Supplements – My Best Explanation for why I didn’t move ahead on this start-up

In this post, I will attempt to explain why I never moved ahead after massive amounts of planning and preparation making a supplement for endurance. AKA my “EnduraBoost Fiasco”.

If you didnt read part 1 of my update, I started working on an endurance supplement in 2008 that would boost endurance temporarily in athletic individuals. It actually had some promising clinical trials of its ingredients, and I believed in it.

I created a website, business cards, a formula, labels, pretty much everything you would need to start it up. Everything except a product.

The dilemma I faced was that when you outsource a supplement to a contract manufacturer, you have to buy a large amount of that supplement. Including encapsulating, bottling, labeling, packaging, I was looking at around $10,000 for a minimum run. As a side note, contract supplement providers will tell you that they can do “small runs”, but the cost per bottle is typically so high, it really makes no sense. Also, because I was so honest, I didnt want to use crappy ingredient substitutes and screw over my customer.

So here I was, with $2000 in my bank account and a $10,000 (minimum) start up cost. My breakeven by doing this would be to sell about 500 bottles. This worried me, so I tried other options first, options which ended up dragging on and on until eventually burned me out and I ended up shutting it all down.

The first option I tried was to presell the product. Not my smartest moment. I would call and email retailers and tell them about the product, show them all of the nice stuff I made for it like labels, and websites, and hope that they would either buy the product at wholesale or even consign the product. I pretty much got no response.

I used the technique in Tim Ferriss’s book “The Four Hour Workweek” by setting up a website and adwords account and trying to “test sell” the product to see if anyone was interested in buying it, no luck there. I later learned that this technique was pretty much made obsolete by the fact that modern Google Adwords is pretty much impossible to use efficiently for the average Joe, and I even spent months researching adwords (I will write a post on this explaining more).

I had considered that this was a product that may not have demand, but I looked a sales numbers of similar products, most of which didn’t have the clinical trials to back it up like mine did, and there was definitely a niche market.

I realized then that I probably couldnt sell the product without the product itself, and local stores/events/promotion is that way to go, so I looked into manufacturing it myself. This was the nail in the coffin. I spent years researching how to buy the ingredients, buy the bottles, buy the printable labels, good ways to encapsulate, good ways to seal the bottles, then package them. It was absolutely rediculous.

I spent $300 on basic equipment and ingredients, and got to the point where I could make 20 bottles of the stuff, including labeling and packaging it. I was so burned out at that point that I never followed through. I’m not really sure why. Maybe because the finished product was not that nice, and I was embarrassed to try and sell it. Maybe because I wasnt interested in spending 1 hour per bottle manufacturing them until I had enough money and customers to pay for the large-run manufacturing. Maybe because I felt I could never really sell them. At this time, I realized how rediculously competitive the supplement industry was. There were web sites like Swansons, and companies like Now, who dominated the industry.

Something that I would probably like to ignore is that I think a fear of failure played a role in me quitting as well.

Looking at it now, I would have probably embraced my passion for health and supplements, saved up the money and paid to have the supplements made. It would have lit a fire under me, and forced me to go to marathons, walk into MMA facilities, give away free product for promotion. All of these things may, or may not have worked, but at least I would have went all in.

This is why I think capital is important in start-ups, it gives you that edge necessary to jump start it all, bypass the riff-raff, and get to networking and selling, the most important parts of getting your product or service off the ground.