How we scaled to $100M in under a year (ft. IM8 co-founder Danny Yeung)

we had a hundred million annual revenue run rate at eleven months gru still in twenty two months right and they were acquired for one point two billion age one took them ten years to hit a hundred million we had two hundred million run rate in eighteen months i feel like i could rule where to i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days on a road less travel never looked alright danny welcome to the show man why don't we start off i just give a little little intro to yourself so who are you what do you do hey sean thanks for having the quick background myself always been an entrepreneur started working at a very young age at fifteen i was a tele so that's how i you know got started working age twenty four had my first business was a restaurant did that for three four years that ventured in the hotel furniture business import export from china into the us eventually work on some big projects like the mt city center in vegas did that also for the three four years then in two thousand ten i took leap a faith and move to hong kong to launch a e commerce company that was doing group buying and then when group on went international they acquired fifty one percent of my company you know we became the largest e ecommerce company in the region i left in two thousand fourteen we're doing about two hundred million annual revenues i had a good exit that's where you know i made my first million know that's it per s more than million but and and after e commerce i was like hey you know what do i do next hell lob options at my disposal and i didn't just wanna go back into your e commerce even though that was the easy route for me i ventured then i actually you know got started in diagnostics and dna testing so founded a which was the life sciences dna testing company you know again this is two thousand fourteen right so very early no one was really talking about this stuff when you'll see that in my entrepreneur career it wasn't the obvious choice but everyone's like now looking back as obvious choice right i'm same thinking about in two thousand ten no one was using e commerce in hong kong everyone in fact told me to go back to the us they're like danny just go back to us this model not gonna work in hong kong we but we made it in them won e commerce company at the time but going back to p you know started off a life sciences company when covid hit you know we were prime position to take advantage of it we worked very fast in two weeks we got our covid testing kit we then became hong kong's number one covid pcr provider as well as in the uk so those you three years we you know i would say we were like printing money i was saying right they exploded at one point we're doing forty thousand pcr test a day right we total the twenty eight million this is lab pcr test those three years we did seven hundred million plus revenue in three years time we list on the nasdaq in twenty twenty two where household name everyone that arrived in the hong kong one point had a mandatory pcr test and then of course that let goes into you know i which is kind of yeah know what happened after covid you know we had a billion dollar evaluation during covid twenty twenty two because covid was still going on eighteen months later our market cap hit i think was like fifty million right went from billion plus to fifty million dollars shit right you really know who your friends are at that point right because at a billion you got a lot of friend got a lot of friends at a billion you got a lot of friends of billy when you're down ninety five percent okay the stock is down ninety five percent where the friends also down ninety five percent everyone wasn't so bad no i mean the friends wasn't down ninety five percent but when you're when year go up everyone wants to be in involved which is natural to be fair right everyone wants to be surrounded by winners but very few want to be surrounded and associated when you're going down right because i think the path to recover is significantly much harder i mean we had a few options like you know what why don't we just close the business because get you have thinking about the the background right we i think in two thousand and twenty two yeah we did you know two hundred and seventy two million revenue right and basically forty thousand tests turn to nothing right so basically you know our revenue dropped by of ninety five percent and then to be fair adding the market you know realized that and it was rightfully valued so we thought hey what do we do you know do we close up shops just return capital to our shareholders you do i do something else i mean of you very i've been successful as a operator as well as an investor right so i love options still but you know i knew that you know i still wanted to create something out of this and also wanted to be very responsible to the shareholders from before coincidentally at the same time as we were thinking what to do you know i had the opportunity to meet with david beckham and this was right at the same time where i was thinking about getting into the supplement category and when i met david you know it wasn't to like pitch him on hey let's get to the supplement category we're just having a conversation about his background what he's doing and he was very intrigued about my consumer background as well as my life sciences background and he was telling me you know about his problem him and victorious problem about how even for where they are as individuals and of course you know they have all these resources available to them right they even found a supplement category very overwhelming especially that when they're traveling you know they just can't maintain that routine of taking twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen pills in these capsules and etcetera they just yeah don't do it right and then yeah me as entrepreneurs was like hey i'm sure there's a better way for that and yeah after you know three to four months countless conversations says i'm i'm sure you can imagine and someone with david's pe and background if something went wrong it's not no one cares about danny it's always gonna be a david's something blew up right so he had to take significant precaution and i told david from day one day david i know you know for the last thirty years there's been so many people wanting to do this category to reject it and i told david something that was surprising to him i was like david if we do this together yeah i don't want you just as ambassador i want you guys as a cofounder but this brand has to lift beyond you i don't want this to be another celebrity brand yeah so let's explain what i is right because that's the current business so i am a if i go to the website i see beckham i see jan i see lilly collins i see a bunch of famous people and they're drinking a little red drink and you know you've seen and i have here mostly most of the supplement category