Don't launch an ecom brand in 2026 before watching this

Transcript

We hit 100 million annual revenue run rate in 11 months. Gruen's daily in 22 months, right? And they were acquired for 1.2 billion. AG1 took them 10 years to hit 100 million. We hit 200 million run rate in 18 months. All right, Danny, welcome to the show, man. Why don't we start off? Why don't you give a little intro to yourself? So who are you? What do you do? Hey, Sean, thanks for having me. Quick background myself, always been an entrepreneur. Started working at a very young age at 15. I was a telemarketer, so that's how I got started working. Age 24, I had my first business, was a restaurant. Did that for three, four years. Then I ventured in hotel furniture business, import-export from China into the U.S. Eventually worked on some big projects like the MGM City Center in Vegas. Did that also for three, four years. Then in 2010, I took the leap of faith and moved to Hong Kong to launch an e-commerce company that was doing group buying. And then when Groupon went international, they acquired 51% of my company. We became the largest e-commerce company in the region. I left in 2014. We were doing about 200 million annual revenues. I had a good exit. That's where I made my first million, more than a million. But then after e-commerce, I was like, hey, what do I do next? I had a lot of options at my disposal. And I didn't just want to go back into e-commerce, even though that was the easy route for me. I ventured. Then I actually got started in diagnostics and DNA testing. So I founded Prenetics, which was a life sciences DNA testing company. Again, this was 2014, right? So very early, no one was really talking about this stuff. And then you'll see that in my entrepreneurial career, it wasn't the obvious choice. But everyone's now looking back is obvious choice, right? I mean, think about in 2010, no one was using e-commerce in Hong Kong. Everyone, in fact, told me to go back to the U.S. They're like, Danny, just go back to the U.S. This model is not going to work in Hong Kong. We made it the number one e-commerce company at the time. But going back to Prenetics, started off a life sciences company. When COVID hit, 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 U.K. So those three years, we did 40,000 PCR tests a day, right? We totaled 28 million. This is laboratory PCR tests. Those three years, we did 700 million plus revenue in three years' time. We listed on the NASDAQ in 2022 where household name, everyone that arrived in Hong Kong at one point had a mandatory Prenetics PCR test. And then, of course, that led into IM8, which is what happened after COVID. We had a billion dollar valuation during COVID in 2022 because COVID was still going on. 18 months later, our market cap hit, I think it was like 50 million, right? Went from billion plus to 50 million. You really know who your friends are at that point, right? Because at a billion, you got a lot of friends. When you're down 95%, okay, the stock's down 95%, were the friends also down 95% or it wasn't so bad? No, I mean, the friends wasn't down 95%, but when you're growing up, everyone wants to be involved, which is natural to be fair, right? Everyone wants to be surrounded by winners, but very few want to be surrounded 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. Why don't we just close the business? Because you have to think about the background, right? We, I think in 2022, we did 272 million revenue, right? And basically 40,000 tests turned to nothing, right? So our revenue dropped by 95%. And to be fair, I think the market realized that and it was rightfully valued. So we started, hey, what do we do? Do we close up shop? Just return capital to our shareholders? Do I do something else? I mean, of course, I've been successful as an operator as well as an investor, right? So I love options still, but I knew that 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, 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, it wasn't to pitch him on, hey, let's get into the supplement category. We were 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 about his problem, him and Victoria's problem, about how even for where they are as individuals. And of course, they have all these resources available to them, right? They even found the supplement category very overwhelming, especially when they're traveling. They just can't maintain that routine of taking 12, 13, 14, 15 pills in these capsules. They just don't do it, right. And then me as an entrepreneur, I was thinking, hey, I'm sure there's a better way for that. And yeah, after three to four months, countless conversations, as I'm sure you can imagine, and someone with David's pedigree and background, if something went wrong, it's not, no one cares about Danny. It's always going to be a David something blew up, right. So he had to take significant precaution. And I told David from day one, hey, David, I know for the last 30 years, there's been so many people wanting to do this category and he's rejected. And I told David something that was surprising to him. I was like, David, if we do this together, I don't want you just as ambassador. I want you as a co-founder. But this brand has to live beyond you. I don't want this to be another celebrity brand. So let's explain what IM8 is, right? Because that's the current business. So IM8, if I go to the website, I see Beckham. I see Giannis. I see Lily Collins. I see a bunch of famous people. And they're drinking a little red drink. So if you've seen, most of the supplement category is green. You guys are red. And it's some sort of supplement drink, longevity drink. You got the Beckham stack on here. And can you explain just in short, 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 90 ingredients, replaces 16 different supplements in a powder sachet. You mix it with 12 ounces of water. You just drink it every single morning. And it takes care of your foundational nutritional needs. So what does that mean? All of your multivitamins, your CoQ10, MSM, probiotics, prebiotics, postbiotics. And because normally you would have to take the equivalent of 16 different supplements, that will easily cost you $250 to $300 on a monthly basis. Yeah. And for us, we're selling at $90 on a monthly basis, this combination, which also tastes great. And you can carry it around with you 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. Yes. You're only about a year into this product line, right? We're only 20 months in. We only launched December of 2024, right? And now we've been the fastest growing supplement brand ever recorded. What does that mean? How fast are you growing? We hit 100 million annual revenue run rate in 11 months. In this category-wise, I mean, Gruen's did it in 22 months, right? And because normally you would have to take the equivalent of 16 different supplements, that will easily cost you $250 to $300 on a monthly basis. Yeah. And for us, we're selling at $90 on a monthly basis, this combination, which also tastes great. And you can carry it around with you 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. Yes. You're only about a year into this product line, right? We're only 20 months in. We launched December of 2024, right? And now we've been the fastest growing supplement brand ever recorded. What does that mean? How fast are you growing? We hit $100 million annual revenue run rate in 11 months. In this category-wise, Gruen's did it in 22 months, right? And they were acquired for $1.2 billion after three years. AG1 took them 10 years to hit $100 million. We hit $200 million run rate in 18 months. So you're at $200 million a year. So there's two angles to this, right? I have my e-com nerd hat. Yes. Because I've been in e-commerce and I can ask you about the funnel and the CAC and all that. Then there's just high-level product market fit. When a product hits a nerve and you've nailed the positioning, the branding, you've nailed something in category and positioning. Can you talk to me about category and positioning? Because I think those are highly underrated and most people are terrible at that. And it's very hard to recover if you have category and positioning wrong. You can be the best at just trying to grind the funnel. But it doesn't matter if you haven't gotten the first key decision right. Can you talk to me about category and positioning? Oh, do you 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 Starter Story put together a list of 90 business ideas. Each one is 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-researched. And so if you want to 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 before we got into this category, everyone told me not to do this. They're like, supplement category is highly competitive, so many bad eggs. And to be fair, I can tell the story now is that my whole board disagreed with me. They're like, you don't know anything about supplements, Danny. I'm like, it's true too, right? I haven't. I didn't do anything in this category before, right? It was e-commerce, selling coupons, DNA testing, running the lab, all that stuff. But also, to be fair, before any of that, I never had a background either, right? Yeah. So, of course, still, the board was like, and then we had to make a commitment with David Beckham. There was a not small commitment, correct? And then so they disagreed with me. But I knew that if we made a great product and we nailed the positioning and the brand right, and with the support of DB, you know, this would be a home run. So I had to really fight and educate my board. And I'm like, if I'm wrong, I'm going to resign. I'm going to quit, right? That was my position because I needed to be convinced myself that this was the right move. But what made you think that this would be the right move? Because it is true. The subcategory is crowded, right? A lot of people have a celebrity. Who cares, right? Correct. And a lot of celebrity brands fail, right? There's actually more failures of celebrity brands if you think about it than success cases, right? So what was your take? So my take was, number one, everything starts with the product, right? Everything starts with a better product than what's available in the market. And I can honestly say we have the best product in the market. But as you fairly pointed out, consumers may not recognize that, right? And so this is where, from day one, we spend more time on the taste profile. Because a lot of times people have a great product, but