Small Suggestion

Yeah, it is much more difficult than most people understand. Even doing it the "wrong" way like everyone else does, and having contract manufacturers make it without proper testing, is tough. Just getting customers to even try your product is next to impossible. So even if you cut corners on making it, actually selling it is a huge hurdle. Did you know we have sponsored the Four Peaks Oktoberfest here at Tempe beach park multiple times now as Natrium Health? It's a beer festival run for a charity here in town called Tempe Sister Cities, and I have volunteered at it for 16 years. Some of my employees are on the board of Tempe Sister Cities, in fact. Well we have sponsored it multiple times since we launched Natrium Health. We have tents giving out free samples, and we had beer steins made with our logo and a packet of Alcohol Defense inside each one for people to try. Our first Oktoberfest we gave out 50,000 samples of Natrium Health products. FIFTY THOUSAND. We had people coming back day 2 and 3 of the event saying that Alcohol Defense saved them the night before, and that they loved it. How much of a boost in sales do you think we got after that event? ZERO! None, zilch, nada. You figure after giving out 50,000 samples, and many people raving about how they loved them, you would see at least some sales from it. Nope! We even had some people come back the year after that, come right up to our tent and say: "Hey, the Alcohol Defense guys! Your stuff works great! I could have used this at other events!" I asked them, did you buy it? They said no. I asked why, and they didn't really have an answer. They had gotten cards with instructions on how to buy it, with discount codes and everything, and they just... didn't. This was a common theme throughout our push with Natrium. We went to tons of events throughout that year. We had really nice light up booths that looked super sick. We always had people coming up and saying they loved the product. However, that never translated to sales. So even if you get customers to try your product and like it, getting them to actually buy it is a whole different hurdle.

After a while we went to do some recon. We had one of our attractive female employees go to gas stations and liquor stores around here to inquire about why it wasn't selling. The owners of these stores will not give a man the time of day, but an attractive female will get their attention. That's another aspect of getting into stores that pisses me off. You have to wine and dine these people, and use attractive women to even get them to speak to you. It's as cliche as you can imagine. Anyway, they said there was another anti-hangover product selling a ton, and people were skipping over ours to buy that one. It was cheaper, and they had a unique way of marketing it. They were paying the sororities and fraternities at ASU commissions to promote it at parties all around. Then they were give stores 50% margins on it. They could do that because it was a garbage product, which cost them less than a dollar to make. Didn't do shit for hangovers or anything close to Alcohol Defense, but that didn't matter. They had an army of college people hocking it for a piece of the pie, and they had the store owners pushing it like crazy because they were making 50% margins on it. Why would they promote our more expensive product that they make less margin on, when they could push this garbage shit and make a ton more? They don't care if it works. That's when I knew I was fighting a losing battle. The average consumer at a store doesn't know two shits about what is and is not a good product. The stores and distributors DON'T CARE if a product is good. They only care about what has margins and will move. Talking to them scientifically about why a product (that they are currently selling tons of) is shit, and is likely causing more damage to people, just doesn't resonate. They don't care about the science. They don't care about the efficacy of the product. They want good margins on things that move, and they will look the other way if they are moving. That's literally the opposite of who we are. That's when I knew I needed to pull the plug. I was playing a totally different game than everyone else, and nobody cared about what we were trying to do. They want to move product and make money. That's it.

So yeah, succeeding in supplements is very difficult these days. Just go out there and look at all these brands that pop up and are competing for everyone's business. Tons of them pop up all the time. Most fail. Some of them have VC funding behind them, and throw tons of money into marketing and giving out free shit. Some of them are likely more interested in the VC funding and eventually selling their company than they are at making products people like. Then you have MLMs constantly pushing out garbage, and using "network marketing" to spam their shit everywhere. People are incessantly bombarded by people attempting to get them to try their product. It's fatiguing for many consumers, and it creates a default state of distrust in supplements in general. This makes it difficult for a legitimate brand to get people to even try things. It's a battle we deal with every day. Some people assume we are a brand new company just trying to get their flash in the pan, too. I am like, guys... we are coming up on 8 years now. We'll be at a decade before you know it. We grew organically. We don't have VC funding. We genuinely would not be where we are if we sold things that were garbage and didn't work. If I had to start over from scratch today without anyone knowing who I was? Hell no! I wouldn't do it.