Comment · Wed, October 20, 2021 · ND Owner
Reddit AMA | In-House Lab Edition
Original post in this thread
NootropicsDepotGuru · 77 points
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We are very excited to announce that Nootropics Depot will be conducting its first-ever Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything), which is a semi-live Q&A session, about our In-House Analytical Laboratory and we would love for you to join us! See below for full details and get your question(s) ready. We hope to see you there!
WHEN
STARTS: October 20th | 9am AZ MST
ENDS: October 22nd | 9am AZ M…
What they were answering
JohnTorque · 1 points
What is the product that took the most effort from your team to develop? Why?
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb · ND Owner
That's a tough one. I am going to break it up into three. One of them is something we have been working on for years, but is not out yet. The other is one that is out, but took us a lot of time, effort, and testing to get right. The other is one that has been out for a while, but changes in the legal framework of the market forced us to go down a much more complex rabbit hole.
Let's start with the one that is out, but took us a long time. That would be Sleep Support. This was years of work to get right. Natrium stacks are more complex than most, because they are mixtures of a bunch of ingredients for a specific purpose. Anyone can just throw random shit into a mixture and claim it helps with something. However, putting in the legwork to test to make sure it actually works is the hard part. Ensuring that your mixture actually does what you claim it does is tough. Plus, when you have a combo of 6 ingredients like Sleep Support, that's a lot of QC lab testing for a single batch of finished product. We usually do 5 analytical tests per ingredient. That's difficult enough with a single ingredient product. When you have a combo of 6 ingredients, that's 30 separate lab tests that go into one batch of Sleep Support. If any one of those tests fail, you have to hold up the whole production. So even from just a normal QC basis Sleep Support takes a lot of work. However, if you consider from development to launch, it was nuts.
Sleep Support development actually started many years ago. We had a bunch of meetings to go over which stacks we wanted to focus on first, then brainstormed over which ingredients we thought might be good additions. Then we would go through the research together to try to understand what made sleep quality good or not good. Generally we will start with an initial mixture that we think will be good. We then go out and source the ingredients in that mixture. Sometimes we can't actually get the specific ingredients we want, or we can't properly test those ingredients to our standards yet. This is what usually sets off the first round of modifications to the formula. If we can't get or properly test the ingredient, it obviously can't be in the final formula. Once we have confirmed that we can get all the ingredients in our pilot formula, we actually get samples in to test. This starts the first round of lab testing. We don't want to beta test something that has not been tested either, just like we don't want to sell something to customers without it being verified. So we have to test all these ingredient samples to make sure they are correct, pure, and free from heavy metals. Some of the samples usually fail one or more of our tests, which means we have to get different batches of sample from the supplier, or go find a completely different supplier in some cases. Then we get the replacement samples in and do the lab testing over again.
Once we have tested and approved all the samples of ingredients we are thinking of using, we create a beta test batch of our formula, then enroll people from ND that want to beta test it. For Sleep Support that was kind of tough, since it's not just something you are taking to get an immediate effect. It's something you have to take before bed, then monitor stats and subjective feelings of restfulness. We also want to focus mostly on the people that normally don't get good sleep, since those are the types of people more likely to use Sleep Support. Once we get some data, we analyze what happened. This beta test process for Sleep Support took us over year. We would make a beta formula, give it to people, then get the data. The initial formula did work to get people to sleep. After taking it everyone fell asleep quickly. However, 3 hour later everyone was waking up in a pool of sweat. At the time we didn't know which ingredient in the formula was causing it, so we had to work backwards taking individual ingredients out to find which one was the cause. This took time to do. Once we found out which ingredient was leading to those effects, we discovered something not spoken about in the scientific data. We had one ingredient in the initial formula that looked great on paper, but we found paradoxical reactions to in the real world. This ingredient was a competitive antagonist of the muscarinic acetylcholine receptors, like Benadryl is. It had some good animal studies on improving sleep, and we figured it would help people get to sleep. We were right. It did help people get to sleep. However, what we did not see in the research was that it metabolized into something that hit the adrenergic system. So while the parent compound helped to get people to sleep, the metabolite actually then woke them up 3 hours later. After figuring that out, we reformulated the stack to remove that ingredient and try to replace it with another. Then beta testing resumed. This beta testing process was long and arduous, since sleep is such a difficult thing to reliably affect. However, after a while we had a formula that was reliably improving sleep for everyone in our beta test group. Great! Time for launch... but it is never that easy.
Once we finalize a Natrium stack, then it moves to our normal sourcing and QC process. This means that we then have to order production scale batches of all the ingredients we settled on, get them in, test them, and approve them. As you can imagine, this never goes perfectly right. One of the ingredients we got as a sample for beta testing may have passed, but then the full scale production batch fails. This happens a lot. So we have to get replacement production batches and hold the stack up till we fix it. You can see how this can get crazy after a while with stacks. The number of analytical tests that went into testing the ingredient samples and production batches just to get Sleep Support to launch is in the hundreds. That's hundreds of lab tests done just to get one product to market. It's complex enough with a single ingredient. 6-10 ingredients in one product just takes that complexity to a whole new level. We just have to work through it and keep pushing forward.
Now the day has come for the Sleep Support launch! It's been years of work to get to this point, but we finally have a finished production batch with all the ingredients we settled on after our beta testing. We start selling it to customers and... shit. Many customers are getting the desired effects. However, a small subset of customers are actually having the opposite effect! They are being kept awake ALL NIGHT! Well that's not good. You certainly can't have a product meant to improve sleep causing people to stay awake all night; even if that is a small percentage of customers. So we have to scramble and try to figure out what is happening. We didn't see this effect in our beta testing, but that is not surprising because of the smaller sample size. So we have to go back and forth with the customers reporting this effect to us, and try to narrow it down with them. I was working directly with one, and I had him try each ingredient individually to see how he reacted. It turns out it was the Microzinc causing it for him. This set us down a path of testing to see if we could recreate that effect in the other customers experiencing it, then figure out what the possible mechanism was leading to it. This led us down a rabbit hole of things we didn't know about zinc. It turns out that zinc can improve sleep in most people. However, some people can't have that zinc before bed without it adversely affecting it. They have to take the zinc in the morning for it to help. So we made the executive decision to completely reformulate Sleep Support without the Microzinc in it. This meant all new raw material batches, and starting the whole QC lab process over again.
So that is why I would say Sleep Support was one of the most difficult products we have made. It wasn't just lots of lab testing, but it was lots of beta testing, strange effects, reformulations, and then novel side effects we had to discover after product release. The difficulty of this stack is one of the reasons we slowed down our Natrium Health product release schedule. Natrium stacks are just much more complex than our average product.