if it doesn't taste good, no one's going to drink it, right? So I spent a week at the factories, every single day, testing 20, 30 different flavors until we got that taste. This tastes good. This is who wants to drink it. But those two things also don't relate to success, right? So you mentioned the color, the brand. We wanted this to stand out. We didn't want to just create another greens powder, right? Then no one created a red powder, right? And so by default, that was interesting to people. Is it red because it's made of beets or it's red because you made it red? Did it need to be red or you chose to be red? It was a natural coincidence that when we created the formulation, there were beets inside the formulation. And this was a natural red color. And then I'm like, let's just go hard on this color, right? Which then made sense. And then our packaging, if you look at it, is a very big red box, right? It's very premium, the positioning. So I didn't want it just to be another supplement brand. I wanted to have a really great unboxing experience. It's bold, the name, easy to remember, the fonts, the colors. How did you come up with the name? Because whenever I brainstorm company names, you get 500 names. Each one you look at, you're thinking, that could be it. And so if I had written down on my list of supplement names "I am" and then the number eight, maybe it would flow. But I would have, the courage it takes to pick such a weird name. Where does that come from? I'm very good at names, right? I would say I'm really good at names. My e-commerce company is called You Buy, I Buy, right? Group buying with that just number you. Then Prenetics was half prevention and genetics. So you have Prenetics, right? And then, of course, I am eight. It came, I wanted something simple and easy to remember. And "I am" means I am. And eight, if you flip it around, means infinity, infinite possibilities, right? And I knew that one day we'll enter China and the number eight will also work in China, right? So there's definitely meaning. That's the lucky number of China, right? Number eight, yeah. And it's like I am, it's like I am healthy. I am strong. I am powerful, right? So there's 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 did that look like? You just fire up Facebook ads, Shopify store. Did you do anything else? What did zero to one look like? Zero to one, the formulation part, I would say was a result of getting an amazing scientific advisory board. When I looked into this, it was like, okay, what are all the different challenges someone can face? And it's like, just because we have David Beckham, it's not enough. And everyone knows David is not a scientist, right? I'm not a scientist, right? So the next step was recruiting a world-class scientific advisory board, the likes of Dr. Don Musilam from Mayo Clinic. James Green, the former chief scientist of NASA. Suzanne DiVco, the director of microbiome at Cedar Sinai. So these individuals we brought along all took part in creating this formulation. And that wasn't enough. And how did you do that, by the way? Is there an agency? There's a brokered service. I don't know if you know this one. There's a brokered service between doctors and supplement brands. That literally is like, get a doctor on your brand. I don't know if you've seen this. I haven't seen it. And everyone knows David is not a scientist. Right? I'm not a scientist. Right? So the next step was recruiting a world-class scientific advisory board, the likes of Dr. Don Musilam from Mayo Clinic, James Green, the former chief scientist of NASA, Suzanne DiVco, the director of microbiome at Cedar Sinai. So these individuals we brought along, they all took part in creating this formulation. And that wasn't enough. And how did you do that, by the way? That's what? Your cold emailing? Is there an agency? There's a brokered service. I don't know if you know this one. There's a brokered service between doctors and supplement brands. That literally is get a doctor on your brand. I don't know if you've seen this. I haven't seen it. It's a very niche agency some guy has. But what did you do? You cold call these people? You go fly out, meet them? Yeah. So what's happening? I knew the former chief scientist of NASA prior. Yeah. He was at NASA for two years. So that was easy because he knew me. Right. And a lot of these relationships are built by trust. And for Dr. Dawn Musalem, I contacted her on LinkedIn. We got on a call. And the first time we chatted, she was very skeptical because so many supplement brands reach out to them. And especially if you're a practicing physician, it's also quite rare to work with a supplement brand, especially if you're with Mayo Clinic. Really, really rare. Because they have a lot of restrictions. Right. So, but I think from day one, even I told Dawn—we're still working today very closely—is that we need to prove the science and evidence. Yeah. So that's why we embarked on a clinical trial before we launched the brand. We embarked on third party testing by not just one organization, but by two, by Eurofins and NSF certification for sport. So that means if you're a professional athlete, you know it's free from 280 banned substances. So I have a lot of friends who are in the supplement game. And in general, when you're in e-commerce, it's easy to become very skeptical and very jaded. Of course. Not because anybody means poorly, but just because it's very easy to get something up and running and put all your effort into the packaging, maybe even some into the taste. But ultimately, you're not in the factory. And it's very easy to have something that might help, but it's not scientifically proven. Right. Scientifically proven is a very high bar. And so I would say there's almost two parts of the ledger. There's the first part, which is, are these clean ingredients? And is it made in a clean factory? That's trust test number one. Trust test number two is, what the hell is a postbiotic? What's a prebiotic? Does any of this stuff actually matter? If I drink this, is anything really changing my body? And I know, obviously, I'm asking the priest if religion is real. But I guess 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 lot of supplements out there don't work. And that's the reality. Right. And I think the best validation of our product is that it doesn't matter who we have, background, et cetera. Our business won't be in 20 months. It can't be a 20 million, 200 million plus business without recurring subscriptions. And that means the product works as advertised. All right. And how does someone know that the product works? How does the customer feel that the product works? I mean, you'll feel it. And the best way to— Energy. What are you feeling? Better energy, recovery. Yeah. You sleep better. Your gut. Yeah. Everything is working better. Yeah. And of course, a lot of these individuals, these are CEOs, athletes. I think the best case I can show you. I mean, I was surprised by this email. Around last April or May of 2025, I got an email from Arena Sabalenka's team. They're like, hey, Arena's been on your product for about three months now via a recommendation from her nutrition coach. When you're the world number one tennis player, every single thing—they're measuring your recovery, how you're feeling three to four times on a daily basis. And they don't need to bullshit. I mean, she has so many options and resources. And she's 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 different time zones every single week, can we partner together? Right. And so that was a great validation of the product working at the highest level of sports. And the reality is every single ambassador that came after that was inbound to me. Hey, let me ask you a question. Is the market in China or India, for that matter, two big population places—is the supplement market the same? Is it just the same but 10 years ago? Is it different? What's going on over there? India, to be honest with you, I don't know. I do know it's a much lower price point category. In China, they do have AG1, but from what I understand, it's not doing well. Why do you think that is? Is it all just price point or is there another factor? Again, it goes back to price point, education, branding, positioning. There's so much, right? And to be fair, 99% of American companies go into China and think they can just succeed with the same business model. And for China to operate successfully, you need a completely different business model, completely different team. For example, my team can't do China, 100%. There's no way they can do China. So for me to enter China, I would need to get a completely new team of every single individual. Right. Tell me about some of the operational excellence. So I want to know what are some things that you're doing that I could look at that I could be inspired by? So I'll give you a couple examples. So we had Chad from Groons on the podcast and he was showing us their funnels and their Facebook ads. We were looking at his ad libraries together. And they were showing he's got eight different reasons to buy. Right? Maybe you're on Ozempic and you want Ozempic support. Maybe you're looking for mood and here's a mood thing. Maybe you're a woman and your hair is falling out postpartum or whatever. I don't remember the exact angles. He's like, I've got 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 usually just get fixated on one and they don't get as much of the market. He would tell us that. Or Eric Ryan from Method Soap and Ollie Gummies came on and he's a master of packaging and positioning. And he said, I was looking in the vitamin aisle and every container was round and so we would be a rectangle. And he's, it's as simple as that. I look for a sea of sameness and everywhere in the aisle that I see a sea of sameness, I know there's an opportunity to come in, do something different. That's what they did in band-aids and soap and vitamins. Yeah. I would say even right now, for us, the ads and landing pages per personas, that's quite standard operating procedure right now, right? If you're a DTC brand doing a hundred to $200 million, I mean, you have to be doing that, right? Yep. I think for us, one thing that we've done really well with scaling on meta ads—right now we have anywhere from two to three thousand ads live at any given time. We're testing out 500 to 800 creators on a weekly basis. So it's that constant testing that is really important, right? And right now the reality