Small Suggestion

So best selling is a built-in thing to Bigcommerce. It sorts by the products that have sold the most units. Those differ on the Natrium site and the ND site. From a unit perspective, Caffeine/NALT is the highest selling Natrium product on the Natrium site. It's totally different on the ND site. Reviews don't come into play at all in that ranking. It's only sales. Almost nobody organically makes reviews. You'll sell 1,000 units of something and get 1 review out of it organically. Also, almost nobody uses the main Natrium site anymore. The data on ND is much more indicative of the actual general population.

Regarding Natrium in general, we have shifted our plans a lot since we launched it. Originally it was not even going to be on Nootropics Depot. Natrium Health was going to be a standalone brand completely separate from ND, and we were going to get it into stores. After wasting a few hundred thousand dollars on that plan, I realized I was trying to make the market go where it didn't want to go. As much as I would have loved to see Natrium stand on its own, and see Natrium stuff in stores all over, I was not willing to play the game it would have taken to get there. It's VERY hard to build a brand new consumer brand with custom formulations from scratch. It's almost impossible if you don't use all the tricks other brands do, like paying people for reviews, paying influencers to promote it, writing fake articles about it that you pay to have posted in Forbes, USA Today, and other "news" sites, etc. Getting people to even try a new brand is tough. Getting them to trust a new brand is next to impossible. It was easier 8 years ago, before the internet was as bastardized as it is now. You could actually rank organically for things. You could actually hear organic reports from people online without it being an affiliate. These days it's all pay to play. Google has made it impossible to organically rank like you used to be able to. There's zero way you can organically get in front of people on most social media now. You have to pay Facebook/Instagram to even show your posts to people that already follow you. Good luck getting in front of new people organically. It doesn't happen anymore. Everyone has found a way to monetize every little piece of the internet now. So Natrium was DOA as a standalone brand. We had to bring Natrium stuff over to ND, and try to leverage people's knowledge and trust of ND to try Natrium stuff. I also had to pull the plug on the store thing. There are too many entrenched middle men for that to work. The whole system is a sham. Middle men are getting more money than the brands are. It's insanity. So rather than keep wasting money trying to make Natrium go where the market didn't want it to go, I pulled the plug to focus more on ND.

The other aspect of it is that making a Natrium product is HARD! It's much much harder than bringing out a single ingredient product, because Natrium stuff is a combo of a bunch of novel products. For one, the beta testing is tough. Combos of things react so differently in various people. It's difficult to formulate one stack that works the same for everyone. Then you think you get it right and start selling it, but you get side effects from tons of people. This is what happened with the Sleep Support with zinc. It led to us finding interesting mechanisms behind zinc we didn't know about, but was a big waste of time, money, and resources. I was a bit naive when I first thought up Natrium Health. I figured we could put our knowledge and resources together to bring out a whole line of products easily, but the actual reality of it is that it is much harder, more expensive, and takes a lot longer than anyone can imagine. Let's say we have a single ingredient new ND product. Well we have to build out the analytical methods for it in our lab, which takes months. We have to do internal beta testing on various extraction methods, standardizations, concentrations, and dosages. We have to then settle on the final formulation and get the raw material in. Then we have to do the QC testing on it, which is usually around 5 analytical tests per ingredient. If any one of those tests fails, we have to reject the batch and get a replacement. It's complex. Now try doing that with 8 new ingredients we are all combining together to make one final Natrium product. That's 40 analytical tests that need to be run on the raw materials for one product. If any one of them fails, the product has to be held up till the ingredient can be replaced. You have the beta testing on it as well. You try to get as much info as you can, but a limited sample size will only give you so much insight. So let's say you get through all that, finalize on a formula, get all the ingredients in, pass them through all the lab tests, then make the product and start selling it. Ohh shit, now you are getting side effects you did not see in the beta testing. Your sleep product is doing the opposite for some people, and keeping them awake. Now you have to triage the situation, figure out why it is happening, reformulate, beta test again, reorder all the raw materials, go through it all over again, then hope the issue is fixed. It's over 2 years since you started working on that product. You've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on it alone, and your break even point is now even further out in the future. This is the reality of releasing a new Natrium Health product. It's risky, takes forever, expensive, and you run the risk of it not even selling once you finally get it up. Let's say it goes as well as you can hope, then you have to convince people to even try this new formula that nobody has ever done before. It's not like adding tongkat ali and having people find you that were already looking for it. Nobody is going to be searching for Dynamax; even more so now that fucking Pokemon decided to use that word after we already were! So you have to do a lot more work marketing it and convincing people to try it. This is why I slowed down on the Natrium side of things. It was taking up all the time my team had, and we were overloaded doing all this for products that sold way less than ND ones. I had to make the executive decision to shift us back to ND, and have a more sustainable and gradual program for Natrium stuff.

So that's where we are today. We are still working on Natrium Health products, but we are doing it from the ND side instead of trying to force it from the Natrium side. Ingredients we are using in upcoming Natrium stacks are being released on ND as standalones first, and we can then judge how people react and like them before we commit massive resources to stacks with them. This makes way more sense than going the other direction. We can do all the analytical work on each ingredient gradually over time, rather than trying to develop methods for 5-10 new things all at once. That way our lab is not as overloaded, and we can smooth the supply chain for each ingredient out beforehand. I tried to push us too gung ho into Natrium at first, and it was a mistake. Maybe if we just were doing Natrium it would be different, but we have to run the massive brand that is Nootropics Depot, too. I realized we were neglecting ND by focusing it all on Natrium, and I had to fix that. That being said, we do have a new Natrium Health product coming out soon. It's one we have been beta testing for a bit, and is our take on a pretty popular stack already out there. It will be part of our essential stack, so that will be cool. However, we are taking our time on the next comprehensive stack we release.