team now has clarity on the type of company that we want to become, we will be changing our approach from raising external capital, to becoming self-suistanable and self-funded for the most part. We still aim to raise capital, but in much smaller and spread out amounts.
- Shares: We will be overhauling our shares to distribute them much more evenly and fairly across our team, now that there’s no need for original founders to retain an excess of shares that would have otherwise gone to investors. Our cap table will be shared publicly so that there’s full transparency, once the changes are made.
- Team: We will be transitioning out any non-active team members, as well as establishing much more defined roles for everyone on the team.
- Growth: We will switch from a paid-aquisition strategy to a non-cost acquisition strategy. Leveraging organic growth, and focusing heavily on making our customer-experience second to none.
Our new focus
We now plan to switch gear and focus on addressing the fundamentals in much more detail, and put growing at a fast rate and raising funds on the back-burner until we’re completely confident that everything is 100%.
Below is a list of things that we’re going to be directing our attention toward over the next quarter.
1. Supply chain
Since we first started gaining substantial traction, it has been harder and harder to keep up with our sales volumes month-over-month. It’s absolutely the biggest issue we face, and it’s the first item on our list of things to improve before anything else.
Unlike SaaS companies that have the luxury to scale their servers up and down instantly; companies that sell physical products like us have a latency between when a production run is initiated, and when the customer receives their order. Not to mention the latency between when an order is placed, and when money is actually in the bank.
The difficult part about being a startup without access to a lot of capital is that your choice in manufacturers is limited. Most manufacturers require massive minimum order volumes, which means that if you don’t have $20k to drop on inventory, you have to work with smaller facilities, which (at least in our experience), have been inconsistent, which has dramaticlly impacted our ability to deliver on time.
We already have a high level plan in place to do a total overhaul of our supply chain, and now we’re working to implement it.
As a result of this overhaul, all of our products are on pre-order until further notice, as we’re not willing to continue to under-deliver on our orders and disappoint people anymore.
In addition, when orders do open back up, we will only be shipping to Australia for a time. We want to get it right in one continent before expanding out to others.
All existing subscribers from the US will continue to get their orders every month of course.
We are currently working through fulfilling all of the outstanding orders in our system, as well as ensuring we’re able to fulfil subscription orders throughout this supply chain overhaul.
2. Clinical trials and better products
A while ago we asked all of our customers to fill out a survey and give feedback on their experience with our products. In the name of transparency, we posted the results on our site, and vowed to make our products way better. You can check out the infographic here.
Overall, people rated our products a 3.62 / 5. That’s too low. That’s the kind of rating an average product has, not an outstanding product. Ever since this feedback, we have been regularly talking to dozens of customers over the phone, to get their (very raw) feedback.
The scary fact is that EVERY other nootropic company out there (aside from Onnit), have not done their own clinical trials. They all focus on marketing more than they do research. That right there is what’s wrong with the entire supplement industry.
A BIG part of the change we’re undergoing right now is to focus much more on research, and dedicate more resources toward clinical trials. We believe in putting science before hype, and refuse to follow in the footsteps of all the other companies out there putting sales before safety.
Our two in-house researchers Adam and Jack have worked wonders since they have come on board. Jack carries a PhD in Neuropharmacology, and Adam carries the killer combination of being a nutritionist + data scientist.
They have spent the last 2+ months building a system based on a massive nootropics meta-analysis, that appends compounds with a rating of: A, AA, or AAA, based on many factors. This system has been used to formulate new stack candidates for Flow and Focus, both of which will now be natural products.
Our next step is to put the theory into practice, by running pilot clinical trials on both the new formulas, to prove that they deliver results.
We will be pioneering what we’re coining “Transparent Clinical Trials”, whereby ALL of the data we track during the trial will be available online, not just the final report.
All too many supplement, pharmaceutical and nootropic companies out there just publish the final report, which allows them to manipulate the data to look better than it actually is. We think that’s b.s., so we’re posting all of the data on our website, to hold ourselves publicly accountable to be 100% honest with our findings (participants will remain anonymous, of course).
We believe ANY company that does not do this should be questioned, as it’s a pretty clear indicator of dishonestly. As such, we hope to set an industry standard and force other companies to do the right thing.
Our first pilot trial will be a randomized double blind placebo control study, which we are aiming to have peer-reviewed by a very reputable university in our city.
Though this will take some time to roll out, our goal is to run clinical trials every quarter, and continue to revise our products as much as possible. Dedicating a large amount of our funding and profit toward research, so that it’s much more proportionate compared to our marketing efforts.
You can learn more about our first pilot clinical trial here.
3. Quality control
As part of putting science before hype, we’re significantly upgrading the quality control around our supply-chain and products.
We are taking a massive step toward having the highest quality sourcing in our products, by doing lab testing from multiple vendors, to determine who has the best raw-ingredients. This includes analysing many factors such as purity, safety (heavy metal content), method of extraction and a bunch of others.
The current vendors we work with do their own lab-testing and offer us a COA (Certificate of Authenticity) for each bulk compound order we put in, but now we will be running our own lab tests to validate their claims.
We’re going to be working with Alchemist Labs, a top-notch lab in the states who have a very methodical testing system in place (far beyond our current vendors and other labs), as well as a vast knowledge in testing nutraceutical nootropic compounds (with a team who takes nootropics themselves!).
Taking these extra measures will ensure that we know every single detail about what goes into each capsule we produce. We believe this will significantly improve the overall efficacy of our products too, as we will be utilising the highest quality compounds avaliable.
Final notes
Though we will be pumping the breaks for a while to truly get all of the fundamentals 100%, it by no means we’re stopping. Once all as said and done, we will be coming back stronger than ever before.
We thank all of the customers who have supported us up until this point—and we are genuinely sorry for everyone who has not had a desirable experience with us, because of ridiculous delays.
Believe me when I saw we’re sincere in our apology here. We know we’ve let people down, and that’s why this post exists.
Until next time friends.
— John, CEO & Founder.
