Nootropics Testing process

Yes, we do 3rd party testing. Moreover we built our own lab to confirm everything ourselves. Our lab section on the site goes into a lot of detail on things, but I can speak to it here as well.

The entire reason I started this company was to advance the lab testing and quality control standards of the industry. If you have not been on Reddit long, you likely don't know the history behind it. Well I have been in nootropics for a long time now. I started out like many of you. I heard about compounds that could improve cognition, and I started trying them on myself. I just bought from who was available at the time, which looking back was like the shadiest shit ever. The vendors at the time were all just buying whatever they could get from China, not doing ANY lab testing on it, packaging it in their living rooms, then shipping it to customers in mylar bags. It was bad. You guys don't know how good you have it today, and that is all because of the effort I put in to making this industry more legitimate. I was trialing all these novel (at the time) nootropics on myself, and relaying my experiences here on Reddit. I became a moderator of /r/Nootropics and decided that I needed to do something about the complete lack of quality control in nootropics. I started the /r/Nootropics testing program, where I would get donations from people in the community and use those to send products that people thought were fake/impure to the lab. I would then call out those companies that we found were selling fake/impure products on Reddit. I've had many strongly-worded posts on /r/Nootropics over the years calling companies out. This is how most people came to know who I was. After a while I decided that it didn't help anyone if I just told them how shitty all the vendors were. If they had no reliable place to turn to, what good does telling people not to buy from someone do? Consumers needed a vendor they could turn to doing it right. That is why I started this company.

It wasn't Nootropics Depot that I started with, actually. Myself and my late business partner Jason created Ceretropic in 2013. That was the brand we launched to help change the industry, and you can find posts and history about Ceretropic all over the place from when it was running. We did a lot of novel things. We were the first to bring out many of the more advanced nootropics and peptides that people see as more common today. However, it was us at Ceretropic that developed them and pushed the envelope. We were the first nootropics vendor to ship 6 days a week, and mandate that all order go out same day. I didn't just want to improve the testing and quality control. I wanted to make the process of buying nootropics as good as humanly possible for everyone here. After all, I was a nootropics customer too. I had lived through buying a bag of pramiracetam and waiting a week for it to ship out. I had lived through not knowing if I would even get the shipment, much less that it was real and pure. You couldn't even call nootropics an industry at that point in time. It was a handful of Jabronis selling untested shit made in non-sterile environments, with snails-pace shipping, no quality control, no customer support, and some of the worst branding I have ever seen. Anybody that was around at the time can tell you just how bad it was, so I knew every single aspect of the industry needed to change, and Ceretropic was the brand we led the charge with. In a bit of serendipitous fate, another vendor called Nootropics Depot launched around the same time we launched Ceretropic, also located here in Phoenix. They were about 45min from our facility. The guy running it was named Matt, and we started talking with each other via PM and email. We realized that we both wanted to accomplish the same things in the nootropics industry, so we decided to have Ceretropic and Nootropics Depot work together to try and accomplish that. Matt and I quickly became personal friends, and we helped each other out for years. Then one day Matt's boss decided he wanted to get out of the industry because of the risk, so Matt floated the idea of selling Nootropics Depot to me. I was more comfortable with risk, since I was running Ceretropic, so I bought ND and took operations over to my team. This was in 2015, and you can see me discussing it in the below post.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Nootropics/comments/3l29ij/nootropics_depot/

From that day forward, Nootropics Depot was my baby. We ran Ceretropic and Nootropics Depot in tandem for a few years. However, we stared having banking and card processing issues not long after I took over Nootropics Depot. This led to a couple years of fighting to keep it alive, but it ended in me having to shut Ceretropic down. I discussed it in the below post.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Nootropics/comments/8qavyc/ceretropic_will_be_closed_permanently_on_62218/

Nootropics Depot had been our main focus for a couple years by that point, due to how many issues we were having on Ceretropic. It was tough to say goodbye to the brand that I started from nothing. I went through hell trying to keep Ceretropic alive. Many people that were on Reddit at the time can confirm how much of a toll that fight took on me, so it was tough to shut Ceretropic down. However, it needed to happen so that I could accomplish the main mission that I set out to accomplish almost a decade ago. Saying goodbye to Ceretropic was needed so that I could focus all my energy and time on building out our lab and dragging not just the nootropics industry, but the entire supplement industry as a whole, into the future of what I thought was needed from a lab testing and quality control perspective. To say we had immense support from the community is an understatement. The amount of support I had behind me with Ceretropic was insane! Everyone resonated with my mission. Everyone saw the need for advancing the lab testing and quality control standards. By that point we had already revolutionized this industry from where it was at the start. It was a real industry, and people actually cared about lab testing. That might sound strange, but it was a fight that I had to deal with for years. I had to convince people they should care about the quality of the stuff they were putting into their bodies, and to care about the scientific validity of the testing methods used to prove that. It truly was a fight, because it was the wild west at the start. Vendors didn't care about any of it, and the consumers didn't care either. I am VERY proud of what I was able to accomplish with turning this industry, and the nootropics community as a whole, into something light-years ahead of where it was.

That is a bit of history behind things. You can go back through posts on Reddit to dig deeper if you want. Soooooo much more went on. However, my mission from day one was to revolutionize the lab testing and quality control standards of the entire supplement industry, and I have succeeded in that. The mission is not over, and we have a long ways to go till I will be satisfied with where the industry is, but it is night and day different today than it was. This is because I spent almost every waking hour of the last 8 years of my life trying to improve it. Lab testing and quality control is everything to me. Not just sending samples to a 3rd party lab and getting the results I want, either. I don't just trust that a lab is doing things right. We prove it. We dig through all the data, and lift up all the rocks to see what is hiding underneath that we don't know about. We go through things in crazy detail to prove that the science is telling us what we think it is. I don't trust anyone else. Experience has shown me that unless I can personally oversee things, and have people on my team verifying the facts and data, things fall through the cracks. This is why I have spent $5 million on building out own own in-house analytical testing lab. Sending a sample to Alkemist, then getting a result back, is not good enough for me. I need to see the science with my own eyes, and pick apart the methods and methodologies before I will put my name behind it. I value the trust people have put in me over the years more than anything else. I have been the one spearheading this mission, so the standards I hold us to are insanely high. Anyone that has been with us for a while can attest that if there is any question about a result, I hold it back till we can prove it is right. We go out of stock for long periods on certain things sometimes because we are going through the science to ensure things are correct. Sometimes that might be a year we lose sales on something because I am not 100% sure it is right. We develop our own methods and reference standards when the industry standard is not good enough. I spend a few hundred thousand dollars on a new machine, and hire a PhD chemist, just to solve some of the problems that pop up. Quality, testing, accuracy, and scientific validity are paramount to me.