is even with ad buying, ad buying is a commodity, right? Something different. That's what they did in band-aids and soap and vitamins. Yeah. I would say even right now, to be fair, the ads and landing pages per personas, that's quite standard operating procedure right now, right? If you're a DTC brand doing a hundred to $200 million, you have to be doing that, right? Yep. I think for us, one thing that we've done really well with scaling on meta ads is right now we have anywhere from two to three thousand ads live at any given time. We're testing out 500 to 800 creators on a weekly basis. So it's that constant testing that is really, really important, right? And right now the reality is even with ad buying, ad buying is a commodity, right? Now, before a few years ago, you had to be really, really good at ad buying. But now meta does all of that for you already, right? You don't need to do the targeting. You don't need to do all this stuff, right? All you need to really figure out is how do you get really good creatives and really good creative diversity on the different personas? Because now you need a creative to do the targeting. So tell me about that creative machine. You said two things. You said you have a couple thousand ads running at a time. So are those like statics or videos? Statics and videos, I would say is about 55, 60% statics and then the rest of videos. And you're doing that with what? A studio? You're doing that with AI? What is the machine that's building all that? A combination of everything. So we have our own ambassadors. Again, we have top 10 very famous ambassadors. Then we have another thousand or more ambassadors affiliates that are creating lots of content for us on a daily basis, right? And that feeds the engine depending on whichever personas that we're going to. And a lot of times you have your proven winners. And then it's like, how do we create all these proven winners? Because there's also creative fatigue that happens, right? So we have our own creative fatigue score that we identify. So we know when an ad is potentially going to get in fatigue, which then ultimately will drop that ROAS, right? Again, $300,000 above on a daily basis on Meta, which is quite high given that we're only 20 months in, right? And we've been able to scale that. And then one key thing, again, public information given we're a public company, if you look at what happened in Q2 versus Q1, in Q1 our CAC was $305, right? Our average order value is about $230, right? So we doubled our marketing spend in Q2, right? We doubled it from about $17 to $33 million in a quarter, right? Our CAC actually went down by $4, right? From $305 to $301. Because you would imagine if you're doubling spend, your CAC's not always going to go up, right? And then so I think we reached a point where we got the engine running. The brand is also doing very well from a brand position. And we've run now 200 plus offline events. I think this is something that I haven't seen any other supplement brand do. And why are you doing that? Because that creates content or because that creates loyalty or both? What's the main reason to do 200 offline events? I mean, it's very important for us from day one. This is about authentic product science. And when we have these events, we have our scientific advisory board members there. They're talking about the product, right? And again, this is not just a marketing aspect. It's real science behind the brand. They get to meet our formulators and our scientists and doctors. Last week in New York, we did seven events in seven days, right? As part of US Open. I always say the events are very difficult to scale, right? Right. But I think that's very, very important, especially in the age of AI. You don't know what's weird. We don't know what's fake or whatever, right? And so I think having that 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 at your laptop, fire up ads, tweak your landing page. And clearly you get the scale, you get to measure it, you get the feedback loop right away. You don't have to go get face rejection out in the real world. And it almost means that offline has this disproportionate premium because it's simply less contested. And once you've had an in-person touchpoint and then you go see an ad, right? It's going to be a completely different experience than if you've never heard of the brand. And I attribute that CAC lowering when we double our spend. We're talking about a lot of spend doubling, right? And even July, our CAC fell to $239, right? Yeah. Which is we're spending more than $10 million a month on marketing, right? And so it was continuing to lower it. But I do believe, again, I don't have quantifiable data to say these are all offline, but I'm going to continue to double down on offline events. Because that's really important to the brand side of things. Tell me about some of the early days of entrepreneurship where maybe your entrepreneurial philosophy got formed or the core skills that are helping you today. But where were they first originated? Where did you cut your teeth doing it? I mean, I dropped off high school, right? So I was basically a bad kid, got kicked out of high school for fighting. So I had to really learn everything on the streets, I would say, right? As an entrepreneur, you're always faced with making decisions with very limited information. And I think, for everyone that knows me, I'm very street smart, right? I can figure things out by myself with very little information. Where were you going to high school? In San Francisco. Oh, you were in San Francisco. So you get kicked out. So why telemarketing? How did you stumble into telemarketing? I mean, I think I didn't stumble. I think it was, what do I do? I'm not going to school, right? And then as a telemarketer, I was 15. I was good at it. I was good at cold calling people. What were you selling? I was selling timeshares. Timeshares. Yeah. Remember timeshares, this is about 30 years ago, right? So those few years where I would say I was a very bad kid actually formed a lot of my thinking as an entrepreneur because I always had to reinvent myself, always had to go to a new school, make new friends. And get very comfortable. And yeah, I believe I can survive anywhere. You put me into Nigeria, Africa, whatever it is, I will figure it out. Yeah. The more adversity you face, the more confidence you get when you survive. You know, there's another guy, Craig Clemens, who came on the podcast. Good friend, great guy. He's also an e-commerce monster. So his company, Golden Hippo, does hundreds of millions a year in sales, bootstrapped him and his brothers. He also was in telemarketing. He was selling dating products when he was younger. And 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 anything he could pull out. One line, one copywriting thing, one psychological hook that he could pull onto. Did you do any of that? Or were you just brute force numbers game? I mean, you have to communicate properly, right? I think you always have to be direct. And I think I've always kept that, right? So very transparent in terms of, hey, especially with B, let's say, trying to meet someone for the first time. Always tell them, James, don't talk about BS, right? I think you just have to be direct and transparent. What's in it for them? What's in it for us? And again, for me, I've always, for each of my businesses, I'm always trying to deliver greater value first. I think that's very important. I never try to look at what's in it for me. I was like, what can I help this person with? How can I help my partner? How can I help their business? And that's been my philosophy from day one. I think if you have that type of philosophy going in, it doesn't matter if the other partner doesn't reciprocate. I think you always have to be direct. And I think I've always kept that, right? So very transparent in terms of, hey, especially with B, let's say, trying to meet someone for the first time. Always tell them to team, James, don't talk about BS, right? I think you just have to be direct and transparent. What's in it for them? What's in it for us? And again, for me, I've always, for each of my businesses, I'm always trying to deliver greater value first. I think that's very important. I never try to look at what's in it for me. I was like, what can I help this person with? How can I help my partner? How can I help their business? And that's been my philosophy from day one. I think if you have that type of philosophy going in, it doesn't matter if the other partner doesn't reciprocate. You move in. You learn and move on. So you're telemarketing. You learn about the numbers game. You learn that you got to figure it out. So you get street smart to figure out things that survive. And you learn that it doesn't matter who you talk to, right? I can go up to anyone and just, hey, the worst thing that happens is they reject me, right? How many people would you call in a day? It was night shift at the time when I was working. So it was 6:30. Then I would say 100, 200 people. And of that, what's the rejection rate? Still going to be 90, 95%, right? And so was that something that you have to figure out, what did you tell yourself to be able to quickly bounce back from that? No, it's just, I mean, again, it's a numbers game. You just fail, you know? You just tell yourself, hey, the next one is going to be more likely to be positive, right? So you have to just get through it. And I think, to be fair, telemarketing taught me a lot. You have to have thick skin. And even when you talk to investors, same thing, right? When you're early on, they're getting investment. I mean, you talk to 100 investors, you know, only five may invest in you. So there's nothing different about that. It's just you're not getting rejected with hanging up behind you, but you're still faced with that, right? I mean, give you an example of how that came to use, right? So I was doing my hotel furniture business. I was cold calling basically MGM. Then I got a meeting and then was able to get a meeting where I was able to deliver the value I was able to get. But without my cold calling days, I probably wouldn't have done that, right? Even when I did my e-commerce business, You Buy, I Buy, which was group buying, I remember I went to Hong Kong and I had to cold call all the merchants myself, right? Because again, it's not like it starts off with somebody. It starts with nobody, right? So I remember one time I was calling a big restaurant group and