is green you guys are red and it's a it's some sort of supplement drink longevity drink you got the beckham stack on here and can you explain just in short like you know just real quick like what what actually is the product that you sell yeah so we've made the business model very simple we came out with our daily ultimate essentials and it's very simple right it has ninety ingredients replaces sixteen different supplements in a powder s you mix it with twelve ounces a while you just drink it every single morning and takes care of your foundational nutritional needs so what does that mean all of your multi vitamins your c q ten ms m pro probiotics pre post and because normally you would have to take the equivalent of sixteen different supplements that will easily cost you two hundred and fifty to three hundred dollars on a monthly basis yeah and for us we're selling at ninety dollars on monthly basis this combination which also tastes as great and you can carry around with your everywhere right and you guys have been i mean you're a public company so you're public about your numbers but you've talked about your numbers before four yes this you're only about a year into this to this product line right we're only twenty months in we only launched december of twenty four right and you know now we've been the fastest growing supplement brand you know ever recorded it what does that mean how how fast do you grown we had a hundred million annual revenue run rate at eleven months in this category why i mean cruel still in twenty two months right and they were acquired for one point two billion after three years age you wanna took them ten years to hit a hundred million we had two hundred million run rate in eighteen months so you're at two hundred million a year so there's two two angles to this right i have my e com nerd hat yes been in e commerce and i can ask you about the funnel and the khaki and all that then there's just like high level you know product ready fit when you hit a when a product hits a nerve and you've you've nailed the positioning the branding you've veil something in category in positioning can you talk to me about category positioning because i think those are highly underrated and most people are terrible at that it it's very hard to recover if you have category and positioning wrong you can be the best at just trying to crank that grind the funnel but it just doesn't matter if you haven't gotten those that the first first key decision right you talk to me about category and positioning oh do see that i just stepped over a million dollar problem a million dollar business idea and that's the thing most people walk by these million dollar ideas all the time and they don't even notice and so our friends at sutter story they put together a list of ninety business idea each one it's vetted they're all real problems real gaps in the market because they talk to hundreds of entrepreneurs and they put together this amazing stuff that's incredibly well research and so if you wanna find a bunch of amazing business opportunities you can get it for free just scan the qr code or click the link in the description even the four you know we got through this category everyone told me not to do this they're like hey supplement category a highly competitive so many bad eggs and and to be fair i mean i can tell the story now is that you know my whole board disagreed with me alright they're like you you don't know anything about supplements standing i'm not it is true though right i haven't got you i i i didn't do anything in this category before right yeah it was e comm or selling coupons dna testing running the lab all that stuff yeah but also to be fair before any of the i never had a a background as well too right yeah so of course still yeah i had the poor was like you know what and then we have to make a of course a commitment with david beckham course yeah you was now a small commitment correct and then so they disagree disagreed with me but you know i knew that if we made a great product and we've nailed the positioning and the brand right and with the support of db you know this would be a home brand so i have to really fight and educate my board and again it's like hey you know what if i'm wrong i'm wanna resign i'm gonna yeah my quit right that that was what that was my position because it really i needed to be convinced myself that was this was the right move but but what made you think that this would be the right move because it it is true sub is crowded right like a lot of people have a celebrity who cares right like correct and celebrity deal right they're like they're my board tell me there's so many there's actually more failures of celebrity brands if you think about then actually success cases right so what was your take so my my take was number one starts with the product alright everything starts with a better product than what's the available in the mark anakin yeah honestly say yeah we have the best product in the market but like you fairly pointed out consumers may not recognize that right and and so this is where know from day one we spend out more time also on the taste profile because a lot of times people have the great product blah blah etcetera but if it doesn't taste because no one one's go drink it right so i spent a week at the factory he says every single day testing like you know twenty thirty different flavors until we got that tastes like you know what just taste this good alright and that's wants them drink again but those two things those two also doesn't you know relate to success right so you mentioned the color the brand we wanted this to stand out we didn't want just create another greens powder right then no one created re powder right and so i didn't buy the fall that was interesting to people is it red because it's like made of beet or it's red because you made it red like what you you what mean like did it need to be red or you chose to be red it was a natural coincidence that when we created the formulation there was like beats inside and the formulation and this was a natural red color and lot of shit let's just let's just go hard on this color right right which then makes sense and then our packaging if you look at is a very big red box right is very premium the positioning so i didn't want us to be another supplement brown one to yeah know have a really great unboxing experience it's both the name yeah easy to remember the fonts the colors with the name because you know i whenever i bring in storm company names you get five hundred names each one you look at you're like that could be it and then you know so like if i had written down on my list of supplement names i am and then the number eight i might have maybe it'll be like that kind of flows but i would've have the the courage it takes to pick such a weird name where's does that come from why why why aren't very good at names right i would say i'm like really good at names i mean my my e