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

Episode Date: September 7, 2026

$1M+ problems worth solving (90+ business ideas): https://clickhubspot.com/phfl Episode 859: Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talks to Danny Yeung ( https://x.com/DannyYeung_ ) about how he built a $200M business in 18 months.  — Links: • IM8 - https://im8health.com/  — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton (joinhampton.com): My community for founders. Average member does $25m/year. Many of the guests are members. Get after it...apply: http://joinhampton.com/mfm — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com  • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - Shaan uses Mercury across all of his companies. you can too: http://mercury.com/  Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N.A., Members FDIC • I run all my newsletters on Beehiiv and you should too + we're giving away $10k to our favorite newsletter, check it out: beehiiv.com/mfm-challenge My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano /

We hit 100 million annual revenue run rate at 11 months. Gruens daily in 22 months, right? And they were acquired for $1.2 billion. Age U.1 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? I'll just 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 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 working on some big projects like the MGM City Center in Vegas.

did that also for the three, four years. Then in 2010, I took a leap of faith and moved to Hong Kong to launch a e-commerce company that was doing GroupBind. And then when GroupBond 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, that's it per se, more than a million. But and then after e-commerce, I was like, hey, you know, what do I do next? Had a lot of options at my disposal. And I didn't just want to go back into e-commerce, even though that was the easy route for me. I ventured. Then I actually, you know, got started in diagnostics and DNA testing. So founded Prenetics, which was a life sciences DNA testing company. And 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 as obvious choice, right? I mean, if you think about in 2010, no one was using e-commerce in Hong Kong. Everyone, in fact, told me to go back to U.S. They're like, Danny, just go back to U.S. This model's not going to work in Hong Kong. We made it in number one e-commerce company at the time.

But going back to Prenetics, you know, started awesome life sciences company. When COVID hit, you know, we were prime position to take a business. advantage of it. We worked very fast. In two weeks, we got our COVID testing kit. We then became Hong Kong's number one COVID PCR provider, as well as in the UK. So those three years, I would say we were like printing money, I would say, right? It exploded. At one point, we're doing 40,000 PCR tests a day. We totaled it 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 pre-netics PCR tests. And then, of course, that goes into IM8, which is kind of 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 cab hit, I think, was like 50 million. Went from a billion plus to 50 million. We all like shit, right? You really know who your friends are at that point, right? Because at a billion...

You got a lot of friends at a billion. You got a lot of friends at a billion. When you're down 95%, 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 going 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. Like, you know what? Why don't we just close the business? Because you have to think about the background, right? I think in 22, we did, you know, 272 million revenue, right? And basically, 40,000 tests turned to nothing, right? So basically, you know, our revenue dropped by 95%. And to be fair, I think the market, you know, realized that and it was rightfully valued.

So we started, hey, what do we do? You know, 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, 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, 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 12, 13, 14, 14, 15 pills in these capsules and et cetera, they just, yeah, don't do it, right? And then me as entrepreneurs, like, 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, hey, David's something blew up, right? So he had to take significant precaution, and I told David from day one, David, I know, you know, for the last 30 years, there's in so many people wanting to do this category as you reject it, 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. Yeah. So let's explain what IMate is, right? Because that's the current business. So IMA, if I go to the website, I see Beckham, I see Janus, I see Lily Collins, I see a bunch of famous people,

and they're drinking a little red drink. And, you know, Yes, I have been here too, yeah. 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, like, you know, just real quick, like, 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 chichet, you mix it with 12 ounces of while, you just drink it every single morning,

and it takes care of your foundational nutritional needs. So what does that mean? All of your multivitam, your CO-10, MSM, probiotics, pre-biotics, post-biotics. And because normally you would have to take the equivalent of 16 different supplements that would easily cost you $250 to $300 on a monthly basis. Yeah?

And for us, we're selling it at 9%. $90 on monthly basis, this combination, which also tastes great and you can carry 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 24, right? And, you know, now we've been the fastest growing supplement brand, you know, ever recorded. What does that mean? How fast are you growing? We had 100 million annual revenue run rate at 11 months. In this category, why? I mean, Gruens did it in 22 months, right?

And they were acquired for $1.2 billion after three years. Age 1 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 because I've been in e-commerce and I can ask you about the funnel and the cacking and all that. Then there's just like high level, you know, product market fit.

When you hit 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. It is very hard to recover. If you have category and positioning wrong, you can be the best at just trying to crank the grind the funnel, but it just doesn't matter if you haven't gotten those. The first key decision right, can you talk to me about?