then the director of marketing, he hung up on me. And I was like, he hung up on me. It hurt me. I was like, wow, this guy, he said some very bad words to me, right? And then normally I was like, oh, that was thinking, wow, who's this guy's boss? I was thinking, right? And then I found who this guy's boss is. He was director of marketing. And I cold called the office and it was Sandeep. And he owned 30 plus restaurants, this Indian entrepreneur. And I asked for Sandeep, called the front desk. He picked up the phone. And I'm like, hey, this is Danny. I just moved to Hong Kong. I moved here from the U.S. Do you have five minutes of your time because I have this interesting e-commerce idea and would love to see if I can partner with you. Right. And then he met with me the next day for 20 minutes. And he told me, Danny, hey, Danny, I don't think your business is going to work in Hong Kong because why would I give 50% off to customers and I only get 25% of the check? Right. But you know what? Because you called me after my director of marketing hung up on you and we're still here. I'm going to work with you and give you all of my dirty restaurants and sign you up. And he did that because he knew you didn't give up and just was persistent and resilient. And that changed the directory of the business because he gave me 30 restaurants and I needed one deal a day. Right. So he gave me basically my whole next 30 days was filled by one guy saying yes. And of course, then I can continue. But he was a big restaurant group. Right. And then I would then go to other restaurant groups because I got him because he was so famous. Hey, you know, Sandeep, Danny Khan, some of those working with us. Yeah. Can you partner too? Then yeah. And once you get some traction, et cetera, then more and more people will work with you. Right. But that's just reality. Someone has to give you a chance and you just always have to be on the hunt. My uncle Vinny was door-to-door when he came to the country. He came to this country. He was a door-to-door salesman of 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 the door, getting rejected even more than on the phone, getting doors slammed in your face. And same thing, 90 to 95% of people door slammed him. He was the top sales guy. And he had a thick Indian accent. I was like, how did you do that? And he goes, oh, I took rejection better than anyone else. I said, well, how did you take rejection better? He goes, I put a price on the word no. So he said, if a yes is worth $100 to me and it's going to take me, you know, for every 20 no's, I get one yes. Then he's like, then every no is worth $5 to me, right? And he's like, I just, so when they would say no, I would hear in my head, all right, that's five bucks in the bank. Let's keep going. And so he's putting a price on it because he knew it's a numbers game. He has to keep knocking. And so he has to see each knock as a success, even though what his ears hear is a rejection. He has to change what he's hearing. And that led him to be the number one sales guy in the country. He ended up training all the other sales guys. And I think there's something everybody should take from that, whether you're fundraising or whatever you're doing, whether it's e-commerce, I think if I looked at our conversion rate right now, I think it's two point something percent, two percent, two and a half percent maybe. And you know, 97.5% of people come to our site and say, no. Now you don't feel it as much when it's e-commerce, but you feel it when it's over there, you know? So it's all the numbers game. Yes. What else? You mentioned MGM. What's the story there? I didn't understand that one. When I started first working in the hotel furniture business, I was doing hotels that were 50 rooms, 100 rooms, small hotels, right? And how small hotels change that's doing all of their custom furniture. Sorry. Can you go back? 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 an interior designer. And she was just telling me, hey, you know, she's a designer for these hotels and she was having difficulty sourcing furniture. And I was like, why don't you look in China? And she was like, she doesn't know how to. And I'm like, why don't I help you? And she's like, okay, why don't you help me? Right. And I just did it for her. And then, but after a few of the hotels, I figured out, you know, it's the same process if I make 50 chairs or 50 tables as if I make 2,000 to 3,000 chairs. Right. So it was like, who is making 2,000 hotel rooms right now? And at that time was Vegas. Right. Then I started cold calling the Vegas hotels and eventually I cold called MGM and she gave I had a good friend that was an interior designer. And she was just telling me, she's a designer for these hotels and she was having difficulty sourcing furniture. And I was like, why don't you look in China? And she was like, she doesn't know how to. And I'm like, why don't I help you? And she's like, okay, why don't you help me? Right. And I just did it for her. And then after a few of the hotels, I figured out it's the same process if I make 50 chairs or 50 tables as if I make 2 to 3000 chairs. Right. So it was like, who is making 2000 hotel rooms right now? And at that time was Vegas. Right. Then I started cold calling the Vegas hotels and eventually I cold called MGM and she gave me a meeting. And then I went into the meeting and one year later, I got a $4 million contract with MGM. How did that feel? That first big contract? I mean, it felt amazing. But of course, ultimately, I wanted to deliver. And that's why a lot of times, even when we do an achievement or milestone, I always tell the team, hey, this is good, but it's not the end, right? We're just getting started, right? And even last month, we had 20 million in monthly revenue, right? But hey, this is good progress, great progress, I would say. But we have so much greater opportunity. So, but, I was of course happy that we're able to get such a big customer. When you were doing the COVID testing, you were kind of in the right place. When COVID hit, where you could provide testing, you said a couple interesting things. One, the ramp was crazy. You said you did like 700 million revenue in a couple of years, which is just a bonkers number. I'm sure there was a lot of free cash flow in that too, not just revenue. Yeah, we made over $100 million net. Net. Yeah, exactly. And the second thing was, you said like in Hong Kong, like everybody who entered the country had that. Sounds like maybe you had a really valuable key contract that you won or some sort of pretty defensible position. So can you tell the story of that? And also during that, did you think, did you know, well, the music's going to stop on this at some point? And what happens after that? Or did you say, I don't know, let's just run and we'll figure it out when that happens. Yeah. So I can tell you the backstory on this, right? So this is in April. Yeah. April of 2020. So COVID was getting very bad. I had a meeting with the chief executive of Hong Kong. I was like, Hey, we have a lab, and COVID seems to be getting worse and worse by the day. Can we somehow provide support and make use of our laboratory to basically provide COVID testing to the community? Right. And then the chief executive at the time said, you know what, we have our own public health laboratory. We can do it all ourselves. So that was that. Right. And I'm like, okay, no worries. And because at the time, 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 $400 USD for COVID tests. And I knew the cost of a COVID test is a fraction of that. Right. And they were making so much money. And at the time, you don't want to go to a hospital to do a COVID test because it means that you may get infected too. Right. I was like, you know what? We'll just create our own at-home PCR tests. And so we launched that within about a little bit more than two weeks. And every day we're just trying to help out the community. We're selling it for a hundred dollars US when everyone else was selling it for $400. And even the hospitals would call me like, why are you guys selling it for so cheap? I was like, I just want to help the community. Right. That was the core reason for getting into it. So every single day we'll be selling out. And then July, yeah, and the government actually then again called me like, can we meet again? Because it was getting out of control. Right. You know, three months later. And they're like, Danny, we need your help. Can you help us service COVID testing to the community? I'm like, yeah, we'd love to help. What do you want us to do? They're like, we want you to test 300,000 restaurant workers across 18,000 restaurants in Hong Kong. And I'm like, how long of a time do you want this testing? They're like, yeah, we want you to do this in three weeks. So that was a crazy operation. Right. I don't know why I even said yes to it. Again, we went from a hundred, 200 tests on a daily basis to now testing 300,000 people in about a month time, which basically meant that we had to scale out from 200 tests to 10,000 tests on a daily basis. And myself, my executive team, we were all in the hole, we were done. And there were so many people without jobs at that time. Right. And then basically we started mass hiring. Yeah. At one point we had like 2 to 3,000 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 get the result at home, right? No, no, no, no. You get the result in the lab. Okay. So you would send it in. You have to send it in. This was before antigen tests were rolled out. Right. Because early on, you had to do a laboratory test, which is the PCR test. And then the antigen test, which is the quick ones, which are less accurate, only came into play maybe one year after. I see. I see. Okay. So you said supply chain and hiring people. People, logistics, data. Right. You had to go through everything. Was anything crazy to unlock the supply chain there? On a daily basis, you had to be fighting with so many different other laboratories around the world, right? You had to get all the supply chain. So it was every single day we were fighting. And a lot of times you had to just outbid them. And we had volumes, right? So again, but it was a constant battle. Those were some crazy two, three years of craziness. Yeah. When you, so my last question, I had a few friends who were doing this. I had one friend who was doing mobile testing. He had vans that were testing. I had another friend that was doing PPE when you