commerce company is called you by ib buy right group buying right with that jeff where you then p was half prevention and genetics so you're okay right and of course i am made it came out one this something simple and easy to remember and then i am means i am and then eight if you flip it around means infinity infinite possibilities right and i knew at one day we'll enter china and the number eight we're also work in china alright so there's that's what's number of china right number me and just like i am is like i am healthy i'm am draw i am powerful right well there's a great meaning behind it okay and so you go into this category now you get your formulation done what's the zero to one so what that what did that look like use fire facebook ads shopping five store did you do anything else like what what does zero to one look like zero two one again the formulation hard you know i would say was the result of also getting amazing scientific of ours report yeah on again when i looked into this it was like hey what are all the different challenges someone can yeah go add us and it's like hey it's just because we have david beckham it's not enough and everyone knows david's is not a scientist right i'm not a scientist right so we then the next step was recruiting a world class scientific of ours board the likes of doctor don was salem from mayo clinic y james screamed the former chief science of nasa suzanne c you know the director of obama cedar their sinai so these individuals we brought along they all took part in creating this formulation and that wasn't enough and how'd did you do that by the way that's what your cold emailing is there a i i actually know there's like a there's like an agency it's like a broker service i don't know if you know this there's a broker service between doctors and supplement brands literally like get a doctor on your brand i don't know if you see this i haven't seen a very niche agency some guy has okay but what did you do you you've cold called these people you go fly out meet them yeah saw mean be what what what's happening i i knew the former chief times or nasa prior yeah yeah basically he was that national for two years so that was easy because he knew me right and again i love this okay relationships is is built bound trust and you know for doctor dom salem yeah i contacted her on linkedin we got a call and again the first time we had who was very skeptical because so many supplement brands you know reach out to them and again the especially as if you have practice in a physician yeah is also quite rare to work with a supplement brand especially if you're let's with mayo clinic really really rare mh alright because they have a lot of restrictions etcetera etcetera right so but i think from day one you know even i i told dawn and again we're we're still working today pretty closely is that we need to prove the science and evidence yeah so that's why we embarked on a clinical trial before we launched a brand we embarked on dirt party testing by not just one organization but by two by euro and nsf certification for sport so that means if you're a professional athlete you know is free from two eighty band substances so i have a lot of friends who are in the supplement game and in in general when you're in commerce could it's easy to become very skeptical and very jade of course not because anybody means poorly but just because it's very easy to get something up and running and put make put all your effort into the packaging maybe even some into the taste but ultimately mh you know you're not in the factory and and you know and also it's very easy to have something that might help but is this is not scientifically proven right scientifically proven is a very high bar and so i would say there's almost two two two parts of the ledger there's the first part which is like are these clean ingredients and as it made in and clean factor that's kinda like text trust test number one yeah trust us number two is the hell a post what's body does anything this stuff actually matter if i drink this is anything really changed in my body and i know obviously i'm asking you know the priest if religion is real but i i guess like if i'm a highly logical rational person what would be your most convincing thing you could tell me that would make me actually believe in supplements a love supplements out there don't work and that's the reality right and i think the best validation of our product is that doesn't matter who we have becca blah blah etcetera our business won't be in twenty months can't be a twenty million the two hundred million plus business without recurring subscriptions and that means the product works as advertised alright and how does someone know that the product we're how is a customer you feel it product mean you feel it and in the best way to energy what what what you feeling better energy recovery yeah you sleep better your gut you know everything is working better yeah and of course a i lot of these individuals use our ceos athletes i think the best case i can show i mean i i was surprised by this email right around last april or may of twenty twenty five alright i got an email from arenas how be team right right the cole email into me right they're like hey you know arena has been on your product for about three months now via a recommendation from her nutrition coach when you're the world number one tennis player every single thing they're measuring the recovery how you're feeling three to four times on a daily basis and they don't need to bullshit right i'm she has so many options and resources and she's was like she's been feeling amazing from a recovery perspective and she hasn't gotten sick while on the product and given that they're traveling you different times zones every single week can we partner together her right and so that was a great validation of the product of working at the highest level of sports and the reality is also every single ambassador that came after that it was inbound to me hey let me ask you a question is the market in china or india for that banner like two big population places is there is the supplement market the same is it just the same but ten years ago is it different what's going on over there india to be honest with i don't know i do know is a much lower price point yeah category in china they do have ag one but it's not like yeah from one is not doing well what do you think that is is it is it all just price point or is there a factor i mean again it goes back you know to price point education branding positioning you know there's like so much right and i think to be fair ninety nine percent of american companies going to china and think they can just sixty succeed of the same business model and for china to operate it successfully you need to a completely different business model completely different team like for example my team can do i know hundred percent there's like no hell they no way they can do china right so far me