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 Satter Story,

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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, hey, supplement category, highly competitive, so many bad eggs. And to be fair,

I mean, I can tell this 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 got to, I didn't do anything in this category before, right? It was e-commerce selling coupons, DNA testing, running the lab, all that stuff.

Yeah, but also, to be fair, before any of that, I never had a background as well, too, right? Yeah. So, of course, still, the board was like, you know what? And then we have to make, of course, a commitment with David Beckham. It was now a small commitment, correct? And so they disagreed with me. But, you know, I knew that if we made a great product and we know, 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 had to really fight and educate my board. And again, it's like, you know what? If I'm wrong, I'm going to, yeah, quit, right? That was my position. Because it really, I needed to be convinced myself that this was the right move. But what made you think that this would be the right move? Because it is true.

It's subpoenaic category is crowded. A lot of people have a celebrity. Who cares, right? Correct. And a lot of celebrity brands fail. Right? They're like, there's actually more failures of celebrity brands

if you think about than actually success cases. Right. So what was your take? So my take was the number one. Everything starts with the product. All right? Everything starts with a better product than what's available in the market. And it can, yeah, honestly say, yeah, we have the best product in the market.

But like you fairly pointed out, consumers may not recognize. that, right? And so this is where, you know, from day one, we spend more time also on the taste profile. Because a lot of times people have the great product, blah, blah, et cetera. But if it doesn't taste good, no one's going to drink it. Right. So I spend a week at the factories, every single day testing, like, you know, 20, 30 different flavors until we got that taste like, ah, you know what? This tastes is good. Right. And that people want to drink again. But those two things, those two also doesn't, you know, relate to a six, six, right? So you mentioned the color, the brand. We wanted this to stand out. We didn't want

just create another greens powder, right? No one created a reds powder. Right. And so I think by the fall, that was interesting to people. Is it red because it's like made of beats or it's red because you made it red? Like, you know what I mean? Like, did it need to be red or you chose to be red? It was a natural coincidence that when we created the formulation, there was like beats inside, you end the formulation. And it was a natural red color. And there was a lot of shit. Let's just go hard on this color, right? Which then made sense. And then our packaging

if you look at is a very big red box. It's very premium, the positioning. So I didn't want just to be another supplement. I wanted to have a really great unboxing experience. It's both the name, you know, easy to remember

the fonts, the colors. I did come up with the name because, you know, whenever I brainstorm company names, you get 500 names, each one you look at you're like that could be it and then you know so like if I had written down

on my list of supplement names I am and then the number eight I might have maybe it would be like oh that kind of flows but I would have the courage it takes to pick such a weird name

where does that come from why why that name I'm very good in names right I would say I'm like really good in names I mean my my e-commerce company is called you buy I buy group buying right

with that just number you then Prenetics was have prevention and genetics. So you have prenetics. And then of course, IM8, it came out one to something simple and easy to remember. And then I am means I am.

And then eight, if you flip it around, means infinity and infinite possibilities. And I knew at one day we'll enter China and the number eight will also work in China. Right. So there's definitely meaning. Lucky number of China, right? Number of me.

And it's like, I am healthy. I am strong. I am powerful. So 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 did that look like? You just fire Facebook ads, a Shopify store. Did you do anything else? Like what did zero to one look like? Zero to one. Again, the formulation part, you know, I would say was the result of also getting an amazing scientific advisory board. Yeah, on.

Again, when I looked into this, it was like, okay, what are all the different childhoods? someone can go at us. And it's like, hey, just because we have David Beckham, it's not enough. And everyone knows David is not a scientist, right? I'm not a scientist. All right? So we then, the next step was recruiting a world-class

scientific advisory board, the likes of Dr. Don Musilm from Mayo Clinic. You know, James Green, the former chief science of NASA, Suzanne Diff-Colda, you know, the director of Microbom 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 a, I actually know there's like an agency. There's like a brokered service. I don't know if you know this one. There's a brokered service between doctors and supplement brands. Literally is like, get a doctor on your brand.

I don't know if you've seen this. I haven't seen that. There's like a very niche agency some guy has. But what did you do? You cold called these people. You go fly out, meet them. Yeah. Saw me now.

What's happening? I knew the former chief science of NASA prior. Yeah, basically he was at NASA for two years. So that was easy because he knew me, right? Again, a lot of this relationships is built bound trust. And, you know, for Dr. Don Mulsalam, you know, I contacted her on LinkedIn. We got on a call. And again, the first time we chat it, she was very skeptical because so many supplement brands, you know, reach out to them.