couldn't get masks and other PPE to hospitals and whatnot. And people were making money hand over fist and doing this because there's so much, I mean, it was the strongest demand I've ever seen for anything ever, right? Yes. Life or death at global scale. But some of those people, they kind of stashed away enough cash that it was still a success. And some people had overbuilt and then suddenly the music stopped. And now it's like a lot of work for nothing. So give me an example, right? On that exact thing is that it was right when we knew COVID was over, I let go of 2,000 people very, very fast. And that turned out to be a really good decision. And because during that time, you had Q Health, you had Lucera. And these were at the time listed companies. At one point, Q Health was $3 billion market cap. They had a billion dollars in revenue in the U.S., right? Lucera, they had another like $2 billion market cap. Yeah. They went bankrupt, you know, 18 months after COVID because they overbuilt. They built their own manufacturing places. They bought into the at-home testing, which never panned out post-COVID. But I knew that for both sides, for a company to survive after this, we needed to make a drastic cut. And also for the individuals, right? Because what are we going to do? Why am I going to have 2,000 people because there's no testing? We're just kind of like, you know, standing around, which is not good for them. Everyone has to move on, you know. And these were at the time, they were listed companies. At one point, Q Health was $3 billion market cap. They had a billion dollars in revenue in the U.S., right? Lucera, they had another, I think they were $2 billion market cap. Yeah. They went bankrupt 18 months after COVID because they overbuilt. They built their own manufacturing places. They bought into the at-home testing, which never panned out post-COVID. But I knew that for both sides, for a company to survive after this, we needed to make a drastic cut. And also for the individuals, right? Because what are we going to do? Why am I going to have 2,000 people because there's no testing? We're just standing around, which is not good for them. Everyone has to move on with their life and livelihood. And that was a very difficult decision, of course, but ultimately, it was the right decision for both sides. If you meet a lot of entrepreneurs or there's a lot of people that will come up to you that are excited about what you've done and they're trying to do something and they're pitching you an idea. What do you think most entrepreneurs just don't get? What's the one thing if you feel like you could just shake them and say, look, you just really don't get it. It's the gap between where you are and where you want to be is this. What do you think that gap looks like for most people? I think, 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, when the COVID testing, we had the best product in the market. So if you had the best product in the market, it's much easier to build foundation, branding, positioning, premium pricing over any of your competitors, right? And I also believe, as entrepreneurs, you have to get into the weeds of everything. I think some entrepreneurs don't like to get involved in every part of the business. But at least from my perspective, 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, 200 million, we'll be in 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 hired CEO, right? I think the founder, and that's why a lot of times these founders, they grow their business to 400, they hire a CEO. Oftentimes, the founder always comes back, right? Because the CEO perspective, they're always much more conservative. And they're looking at this from a paycheck where the founders are able to take risks that a CEO wouldn't be able to take. So for example, even when I started IEMate, if I was a CEO, there was no way he would have been able to take that risk, right? But because I'm the founder, you have so much at stake here, there's no one in the organization that takes as much risk as me. To be able to make that move, let's get into the supplement category, right? Yeah. I don't know if you've read, have you read Founder Mode, the Paul Graham blog post? Yeah, I mean, I've read that. Yeah, that's correct. I think Founder Mode is very different. Correct? It's like, yeah, we see things very, very uniquely different. And entrepreneurs really have to dive into that. Yeah. And you know, the first thing you said about product, you know, build the best product in the market, I mean, on one hand, that sounds obvious, 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, it's a big difference. I mean, I tell people, how do you know this? I say, don't trust me, just put it into a cloud, put it in chat with you. What's better, IMAID or AG1, Doran, Gruenz, right? Let's see what it says on the similar product, right? What does it say? Let's try. Yeah. It says, if I had to choose one today, I'd buy IMAID over AG1. So there you go. It says it's not just 90 ingredients for 75, because that's ingredient count is mostly marketing. I think that it's currently doing a better job putting useful ingredients at disclosed, non-trivial doses in the same daily drink. And then it goes through the formula and it gives a little bit of an answer. So at least according to ChatGPT right now, that is correct. Which I think is no trivial accomplishment. I'm going to cut that segment out and use it as an ad, okay? That's perfect. Yeah, yeah. Give me my kickback and then you can do whatever you want. Yeah, give me 10% back. I'll be one of your TikTok affiliates. Exactly. Affiliates. Yeah. You know, I sold my company to this guy, Mike Whitmire, 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 the premier leader. And I was excited when we sold because I was thinking, oh, you know so much about SEO. What are all the SEO hacks that we're not doing? I'm terrible at SEO. I never even tried that as a growth strategy. So I was thinking, tell me, tell me, what should we start doing? And after a few meetings, I was thinking, dude, when are you going to tell me the hacks? And he's like, well, there's some best practices. He's like, there's not really hacks. He's like, so I was thinking, what'd you do with the gold company? And he goes, I printed out the webpage for all of us. And I asked myself, honestly, is there a reason that you should use us? Why should Google put us number one? Are we better? Are we actually better? Is it easier to use? Is it easier to understand? Is it more friendly? Is it faster? Do we have, are we better in any way? And he's like, we had a cold, honest conversation with ourselves that no, we were not better. And then we decided, well, we actually have to be better if Google's going to rank us higher. And slowly but surely, we did, one brick by brick. We just made the actual experience better until we felt we actually deserved to be number one. And guess what? At that point, we didn't need any of the hacks. We actually were number one. And I just remember thinking, oh, I feel like you just taught me a very valuable lesson that I needed to hear from someone like you. I needed to hear from the guy who could shatter this myth in my head that the guys who rank number one are always just doing these clever tricks. And it's like, there's no trick. The trick was be the best. And if you're not willing to be the best, there's no way around. You just got to go through this. And I needed to hear that at the time. Again, it starts with the problem. And I think entrepreneurs ought to be realistic, right? Well, isn't it right that as a founder, you basically have to alternate between delusion and realism in a way that doesn't make any sense? In one moment, you're going to have to be delusional. You're going to have no evidence, but you're going to have to have the faith. Yes. And you're going to have to believe, even though you have no experience in this, the market tells you one thing, smart people tell you one thing, but you believe another. That's delusion. And you got to be a little delulu. But then, exactly. Then you have to switch gears and be hyper-realistic. And the guy, somebody who's never delusional, they end up being an employee. And somebody who's only delusional ends up being a failed founder. It's the person who's able to shift gears between the two and know when you're in each mode, that's the art of the whole thing. Yeah. And then, again, I had to be very delusional because I knew in my head, if we put all these pieces together, we will have a big success. Right? But again, And you're going to have to believe, even though you have no experience in this, the market tells you one thing, smart people tell you one thing, but you believe another. That's delusion. And you have to be a little delulu. But then exactly. Then you have to switch gears and be hyper-realistic. And the guy who's never delusional ends up being an employee. Somebody who's only delusional ends up being a failed founder. It's the person who's able to shift gears between the two and know when you're in each mode. That's the art of the whole thing. Yeah. And then again, I had to be very delusional because I knew in my head that if we put all these pieces together, we would have a big success. Right? But again, going back, I didn't have any experience in this. So you had to build this with the limited information I knew at the time. Yeah. Well, Danny, I appreciate you coming on, man. This is a fun story from telemarketing to now running one of the fastest-growing supplement brands in the world. And thanks for coming on. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I mean, I was surprised by this email. Right. Around last April or May of 2025, right, I got an email from Arena Sabalenka's team. Right. A cold email into me. Right. They're like, hey, you know, Arena's been on your product for about three months now via a recommendation from her nutrition coach. When you're the world number one tennis player, every single thing, they're measuring your recovery, how you're feeling three to four times on a daily basis. And they don't need to bullshit. Right. I mean, she has so many options and resources. And she's like, hey, she's been feeling amazing from a recovery perspective. And she hasn't gotten sick while on the product. And given that they're traveling, yeah, different time zones every single week, can we partner together? Right. And so that was a great validation of the product working at the highest level of sports. And the reality is also every single ambassador that came after that was inbound to me. Hey, let me ask you a question. Is the market in China or India for that matter, like two big population places, is the supplement market the same? Is it just the same but 10 years ago? Is it different? What's going on over there? India, to be honest with you, I don't know. I do know it's a much lower price point category. In China, they do have AG1, but it's not like, from what I understand, it's not doing well. Why do you think that is? Is it all just price point or is there another factor? I mean, again, it goes back to price point, education, branding, positioning. There's like so much, right? And to be fair, 99% of American companies go into China and think they can just succeed with the same business model. And for China to operate it successfully, you need a completely different business model, completely different team. Like, for example, my team can't do China, 100%. There's like no hell, no way they can do China. So for me to enter China, I would need to get a completely new team of every single individual. Right. Tell me about some of the operational excellence. So I want to know what are some things that you're doing that I could look at that 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 Groons on the podcast and he was showing us their funnels and their Facebook ads. We were looking at his ad library together. And they were showing like, he's got like, you know, there's eight different sort of reasons to buy. Right. Maybe you're on Ozempic and you want Ozempic support. Maybe you're looking for mood and here's a mood thing. Maybe you're a woman and your hair and your hair is falling out postpartum or whatever. I don't know what they're, I don't remember the exact angles. He's like, I've got like the ad that goes to the landing page for that persona, for that problem, for that sales pitch. And I'm running all eight simultaneously, whereas most entrepreneurs are, you know, usually just get fixated on one and they don't get, they don't get as much of the market. He would tell us that. Or Eric Ryan from Method Soap and Ollie Gummies came on and he was, he's a master of packaging and positioning. And he said, I was looking in the vitamin aisle and, you know, first thing I knew is that every container was round and so we would be a rectangle. And he's like, it's as simple as that. I look for a sea of sameness and everywhere in the aisle that I see a sea of sameness, I know there's an opportunity to come in, do something. Something different. That's what they did in band-aids and soap and vitamins. Yeah. I would say even right now, you know, to be fair wise, you know, the ads and landing pages per zonas, that's quite standard operating procedure right now, right? If you're a DTC brand doing a hundred to $200 million, I mean, you have to be doing that, right? Yep. I think for us wise, I mean, one thing that we've done really well with scaling on meta ads, you know, right now we have anywhere from, you know, two to three thousand ads live at any given time. We're testing out, you know, 500 to 800 creators on a weekly basis. So it's 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, ad buying is like a commodity, right? Now, yeah, before a few years ago, you have to be really, really good at ad buying. But now meta does all of that for you already, right? You don't need to do the targeting. You don't need to do all this stuff, right? All you need to really figure out is how do you get really good creatives and really good creative diversity on the different personas? Because now you need a 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 like statics or those videos? Statics and videos, I would say is about, you know, 55, 60% statics and then the rest of videos. And you're doing that with what? A studio? You're doing that with AI? 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 top 10 very famous ambassadors. Then we have another thousand or more or so ambassadors affiliates that are creating lots of content for us on a daily basis, right? And that feeds the engine depending on whichever personas that we're going to. And a lot of times you have your proven winners. And then it's like, how do we create all these proven winners? Because, you know, there's also creative fatigue that happens, right? So we have our own creative fatigue score that we identify. So we know, okay, when a ad is potentially going to get in fatigue, which then ultimately will drop that ROAS, right? Again, 300,000 above on a daily basis on Meta, you know, which is quite high given that we're only 20 months in, right? And we've been able to scale that. And then one key thing, again, public information given we're public companies that if you look at what happened in Q2 versus Q1, Q1, our CAC was 305, right? Our average order value is about $230, right? So, and we doubled our marketing spend in Q2, right? We doubled it from about 17 to $33 million in a quarter, right? Our CAC actually went down by $4, right? From 305 to 301. Because you would imagine if you're doubling spend, your CAC's not always going to go up, right? And then so I think we reached a point where, again, we got the engine running. The brand is also doing very well from a brand position. And we've ran now 200 plus offline events. I think this is something that I haven't seen any other supplement brand do. And why are you doing that? Because that creates content or because that creates loyalty or both? What's the main reason to do 200 offline events? I mean, it's very important from us from day one. This is about an authentic product science. And when we have these events, we have our scientific advisory board members there. They're talking about the product, right? And again, this is not just a marketing aspect. It's a real science behind a brand. They get to meet our formulators and our scientists and doctors. Last week in New York, we did like seven events in seven days, right? As part of US Open. I always say the events are very difficult to scale, right? Right. But I think that's very, very important, especially in the age of AI. You don't know what's weird. We don't know what's fake or whatever, right? And so I think having that 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 at your laptop, fire up ads, tweak your landing page. And clearly you get the scale, you get to measure it, you get the feedback loop right away. You don't have to go get face rejection out in the real world. And it almost means that offline has this disproportionate premium because it's simply less contested. And once you've had an in-person touchpoint and then you go see an ad, right? It's going to be a completely different experience than if you've never, it's just a brand you've never heard of. And I attribute that CAC lowering when we double our spend. We're not talking about, we're talking about like a lot of spend doubling, right? And even July, our CAC fell to $239, right? Yeah. You know, which is, you know, we're spending more than $10 million a month on marketing, right? And then so it was continuing to lower it. But I do believe, again, I don't have quantifiable data to say these are all offline, but I'm going to continue to double down on offline events. Because that's 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 formed or the core skills that are helping you today. But where were they first kind of originated? Where did you cut your teeth doing it? I mean, so I dropped off high school, right? So I was, you know, basically a bad kid, got kicked out of high school for fighting. So I had to really learn everything, you know, on the streets, I would say, right? As an entrepreneur, you're always faced with making decisions with very limited information. And I think, you know, for everyone that knows me, I do know me, I'm like very street smart, right? I can figure things out by myself with very little information. Where were you going to high school? In San Francisco. Oh, you were in San Francisco. So you get kicked out. So why telemarketing? How did you stumble into telemarketing? I mean, I think I didn't stumble. I think it was like, well, what do I do? You know, I'm not going to school, right? So, and then as a telemarketer, you know, I was 15. I was good at it. I was good in, you know, kind of like cold calling people. What were you selling? I was selling timeshares. Timeshares. Yeah. Remember timeshares is like, again, this is about 30 years ago, right? So those few years where I would say I was a very bad kid actually formed a lot of my thinking as an entrepreneur because I always had to reinvent myself, always had to go to a new school, make new friends. And get very comfortable. And yeah, I believe I can survive anywhere. You put me into Nigeria, Africa, whatever it is, I will figure it out. Yeah. The sort of more adversity you face, the more confidence you get when you survive. You know, there's another guy, Craig Clemens, who came on the podcast. Good friend, great guy. He's also an e-commerce monster. So his company, Golden Hippo, does hundreds of millions a year in sales, bootstrapped him and his brothers. He also was in telemarketing. He was selling dating products when he was younger. And, you know, 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 copywriting thing, one psychological sort of hook that he could pull onto. Did you do any of that? Or were you just brute force numbers game? I mean, you have to like communicate properly, right? I think you always have to be direct. And I think I've always kept that, right? So very transparent in terms of, hey, especially with B, let's say, trying to meet someone for the first time. Always tell them to team, James, don't talk about BS, right? I think you just have to be direct and transparent. What's in it for them? What's in it for us? And again, for me, I've always, for each of my businesses, I'm always trying to deliver greater value first. I think that's very important. I never try to look at what's in it for me. I was like, what can I help this person with? How can I help my partner? How can I help their business? And that's been my philosophy from day one. I think if you have that type of philosophy going in, it doesn't matter if the other partner doesn't reciprocate. You move in. You learn and move on. So you're telemarketing. You learn about the numbers game. You learn that you got to sort of figure it out. So you get street smart to figure out things that survive. And