to enter china i would need to get a completely new team of every single individual hey let's take a quick break you know that feeling when strategy is done the brief is written everyone's aligned and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content that someone is usually you and it's due tomorrow well the breeze assistant from hubspot can help it works right inside hubspot you can draft campaign copy blog posts emails all in your brand voice all using your actual customer data so you don't create just content you create content that converts check out hubspot dot com the agent customer platform for growing businesses tell me about some of the operational excellence so i wanna know what are some things that you're doing that i could look at that i could be inspired by oh that you know the way they do that that's really good so now i'll give you a couple examples so we had chad from groom on the podcast and he was showing us their funnels with their facebook ads we're looking at his ad library together and they were showing like he's got like you know there's eight different sort of reasons to buy right maybe you're on oz and you want oz support maybe you're looking for mood and here's a mood thing maybe you're a woman and your hair and your your hair falling out post part or whatever i know what their i don't remember the exact angles he's like i've got like the ad that goes to the landing page for that persona for that problem for that sales pitch and i'm running all eight simultaneously whereas most entrepreneurs are you know usually just get fixated on one and they don't get they don't get as much of the market he'd tell us that or eric ryan from method soap and ollie gum came on and he was he's a master of packaging and positioning and he said i looking in the vitamin aisle and you know first thing i knew is that every container was round and so we would be a rectangle mh and he's like it's as simple as that i look for a c of same ness and everywhere in the aisle that i see a c of same this i know there's an opportunity to come and do something different that's what they did in band aids and soap and vitamins yeah i would i would say you know even right now you know to be fair wise he on the ads and landing pager personas that's quite standard operating for caesar right now right if you're a d brand doing hundred to two hundred million dollars i mean you have to be doping data right yep adding for us wise is one that we've done really well with scaling on meta ads you know right now we have anywhere from you know two to three thousand ads live at any given time we're testing out you know five hundred to eight hundred creators on a weekly basis so that constant testing that is really really important right and you have and right now the reality is even with ad buying i mean you know app buying is like a commodity right now yeah before a few years ago you have to be really really good at at buying but now meta does all of that for you already right you don't need to do the targeting and you don't need do all this stuff right all you need to really figure out is how do you get really good creative in really good creative diversity on the different personas because now you need the creative to do the targeting so tell me about that creative machine so you said two things you said you have a couple thousand ads running at a time so are those static or those videos videos says well you know fifty five sixty percent static and then the rest of videos and you're doing that with what a studio you're doing that with ai you what what is the machine that's building all that a combination of everything so we have our own ambassadors yeah again we have of course we have like yeah top ten very famous ambassadors then we have another thousand or more so ambassadors affiliates that are creating loss of content for us on a daily basis right and that feeds the engine depending on whichever personas that we're going to and a lot of times saying you have your proven winners and then it's like how do we recreate all these proven winners because you know there's also create a fatigue that happens right so we've have our own create a fatigue score that we identify so we know okay when a ad is potentially going to get in fatigue which then ultimately will drop that ro right again three hundred thousand above on a big daily basis on meta you know which is quite high given that we're only twenty months in right and we've been able to yeah scale that and any ain't one key day again public information given where public companies that if you look at what happened in q two versus q one q one our cat was three zero five right our average order value is about two hundred thirty dollars right so and we we doubled our marketing spend in q two right we'd doubled it from about seventeen to thirty three million dollars in a quarter right our c actually went down by four dollars alright from three zero five three zero one because you would imagine if you're doubling spend your cats always gonna go up yeah and then so i think we've reached a point where again we got the engine running the brand is also doing very well from a brand position and we've ran now two hundred plus flying events i think this is something that i haven't seen any other supplement brand do so why are you doing that because that create content or because that creates a loyalty or both well what's the what's the main reason to do two hundred offline events i mean it's very important from us from day one and it's by a bit this is about a authentic product science and you know when we have these events we have our scientific advisory report members there they're talking about the product right and again this is not just a marketing aspect as you know we have real science behind a brand they get to meet our leaders and our scientists and in doctors last week in new york we did like know seven events in seven days right as part of us open i always say these the events are very difficult to scale right right but i think that's very very important especially in the age of ai you don't know what's weird where we don't know what's what's or fake or whatever right and so i think having the offline presence is really important for us yeah and i think that's pretty counter to where most brands are right now i think it's so easy to sit sit at your laptop fire up ads let you know tweak your landing page and it's clearly you get the scale you get to measure it you get every you get the feedback loop right away you don't have to like go get face rejection out in the real world and it almost means that like offline has this disproportionate premium because it's simply like less contested and once you've had an in person touch point and then you go see an ad right it's gonna be a completely different experience than if you've never it's just right saying and any know attribute you know that c lowering worrying when we double our spend we're not talking we're don't