And again, especially as if you're a practicing physician, yeah, it's also quite rare to, to work with a supplement brand, especially if you're, let's say, with mail clinic. Really, really rare. Because they have a lot of restrictions, et cetera, et cetera. But I think from day one, even I told Don, again, we're still working today very closely, is that we need to prove the science and evidence. So that's why we embarked on a clinical trial before we launched a brand. We embarked on third party testing by not just one organization,

but by two, by Eurofinns 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 know, you're not in the factory. And also, it's very easy to have something that might help, but it's not scientifically proven, right? And 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 like, are these clean ingredients and is it made in a clean factor? That's kind of like trust test number one. Trust test number two is, what the hell is a postbiotic? What's a prebiotic? Does anything that 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 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 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, Beckham, blah, blah, et cetera. Our business won't be in 20 months. can't be a $200 million plus business

without recurring subscriptions. And that means the product works as advertised. How does someone know that the product work? How does the customer feel that product work? You'll feel it. You'll feel it. And the best way to... Like energy?

What are you feeling? Better energy, recovery. You sleep better, your gut. Everything is working better. And of course, a lot of these individuals These are CEOs, athletes. I think the best case I can show you. I mean, I was surprised by this email, right?

Around last April or May of 2025, right, I got an email from Arena Sabalinkas team. Right? Co-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 a 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

given that they're traveling, you know, different times times. 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 in 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, you know, to price point, education, branding, positioning.

You know, there's like so much, right? And to be fair, 99% of American companies going to China and they can just succeed with 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't do China. 100%. There's like no hell.

They have no way they can do China. Right. So for me to enter China, I would need to get a completely new team of every single 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.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.

Tell me about some of the operational excellence. So I want to know what are some things that you're doing that I could look at that 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 Grooons on the podcast, and he was showing us their fun. and 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 OZMPIC and you want OZMPIC support. Maybe you're looking for mood and here's a mood thing. Maybe you're a woman and your hair and your hair's falling out postpart. 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 on

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 Ali Gummies came on. And he was, he's a master of packaging and positioning. And he said, I was looking in the vitamin aisle. And, you know, first thing I knew was that every container was round. And so we would be a rectangle. And he's like, it's as simple as that I look for a sea of sameness. And everywhere in the aisle that I see a sea of sameness, I know there's an opportunity to come in do something different. That's what they did in Band-Aids and soap and vitamins. Yeah, I would say even right now, to be fair, wise, you know, the ads and landing pages per zonnas, that's quite standard operating for Cesar right now, right? If you're a DTC brand doing $100 to $200 million, I mean, you have to be doing that, correct?

Yeah. 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, 2,000 to 3,000 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 right now, the reality is, even with ad buying, I mean, you know, app buying is like a commodity, right? Now, before a few years ago, you have to be really, really good at app 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 to 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 well, you have 55, 60 percent statics and then the rest 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. And again, we have, of course, we have like top 10. very famous ambassadors, then we have another thousand or more so ambassadors' affiliates that are creating

lots of content for us on a daily basis, right? And that feeds the engine depending on whichever personas that we're going to. And a lot of times, you have your proven winners, and then it's like, how do we recreate all these proven winners? Because, you know, there's also creative fatigue that happens, right?

So we have our own 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 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 in one key, again, public information, given we're public companies, that if you look at what happened in Q2 versus Q1, Q1, our CAQ was 305, right? Our average order value is about $2305. $30, 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 cat actually went down by $4, right, from 305, 301. Because you would imagine if you're doubling spend, your cats are always going to go up.

Yeah. 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. 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 a 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 the 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 the U.S. Open. I always say these,

the events are very difficult to scale. Right. But I think that's very, very important, especially in the age of AI. You don't know what's weird. Well,

you don't know what's, 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, you know, tweak your landing page. And it's clearly you get the scale, you get to measure it, 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 less contested. And once you've had an in-person touchpoint and then you go see an ad, it's going to be a completely different experience than if you've never... 100%.

And I attribute that cap lowering when we double our spend. We're not talking about a lot of spend doubling, right? And even July, our cap fell to $239. Right? Yeah. Which is, you know, we're spending more than $10 million a month on marketing, right?