you learn that it doesn't matter who you talk to, right? I can go up to anyone and just basically, hey, the worst thing that happens is they reject me, right? How many people would you call in a day? It was like night shift at the time when I was working. So it was like 6.30. Then I would say 100, 200 people. And of that, what's the rejection rate? Still going to be like 90, 95%, right? And so was that something that you have to sort of, what did you tell yourself to be able to like kind of quickly bounce back from that? No, it's just, I mean, again, it's a numbers game. You just fail, you know? Basically, you just tell yourself, hey, you know, the next one is going to be more likely to be positive, right? So you have to just get through it. And I think, you know, to be fair, telemarketing taught me a lot. Yeah, you have to have a dick skin. And even when you talk to investors, same thing, right? When you're early on, they're getting investment. I mean, you talk to 100 investors, you know, only five may invest in you. So there's nothing different about that. It's just you're not getting rejected, like hanging up behind you, but you're still faced with that, right? I mean, give you an example of how that came to use, right? So I was doing my hotel furniture business. I was cold calling basically MGM. Then I got a meeting and then was able to get a meeting that I was able to deliver the value I was able to get. But without my cold calling days, I probably wouldn't have done that, right? Even when I did my e-commerce business, You Buy, I Buy, which was group buying, I remember I went to Hong Kong and I had to cold call all the merchants myself, right? Because again, you know, it's not like, you know, it starts off with nobody. It starts with nobody, right? So I remember one time I was calling a big restaurant group and then director of marketing, he hung up on me. And I was like, he hung up on me really like, he was like, it hurt me. I was like, wow, this guy, he said some very bad words and blah, blah, blah to me, right? And then normally he was like, oh, shit, you probably like, you know, that was thinking, wow, who's this guy's boss? I was thinking, right? And then I found who this guy's boss is. He was director of marketing. And I cold called the office and it was Sandeep. And he owned like 30 plus restaurants, this Indian entrepreneur. And I asked for Sandeep, called the front desk. He picked up the phone. And I'm like, hey, this is Danny. I just moved to Hong Kong. I moved here from the U.S. Yeah, have five minutes of your time because I have this interesting e-commerce idea and would love to see if I can partner with you. Right. And then he met with me the next day for 20 minutes. And he told me, Danny, hey, Danny, I don't think your business is going to work in Hong Kong because why would I give 50% off to customers and I only get 25% of the check? Right. But you know what? Because, you know, you called me after my director of marketing hung up on you and we're still here. I'm going to work with you and give you all of my dirty restaurants and sign you up. And he did that because he knew, you know, I didn't give up and just was persistent, resilient. And that changed the directory of the business because he gave me 30 restaurants and I needed one deal a day. Right. So he gave me basically my whole next 30 days was filled by one guy saying yes. And of course, then I can continue. But he was a big restaurant group. Right. It was very. And then I would then go to other restaurant groups because I got him because he was so famous. Hey, you know, Sandeep, Danny Khan, some of those working with us. Yeah. Can you partner too? Then yeah. And once you get some traction, et cetera, then more and more people will work with you. Right. But that's just reality. Someone has to give you a chance and you just always have to be on the hunt. My uncle Vinny was door-to-door when he came to the country. He came to this country. He was 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 the door, like getting rejected even more than on the phone, like to your face, door slam. And same thing, 90 to 95% of people door slam us. He was the top sales guy. And he had a thick Indian accent. I was like, how did you do that? And he goes, oh, I took rejection better than anyone else. I said, well, how did you take rejection better? He goes, I put a price on the word no. So he said, if a yes is worth $100 to me and it's going to take me, you know, for every 20 no's, I get one yes. Then he's like, then every no is worth $5 to me, right? And he's like, I just, so when they would say no, I would hear in my head, all right, that's five bucks in the bank. Let's keep going. And so he's like, I was adding up the no's. I was putting a price on it because I knew really like it's a numbers game. I have to keep knocking. And so I have to like sort of see each knock as a success, even though what my ears hear is a rejection. I have to change what I'm hearing. And that led him to be the number one sales guy in the country. He ended up training all the other sales guys. And I think there's a, I think there's something everybody should take from that, whether you're fundraising or whatever, whatever you're doing that like, you know, e-commerce, I think a good, like if I looked at our conversion rate right now, I think it's like two point something percent, two percent, two and a half percent maybe. And you know, 97.5% of people come to our site and say, hell no. Now you don't feel it as much when it's e-commerce, but you feel it when it's over there, you know? So it's all the numbers game. Yes. What else? You mentioned MGM. What's the story there? I didn't understand that one. When I started first working in the hotel furniture business, I was doing hotels that were like 50 rooms, 100 rooms, small hotels, right? And how small hotels change that's doing all of their custom furniture. Sorry. Can you go back? Why, why, 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 an interior designer. And she was just telling me, hey, you know, she's a designer for these hotels and she was having difficulty sourcing furniture. And I was like, why don't you look in China? And she was like, she doesn't know how to. And I'm like, why don't I help you? And she's like, okay, why don't you help me? Right. And I just did it for her. And then, but after a few of the hotels, I figured out, you know, it's the same process if I make 50 chairs or 50 tables as if I make two to 3000 chairs. Right. So it was like, who is making 2000 hotel rooms right now? And at that time was like Vegas. Right. Then I started cold calling the Vegas hotels and eventually I cold called MGM and she gave me a meeting. And then I went into the meeting and one year later, I got a $4 million contract with MGM. How did that feel? That first kind of big contract? I mean, it felt amazing. But of course, ultimately, you know, I wanted to deliver. And that's why a lot of times, even when we do an achievement or milestone, you know, I always tell the team, hey, you know, this is good, you know, but it's not the end, right? We're just getting started, right? And it's like, you know, even last month, we had 20 million in monthly revenue, right? But hey, this is good progress, great progress, I would say. But we have so much greater opportunity. So, but, you know, I was of course happy that we're able to get such a big customer. When you were doing the COVID testing, you were kind of in the right place. When COVID hit, where you could provide testing, you said a couple interesting things. One, the ramp was crazy. You said you did like 700 million revenue in a couple of years, which is just a bonkers number. I'm sure there was a lot of free cash flow in that too, not just revenue. Yeah, we made over $100 million net. Net. Yeah, exactly. And you, the second thing was, you said like in Hong Kong, like everybody who entered the country had that. Sounds like maybe you had like a kind of a really valuable key contract that you won or some sort of like a, you know, pretty defensible position. So can you tell the story of that? And also during that, did you, did you think, did you know, well, the music's going to stop on this at some point? And what happens after that? Or did you say, I don't know, let's just run and we'll figure it out when we, when, when that happens. Yeah. So I can tell you the backstory on this, right? So I think this is in April. Yeah. April of 2020. So COVID was getting very bad. I had a meeting with the chief executive of Hong Kong. I was like, Hey, you know, we have a lab, you know, COVID seems to be getting, you know, worse and worse, you know, by the day. Yeah. Can we somehow provide support and make use of our laboratory? Yeah. To basically to provide COVID testing to the community. Right. And, um, and then, you know, the chief executive said the same at the time said, you know what, um, you know, we have our own public health laboratory. We can do it all of ourselves. So that was that. Right. And I'm like, okay, no, no worries. And because at the time wise, it was very difficult to get a COVID test in Hong Kong. You will have to go to the hospital and they were charging like three to $400 USD for COVID tests. And then I knew the cost of a COVID test is a fraction of that. Right. And they were making so much money. And at the time, you don't want to go to a hospital to do a COVID test because it means that you may get infected too. Right. I was like, you know what? We'll just create our own at home PCR tests. And so we launched that within about a little bit more than two weeks. And every day we're just trying to help out the community. We're selling it for a hundred dollars US when everyone wants selling it for $400. And even the hospitals would call me like, why are you guys selling it for so cheap? I was like, I was like, I just want to help the community. Right. That was, that was the core, um, reason for getting into it. So every single day we'll be selling out and then July. Yeah. And the government actually then again called me as like, can we meet again? Cause it was getting out of control. Right. You know, three months later. And they're like, Danny, we need your help. Um, yeah. Can you help us service COVID testing to the community? I'm like, yeah, we'd love to help. Like, yeah. Uh, what do you want us to do? They're like, we want you to test 300,000 restaurant workers across 18,000 restaurants in Hong Kong. And I'm like, how long of a time do you