talking about like a lot of double of loud spend doubling right and even july our calf fell to two hundred and thirty nine dollars alright yeah you know which is you we're spending more than ten million dollars a month for marketing right and then so it was continue lower i do believe again i don't have quantifiable data this days these the all offline but i i'm gonna continue to double down offline events because that's a really important to the brand side of things tell me about some of the kind of early days of entrepreneurship where maybe your entrepreneurial philosophy got got formed or the core skills that are helping you today well where were they first kind of originate where where would you cut your teeth doing it i mean so i dropped out of high school right so i was you know basically a bad kid got kicked out high school for fighting so i had to really learn everything you know on the streets i would say alright as as a entrepreneur in you're always faced with making decisions with very limited information and i think you know for everyone that knows ma'am do you know i'm like very street smart right i can figure things out by myself with very little information where where were you going to high school in san francisco oh you're in san francisco so you get kicked out so what why tele marketing how did you stumble into tele marketing i i mean i think i didn't stop i think it was like well what do i do you know i'm not going to school right so and then as a tele you know was fifteen it was good at idea i was good in you know kind of like c calling people what were you selling i was telling times shares times shares yeah and yeah at remember times shares is like i this is about thirty years ago right so those few years were i was that was a very bad kid actually formed the love of my thinking as a entrepreneur because i always had to reinvent myself always had to go to a new school make new friends and get very comfortable and yeah i i believe i can survive anywhere you put me to a nigeria africa whatever it is i will figure it out yeah the yeah sort of more adversity you face the more confidence you get when you survive you there's there's another guy craig craig le who came on the podcast good friend great guy he's also an e commerce sponsor so his company golden hip does hundreds of millions a year in sales bootstrap him and his brothers he also was in tele marketing who's selling dating products so he was the younger and you know he he was sharing for him one of the ways he got better at sales was he was going to these seminars and he was reading books and he was just looking for like anything he could pull out one line one one copy or anything one psychological sort of hook that he could pull onto to did you do any of that or were you just brute force numbers game i mean you have to like communicate you properly right i think you always have to be direct and i oh i've always kept that right so very transparent in terms of hey you guys especially would be let's say trying to meet someone for the first time always tell team james don't don't don't talk about bo sbs right i think you just have to be direct and transparent what's in it for them what's in it for us and again for me i've always for each of my businesses i'm always trying to deliver greater value first i think that's very important i never tried to look at what's in it for me i was like what can i help this person with how can i help my partner and how can i help their business and that's been my philosophy from day one i think if you have that type of philosophy going in it doesn't matter if the other partner doesn't reciprocate you move in you learn and move on mh so you tele marketing you learn about the numbers game you learned that you gotta sort of figure it out street street smart to figure out things that survive and you and you you learned that it doesn't matter who you talk to right you can i can go up to anyone is just basically a you the worst thing that happens is to reject me right how many people would you call in a day it was like night shift at the time while i was working so i was like you know six thirty to ten was say hundred two hundred people and of that what's the rejection rates still gonna be like how much nine ninety ninety ninety five percent right and and so was that something did you have to sort of would you tell yourself to be able to like kind of quickly bounce back from that no he's just something again it's a it's a number camera when he's just yeah but basically you just tell yourself hey you have the next one it's gonna be more likely to be positive right so you have to just get through and i think you to fair tele marketing taught me a lot yeah you have to have a dick skin even when you talk to the investors same thing right hey when you're early on bell he's getting investment i mean you talk to a hundred investors you only five may invest in you so there's nothing different about that it's just you're not getting rejected like hanging up blind you but you you're still face with that right i'm giving you example of how that came to use right so i doing my hotel furniture business i was cold calling basically mgm then it i got a meeting and then i was able to get a meeting that i was able to you know deliver the value i was able to get but without my c calling days i probably wouldn't have done that right even when i did my e commerce business you buy i by which group buying i remember i went to hong kong and i did c call all the merchants myself right because again you know it is not like starts off with nobody yeah starts with nobody right so remember one i was calling a big restaurant group and then director of marketing he hung up on me and i was like he hung up on me really like like was like you hurt me i was like well this guy like he said some like very bad words and blah me right and then normally he was like oh shit probably like you know that was thinking wow who's this guy's boss i was thinking right and then i then i you like found who's this bought with guy's bosses he was director marketing and at cole called the office and it was sand diego and he owned like thirty plus restaurants is indian entrepreneur and i asked for sand called the front desk he picked up the phone and i'm like hey this is danny i just moved to hong kong i moved here from the us yeah have five minutes of your time because i have this interesting e commerce idea and would love to see if i can partner with you right and then he met with me the next day for twenty minutes and he told me danny ate danny i don't think your business has been work in hong kong because why would i give fifty percent off to customers and i only get twenty five percent of the check alright but right you know what because you know you called me after my direct marketing hung up on you and we're still here i'm gonna work with you and give you all of my dirty restaurants and sign you up and he did that because he knew you know i