And so it was continuing lower if 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 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 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 up 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'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're 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, 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 and, you know, kind of like co-calling people. What were you selling? I was telling timeshares. Time shares. Yeah. Remember time shares. It's like, again, this is about 30 years ago, right? So those few years where 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. Sort of more adversity you face, the more confidence you get when you survive. There's another guy, Craig, Craig Clemens, who came on the podcast, good friend, great guy. He's also an e-commerce sponsor. 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 on. to. Did you do any of that, or were you just brute force numbers game? Well, 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 would be, let's say, trying to meet someone for the first time, always telling

the team, just don't talk about bo-ass, 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 business is 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 learn to move on. So you're telemarketing. You learn about the numbers game. you learn that you got to sort of figure it out.

You get street smart to figure out things that to survive. And you learn it doesn't matter who you talk to, right? I can go up to anyone that's just basically, you know, 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 when I was working. So it was like, you know, 630 or 10, I would say 100, 200 people. And of that, what's the rejection rate?

Still going to be like 90, 995%, right? And so was that something, did you have to sort of, what did you tell yourself to be able to like kind of quickly bounce back from that? No, he's just, I mean, it's a number of scam. You just fell. 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 just get through it. And I think, you know, to really fair, telemarketing taught me a lot. Yeah, you have to have a dick skin.

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 on 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 co-calling basically MGM. Then I got a meeting. And I was able to get a meeting that I was able to deliver the value I was able to get. But without my co-calling days, I probably wouldn't have done that, right? Even when I did my e-commerce business, you buy, I buy which was group buying, I remember I went to Hong Kong

and I had to go call all the merchants myself, right? Because again, you know, it is not like, 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 it was like, he hung up on me really like,

you like, was like, hurt me. I was like, wow, this guy's like, he said some like very bad words and blah blah to me, right? And then normally it was like, oh shit, you probably like, you know, that was thinking, wow, who is 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 co-call of the office, and it was Sandeep. And he owned like 30 plus restaurants, this Indian entrepreneur. And I asked for Sandeep, called a 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.

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. 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

I didn't give up and just was persistent, resilience, and that changed the directory of the business because he gave me dirty restaurants and I needed one deal a day. 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 he got him because he was so famous. Hey, you know, Sandeep, the Anyconcepts was working with us. Yeah, can you pull? partner too. Then, yeah, and once you get, yeah, 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 he just always has 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 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, I get one yes, then he's like, then every no is worth $5 to me. Right? He's like, I just, so when they would say, no, I would hear in my head, all right, that's five bucks in the bank. Let's keep going. And so he's like, I was adding up the 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 my ears here is a rejection. I have to change what I'm hearing. And that led him to be the number one sales guy in the country. He ended up training all the other sales guys. And I think there's a, I think there's something everybody should take from from that, whether you're fundraising. And or 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 2.something percent, 2 percent, 2 percent, 2 and a half percent maybe. And, you know, 97.5 percent of people come to our site and say, hell no. Now, you don't feel it as much when it's e-commerce, but you feel it when it's over there, you know, so it's all the numbers came.

Yes. What else? You mentioned MGM. 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 were like 50 rooms, 100 rooms, small hotels, right?

Small hotels change because 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, she's a designer for these hotels,

and she was having difficulty sourcing furniture. And I was like, why don't you look in China? And she's like, she doesn't know how to. And then I'm like, why don't I help you? And it's just like, oh, day, 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 it out, you know, it's the same process. If I make 50 chairs or 50 tables as if I make two to three thousand chairs, right?

So I was like, who is making 2,000 hotel rooms right now? And at that time was like Vegas, right? Then I started co-calling the Vegas hotels. And eventually I co-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 so that's why a lot of times, even when we do an achievement of a milestone, you know, I always tell the team, hey, you know, this is good. But it's not the end, right? We're just getting started, right? And it's like, even last month, if 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 of 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.

Yeah, exactly. And you, the second thing was you said, like, in Hong Kong, like, everybody who entered the country had that. It sounds like maybe you had like a kind of a really valuable key contract that you won or some sort of like, you know, pretty defensible position. So can you tell the story of that? And also during that, did you think, did you know, 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 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. 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, you know, the chief executive said the same at the time, saying, you know what, we have our own public health laboratory. We can do it all of ourselves. So that was that. And I'm like, okay, no worries. 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 $3 to $400 USD for a 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. 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 of the community. We're selling it for $100 U.S. when everyone wants selling it for $400. And even the hospitals would call me, it's like, why are you guys selling them 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 in July, yeah, the government actually then again, called me. It's like, can we meet again? Because it was getting out of control, right? You know, three months later. And they're like, Dan, we need your help. can 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? 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 the 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? And I don't know why I even said yes to it. Again, we went from 100,000, 200 tests on the daily basis to now testing, you know, 300,000 people in about a month of 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, and there were so many people without jobs at that time, right? And then basically we started mass hiring. 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 to play maybe one year after. I see, I see.