want this testing? They're like, yeah, we want you to do this in three weeks. So that was a crazy operations. Right. I don't know why I, I even said yes to it. Again, we went from a hundred thousand, a hundred, 200 tests on a daily basis to now testing, you know, 300,000 people in about a month time, which basically meant that we had to scale out from 200 tests. To 10,000 tests on a daily basis. And myself, my executive team, where we're all in the whole, we were done. And there were so many people without jobs at that time. Right. And then basically we started mass hiring. Yeah. At one point we had like two to 3,000 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? Cause you, you get the result at home, right? No, no, no, no. You get 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 to do the, 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 into play, you know, maybe one year after. I see. I see. Okay. So, so you said supply chain and hiring people. People, logistics, data. Right. You had to go through the . anything crazy to unlock the supply chain there? On a daily basis, you had to be fighting with so many different other laboratories around the world, right? You had to get all the supply chain. So it was every single day we were fighting. And again, a lot of times you had to just outbid them. And we had volumes, right? So again, but it was a constant battle. Those were some crazy, two, three years of craziness. Yeah. When you, so my last question, I had a few friends who were doing this. I had one friend who was doing mobile testing. He had like vans that were testing. I had another friend that was doing PPE when you couldn't get masks and other PPE to hospitals and whatnot. And people were making money hand over fist and doing this because there's so much, I mean, it was the strongest demand I've ever seen for anything ever, right? Yes. Life or death at global scale. But, you know, some of those people, they kind of stashed away enough cash that it was still a success. And some people had overbuilt and then suddenly the music stopped. And now it's like a lot of work for nothing. So every, so give me an example, right? On, on that exact thing is that it was, it was right when we knew COVID was over, I let go of 2,000 people very, very fast. And that turned out to be a really, you know, good decision. And because again, during that time wise, you had Q Health, you had, you know, Lucera. And these were at the time, they were listed companies. At one point, Q Health was $3 billion market cap. They had a billion dollars in revenue in the U.S., right? Lucera, they had another, like, I think they were $2 billion market cap. Yeah. They went bankrupt, you know, 18 months after COVID because they overbuilt. They built their own manufacturing places. They bought into the at-home testing, which never panned out post-COVID. But I knew that for both sides, for a company to survive after this, we needed to make a drastic cut. And also for the individuals, right? Because what are we going to do? Why am I going to have 2,000 people because there's no testing? We're just kind of like, you know, I'll stand around, which is not good for them. Everyone has to move on, you know, with their life and livelihood. And, you know, that was a very difficult decision, of course, but ultimately, it was the right decision for both sides. If you were, I don't know if, you know, you meet a lot of entrepreneurs or, you know, there's a lot of people that will come up to you that are excited about what you've done and they're trying to do something and they're pitching you an idea. What do you think most entrepreneurs just don't get? What's the one thing if you feel like you could just shake them and say, look, Ben, you just really don't get it. It's the gap between where you are and where you want to be is this. What do you think that gap looks like for most people? I think, I mean, again, but 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 the COVID testing, we had the best product in the market. So if you had the best product in the market, it's much easier to build foundation, branding, positioning, premium pricing over any of your competitors, right? And I also believe, you know, as entrepreneurs and et cetera, you have to get into the weed of everything. I think some entrepreneurs, they don't like to, yeah, get involved in every part of the business. But at least from my perspective, you know, what's worked very well for me is I'm involved in every part of the business. Doesn't matter if we're a hundred million company, 200 million, we'll be in a billion dollars, whatever. I guarantee I'll be involved in a lot of the key, all of the key decisions. Because I think that's what separates a founder from a higher CEO, right? I think the founder, and that's why a lot of times these founders, blah, blah, blah, et cetera, they grow their business to 400, they hire a CEO. Oftentimes, the founder always comes back, right? Because the CEO perspective, they're always much more conservative. And they're looking at this from a paycheck where the founders at were able to take risks that a CEO wouldn't be able to take. So for example, even when I started IEMate, if I was a CEO, there was no way he would have been able to take that risk, right? But because I'm the founder, you have so much at stake here, there's no one in the organization that they take at risk as much as me. To be able to make that move, let's get into the supplement category, right? Yeah. I don't know if you've read, have you read Founder Mode, the sort of Paul Graham blog post? Yeah, I mean, I've read that. Yeah, that's correct. I think Founder Mode is very different. Correct? It's like, yeah, we see things very, very uniquely different. And entrepreneurs, you know, really have to dive into that. Yeah. And, you know, the first thing you said about product, you know, build the best product in the 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, it's like a big difference. I mean, I tell people, how do you know this? I say, don't trust me, just put it into a cloud, put it in chat with you. What's better, IMAID or, you know, AG1, Doran, Gruenz, right? Let's see what it says on the similar product, right? What does it say? Let's try. Yeah. It says, if I had to choose one today, I'd buy IMAID over AG1. So there you go. It says, it's not just 90 ingredients for 75, because that's ingredient count is mostly marketing. I think that it's currently doing a better job putting useful ingredients at disclosed, non-trivial doses in the same daily drink. And then it goes through the formula and it gives a little bit of an answer. So at least, according to ChadGPT right now, that is correct. Which I think is a no trivial accomplishment. I'm going to cut that segment out and use it as an ad, okay? That's perfect. Yeah, yeah. Give me my kickback and then you can do whatever you want. Yeah, give me 10% back. I'll be one of your TikTok affiliates. Exactly. Affiliates. Yeah. You know, I sold my company to this guy, Mike Whitmire, 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 the premier leader. And I was excited when we sold because I was like, oh, you know so much about SEO. What are all the SEO hacks that we're not doing? I'm terrible at SEO. I never even tried that as a growth strategy. So I was like, tell me, tell me, like, you know, what should we start doing? And after a few meetings, I was like, dude, when are you going to tell me like the hacks? And he's like, well, there's some best practices. He's like, there's not really hacks. He's like, so I was like, what'd you do with the gold company? And he goes, I printed out like the page, the webpage, for all of us. And I asked myself, honestly, is there a reason that you should use us? Why should Google put us number one? Are we better? Are we actually better? Is it easier to use? Is it easier to understand? Is it more friendly? Is it faster? Like, do we have, are we better in any way? And he's like, we had a cold, honest conversation with ourselves that no, we were not better. And then we decided, well, we actually have to be better if Google's going to rank us higher. And slowly but surely, we did, you know, one brick by brick. We just made the actual experience better until we felt we actually deserved to be number one. And guess what? Like, at that point, we didn't need any of the hacks. We actually were number one. And I just remember thinking like, oh, I feel like you just taught me like a very valuable, like, you know, a very valuable, obvious lesson that I needed to hear from someone like you. I needed to hear from the guy who could shatter this myth in my head that the guys who rank number one are always just doing these clever tricks. And it's like, there's no trick. The trick was be the best. And if you're not willing to be the best, like, you know, there's no way around. You just got to go through this. And I needed to hear that at the time. Again, it starts with the problem. And I think entrepreneurs, that's ought to be realistic, right? Well, isn't it right that as a founder, you basically have to alternate between delusion and realism in a way that doesn't make any sense? In one moment, you're going to have to be delusional. You're going to have no evidence, but you're going to have to have the faith. Yes. And you're going to have to believe, even though you have no experience in this, the market tells you one thing, smart people tell you one thing, but you believe another. That's delusion. And you got to be a little delulu. But then, exactly. Then you have to switch gears and be hyper-realistic. And the guy, you know, somebody who's never delusional, they end up being an employee. And somebody who's only delusional ends up being a failed founder. It's the person who's able to shift gears between the two and know when you're, when you need to be in each mode, that's sort of the art of the whole thing. Yeah. And then like, again, I had to be very, like you said, I had to be very delusional because I knew in my head, if we put all these pieces together, we will have a big success. Right? But again, going back, I didn't have any experience in this. So you had to build this with the limited information I knew at the time. Yeah. Well, Danny, I appreciate you coming on, man. This is a, you have a fun story from telemarketing to now running one of the fastest growing supplement brands in the world. And, uh, thanks for coming on. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.