didn't give up and just was persistent resilience and that changed the directory of the business because he gave me thirty restaurants and i needed one deal a day right so he gave me basically my whole next thirty days was filled by one guy saying yes and then of course then i can continue you but he was a big restaurant group right i was brief and then i would then go to other restaurant groups because he got him because he was so famous hey yes sand deep done concepts working with us yeah can you partner it too then yeah and once you once you get yeah some traction etcetera then more and more people will work with you right but that's that's where reality least someone has to give you a chance and you just always have to be on the hunt my my uncle vin was door door when he came to the country it came to this country door to door salesman of like the bible or i don't know what he was selling and i asked him the same thing i'm like man you were walking around in the heat in georgia in the summers you're walking house to house knocking on door like getting rejected even more than on the phone like two your face door slam and same thing ninety to ninety five percent of people door slam us he was the top sales guy and he he had a thick indian accent i was how did you do that he goes oh i took rejection better than emmanuel well i said well how did you take rejection better he goes i put a price on the word no so he said if a if a yes is worth a hundred dollars to me and it's gonna take me you know for every twenty knows i get one yes mh then he's like then every no is worth five dollars to right and he's like i just so he when they would say no i would hear in my head alright that's five bucks in the bank let's keep going and so he's like i was adding up the nose i was putting a price on it because i knew really like it's a numbers game i have to keep knocking and so i have to like sort of see each knock as a success even though what i my ears here is is a rejection i have to change what i'm hearing and that led him to be the number one sales guy in the country ended up training all the other sales guys i think there's a i think there's something everybody should take from from that whether you're fundraising or whatever whatever you're doing that like you know e commerce i think a good like i think if i looked at our conversion rate right now i think like two point something percent two percent two to two and a half percent maybe and you know ninety seven point five percent of people come to our site just say hell no now you don't feel it as much when it's e commerce right but you but if but you feel it when it's over there you know so so all the numbers came mh yes what else you you you mentioned mgm what what's the story there i didn't understand that one when i started first working the hotel furniture business i was doing hotels that like fifty rooms you know hundred room small hotels us right how small hotels chains that's doing all of their custom furniture sorry i can you go back why why did why does danny start selling hotel furniture how does that happen no because i was doing my restaurant business at the time i had a good friend that was the interior designer and she was just telling me she's a designer for these hotels and she was having difficulty sourcing furniture and you know i was like why don't you look in china and she was like she doesn't know how to and then i'm like why don't i help you and it's just like okay why don't you help me right and i had just did it for her and then after a few of the hotels i figured it out you know it's the same process if i make fifty chairs or fifty tables as if i make two to three thousand chairs right so i was like who is making two thousand hotel rooms right now and at that time was like vegas right then i started c calling the vegas hotels and eventually i c called mgm and it she gave me a meeting and then i went into the median and you know one year later i got a you know four million dollar contract with mgm how did that feel that first kinda of big contract i mean if it felt you know amazing but of course ultimately you know i wanted to deliver and that's all that's why a lot of times even when we do an achievement or milestone yeah know i always tell the team hey you know this is good yeah but it's not the end right we're just getting started right and it's like you even last month if we had twenty million in monthly revenue right by day this is good progress great progress i would say but we have so much greater opportunity so but you know was of course happy that we're able to get such a big customer when you were doing the covid testing you kind of in the right place when covid hit where you could provide testing you said a couple of interesting things one the ramp was crazy you said you did like seven hundred million revenue in the couple of years which is just a bonkers number i'm sure there was a lot of free cash flow in that too not just revenue yeah we made over a hundred million dollars net yeah exactly and and you the second thing was you said like in hong kong like everybody who entered the country had that sounds like maybe you had like a kind of a really valuable key contract that you won or some sort of like a you know pretty def position so can you tell the the story of that and also during that did you did you think did you know well just the music's gonna stop on this at some point and what happens after that at or you say i don't know let's just run and we'll figure it out when when when that happens yeah so i can tell you the back on this right so i think this is in april yeah april of twenty twenty so covid was getting very bad i had a meeting with the chief executive of hong kong i was like hey you know we have a lab you know covid seems to be getting you know worse and worse you know by the day yeah can we somehow provide support and make use of our laboratory yeah to basically provide the covid testing to the community right and then you know the chief sector said the same at the time said you know what them you know we have our own public health laboratory we can do it all of ourselves so that was that alright and i'm like okay no no worries stand because at the time wise it was very difficult to get a covid test in hong kong you would have to go to the hospital and they were charging like three to four hundred dollars usd for covid test and then i knew the cost of a covid test is a fraction of that right and they were making so much money in at the time you don't wanna go to a hospital to do a covid test because it means that you may get infected too right i was like you know what we'll just create our own at home pcr test and so we launched that within about little bit more than two weeks and every day we're just trying to help out the community we're selling for a hundred dollars us when everyone one selling it for four hundred dollars and even the hospitals with called me like why are you guys selling them for