Okay, so you said supply chain and hiring people. People, logistics, data, right? And then we're the first company contracted by the Hong Kong government to do mass community testing. And of course, six months later, there was like 14, 15 different laboratories that were also doing COVID testing. However, the thing that stood out from us is I think a lot of it has to do with my technology and e-commerce background and data and all that stuff. Yeah? Was we're the only testing provider that never had a fuck up when it came to false positives and false negatives. And so when all these other laboratories, they messed up.

And then the government got a lot of crap for it, right? Obviously, because if you get a positive during that time, you have to go to the, detention for like 7 to 14 days, right? And then so this is why at one point, every single individual that landed at Hong Kong airport was mandated a pre-netics 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 have to be fighting, you know, with so many different other laboratories around the world, right? You know, to get all the supply chain. So it was like every single day we're fighting. And again, a lot of times, yeah, it's just to outbid 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, you know, 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, There's the strongest demand I've ever seen for anything ever, right? Yes. Life or death at global scale.

But, you know, some of those people, they kind of stashed away enough cash that it was still a success. And some people had overbuilt. And then suddenly the music stopped. And now it's like a lot of work for nothing. So give me an example, right? On that exact thing is that it was right when we knew Kov 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, there 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 there were $2 billion in the 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? What do we'll have 2,000 people if there's no testing? We're just kind of like, you know, 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. Today's 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 use 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.

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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 by what you've done. they're trying to do something, 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, about going back to the number one, right? You know, I always believe that if you build the best product in the market, it just makes everything so much easier. Right? And I think if you look at, again, even, you know, when the COVID has, 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, what's worked very well for me is I'm involved in every part of the business. It doesn't matter if we're a hundred million company, $200 million, will be in a billion dollars, whatever.

I guarantee I'll be involved in all of the key decisions because I think that's what separates a founder from a higher CEO. I think the founder, and that's why a lot of times

these founders, blah, blah, et cetera, they grow to a business to $400 the hire CEO, oftentimes the founder always comes back, right? Because the CEO, prospective, 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 IM8, if with 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 to take a risk as much as me. Right? 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, it's correct.

I think your founder mode is very different. Correct is 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, 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, it's like a big difference. I tell people, like, how do you know this? I say, don't trust me. Just put it into Cloud, put in the HATC2T. What's better, IMA or, you know, AG1, Dore and Grunes, right? Let's see what it says on the similar product, right? What does it?

Let's try. It says, if I had to choose one today, I'd buy IMA8 over AG1. So there you got. It says, it's not just 90 ingredients for 75, because that 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 a little bit of an answer.

So at least according to Chad GPD right now, that is correct. Also, I think is a trivial accomplishment. I'm going to cut that segment out. I'll use it as an ad. Okay, that's perfect. Yeah, yeah, give me my kickback and then you can do whatever you are. Give you 10% back. I'll be one of your TikTok affiliates.

Exactly. Affiliates. Yeah. You know, I sold my company to this guy, Mike. Mike Whitmire, and 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 practice. 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 web 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 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, 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. And I needed to hear from the guy who could shatter this myth in my head that the guys who rang number one are always just doing these clever tricks. And it's like there's no trick.

The trick was be the best. And if you're not willing to be the best, like if, you know, there's no way around. You just got to go through this. And I needed to hear that at the time. Again, it starts with the problem and any entrepreneurs, that sounds 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. 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've got to be a little delirut. Exactly. Then you have to switch gears to be hyper-realistic. And somebody who's never delusional, they end up being an employee. And somebody who's only delusional ends up being a failed founder. It's the person who's able to shift gears between the two and know when you need to be in each mode that's sort of the art of the whole thing.

Yeah, and again, I had to be very, like you said, I had to be very delusioned 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. You have a fun story. from telemarketing to now running one of the fastest growing supplement brands in the world. And thanks for coming on. Thank you. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off.

On a road, let's travel, never looking back. All right, let's take a quick break. I want to tell you about marketing school. It is a podcast that is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network. And it is run by Neil Patel and Eric Sue. And these guys are both marketers who are running businesses. is. 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.