so cheap i was like i was like i was wanna i help the community there right at that that was that was a core reason of for getting into so every single day we'll be selling out and then july yeah the government actually then again called me it's was like can we meet again because it was getting out of control right yeah know three months later and they're like dan we need your help yeah can we you help us service covid testing to the community i'm like yeah we love to help like yeah what do you want us to do you're like we want you to test three hundred thousand restaurant workers across eighteen thousand restaurants in hong kong and i'm like how long of a time yeah do you want this testing they're like yeah we want you to do this in three weeks so that was a crazy operations right and don't know why i i even said yes to it again we went from hundred thousand hundred two hundred tests on a daily basis to now testing you know three hundred thousand people in about a month of time which basically meant that we had to scale out from two tests to ten thousand tests on a daily basis and myself my executive team where we're all in whole we done we and there were some people without jobs at that time right and then basically we started mass hiring yeah at one point we had like two to three thousand people what was the bottleneck was it the actual tests the supply chain for the test or was it the people in the lab to read the test because you you you get the result at home right no no you did the result in the lab okay so you would send it in you have to send it in this this was before antigen tests were rolled out right because early on you had do this so you had to do a laboratory test which is the pcr test and then the antigen test which is the quick ones which are less accurate only came to play you know maybe one year after i see i see right okay so so you said supply chain and hiring people all logistics data alright and then we're the first company contracted by the hong kong government to do a mass community testing and of course you know six months later with there was like fourteen fifteen different laboratories that we're also doing covid testing however the thing that stood out from us is i think a lot of has do with my technology and e commerce background and and data and all that stuff yeah was we're the only testing provider that never had a up when it came to false positives and false negatives and and so when all these other laboratories they messed up and then the government got a lot of yeah crap for it right obviously because if you get a positive during that time you have to go to detention for like seven to fourteen days right and then so this is why at one point every single individual that land hong kong airport was mandated a p test because they wanted to be the most secure and most accurate test did you have to do anything crazy to unlock the supply chain there on a daily basis you had to be fighting you know with so many different other you laboratories toys around the world right you to get all this supply chain so it was like every single day we're fighting and again a lot of times y'all just to out them and we have volumes right so again but it was a constant battle those were some crazy two three years of craziness yeah when you so i i my last question was you know i a few friends who were doing this i had one friend who was doing mobile testing he had like vans that were testing another friend that was doing ppe when when you couldn't get masks and in other ppe to hospitals and whatnot and people were making money hand over fist and they're doing this because there's so much i mean there's the the strongest demand i've ever seen for anything ever right yes life or death at global scale but you know some of those people they kind of stash away enough cash that it was still a success and some people had over built and then suddenly the music stopped and now it's like a lot of work for nothing so eric so give me an example right on on that is exact thing is it was it was right when we neil ko is over i let go of two thousand people very very fast and that turned out to be a really you know good decision yeah because again during that time wise i you had kill health you had you know luc sarah and these were at the top to list of companies at one point q health was three billion dollar la market cap they had a billion dollars in revenue in the us right luc sarah i another like i think there were two billion dollar maria cap yeah they went bankrupt you know eighteen months after covid because they over built they built their own manufacturing places they bought into the at home testing which never pan out post covid but i knew that for both sides for a company to survive after this we needed to make a drastic cut and also for the individuals right there's what what we're gonna do one more have two thousand fields there's some testing and we're just kinda like right you know stand around which is not good for them everyone has to move on you know with their life and in livelihood and you that was very difficult decision of course but ultimately it was the right decision for both sides thanks podcast is brought to you by my friends at mercury they make the world's best banking product i think you know this already i used mercury for all of my businesses i think i have like maybe seven or eight businesses we use mercury as our business banking across all of them and now they actually just launched a personal banking account so i have my personal account there i moved off of wells fargo in chase i'm just all in on mercury why i like products that are easy to use i like products that get me and the problems that i have so like very easy to make a joint account with my wife very easy to spin up virtual cards one click and i get savings yield it just has all the stuff that i need in one place so if you're looking for the best banking product on the market it's definitely mercury i will fist fight anybody who dis disagrees me on that go to mercury dot com slash personal and learn more mercury is a fintech not an fdic insured bank banking services are provided through choice financial group and call them an a members fdic if you were i don't know if you know you meet a lot of entrepreneurs or you you know there's a lot of people that will come up to you that are yeah excited about what you've done and they're trying to do something and they're pitching you an idea what do you think most entrepreneurs just don't get what's the one thing if you feel like you could just shake them and and say look ben you just really don't get it's the gap between where you are and where you wanna be is this what do you think that gap looks like for most people i think i mean again in about going back to number one right you know i always believe that if you build the best product in the market it just makes everything so much easier right and i think if you look at again even you know when covid testing i i we had the best product in the market so if we had the best product in the market is much easier to build foundation branding positioning premium pricing over any of your competitors alright and i also believe you know as entrepreneurs and etcetera you have to get into the weight of everything i think some entrepreneurs they don't like to yeah get involved in every part of the business at least from my perspective you know what's worked very well for me is i'm involved in every part of the business doesn't matter if we're a hundred million company two hundred million will be a billion dollars whatever i guarantee i'll be involved in a lot of the key all of the key decisions because i think that's what separates a founder from a higher ceo right i think the founder and that's why a lot of times these founders blah blah blah etcetera they grow your business to four hundred hire ceo oftentimes the founder always comes back right because the ceo perspective always much more conservative and they're looking at this from my page had where the founders that i were able to take risks that a ceo wouldn't be able to take so for example even when i started i made it will the seal there was no way he would being able to take that risk right but because i'm a founder you know have so much at stake care there's no one in the organization that to take a risk as much as me right to be able to make that movement let's get into the supplement category right yeah it's i i don't know if you've read have you read founder mode the sort of paul blog post yeah i mean are you over read yeah i think you found the is very different hey craig is like yeah we're we see things very very uniquely different any entrepreneurs you know really have to dive into that yeah and and you know the first thing you said about product you know the best product market i mean on one hand that sounds obvious of like oh well okay yeah and i would say most people everyone thinks they have a good product yeah but you have the realistic right it's like yeah it's like a big difference so we i i tell people about like how do you know this i i say don't trust me just put in into cloth put in touch you what's better i or you know one dora and ruins right and let's see what it says on the similar product right what what does it let's try yeah so if i had to choose one today i buy i over eighty one so you there you go it says yeah it's not just ninety ingredients for seventy five because that's ingredient count is mostly marketing okay i think that it's currently doing a better job putting useful ingredients at disclosed non trivial doses in the same daily drink and then it goes through the formula and it gives gives a little bit of an answer so at least according to to chad gp right now yeah that that is that is correct also i think is it okay i'm gonna cut that and you i'm gonna cut that the segment out use it as an add okay that's perfect give me my kick back if i have it you want give you a ten step back i'll be one of your tiktok affiliates exactly affiliates yeah you know i sold my company to this guy mike like w meyer and he was telling he had built the number one ranked result for buying or selling gold online so anybody wants to buy gold his company was was the the premier leader and i was excited when we sold i was oh you know so much about seo what are all the seo hacks that we we're not doing i'm i'm terrible at seo i've never even tried that as a growth strategy so i was like tell me tell me like you know what should we start doing and after a few meetings i was like dude when he didn't tell me like the hacks and he's like well there's practices he's like there's not really hacks he's like so i was like what did you do with the gold company and he goes i printed out like the page the webpage page for all of us and i asked myself honestly is there a reason you should use us why should google put us number one are we better are we actually better is it easier to use is it is it easier to understand is it more friendly is it faster like do we have are we better in any way and he's like the we had a cold honest conversation with ourselves that no we were not better and then we decided well we actually have to be better if google's gonna rank us higher and slowly but surely we did you know one brick by brick we just made the actual experience better until we felt we actually deserved to be number one and guess what like at that point we didn't need any of the hacks we actually were number one and i just remember thinking like i feel like you just taught me like very valuable like you know a very valuable obvious lesson that i needed to hear from someone like you i i i needed to hear from the guy who could shatter this myth in my head that the guys who ring number one are always just doing these clever tricks and it's like there's no trick the trick was be the best and if you're not willing to be the best like if it you know there's no way around you just gotta go through this and i i needed to hear that at the time again that's the if that's with the problem anything stuff something be realistic right well isn't right that has a founder or you basically have to alternate between delusion and realism in a way that doesn't make any sense one in one moment you're gonna have to be delusional you're gonna have no evidence but you're gonna have to have the faith yes and you're gonna have to believe even though you have no experience in this the market tells you one thing smart people tell you one thing but you believe another that's delusion and you gotta be a little dilute but then exactly then you have to switch gears it'd be hyper realistic and the guy you know somebody who's never delusional stand up being an employee mh and somebody who's only delusional ends being a failed founder mh it's the person who's able to shift gears between the two i know when you're when you need to be in each mode at that's sort of the the art of the whole thing yeah and like again i had to be very like you said to be very because i knew in my head if we put all these pieces together we will have a big success right but again going back i didn't have an experience in this so yeah you had to build this with the limited information i do at that time yeah well danny i appreciate you coming on man this is a you you have a fun story from tele marketing to now running one of the fastest growing supplement brands in the world and thanks thank you i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put my all in it like a day's off on a goal travel never looking back alright let's take a quick break i wanna tell you about marketing school it is a podcast that's is part of the hubspot podcast network and it is run by neil patel and eric hs and these guys are both marketers who are running businesses and so if you want real world tactics from practitioners who are actually out there in the field doing it this is the podcast for you check it out wherever you get your podcast